Debunking Brain Myths: What’s Really Holding You Back from Change with Sarah McKay

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
All your brain is doing is kind of gathering a
lot of information. Is it goes along through life in
stores that information so that when you're in that situation
next you can make that decision about what to do.
And a lot of the time we will be making
decisions based on did that feel really good last time?
Or did that not feel so great?

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Wow?

Speaker 3 (00:25):
Welcome to the one you feed through our time. Great
thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have,
quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
you think ring true. And yet for many of us,
our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't

(00:47):
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
What if I told you that some of the most
popular beliefs about your brain, like the idea that you
only use ten percent of it, are completely false and worse,
these myths might actually be holding you back from real change. Today,
I sit down with neuroscientists doctor Sarah McKay to debunk
the biggest neuromiths you probably still believe. We'll also explore

(01:33):
why willpower isn't the magic bullet for behavior change and
what actually is, And Sarah shares a deeply personal shift.
She's making it fifty that might just change how you
think about your own life space, if you're ready to
separate fact from fiction when it comes to your brain,
and maybe even rethink how you're living. Stick around. I'm

(01:54):
Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Sarah,
Welcome to the show.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Thank you for inviting.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
I am happy to have you on. I first came
across your work, I think because my partner, Jinny, subscribes
to your email list.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Oh that's cool.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
The thing that sort of hooked me and that I
wanted to talk about was that you often talk about
neuro myths, and so we'll be getting into neuro myths.
We'll be getting into your latest book, which is called
Brain Health for Dummies, and all of that in a moment.
But first we'll start like we always do, with the
parable of the wolves. And in the parable, there's a
grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life,

(02:34):
there are two wolves inside of us that are always
at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things
like kindness and bravery and love, and the other's a
bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.
And the grandchild stops think about it for a second.
They look up at their grandparent and they say, well,
which one wins, And the grandparent says, the one you feed.

(03:00):
I'd like to start off by asking you what that
parable means to you in your life and in the
work that you do.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
Yeah, it means quite a lot right now. I was
thinking about this last night because I'm one of those
sort of seasons of life. Let's say, my mother loves
to talk about seasons of life where I think that
kind of the balance and moments and places and people
kind of working against each other. So I turned fifty
at the very beginning of the year. Last year, it
was a huge year. I wrote a couple of books.

(03:27):
We had a lot going on. I had lots of great,
exciting fun things happen, But we also had quite a
lot of stress in our family, and I decided that
this year, turning fifty, I was going to take like
a gap year. I think growing ups are meant to
call it a sabbatical, which is I don't want to
be at my desk. I don't want to be writing.
I don't want to be I don't spend too much

(03:50):
time thinking, to be honest, I'm going to do podcasts
and speaking, but I want to travel and I want
to connect. I'm trying to sort of shift a balance.
I think my oldest son it's his final year of
high school and he'll probably go away to university next year.
And I left academia many years ago when I had

(04:10):
my boys because I wanted to be at home with them,
and I feel like it's a really nice book end
of his schooling to kind of be here, I mean,
to be honest, he probably won't notice whether I'm here
or not, but he will notice the food and the baking.
Just to kind of shift my focus and just sort
of slow down and live a bit of a slower
linear like I like to say, less of a three

(04:31):
sixty life. So I feel sometimes I can be in
a tug of war between striving and achieving and trying
to do all of the things and parent with trust
not anxiety, try and give up control and be a mentor.
So I feel like I've purposefully decided this year it's
not the word slow down, but perhaps anchor myself a

(04:54):
little bit more. You know, people have a word of
the year. Last year, I had this word equanimity, and
I think I'm going to to reuse it again this
year because I think that's about kind of being grounded
and balanced and when life is kind of rushing around,
I'm going to try and be a little bit more
like linear, choosing way to place my focus yep, and
a calm away this year. I think I need that,

(05:15):
my body needs that. I want to give that to
my family again. So that's what that parable kind of.
It's about not fighting between different ideas. It's just about
lip sitting summ aside and leaning into some others.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
Yeah, that idea of being away from your desk is
one that sounds good. I've been working on my first
book and it's due to the publisher in a month.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
So oh, congratulations, thank.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
You, thank you. So I spend a lot of time
at my desk. Normally you spent a lot of time
sitting down alone even more. Yeah, and just lately the
last few days, I've just had this feeling like I
get off and I'm like, I just need to go
for a walk, you know, with no music, no audio books,

(06:02):
no podcasts. I hate to say it, listeners. I don't
advise that. I think you should always have the one
if you want, now.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
Do walk without a podcast if you have a busy brain.
I find it stops me thinking. As I say I
don't like this three sixty, my brain will just be
going off in a million angles.

Speaker 2 (06:18):
So I agree, And generally I felt like no stimulation
for just even thirty minutes, where it's like there's not
something coming at me. So let's move into talking first
about neuro myths. What does that mean to you? And
what are some of the most prevalent neuro myths out there.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
This is interesting because I haven't thought to be perfectly
honest about neuromths in quite some time. I feel like
when I started, I sort of started the current phase
of my career, which was very much about my backgrounds
a PhD neuroscientist, a research When I left academia and
I was home with my boys for a few years,
and then I set up a sort of teaching talking

(07:02):
writing about neuroscience was probably at a point in time
when I don't know whether people know whether that's gone backwards.
People were as scientific literate as they are now, But
then sometimes I wonder if that's, like I say, changed again.
Neuroscience wasn't as popularized then as it is now, and
I don't think people had as clear understanding. And so

(07:25):
there were lots of ideas people had about the brain
that were reasonably whether they were widely shared, whether I
just tuned into them that as a neuroscientist I'd never
heard of. Because when you're in the neuroscience research world academia,
you're doing your thing and you're surrounded by other like
minded people. And so then when I first stepped out,
there were people saying things about the brain that I

(07:46):
didn't necessarily think were correct or I'd never heard of before.
So I thought, I'm going to bust those myths. Let
me show them and tell them. And so I started
talking about some of these ideas, and honestly, it feels
a little bit old for me now to talk about
what some of them are. Maybe these ideas around we
have a right creative brain and a left analytical brain.

(08:08):
And you're either right brained or you're left brained. Or
learning styles either a kinesthetic, an auditory, or a visual learner.
We only use ten percent of our brain. I think
these are some of the more popular ideas that are
out there about the brain. And initially I used to
be I'm going to bust the myths and I'm going
to tell them. And I have learned a lot in

(08:29):
the last sort of seventeen years. I suppose of doing
what I do that busting a myth isn't a way
of connecting with other people and educating them about neuroscience.
No one wants to be told now what you think
is wrong, in fact that it'll make them dig their heels.
And that's why I say, when you say, what do

(08:50):
neuromiths mean to me? This is what it means to me. Now,
That's not how I now approach their work that I do.
It's around taking ideas that are correct and are accurate,
and are based in the research or at least our
current understanding of where ideas about neuroscience are, and then
sharing them in a way that will resonate with someone

(09:11):
that will land with someone and then if they come
to me and ask, well, what about this or what
about that, then I might say, hey, let's kind of
take a look at what our latest understanding is. And
often it will be kind of different. I suppose some
ideas that have persisted over the years, and maybe not
so much neuro myths, but might be just inaccurate ways

(09:31):
of phrasing discussions about the brain. And perhaps the one
that I still tend to rant on a little bit
about would be the reptilian brain or the lizard brain.
And this gets thrown about, is this kind of phrase
that we've all got this kind of lizard brain inside
of us, kind of waiting to be scared, to freeze

(09:51):
or to flee, or to fight where lizards don't typically fight,
and that kind of controls everything that could potentially go wrong,
that controls our behave. And we don't have a lizard
brain because we're not lizards. We're humans. Our brains are
far more complex. We're not born with this kind of
fear hub inside us waiting for something to go wrong.
So that is perhaps not a myth that I tell

(10:13):
people is wrong, But I try and present different ideas instead,
which I think are more contemporary ways of explaining how
the brain works that I think are more useful and
give people a bit more agency and a bit more
to kind of move on with in a useful way.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
With the lizard brain, I mean, obviously, I think that
you're right, we're not lizards.

Speaker 3 (10:31):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
Secondly, I think one of the things that you talk
about in your book, and I think if you dig
into neuroscience a little bit, you start to realize is
that there's a lot of connectivity among parts of the brain.
So to think that one part of your brain is
doing all of something is misleeding. But is it safe
to say that we have a part of our brain

(10:53):
that is more I don't even know if this would
be safe to say limbically based a part of our
brain that is more react dictionary that is from older
brain structures in creatures that we've evolved from and we've
built on top of that. Or is even that a misunderstanding.

Speaker 1 (11:10):
The brain is complicated. It does a whole lot of things.
This idea that we evolved from lizards, first of all,
is inaccurate, because an evolutionary biologist will be able to
tell you, you know, mammals didn't evolve from lizards. If
you kind of look at a kind of an evolutionary tree,
they branched off. We branched off. We kind of evolved

(11:31):
along one kind of path, and they evolved on the other.
So this idea that we've retained some lizard part in
us as inaccurate. On top of that, if we look
at how the brain develops, this idea that there's this
kind of like layer by layer kind of development of
the brain where by these primitive lizardy parts develop first
and then the other parts grow on top or develop

(11:53):
on top. Again, that's not necessarily how our brains develop either.
So the idea that they evolve and then develop in
this way has been set aside. The idea was really
popularized many, many years ago, kind of back in the
nineteen sixties. We've learned let's just say we've learned. We've
learned a lot in the last five years, let alone
a lot from the nineteen sixties when it was originally

(12:14):
proposed this idea of this kind of lizard brain, or
the limbic brain. It was proposed by this chap Paul MacLean,
And when he was first describing the different parts of
the brain, he didn't even label the limbic brain, the
so called limbic regions of the brain as the lizard brain.

(12:35):
He in fact labeled them as the mammalian brain. The
lizard part or the reptilian part of the brain was
even kind of more sitting below there. It was more
parts of the brain that are involved with things like
kind of respiration and heart rate and sleep and awake,
et cetera. So, if his description is accurate, people aren't
using his description accurately today, And I think, what's kind

(12:56):
of funny. What I always encourage people to do, do
a Google image search for lizard brain or reptilian brain
and look to see the diagrams that people have drawn
of this, and you could get an array of twenty
of them, and I guarantee every single one of them
will label a different part of the brain is lizard
or reptilian. And the reason they can't label that is

(13:16):
because it doesn't exist. It's not kind of a thing.
What we understand now the current contemporary neuroscience perspective, and
this may change, is that we don't have these kind
of hardwired neurobiological basic emotions that are widen from birth
whereby every human on the planet is going to respond
in an identical way, in the same way that every

(13:39):
lizard on the planet does, like elizard of Morocco and
New York and in my backyard here in Sydney. You're
all going to behave the same way we humans don't. Instead,
we talk about this idea of constructed emotions, and some
of this has been popularized by various neuroscientists, whereby like
everything else in our brain, like a thought or a memory,

(14:01):
or an expectation or a belief, and emotion is also
constructed from kind of multiple inputs, or we can think
about them as like ingredients. So some of these would
be from our bottom up kind of physiological body, the
sensations we feel in our body. Some of us are
more consciously aware of what happens in our body than others.
The situation we're in, the context we're in, the people

(14:23):
we're with, I mean, and there's a whole lot of
data coming in these days from like your mobile phone.
So a war happening on the other side of the
world is now happening thirty centimeters away from your face,
and that gets combined with our memories and our personal experiences.
The language we've learned to describe these kind of feelings.
And so there's this kind of conglomeration of or this

(14:45):
kind of a mix or construction of all of these
different components that create this kind of feeling that we
would have that we would give a particular word too.
And we know that this is the case because people
can learn to experience new emotions as they have different experiences.
As they're going through life, we gain a much broader

(15:08):
kind of emotional vocabulary, so to speak, as we get older.
We see this from small children to teenagers to adults
in terms of the nuance and the kind of shades
of gray that we learn to understand and feel and experience.
And we also know, from say therapy or cognitive behavioral
therapy or other types of sort of learning or training,

(15:30):
that we can learn to respond in different ways to
situations by understanding all of these different inputs. If we
had a lizard brain that controlled our emotions, where would
be like the lizard in Morocco, New York or Sydney.
There would be no variation, And that's not the case
in a human.

Speaker 2 (15:45):
Do you think the lizards are insulted by us constantly
talking about them in this way?

Speaker 1 (15:51):
I don't really think that lizards. You have that many
deeper thoughts. I do spend a lot of time. I've
got a little lizards, very familiar with lizards. Have little
lizards sort are happening in my house. There's lizards inside
the house. Australia is a wild place to live. There's
a lot of wildlife in an out My dog just
thinks that they are all meant to live in here

(16:11):
with him. Has it learned that they don't belong. What
I really try to teach and encourage people to do
is to think about the words and the phrases they
use to describe neuroscience and all the brain and all
their behavior, because it can be very limiting if we
use certain phrases. It almost dials us in to think

(16:32):
that that is the only option. So I don't even
like using the word stress. And that's kind of I
suppose related to these ideas of lizard brains. When we
say the word stress, it's a useless word in the
English language, because it could mean the thing that's happened
out there, know, whether it be a natural disaster or

(16:52):
something that you've seen on your phone, or it could
be something that you've imagined It could be a threat,
it could be a challenge, it could be an opportunity.
One event could be all those three diferent things, depending
on who you are. We've got various sort of physiological
response systems which are deployed over different sort of time
scales and response to those threats, challenges, and opportunities. We've

(17:13):
got sort of our stress response systems, but they're not
only responding when something is scary or a threat. They're
also responding. You know, your heart rate rises as you
stand up so you don't faint. That's controlled by your
sympathetic nervous system. Some people like to call out your
fight and flight system. Your heart rate isn't rising as

(17:35):
you stand up because you were once chased by a
sabertoothed tiger. It's just how your body is responding and engaging.
And then we've got the feeling that we use. So
we've got the threat, challenge, you, opportunity, the response systems,
and then we've got this word that we would use
to describe our physiological response in the context. And again
we like to use the word stress. So what I

(17:55):
try and do with all of the neuroscience education I
do is to give people a very clear biological understanding
what is happening, and then some more sophisticated language to
describe that, and that blows open opportunities for them to
act in different ways instead of focusing and all, we've
got a lizard brain in this vital flight.

Speaker 2 (18:17):
Yep. So let's change directions just a little bit, because
I'd like to get a neuroscience perspective on a couple
of different things. So one of the things that this
show is about, and one of the things that I
help people do in various different ways, is to make
changes in their lives of different types. But change is difficult.

(18:39):
This may be me using a broad term like change,
which is like using a broad term like stress that
doesn't isn't helpful enough. But from a neurological perspective, is
there a reason that change is so difficult for us? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (18:56):
I mean as a neuroscientist, bat that back and asking
to define change in a little bit more of a
clear way. So if I was to reframe that question
and think about change, would be you're in place A
and you want to get to place B. Now that
might be you're wanting to learn something new, So maybe

(19:16):
you're you know, you're fifteen years old and you're a
real example. You're in high school and you're studying Shakespeare
and you've got to learn some quotes, but you know
an essay that you've got to write in class coming up.
That's change. That's you've got to read Shakespeare, which you
find a struggle and really difficult, and then you'll get
to the point where you've learned those and you can
understand and write about that. So that's change. Learning something

(19:38):
new is change. Having perhaps a mood that you know,
you've got low mood and you've been struggling with that
for some time, and you want to have more upbeat moods.
So perhaps you've been diagnosed with depression or anxiety. Perhaps
you've just got the blues and you want to not
be like that anymore. That's that's also changed. So we've

(19:59):
got different types of scenarios. Or perhaps you're trying to
learn a new skill, Like you know, I'm in a
musical theater group. I'm very untalented at singing and dancing,
but I do like knocking about in the back row
with the other mums and the ensemble. We've got to
learn a new dance for the show. Coming up, and
it's like we first get taught it and again that's changed.
I have to change something to be able to get

(20:22):
from point A to point B. And if you are,
you know, five years old or ten years old, and
it's a context relevant type of learning that you're doing
or change that you're trying to make, it is a
whole lot easier than it is when you're fifty years old.
Anything is easier to learn when you're young versus old.
And one of the principles around that is based on

(20:42):
the degree of plasticity in which your brain kind of has,
or the degree to which it changes by experience. And
we know that there are certain times through life, particularly
during infancy, childhood, adolescence, and then interestingly, some context relevant
plasticity takes place in pregnancy for women, where the brain

(21:04):
is incredibly kind of receptive and can be shaped very
very easy by the experiences it has, and in fact,
it often fundamentally requires those experiences to guide its development appropriately.
And we might call these sensitive periods of development. And
by and large, these kind of phases of life open
and then they close because you want to grow up

(21:25):
and learn and adapt to the environment and the context
in which you're in and be changed and molded and
shaped for it, and then an adulthood function within that.
And so what we see is that the capacity for
plasticity dialing down. Some types of different brain networks that
are responsible for different types of behaviors we might perform,

(21:46):
will retain plasticity longer than others. So your hearing centers
and your brain are very very plastic when you're very
very young in infancy, and then they kind of close down.
So it's much harder to learn languages later in life
than it as earlier in life. Life, and if you're
born profoundly deaf and you never hear spoken language, it's
going to be very very hard for those brains you

(22:06):
just to ever hear spoken language later in life if
there's not an intervention straight away. However, we can still
learn to solve a maths problem, We can still learn
to play a new musical instrument, you can still learn
new dance moves, and your fifties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies.
It's just a whole lot harder than it was then.
So again it's going to very much depend on what

(22:28):
is this change that you are wanting to make and
what is the process by what you're going to go
through that change. If it's learning a new motor skill,
if it's changing a thought process. Often those are kind
of two different things, because learning something new is often
easier than trying to unlearn something old, because typically, say

(22:51):
you have this thought that you're always having, Perhaps you
berating yourself for being a useless mother. I used to
do that. Now I think I'm a brilliant mother. But
back in the day when my boys were young, I
used to think I was terrible. It was completely fine.
It was just going through early toddlehood years. It was
very hard to unlearn that to stop that thought process.
In fact, I had to figure out what triggered that

(23:14):
thought process. This is what we would do if we
were talking about habit change. What is triggering or causing
that particular thought, and what can I think or do
instead when I encountered that trigger, Instead of trying to
unwind a thought, I had to learn a new thought
in its place. So it's very important when we're talking

(23:34):
about change to say, am I just trying to learn
something new? Do I need the skill development that someone
could teach me? Am I having to learn something new
but I really don't want to like learning Shakespeare quotes,
And so the problem isn't the teaching and the skill development.
The problem is like the kind of the motivation and

(23:55):
the grit and the kind of emotional regulation required to
form the task and the absence of wanting to or
is there some particular habit or learned skill that you
don't want to do anymore? So you need to kind
of unpack the trigger for that and learn a new
process in its place. And those are three different kind

(24:17):
of brain networks and processes that would be involved for change.

Speaker 2 (24:40):
Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask
you something. What's one thing that has been holding you
back lately? You know that it's there, You've tried to
push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way.
You're not alone in this, and I've identified six major
saboteurs of self control, like autopilot behavior, self doubt, emotional

(25:03):
escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's the
good news. You can outsmart them. And I've put together
a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles
and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use
to regain control. Download the free guide now at oneufeed
dot net slash ebook and take the first step towards

(25:26):
getting back on track. In psychology studies, there is discussions
about the idea of willpower or self control, and in general,
the behavior change lens on this is that you want
to rely on these things as little as possible, right.
You want to set up your environment, you want to

(25:47):
get all the support that you can get, et cetera,
et cetera. But neurologically, do we know where this idea
of willpower or self control comes from? Which, I guess
I'm just going to define it as I'm in a
moment where I need to make a choice, and I've
got the two wolves going right, and one wolf is
the one that I've decided I want to follow, and

(26:09):
the other is the other wolf. Do we know what's
happening neurologically when somebody is sort of in a moment
of wrestling with these questions and then making the right choice.
Is it solely an executive function? Do we know? It?

Speaker 1 (26:25):
Probably depends how sophisticated yourself awareness and executive functions are,
and whether you're able to kind of stand back and
look at those choices from a distance and then consciously
choose which one or the other to choose, or whether
you know, perhaps you're very emotionally disregulated and you know
you'll be driven to the right or the wrong decision.

(26:47):
You're listening to your emotions instead of being able to
thoughtfully engage in that task. What I always try to
explain to people is pretty much that one of the
main things that the brain does is it draws from
our past experiences and predict what we should do next.
So whether that be you know, the construction of emotion.
Last time I was in this situation and my body

(27:08):
was feeling this way surrounded by these people, then this
is what I felt, So I feel that again. Or
the last time I was in this situation, I made
choice A and that felt really good, So I'm going
to do choice A again. Or last time I was
in this situation, I chose B and it did not work.
I was very disappointed, or it was really scary, or

(27:28):
I really didn't enjoy it, So I'm going to do
A instead of B. So all your brain is doing
is kind of gathering a lot of information as it
goes along through life in stores that information so that
when you're in that situation next you can make that
decision about what to do. And a lot of the
time we will be making decisions based on did that
feel really good last time? Or did that not feel

(27:50):
so great last time? And part of that learning process,
the signaling process for that one component of that there's
a whole lot going on, is what we would call
like kind of our dopamine system. People think that dopamine
is released just when something feels great, but actually it's
a learning queue. It's been constantly kind of dribbled out
this kind of like really sort of slow rate. And

(28:11):
the reason the brain often sort of has these kind
of baseline rates. It's not going from zero to on.
It's got a baseline rate. That means it can dial
up the release and it can dial down the release,
so you've got far more kind of you know scope there.
Dopamine to act as a teaching signal. So if something
was really horrible last time you did it, dopamine dropped off.

(28:32):
If it was really good last time, dopamine went up,
and that's a teaching signal that didn't work, that did work,
and so the next time you encounter that, an advance
of you making the decision to act, you'll be going, oh,
that felt really great. Oh it didn't feel really great,
and that'll be part of the desire to do it again,
or the kind of oh gosh, the feeling of not

(28:53):
wanting to do it again. Often the problem lies therein
when last time you think you didn't really enjoy it.
But it's kind of the smart voice, and then you're
trying to override that feeling of a version or disappointment
or you know, I just I don't want to do that.
But that's the thing that you've got to do, and
that's really tough. And that's all around dopamine acting as

(29:16):
a teaching signal, so a brain can predict what to
do next.

Speaker 2 (29:19):
Well, you've got the other example also, which I think
addiction is the extreme version of you know, I've heard
addiction framed as a learning disorder. I'm a recovering person.
When I heard that, it made a certain sense to
me because in the beginning it was all good. It's
obvious to me why I did it and why I
kept doing it because it felt freaking great and I

(29:41):
loved it and it made my life.

Speaker 1 (29:43):
That's kind of the unspoken yeah thing about it. Especially
they say drugs of addiction, or it feels really good,
that's why you keep doing it.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
But over time the adverse effects start to really add up,
and it almost seems as if the brain is not
getting the new learning information on a deep enough level. Right.
It almost just seems like that reward learning loop somehow
has just been broken. Yeah, but I think we can

(30:12):
say this even on a much lesser level. Let's say
people who have a mild issue with eating more than
they want to in the evening, and when they do it,
now what they end up with is shame and remorse,
which seems that if reward learning was driving the whole show,
your brain would be like, oh, the last three times

(30:33):
I did that, maybe it felt good for a minute,
but I just then felt terrible for an hour. And
yet yeah, we continue.

Speaker 1 (30:40):
Particularly when we're talking about drugs of addiction, they have
a psychoactive component. Part of the problem there is that
acting on the exact same neural pathways and signapses as
that reward learning process. So that kind of makes it
twice as hard because they've interfered with that process others,

(31:01):
you know, it's more like the act of doing them.
The psychological process is acted on those pathways. So I
don't know enough about addiction neuroscience to know how much
we can sort of differentiate in tweak between those two.
But I suppose one of the definitions, and there's many
definitions of addiction, is that you are compelled to keep

(31:22):
on doing this behavior or activity despite the negative consequences,
even if you're not getting the high or the pleasure
from it anymore. And that's the difference between what we
would call a habit or an automated behavior and an addiction,
because a habit you can always intervene, you can consciously intervene,
whereas an addiction, you're often compelled even if you don't

(31:42):
want to do it, you still appear to be compelled
to do it despite the negative consequences. And that makes
that very very hard. And I mean that's why we
have these, you know, support programs of people with problems,
because again these circumstances, change is so incredibly difficult, yep.

Speaker 2 (31:59):
And habit has aspects of that nature to it, though, right,
I'm basically probing it an unanswered and probably unanswerable question, right,
which is where does something verge from being a bad
habit into an addiction? And I don't think we have
to answer that, but there is something happening. Even with

(32:20):
a bad habit, you sort of feel it, right. You
might technically yes, you can intervene, but I like to
think of it as like the habit energy, which is
just the pushing forward. Yeah, it feels so strong.

Speaker 1 (32:33):
Yeah, and often. I mean if it was as I
like to call them, a true habit from a neuroscience perspective,
which was very, very similar to an automated behavior riding
a bike, for example, as the motor process that has learned.
You have to be very conscious and aware about it,
engage a lot of cortical networks to learn that process,
and then eventually your brain goes wrong. I know how

(32:55):
to do that. I'm going to store that down and
the striatum where I would just roll at motor program
out when someone gets on a bike, you don't roll
the motor program out when you're not on a bike.
So there's a specific trigger or contextual situation in which
that behavior is performed, and it doesn't require typically motivation.

(33:15):
You don't really need to think about how to do it.
It's a little bit like the analogy of brushing your teeth.
I like to say, well, it's a light brushing your teeth,
but actually it's not just going and brushing your teeth.
It's that the way that you move your hand around
your mouth, move the brush around your mouth. You probably
do that the same every time, but you never really
think about that. So again, that's a stored behavior. But
you can get on a bike and go, well, I'm

(33:36):
just going to not pet all. I'm going to stand
here and not do that, so you can intervene consciously.
The addiction would be not being able to stop yourself
from doing that despite not wanting to. So that's how
we would differentiate a habit from an addiction. Addictions that
compulsion despite the negative consequence.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
Let's talk a little bit about some of the things
in your Brain Health for Dummies book, and the things
that you talk about in that book are cognitive diseases,
Alzheimer's dementia being some of the most common ones. I
think there's a section that's called knowing what's normal aging

(34:21):
versus dementia. So talk to me about this because those
of us like you and me, who've hit fifty, right,
we have to start to wonder about this stuff a
little bit like Okay, what's normal here and what's early
mild cognitive impairment? And my dad died of Alzheimer's, Ginny's

(34:41):
mom died of Alzheimer's. So we're on the lookout to
a certain degree. So how do we know what is
normal aging and what is a problem.

Speaker 1 (34:49):
Yeah, we do get to a certain point in life
when you have those sort of like tip of the
tongue moments, or you used to be really really quick
and sharp, and I'm like that. I used to be
like they really quick and sharp, and now I've got
like quick, sharp teenage sons and it drives me crazy
because because they think I'm kind of a bit dopey
and slow, and I'm like, excuse me, I'm very well qualified.

(35:09):
I may be your mother, but that not capable. So
we do get to these points in life when these
things happen, or they can happen throughout life. It just
may depend what we want to attribute them to. And
to use the example of teenage boys who are very
sharp and quick, they I reckon at least two or

(35:31):
three days a week now, Still they will come to
me because they can't find their school tie, or they
can't find their shoes or one of them left their
pea bag at school. Now, if I was doing that
much forgetting of my personal belongings, I would be probably
at the GP asking for some kind of cognitive test.
But we're not assuming that there's anything wrong with them.

(35:53):
What's probably going on there is attention. And when we
think about memory and we think about what we remember,
a big part of the information that we take in
and what we felt out is around attention. And that's
one of our most kind of precious resources that we
can kind of learn how to control that we're kind
of halfway there. So sometimes when we are forgetting things,

(36:16):
like we're leaving things in places, it's really just coming
down to what are we choosing to pay attention to
and what are we not. We know, through pregnancy and
early motherhood, lots of women, many many women, for out
of five women will say, oh, I'm really forgetful. I
can't remember everything, Like my brain's not working the way
it used to. And part of that is around attention
and just still trying to do it all as well

(36:38):
as trying to look after a whole new human. So again,
a lot of that is around attention. But other times
in life it may not be you know, just that
there's a lot going on and we're trying to remember things.
You may genuinely feel that there is some kind of
cognitive impairment with your brain, or you might just be
noticing that things are sort of starting to slow down
or change. And as we go through life, we know

(37:00):
that one thing that does change is kind of the
processing speed in which we're kind of able to sort
of sort through all of the information that we have
with our brain and retrieve it. You know, part of
that is not that the information's not there and it's inaccessible.
We might just be a bit slower at retrieving it. However,
at the same time we've learned, we've gained a whole
lot of experience and a whole lot of wisdom, so

(37:24):
you know, we've also got this kind of treasure trove
of content and information and learning that the young swift
thinkers don't necessarily have at hand. Forgetting where you left
things is probably an attention issue and is pretty common
and normal, But getting how to drive a car or
getting lost when you're driving, that's when we need to
sort of start checking things out. So then you would

(37:45):
head off to your general practitioner or your family doctor
or wherever you are in the world. I tried to
write this book so everyone in the world could read it,
because there's different healthcare systems in different places, so people
are going to have access to different resources. Then you
would go and you might say to you, I would
go down to my local GP and I'd say, Ruzica,
I'm forgetting things. And then she would just look at

(38:08):
me because she's this very tall Eastern European lady and
should be like, tell me a little bit more. She
would be slightly skeptical knowing me. But then there's various
types of cognitive testing that can be done that would
act as a good screening tool to help her decide
we need to send Sarah off to say a memory
clinic to get this locked out in much more detail,

(38:28):
or we can reassure Sarah that this is completely normal.
And there's standard tests that are used in a lot
of places in the world where say a perfect score
might be thirty, and they test all different aspects of
your memory and your reasoning and your being able to
name objects and remember numbers. There's a lot of kind

(38:50):
of quick type executive skills that are tested in these
and say a perfect scores thirty. If you've got below
sort of twenty four to twenty five, then that might
be kind of cause for concern, and perhaps we'll go
away and do a bit more of an investigation to
see are these cognitive symptoms the sign of something to
be concerned about, something neurological. If you get above that,

(39:12):
it might just be you need to kind of look
at you know, what's your sleep, like, what's your mood, like,
are you're doing enough exercise, all the kind of typical
health and wellbeing things, just to kind of get you
back on track, because it might not be neurological. It
might be just lack of well being.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
So if you draw a clock and it looks like
a Salvador Dally picture, that's a good sign that maybe
things are going wrong.

Speaker 1 (39:31):
Yeah, So there's lots of different kinds of tests in there,
like here, copy this or remember this. You know, we'll
name ten animals you know be able to kind of
perform those, And I guarantee that a teenager will be
able to do that quite quickly. Someone in their fifties
will be doing that slow. You probably get there, but
you might not be quick quick quit quick. But then
as I talk about and the book, there are lots

(39:53):
of different types of mental abilities. And if I was
going to go and have brain surgery, because you know,
so I had a benign tumor that I needed removed,
for example, I would much rather have a fifty five
year old skilled surgeon who maybe sometimes is a bit
slow at remembering names versus the twenty two year old

(40:15):
trainee who's super super super quick, because obviously there's a
skilled set involved there. So there's a whole lot of
different ways to think about mental capacity as we age,
And there's this lovely idea whereby, you know, perhaps we
do need to be kind of quick and fast, and
we're building and we're kind of creating, and we're kind
of as we're younger, we're needing all of the quick fire.

(40:38):
And then as those skills kind of lessen as we
get older, that's okay, because we need to be kind
of still, and we need to be slow, and we
need to be able to gather the information and mull
over it and in part wisdom. So maybe becoming like
if you're a female and matriarch, isn't about having that
quick fire memory and remembering every single little item. It's

(40:59):
about the kind of the slower imparting of wisdom in
a more thoughtful way.

Speaker 2 (41:22):
Is there much happening in the neuroscience world that you're
aware of that seems exciting On this dementia front, there's.

Speaker 1 (41:31):
Things that are happening and then the things that I'm
excited about it. So I think that people are desperate
to try and find it, like a cure if you've
been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or front of temporal dementia,
one of the dementia's like, what kind of medicine can
we give that person and make them better straight away?
And there's lots of different people working on that problem,

(41:52):
and it's incredibly complex because you know, I think it's
pretty safe to say that Alzheimer's disease is a disease
of unhealthy brain degeneration, typically seen as you're older, but
it's kind of an accumulation of years, if not decades,
of unhealthy brain aging, and so it's not like if
you've broken a leg, where you can kind of fix it.

(42:15):
So it's a very complicated problem in there. What I'm
more interested in, which I think is more kind of
population data science, I think is taking a look like
a really big like kind of zooming out from the
whole globe, looking at rates of dementia around the world
and looking at different kind of cohorts of ages of

(42:36):
people going through because we've got a lot of throwaway
statistics about dementia, like two out of three cases of
dementia women. Why is it women? Is it something to
your female biology. Let's look at menopause and that must
be the answer. Give woman an HRT. You have solved
Alzheimer's disease. No one's kind of going back to that
original statistic and trying to interpret and understand that. And

(42:59):
it's interesting if you look at the difference between prevalence,
which is the number of people with a diagnosed disorder
at any kind of moment in time, versus incidents, which
is kind of always the rate in which you're adding
new cases in. We've also got it's like a pool
of water, You've got incidence as the inflow, but you've
also got people dying as they're flowing out the bottom.

(43:20):
And if we look at healthy, wealthy countries around the world,
sometimes the US is included and that sometimes it's not Australia.
And you know, so the Nordic countries and some European countries.
That's to say, to be more safe, we're actually seeing
the incidence of Alzheimer's disease and other dimesias declining slightly.
We're seeing more prevalence because that's as less outflow because

(43:41):
people are living longer, but actually the inflow is slowing
a bit, so we're starting to see that incidents coming down,
and that gives us some clues to the cause. And
we know partly the incidence is coming down because we're
getting much better at treating some of the diseases that
predispose people to Alzheimer's, like art disease and metabolic disorders, diabetes, etc.

(44:04):
So that's slowing the incidents down in the healthy, wealthy countries,
but we're not seeing that in parts of the world
that are less wealthy and more unhealthy with as much
lower socioeconomic support, where people are poorer but want of
a better language. So that's interesting because I think if
we take that perspective, it gives us clues into where

(44:25):
we could be intervening as well. The two out of
three cases of dementia. We need to have a look
at Alzheimer's disease and again prevalence versus incidents, and what
we see in terms of Alzheimer's disease that males and
females when we're looking at women in their sort of
sixty seventies and eighties, we're looking at people in their sixties,
seventies and eighties. There's more females in there because they're

(44:47):
living longer. But are the incidence rates the kind of
the rates of inflow the same. It would be very
easy to think, oh, it's the rate of inflow of
females as much greater, but actually you don't see a
greater rate of inflow until you're looking at people in
their nineties. The men just kind of die off soon
as that they're coming out of the pool. So the
overall prevalence is higher. And so we've got to start

(45:07):
to be a little bit more sophisticated with thinking about
the stats instead of assuming the statistic that you heard
is correct and then trying to look at the causes
from there. I'm interested in taking this bigger picture perspective
because we must do that, or else we will jump
to trying to solve a problem that may not necessarily
be the right problem to solve. Midlife The greatest risk factor,

(45:29):
which no one talks about because it's very unsexy and
it doesn't make for good social media content, is hearing loss.
It's an untreated hearing loss and then later in life
untreated vision loss, and no one wants to talk about
them because they're very, very boring and very unsexy. But
what is that meaning If you can't hear and you
can't see, your brain is not like interacting with the world.

(45:52):
It's not receiving input from the world. It's almost shutting
off one of the signals coming up from your body.
It's completely shutting off those senses to the world. And
that's how we kind of a meaning of the world
and navigate our way around and use our brain for
what it evolved to do. So there's lots of kind
of points in which we can intervene, and I think
unless we take this big picture perspective that's what I'm

(46:15):
interested in, we're going to be intervening in the wrong places.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
That makes a lot of sense. I mean, honestly, a
lot of the things that you do to be more
preventative of Alzheimer's all fall into the not very sexy category.
I mean, it's the basic stuff like eat better, exercise,
get better, sleeping.

Speaker 1 (46:36):
Yeah, all of those things. Yeah, most health and wellbeing
advice is boring. I like to call them the tech bros.
I call them ice bath boys. They like to dial
it on that top one percent and like tweet that
because they think that's going to matter. But the vast
majority of the population isn't doing the ninety nine percent,

(46:56):
so the top one percent isn't going to make any difference.
They just popularize it. Yes, you know, we need to
get all of those basics right, and some of those
basics are beyond the control of an individual. Air pollution,
education and childhood, you know, a lot of those. Or
head injury. I mean, you can like try and prevent
getting a concussion, but like you might just get knocked

(47:16):
over by your dog and hit your head. You know.
You know, we've got lots of contributing factors that are
risk factors, individual risk factors, but the individual can't necessarily
do things about And then that overall metabolic health, heart health,
metabolic health that we talk about, which is the diet
and the exercise and keeping you know, your blood pressure
under control and your cholesterol down and all of the

(47:38):
boring things most people aren't doing, and a lot of
people just don't have the education, or the capacity or
the kind of resources to be able to manage that well.
And particularly in parts of the world, you know, the
low and middle income countries, is even harder to do that,
and that's where we're seeing the cases of dementia rising.

Speaker 2 (47:56):
Yeah, I mean, I do think you make a really
good point in the book, and you just met it there,
which is that there's a bunch of risk factors. There
are some that are modifiable, and then even within the
modifiable ones, right, there are some that are going to
be easier given your geographic, socioeconomic type status.

Speaker 1 (48:19):
Yeah, this enormous kind of social factor embedded in it
that people don't realize. I live in the Northern Beaches
of Sydney, one of the healthiest, wealthiest, kind of you know,
places to live in Australia, if not the planet, and
it's very easy to be healthy when you are resourced
and when everyone around you as fit and healthy. If

(48:40):
I lived in a completely different part of the world,
I'd be surrounded by a completely different social and resource environment,
which would make it that much harder and perhaps wouldn't
occur to me because everyone I know wouldn't be behaving
in a certain way. So I think we need to
be very, very careful. And I know that there's a
bit of a shift without trying to police language. Not
about that, but if we're talking about lifestyle choices, there's

(49:03):
a bit of shame in there. And it's not always
taking into account why people make a lifestyle choice. It
may not just because they lack willpower. It's usually very,
very complicated.

Speaker 2 (49:15):
Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this.
Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices
didn't quite match the person you wanted to be. Maybe
it was autopilot mode or self doubt that made it
harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why
I created The Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It's a

(49:35):
free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that
hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to
break through them. If you're ready to take back control
and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at
oneufeed dot net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen
starting today one you feed dot net slash ebook. Change

(50:00):
and behavior can be so very challenging because there are
so many different factors. What are a couple of other
things besides the things we just talked about around diet, exercise, sleep,
that are risk factors that are modifiable. Let me even
broaden it out a little bit, because I think that

(50:21):
what we're talking about is a healthy brain here at
any age, right, And so we may choose to engage
with these things more because we're like, oh, I don't
want to get Alzheimer's. We may just choose to engage
with them because we just want to have a healthier
brain overall. What are a couple other strategies people could
kind of walk out of here that they should be
thinking about if they want a healthier brain.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
Yeah, I think if I had to kind of choose
a couple, and I would like to try and choose
those which are most important. One would be sleep. Lots
of people have problems with getting a good night's sleep,
and there's lots of resources out there now to teach
us about sleep high gene and how to kind of
manage sleep. And again that's kind of a bit boring,

(51:03):
but it's super important because that's sort of the foundation
on which everything else can be built. If you miss
one night's sleep, you feel not great weeks months, and
it increases mortality, and it increases poor brain health. And
then lots of those kind of first signs and symptoms
people might start to query about as my brain working
may be around an adequate sleep, or you're sleeping but

(51:25):
it's not good deep healthy sleep. So if you can
do all of the things to get your sleep sorted,
that would be great. But again we don't need to
belabor that point. The thing that I think perhaps always
always shows up in all of the research search I
do and the teaching I do, is around It's another Yes,
it's that social you know, the sort of the social

(51:45):
relationships and people that we have around us, and they
can be the source of the greatest kind of you know,
neurological architecture and support that we need for a healthy brain.
But they can also perhaps be one of the greatest
sources of stream. Yeah, And I think if we look
at the phases of life we go through when there's

(52:06):
probably these inflection points whereby our brains are most vulnerable
stay to develop mental health problems or later in life
neurological you know, problems or diseases of unhealthy brain aging.
So we look at puberty and adolescents. Young people look
a bit more vulnerable to mental health disorders. But a
large component of that is the social brain is going

(52:27):
through this massive phase of reorganization from you know, the
focus towards family, towards friends, and the greatest vulnerabilities. There
are kids who are lonely or socially isolated, or perhaps
have been bullied or picked on. It's the social component
there that the greatest risk or the greatest kind of benefit.
We see that all throughout life that the social architecture

(52:49):
that we have around us is one of the strongest,
and in some studies it comes up almost top is
the strongest kind of protection for good health. The biggest
brain reorganization that we're seeing taking places in the social
networks of the brain. Because you know, we're tribe animals.
It's fundamental to a health and well being to have good, strong,

(53:11):
healthy social connections. You know, like go out and make
lots of friends. Sounds like a little bit of a
trite piece of advice, but you might think about this.
I actively chose to do this after I wrote my
first book, because I spent like a year sitting down
in my office alone with my dog writing and I
got to the end of the year and I had

(53:32):
this book that I felt terrible because I've been doing
all of the opposite things that I should be doing
to feel healthy. So I needed to get up out
in the world, move, connect, communicate, interact with other people.
Then you're kind of using your brain for what it
evolved to do. Didn't evolve to sort of sit in
a little room all alone staring at a screen. It

(53:53):
evolved to be moving and navigating around the world with
other people by your side.

Speaker 2 (53:57):
Excellent. Well, I think that is a great place for
us to wrap up. Sarah. Thank you so much for
joining me on the show. It's been a real pleasure
to talk with you.

Speaker 1 (54:05):
You're very welcome.

Speaker 2 (54:07):
Thank you so much for listening to the show. If
you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I'd
love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing
from one person to another is the lifeblood of what
we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm
certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better,
and that's you. Just hit the share button on your

(54:28):
podcast app or send a quick text with the episode
link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means
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Eric Zimmer

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Debunking Brain Myths: What’s Really Holding You Back from Change with Sarah McKay