October 30, 2024 • 50 mins
Dr. Henry Mahncke joins me today to reinforce the idea that you can infact teach an old dog new tricks.
Dr. Mahncke is a leading expert in how behavioral change can improve brain health. And in this episode we talk about the specific behavioral changes we all need to focus on to stay sharp and keep our brain healthy as we age.
Spoiler... it's not with crosswords or zuduku.
Check Brain HQ:
https://www.brainhq.com for more brain games and to learn more.
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---
Kindal Boyle has been a personal trainer for nearly 20 years focusing on women's strength and fitness. She'll teach you how to combine strength training and cardio for a hybrid approach to build the fittest body and life no matter where you are in your fitness journey.
---
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) What's up, guys?
Welcome to a brand new episode of the
Fit Women's Wiggly podcast.
I am so excited because today I'm joined
by Dr. Henry Monke, who's going to talk
to us about brain health and keeping our
brain as strong and as sharp as possible.
I talk about all the time about keeping
our body strong, maintaining our muscle mass, building
muscle mass as we get older.
But what about our brain?
(00:21):
What should we actually be doing to keep
it as sharp as possible and as healthy
as possible?
Are there certain things with our diet we
should be doing?
Are there certain types of games that we
should be doing?
Are there certain types of exercises in terms
of running or table tennis?
Crossword puzzles.
Are those actually as beneficial as we think?
I don't know.
We're going to break it all down in
(00:41):
this episode.
It is filled with so many nuggets and
I hope that you guys enjoy this.
If you do, do me a favor.
Make sure to like this video and make
sure to subscribe.
Or if you're listening to this on the
podcast platform, make sure that you're subscribed and
leave a review.
It really does mean a lot to me
and it helps get this podcast out to
other women who want to live a healthier
(01:02):
life and, of course, live their fitness.
And then the last thing that I'm going
to say, I'm not going to go into
a ton of detail because I want to
jump into this episode, is that our Night30
Challenge begins on November 4th.
It is not too late to sign up.
I'll make sure to put everything down in
the show notes.
But basically, if you are looking to stay
consistent with your workout routine, what you're doing
(01:23):
right now isn't working and you need something
else to push you a little bit harder
to let you know what you need to
do on a day-to-day basis to
push your body into a state where it
goes, ooh, I need to get stronger.
I need to rev up my metabolism a
little bit.
Well, then the Night30 is probably exactly what
you need.
It is a simple plan to follow only
(01:43):
20 to 60 minutes a day.
You get to choose.
There's a busy woman's goal and then like
your quote unquote primary goal for each and
every day.
And so I'm going to make sure that
you have a program that is not overwhelming,
that you can maintain your fitness, especially over
this time of year.
Also, nutrition challenges are included.
I get that question a lot.
So go check it out and sign up
(02:05):
so that you can join me on November
4th to kick things off.
All right, let's jump into this episode.
Dr. Monka, it is a pleasure to have
you on the show today.
I would just love to understand a little
bit more what it is that you do
specifically and learn a little bit more about
Brain HQ.
I've kind of been trying to research a
little bit, and I'm like, this sounds very,
(02:26):
very interesting to me.
I know that as a personal trainer, I
focus so much on the body, right?
Bones and muscles and keeping our heart healthy,
but I don't get to work as much
with the brain.
So please introduce yourself and tell me what
it is exactly that you do.
Well, the most important thing to say is,
hey, the brain is a part of the
body.
So if we're thinking about keeping our bodies
(02:47):
fit, we should certainly be keeping our brains
fit as well.
So my background is, hey, I'm a neuroscientist.
I originally came out to San Francisco to
get a graduate degree in neuroscience.
I got a PhD in neuroscience from the
University of California, San Francisco.
And I had the opportunity to just work
in a fabulous lab run by a researcher
(03:08):
named Dr. Michael Mursnick.
And what Mike is really world famous for,
at least in the world of neuroscientists, my
parents always remind me that that doesn't mean
you're actually world famous.
You know, he's known for his discovery that
the adult brain is capable of change and
rewiring itself.
And, you know, if you're a fitness person,
you probably already think, well, of course, the
(03:28):
body's capable of change, right?
We can go from being very out of
shape to very in shape and all points
in between.
But, you know, it's only recently become clear
that the brain works exactly the same way.
And in fact, you know, if you were
to roll back the clock to the early
1970s and you were to ask any brain
scientist, how does the brain work?
They all would have said the same thing,
right?
They all said, hey, the brain's a computer
(03:48):
chip.
It's got wires, processes information, carries electricity, sounds
exactly like a computer chip.
And that led to some really wrong ideas
about brain health and brain fitness, right?
Because it led to the idea that, well,
the brain probably just wears out as it
gets older, right?
We all know that our computers eventually stop
working as time- Batteries, right?
(04:09):
Exactly.
And it led to the idea, in fact,
if you read papers from the 1970s, you'll
read about the wear and tear hypothesis of
aging, right?
Our brain just wears out.
And that made us think, hey, eventually we
slow down and we get worse memory and
we get Alzheimer's disease, and that's that.
And it also led to the idea that
the brain can't be fixed if it's broken,
right?
And you drop a computer on the floor
and it breaks, like you're getting a new
computer, right?
(04:29):
You're not fixing it.
And so people had, I think, very much
the idea that if you had a stroke
or you had traumatic brain injury, that you
really weren't going to recover from that.
And the research around brain change that Dr.
Mursnik led really just turned the world on
its head.
We went from a world where we thought
the brain was just kind of hardwired, you
know, maybe once you were after a little
kid, your brain, you just had the brain
(04:49):
you had.
You were never going to change it.
We went from that world to a world
that's more accurate, biologically, to a world where
we understand the brain is constantly changing and
rewiring itself in response to what we do
with it.
And hey, it happens when we're little kids.
It happens when we're young adults.
It happens when we're old adults.
It happens if we have healthy brains.
It happens if we have unhealthy brains.
(05:10):
And it's kind of been new as well,
too, that really, I feel like it's more
recent that we've really just learned that the
brain isn't done maturing now until our later
20s, right?
That is absolutely true structurally, you know, in
the sense that, right, if you look with
brain imaging, like magnetic resonance imaging, you can
see that the white matter, which is the
(05:31):
insulation that kind of wraps the connections between
neurons, you know, that isn't really fully into
place on the average until the mid 20s,
which probably explains a lot of things about
young people and risk-taking because the frontal
cortex in the brain where all that wiring
is happening is where sort of the seed
of good decision-making happens.
But, you know, to push that even one
step further, even once that structural wiring and
(05:53):
insulation is in place, the brain, I would
say, actually is never stop developing.
We are going to continue to rewire our
brain through learning and experience and change.
And that's going to happen in our 20s,
but it's going to happen in our 40s
and our 60s and our 80s.
And for those of us who are lucky
enough to make it into our hundreds.
And that's a really powerful idea, right?
(06:14):
You know, I meet people all the time
and they say, well, I'm just not good
at languages.
I can never learn French.
I talk to people.
I've never been a math person, right?
And, hey, I get that.
We all have different experiences in our childhood
that, you know, form these images of ourselves.
But that's a very crystallized notion of your
brain and how it works.
Where as in real...
You can't teach an old dog new tricks.
(06:35):
That is exactly right.
And when I hear that, what I usually
come back and tell people is, hey, what
brain plasticity tells us is, hey, what makes
a dog old is it stops learning new
tricks.
And so if you can keep your brain
learning through something you enjoy through the activities
you have, you're going to keep a young
brain that's capable of change.
And in fact, that it's a healthy brain.
(06:57):
So, you know, this has just been a
revolution in how we think about brain health
over the past 30 years.
And what we're now starting to do is
put it into action.
So, you know, as a fitness leader, you're
probably familiar with the idea that, hey, we
actually now understand that certain aspects of physical
exercise are linked to brain health.
And it's not obvious that that would be
true, right?
(07:17):
Why would exercising your muscles help your brain?
But it clearly does.
We can talk more about that.
And then, you know, to sort of loop
back to my very long self introduction, what
we're doing at BrainHQ is we're taking an
idea and we're building real world brain training
exercises that really anyone can do on their
computer or their phone.
And they take advantage of this idea of
brain plasticity.
They're adaptive challenging exercises that focus on speed
(07:41):
and attention and working memory.
And they rewire the brain.
We've seen that with brain imaging experiments.
And as a result, they build a healthier
brain and help people think faster, focus better,
and remember more.
But it's really just opened up this huge
vista to starting to think about how should
we take care of our brains throughout our
entire lives, right?
For the moment we're born as a baby,
(08:02):
for the moment we pass away, how can
we maintain, optimize brain health in exactly the
same way that we should be maintaining and
optimizing our physical health so we have a
great vibrant life and we can do all
the things we want to do.
Do you feel like our modern world with
modern technology has really hurt people a lot
when it comes to brain health because we're
(08:22):
no longer, you know, thanks to Google and
my husband and I have a game that
if we ever have a question that we
know we have the answer to it somewhere
in there, we don't let each other just
pick up our phone and look it up
because we're like, it's in that file.
You know, it's in our file and can
have it somewhere.
Give yourself at least five or 10 minutes
and see if you can find it.
Because otherwise, if you're always just finding the
answer because it's so easy on our computers
(08:43):
or on our phone, we're not making our
brains work like they used to have to
work.
Yeah, you know, I certainly think we're living
in a very different technological environment and the
pace of technology change has gotten so fast
that, you know, its impact on our brains
is already distinct than it was from, let's
say, our parents or even a younger generation.
You know, I'm a bit of a moderate
(09:05):
on that.
I normally don't like to say, hey, it's
good or it's bad.
Exactly.
I'm more a believer that, hey, it's different.
We should probably think very carefully about what
those differences mean.
You know, you gave a great example.
An example that often comes to me is
GPS, right?
So I live in San Francisco.
I've lived here for, I guess, almost 30
years now.
(09:26):
And, you know, I lived here before GPS
and I've lived here after GPS.
And it is, I think, striking that we
all use, you know, Google Maps or Apple
Maps when we're driving, even in a city
that we've lived in for a long time.
And on the one hand, sometimes I'll plot
out that route and I'll be like, oh,
I had no idea you could get from
here to there that way.
And other times I wonder exactly like you
(09:47):
saying, hey, am I exercising the parts of
my brain that are involved in navigation and
planning and thinking less because, you know, I
just pop in the in the in the
destination and I never get to experience that.
And, you know, I think that is an
important change for brain health.
You know, it's quite surprising that it turns
out that the part of the brain that's
involved in navigation, like through a city, is
(10:09):
actually the part of the brain that's involved
in forming memories.
It's called the hippocampus.
And there's a lot of sort of deep
seated, almost philosophical thinking among neuroscientists.
Hey, why is making a long term memory
kind of the same to the brain as
finding your way through the city?
But it definitely is.
Perfect sense.
I mean, it's a memory in there how
to get the point and it's kind of
(10:30):
the learning of the point B.
But there was this wonderful study done in
London taxi cab drivers probably 20 years ago
now.
And, you know, as you may know, to
get a taxi cab license in London, at
least back in the day, you had to
demonstrate that you could, you know, get all
across London in all different ways.
In London, it's incredibly big city.
(10:51):
It's an incredibly ancient city.
You know, it's not like Manhattan where we
have vertical and horizontal streets.
And so taxi cab drivers had to demonstrate
they called it the knowledge, right?
And so some scientists in the UK did
an experiment and they actually looked at this
part of the brain, the hippocampus of people
who had the knowledge and ordinary people and
then maybe taxi cab drivers at the beginning
(11:12):
of their career.
And they clearly showed that actually the hippocampus
got bigger and it got thicker as a
result of acquiring this navigational knowledge.
Now, if that's true, and it clearly is,
you have to wonder, well, if we no
longer have to acquire this navigational knowledge, maybe
our hippocampus is not going to be so
big and strong and healthy.
And hey, the hippocampus is the first thing
(11:33):
that starts to deteriorate as we go on
to Alzheimer's disease and certain kinds of dementia.
So maybe we are, you know, as you
say, kind of putting our brain health a
little bit at risk with these kinds of
things.
So I do think that what you say
is exactly right.
I think all of us should be looking
for moments that we can exercise our brains,
(11:54):
put our brains to use and make, you
know, in that sense, contribute to their health.
Exactly the same way in fitness, right?
I mean, I imagine you might tell someone,
hey, if you're going somewhere on the second
floor, or if you're always in the habit
of taking the elevator, because right there in
front of you, hey, maybe think about taking
the stairs, right?
You know, it's not a life-changing thing,
but each little bit of extra exercise you
can get in is going to help your
(12:14):
fitness.
It's going to help preserve your mobility.
And I think absolutely the same thing is
through co-cognition, right?
So like you say, you're trying to remember
who is that actor in that movie for
five years ago.
Worth giving yourself a chance to think it
through, puzzle through while they were also in
this other movie and they were a friend
of person rather than just answering it right
off the bat.
That little bit of extra cognitive exercise is
kind of like taking the stairs in extra
(12:35):
flight and giving yourself some exercise.
Awesome.
My trick for figuring that kind of stuff
out is I'll go through the alphabet.
Who is that actor?
Did it start with an A, B, C?
Okay, I know it started with a C.
CH, and then a lot of times it'll
pop into my head.
I'm curious, and maybe the people listening are
curious as well.
(12:55):
Is there any kind of science that shows
that there's some kind of capacity to our
memory bank, so to speak?
So like we have a limited amount of
memories that we can keep.
And once we hit that, we kind of
start losing memories at the bottom.
Yeah, this works in different ways for different
kinds of memory.
So there are some examples with limitations, but
I think mostly the answer is actually no.
(13:18):
So some common areas where we know their
limitations is like what's called working memory.
So working memory is your ability to keep
a number of things in mind at the
same time and kind of juggle them back
and forth.
Classic example is a phone number, right?
You know, can I remember all the digits?
You tell me your phone number, and can
I remember all the digits by the time
I actually open up my phone and type
it in with my phone?
(13:38):
Right, and hey, there's a ton of very
famous experiments that say, hey, for just about
everyone, the magic number of items you can
keep in your working memory is 7 plus
or minus 2, as they say.
If you have low working memory, maybe 5.
If you have great working memory, maybe 9.
But hey, most people just cannot keep 15
items in their working memory.
And that probably has to do with some,
(13:59):
you know, very fascinating and complex issues about
how brainwaves work and how networks of neurons
kind of fire together to maintain an image
of something in your mind.
So in that sense, that's a well-known
limitation.
Another pretty well-known limitation is, you know,
people kind of be all the time, they're
like, oh, I'm terrible at names and faces,
right?
I just cannot remember people's names.
(14:19):
And I usually say, hey, you are fine,
actually.
You've convinced, that's mindset a lot of times,
too.
It's mindset, but it's also, you know, back
to your comments about the modern world.
You know, we as humans, you know, we
were evolved to live in these, you know,
sort of small hunter-gatherer societies, probably around
100 people in them is what anthropologists say.
And hey, most people can remember 100 names
(14:41):
and faces of people that we know and
have worked with, your childhood friends, your family
members, the people you see every day at
work.
So that's what your brain was evolved to
do.
It's fine at it.
You know, what your brain was not evolved
to do is how we've moved into this
kind of more modern society with cities and
industrial living.
And now our expectation is, I meet someone
once at a, you know, coffee store and
(15:02):
four months later, I see them again and
I should be able to remember their name
and like, no, actually you shouldn't.
Your brain was never evolved to do that.
You're never going to do that.
Don't feel bad about it.
We should all just feel fine about reintroducing
ourselves.
You know, there's chips and tricks, but the
brain just wasn't evolved to do that.
On the other hand, you know, I think
that a lot of people have a metaphor
of their brain that it's like their computer's
hard disk, right?
(15:23):
Hey, I've got a hundred gigabytes on my
hard disk.
And once I fill it all up with
photos, I got to, like you say, I
got to delete the old ones and they
got to go.
And there's not really a lot of evidence
that our brain works that way.
You know, it is not so much that
as we live a longer life that we
get rid of our younger memories and that's
(15:45):
why we can't remember them.
I don't think there's many neuroscientists who see
it that way.
I do think it's true that we often
think of memory with a metaphor that's probably
just wrong, right?
Well, I mean, let's say you're trying to
remember something from your childhood, right?
A metaphor that a person might have as
well, my brain's kind of like a filing
cabinet, right?
I'll pull open the filing cabinet drawer, flick
through it off.
(16:05):
There's that one, I'll pull it out.
Oh, there's me at camp with my best
friend.
That's not really the way memory works.
When you remember something in your brain, your
brain actually fully recreates the experience for you.
And what I mean by that is if
you look at brain imaging and you ask
people to see something and then you ask
them to close their eyes and imagine seeing
(16:26):
it, there's like a lot of overlap between
those situations, right?
That is the memory.
It is recreating the experience as it happened
to you in your brain.
And what that means is remembering is a
very active process, right?
We're not just pulling something out of the
filing cabinet.
We're turning on hundreds of different areas of
the brain that are connected to each other
in all those complex ways.
So because it is an active process, it's
(16:49):
a process that Canon needs to be exercised,
right?
You know, again, from a physical fitness perspective,
let's say you got really good at doing
pull-ups 20 years ago, right?
Good for you.
And I took about 30 today, actually.
That is incredible.
Wow.
I will get some tips from you on
that topic.
Happy to have pull-ups are my thing.
Okay, but then if you didn't do them
(17:10):
for 20 years, you wouldn't say, well, I'll
just hop on and rack out 30 pull
-ups again, right?
Because your body wouldn't be accustomed to anything.
So if you are looking to have those
childhood memories stay fresh, you need to actively
exercise, recreate them.
You need to take little bits of your
day and you need to think, I really
wanna walk through my childhood camp experience where
I met my best friend and you need
(17:30):
to actively bring those memories to life.
What did I hear?
What did I see?
What was I feeling?
What was I thinking?
What did I smell?
And that process itself can strengthen memories.
But in that sense, no, I don't think
we get full in that sense.
Sometimes a science fiction book will come out,
right?
What if we all have to be 200?
What would that be like?
I mean, probably bad in a lot of
(17:51):
ways, but I don't think one of them
would be, you would run out of memories.
That's sad.
This doesn't seem to be how it works.
That's interesting that you said that about remembering
your memories to help you keep your memories.
And again, talking about modern society, I grew
up in the time, I'm what's called an
organ trail millennial where I was, the old
school, I had real photos back in the
(18:12):
day.
I remember a time before the internet and
we have the photo books still that we
are able to look back at.
I was actually just showing my sister-in
-law a couple of weekends ago, my scrapbooks
from college.
And a lot of the kids nowadays, they
don't have that, right?
Because everything's saved in our phone.
And I don't think that families sit down
and, oh, let's scroll through our phone from
(18:33):
when you were in kindergarten.
So I wonder how that will change in
the future as well with people being able
to keep their memories healthy.
You know, I think you're exactly right.
I think that, you know, very heartwarming sense
of, hey, let's sit around and let's get
out the wedding photos, or let's look at
the photo book I had from when you
were in elementary school.
You know, that's a process by which we
(18:54):
exercise our memories that strengthens the memories we
already have.
And to the extent we don't do them,
I think they're more likely to fade.
You know, I think more families probably should
bust out the iPhone and take a look
at those old photos.
In fact, I think at this point, my
favorite thing my phone does is it occasionally
says, hey, wanna know what you were doing
10 years ago?
Look at you climbing this mountain.
I'm like, oh, that's a great memory.
(19:15):
I'm glad you're refreshing that and that helps
it cement it.
But again, it just shows that the brain
and the memory and the thinking and all
this stuff, it's a very active process.
We're not a passive system.
It's not like a computer that does the
same thing over and over again.
You know, this brain as a system is
constantly rebuilding and rewiring itself in response to
what we do, what we learn, and it
(19:36):
reshapes itself in that way.
And that process of brain plasticity, just like
the physical body, reshapes itself in response to
what we ask it to do.
You know, it can either build a healthier
brain for us that can remember these things
and have sharp pivot perceptions and clear thinking,
or it can build a brain that like
doesn't do those things quite as well.
And you know, we start to slide into
various kinds of cognitive impairment issues or brain
(19:58):
health issues.
I definitely wanna talk here in just a
second about some tips on what you can
actually do to improve your brain health, improve
your brain fitness as you move forward with
activities and nutrition.
But I'm also, is there, I was just
thinking about this as we're talking about memories.
You know, sometimes in your childhood, you kind
of look back and you're like, wait, did
this happen?
Or was this a story that my mom
(20:20):
told me?
So what's going on in our brain where
we confuse, you know, the story of somebody
else?
And we've literally, like you've mentioned with memories
create this picture and all of a sudden
we've created that to be a memory that
we had.
You wouldn't think we would ever have false
memories.
You know, if the brain worked like a
file drawer and you had a file drawer
full of things that happened to me and
you had a file drawer full of things
that my mom told me, you'd never get
(20:42):
mixed up, right?
There's two different parts.
But unfortunately, for better or worse, brain doesn't
work anything like that.
You know, when you first have the experience,
as we were saying, you know, all kinds
of brain parts activate your sight, your sense,
your sound, your smell, your thinking, and all
those kinds of parts of the brain, they
kind of fire together and they wire together
(21:03):
and they form this coherent, multi-dimensional, multi
-spectral kind of activity pattern.
And hey, that goes away.
And then when we want to remember it,
we can trigger it, right?
You know, a smell can remind us of
a memory like Proust, right, in the Madeline.
And he remembers all of his childhood in
France.
And so, you know, you might think of
that as that little bit of a sensation
(21:24):
kind of kicks off this reverberation in the
brain, which recruits all these other brain regions
that were active when we were having that
memory.
And hey, we have the memory again.
That's great.
Well, what happens when your mom tells you
something?
They'll say, let's take a good scenario.
You've forgotten the memory, right?
And your mom tells you, oh, don't you
remember when you were a kid, we used
to go out to the market and we
used to buy these, you know, bananas.
(21:46):
So as she's telling you that, well, your
brain is forming that image.
It doesn't really matter whether it happened or
not, right?
You're hearing it and your brain is thinking
about being in the market and buying bananas,
as the case may be.
And if that happens enough, well, your brain
will trigger that as if it happened.
And, you know, if you're an adult and
you're very thoughtful, you might think, well, I
form a conscious memory of not remembering that
(22:08):
even though my mom's telling.
But it's very, very easy for that to
become a thing that your brain can kick
off, that at that point feels exactly like
a memory you might have yourself.
And yeah, I think in most cases that's
really quite benign, right?
I think it's nice when my mom tells
me about something that I kind of remember
and, you know, maybe it fills in some
details and now I have this joint memory
(22:29):
with her.
But of course that can be much more,
you know, problematic in certain situations, right?
Sometimes people are trying to deceive you, right?
And, you know, and you can inadvertently form
a false memory.
There are terrible situations with like forced confessions,
right?
And I think often a person who's not
under stress, who's cognitively healthy thinks, why would
(22:50):
someone ever confess to something they didn't do?
Right, you almost can't imagine that.
But, you know, if your brain is under
sufficient stress and you are being told over
and over again that this thing happened and
you did it, you're forming that image and
that sensation in your mind.
And if your stress is high enough and
your panic is high enough, it can eventually
seem like, well, that does actually kind of
(23:11):
seem like a memory.
How would I tell the difference?
And so we can have very tragic outcomes
for that.
So memory is, you know, it is an
incredible thing that our brains can do, but
it's not like a photo you pull out
of the photo gallery and that's exactly the
way it was.
Right, very, very interesting.
So now as we're getting older, like I
said, that Oregon Trail millennial, what can we
(23:32):
be doing to help ourselves stay as healthy
as we can up here?
Because as my grandmother always used to say,
anytime she'd have a lapse in memory, she'd
be like, just the case of the old
timers.
And I don't want to have a case
of the old timers if I can help
it.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
I think, you know, I think, you know,
our generation as we get older, we are
(23:54):
much more thinking about how we can take
charge of our health and our destiny as
we get older.
You know, I think my parents' generation and
probably your parents too, maybe the last generation
where it was like, well, this is what
getting older is like and I should just
sit back and like, what are you going
to do?
It's part of it, exactly.
Like now the old timers.
(24:15):
So my- It's the same way I'm
supposed to, you know, lose- I'm supposed
to lose mobility.
I'm not going to be able to walk
around anymore.
And I'm probably not going to have everything
so good, but hey, this is the way
our bodies were built.
So we should just make the best of
it.
So my grandfather passed away when I was
about 10 years old and he passed away
of at the time, what was called senile
dementia.
And, you know, we would now call that
(24:35):
Alzheimer's disease.
But when he passed away, it was like,
hey, this is just kind of what happens.
You're going to get old and lose your
memory and be committed to a home.
And I think our generation, we've had this
change with our physical health, right?
I think every person now who's getting older
realizes, hey, I need to maintain physical activity.
I should have a physical health program.
I should walk.
I should take the stairs when I can.
(24:56):
I should swim.
You know, maybe I'll do balance exercises to
reduce my risk of fall.
But fundamentally we believe that we can change
our physical fate by investing effort in our
physical health, right?
And that's great.
It is true.
And people should absolutely do that.
We should get to the point where we
can do 32 pull-ups in the morning
before we do that.
That's incredible.
(25:17):
But I think we're just now at the
point where we realize the same thing is
true for brain health.
And we do not have to accept that
we're necessarily going to go on to dementia.
We don't have to believe that it's all
just in the genes, right?
Your grandfather had dementia, so you are too,
and whatever, it's going to hit you when
it hits you.
So there's quite a few things that we
can do that have been shown to improve
brain health.
And I'll talk about a few of them.
(25:39):
I'll start with physical health, because of course
you're talking about fitness and many of the
people watching or listening to this are thinking
about fitness.
It is very well established at this point
that people who are in better physical health
have reduced rates of cognitive decline, and they
have a lower risk of going on to
Alzheimer's and dementia.
And so why is that, right?
It's counterintuitive, right?
You're out there going up the stairs.
That kind of feels like you're like muscles.
(26:00):
So you can work, right?
And there seem to be probably two things
that are going on.
First of all, when you engage in physical
exercise, it actually releases a growth factor in
your brain called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor.
And that's a protein that literally helps neurons
sprout and helps them make new connections and
in that sense builds the health of the
brain.
(26:21):
Now, why is that true?
That's a great question.
It has something to do with the fact
that again, back in old human times, as
we were out and about in the world,
our brains needed to learn and rewire themselves
as we were getting exercise, because we were
out hunting a mammoth or exploring a new
part of the forest or whatever.
As I say, you're on trails or in
the woods.
You're not walking down a street.
You have to be very aware of, don't
(26:43):
trip over this and die.
Exactly right.
And as a brain scientist, as we talk
about this kind of exercise, I think growing
to the gym is great.
I went to the gym this morning myself,
but it's not like being out hiking on
a trail, right?
Being out hiking on a trail is much
more cognitively demanding.
There's more unexpected things, but on the plus
side, there's more things to notice.
(27:04):
You can use your attention and your working
memory and your speed.
The other thing that happens with physical exercise
and brain health is we make our heart
healthy.
And making the heart healthy, we know has
benefits like lowering blood pressure and reducing the
risk of heart attack and stroke.
And those are incredibly important for brain health.
I mean, obviously a stroke is a disastrous
brain health issue, right?
Literally your brain is damaged because it's deprived
(27:26):
of oxygen for a period of time.
But there are probably little tiny, sometimes we
call them micro strokes.
I hate to call them micro strokes because
they sound so bad.
But from time to time, our brain is
probably just getting a little touch of damage
as a result of a heart health issue.
And if you're exercising and building a healthier
heart, hey, you're gonna have less of those
micro damages to your brain and they'll add
(27:49):
up less over time and you'll be less
risk for dementia.
So physical exercise is a great piece.
You know, a second area that's gotten a
ton of interest, that's been, well, I'll mention
a few of them and then I'll dive
into just one or two depths.
You know, often we think about physical exercise.
We think about diet and nutrition.
We think about stress.
(28:10):
We think about sleep.
We think about social connection.
And then we think about my particular area
of expertise which is cognitive activity and brain
training.
So I'll pick one more and then I'll
talk about brain training because it is so
near and dear to my heart.
You know, after physical exercise, I think one
of the things that comes up most interestingly
to people is, I think one of the
most interesting ones is social connection.
And you know, that's not one again that
(28:31):
maybe 10 or 15 years ago, a lot
of people would have highlighted, but it's become
very, very clear now that our brains are
not designed to exist in isolation at all.
We are social primates.
We're designed to work together and be together,
you know, and play together, have fun together.
Exactly, be angry at each other is the
case maybe.
And that actually ends up being incredibly important
(28:53):
to our brains.
The Surgeon General, you know, wrote a book
where he talked about loneliness as the new
sedentary, the new size, the risk from oldiness
or as bad as your risk from being
a sedentary person, right?
And we do have an epidemic of loneliness,
right?
We are in our houses more, especially after
the COVID pandemic.
We have all kinds of things we can
(29:14):
do around watching movies or, you know, that
don't involve necessarily being out and about with
each other.
We live farther from each other.
I live 3000 miles from my mom.
I don't see her every day the way
I would have a generation ago.
And it's also so funny and kind of
ironic that there's a loneliness epidemic and yet
we've never been so close to people in
terms of like, you know, I've got 5
,000 on those followers on social media.
(29:36):
There's people all around me, but yet I
can be so lonely here in this home.
Yes.
And I, there was so much to say
about social media, but some of it's a
strength.
I think it can bring us together.
I think people probably watch the podcast and
they feel some of that social connection that
they're looking for.
And that's great.
But at the same time, so much of
how we do live our lives does lead
us to, you know, not having so many
(29:56):
authentic personal interactions.
So anyway, people who...
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) What's up, guys?
Welcome to a brand new episode of the
Fit Women's Wiggly podcast.
I am so excited because today I'm joined
by Dr. Henry Monke, who's going to talk
to us about brain health and keeping our
brain as strong and as sharp as possible.
I talk about all the time about keeping
our body strong, maintaining our muscle mass, building
muscle mass as we get older.
But what about our brain?
(00:21):
What should we actually be doing to keep
it as sharp as possible and as healthy
as possible?
Are there certain things with our diet we
should be doing?
Are there certain types of games that we
should be doing?
Are there certain types of exercises in terms
of running or table tennis?
Crossword puzzles.
Are those actually as beneficial as we think?
I don't know.
We're going to break it all down in
(00:41):
this episode.
It is filled with so many nuggets and
I hope that you guys enjoy this.
If you do, do me a favor.
Make sure to like this video and make
sure to subscribe.
Or if you're listening to this on the
podcast platform, make sure that you're subscribed and
leave a review.
It really does mean a lot to me
and it helps get this podcast out to
other women who want to live a healthier
(01:02):
life and, of course, live their fitness.
And then the last thing that I'm going
to say, I'm not going to go into
a ton of detail because I want to
jump into this episode, is that our Night30
Challenge begins on November 4th.
It is not too late to sign up.
I'll make sure to put everything down in
the show notes.
But basically, if you are looking to stay
consistent with your workout routine, what you're doing
(01:23):
right now isn't working and you need something
else to push you a little bit harder
to let you know what you need to
do on a day-to-day basis to
push your body into a state where it
goes, ooh, I need to get stronger.
I need to rev up my metabolism a
little bit.
Well, then the Night30 is probably exactly what
you need.
It is a simple plan to follow only
(01:43):
20 to 60 minutes a day.
You get to choose.
There's a busy woman's goal and then like
your quote unquote primary goal for each and
every day.
And so I'm going to make sure that
you have a program that is not overwhelming,
that you can maintain your fitness, especially over
this time of year.
Also, nutrition challenges are included.
I get that question a lot.
So go check it out and sign up
(02:05):
so that you can join me on November
4th to kick things off.
All right, let's jump into this episode.
Dr. Monka, it is a pleasure to have
you on the show today.
I would just love to understand a little
bit more what it is that you do
specifically and learn a little bit more about
Brain HQ.
I've kind of been trying to research a
little bit, and I'm like, this sounds very,
(02:26):
very interesting to me.
I know that as a personal trainer, I
focus so much on the body, right?
Bones and muscles and keeping our heart healthy,
but I don't get to work as much
with the brain.
So please introduce yourself and tell me what
it is exactly that you do.
Well, the most important thing to say is,
hey, the brain is a part of the
body.
So if we're thinking about keeping our bodies
(02:47):
fit, we should certainly be keeping our brains
fit as well.
So my background is, hey, I'm a neuroscientist.
I originally came out to San Francisco to
get a graduate degree in neuroscience.
I got a PhD in neuroscience from the
University of California, San Francisco.
And I had the opportunity to just work
in a fabulous lab run by a researcher
(03:08):
named Dr. Michael Mursnick.
And what Mike is really world famous for,
at least in the world of neuroscientists, my
parents always remind me that that doesn't mean
you're actually world famous.
You know, he's known for his discovery that
the adult brain is capable of change and
rewiring itself.
And, you know, if you're a fitness person,
you probably already think, well, of course, the
(03:28):
body's capable of change, right?
We can go from being very out of
shape to very in shape and all points
in between.
But, you know, it's only recently become clear
that the brain works exactly the same way.
And in fact, you know, if you were
to roll back the clock to the early
1970s and you were to ask any brain
scientist, how does the brain work?
They all would have said the same thing,
right?
They all said, hey, the brain's a computer
(03:48):
chip.
It's got wires, processes information, carries electricity, sounds
exactly like a computer chip.
And that led to some really wrong ideas
about brain health and brain fitness, right?
Because it led to the idea that, well,
the brain probably just wears out as it
gets older, right?
We all know that our computers eventually stop
working as time- Batteries, right?
(04:09):
Exactly.
And it led to the idea, in fact,
if you read papers from the 1970s, you'll
read about the wear and tear hypothesis of
aging, right?
Our brain just wears out.
And that made us think, hey, eventually we
slow down and we get worse memory and
we get Alzheimer's disease, and that's that.
And it also led to the idea that
the brain can't be fixed if it's broken,
right?
And you drop a computer on the floor
and it breaks, like you're getting a new
computer, right?
(04:29):
You're not fixing it.
And so people had, I think, very much
the idea that if you had a stroke
or you had traumatic brain injury, that you
really weren't going to recover from that.
And the research around brain change that Dr.
Mursnik led really just turned the world on
its head.
We went from a world where we thought
the brain was just kind of hardwired, you
know, maybe once you were after a little
kid, your brain, you just had the brain
(04:49):
you had.
You were never going to change it.
We went from that world to a world
that's more accurate, biologically, to a world where
we understand the brain is constantly changing and
rewiring itself in response to what we do
with it.
And hey, it happens when we're little kids.
It happens when we're young adults.
It happens when we're old adults.
It happens if we have healthy brains.
It happens if we have unhealthy brains.
(05:10):
And it's kind of been new as well,
too, that really, I feel like it's more
recent that we've really just learned that the
brain isn't done maturing now until our later
20s, right?
That is absolutely true structurally, you know, in
the sense that, right, if you look with
brain imaging, like magnetic resonance imaging, you can
see that the white matter, which is the
(05:31):
insulation that kind of wraps the connections between
neurons, you know, that isn't really fully into
place on the average until the mid 20s,
which probably explains a lot of things about
young people and risk-taking because the frontal
cortex in the brain where all that wiring
is happening is where sort of the seed
of good decision-making happens.
But, you know, to push that even one
step further, even once that structural wiring and
(05:53):
insulation is in place, the brain, I would
say, actually is never stop developing.
We are going to continue to rewire our
brain through learning and experience and change.
And that's going to happen in our 20s,
but it's going to happen in our 40s
and our 60s and our 80s.
And for those of us who are lucky
enough to make it into our hundreds.
And that's a really powerful idea, right?
(06:14):
You know, I meet people all the time
and they say, well, I'm just not good
at languages.
I can never learn French.
I talk to people.
I've never been a math person, right?
And, hey, I get that.
We all have different experiences in our childhood
that, you know, form these images of ourselves.
But that's a very crystallized notion of your
brain and how it works.
Where as in real...
You can't teach an old dog new tricks.
(06:35):
That is exactly right.
And when I hear that, what I usually
come back and tell people is, hey, what
brain plasticity tells us is, hey, what makes
a dog old is it stops learning new
tricks.
And so if you can keep your brain
learning through something you enjoy through the activities
you have, you're going to keep a young
brain that's capable of change.
And in fact, that it's a healthy brain.
(06:57):
So, you know, this has just been a
revolution in how we think about brain health
over the past 30 years.
And what we're now starting to do is
put it into action.
So, you know, as a fitness leader, you're
probably familiar with the idea that, hey, we
actually now understand that certain aspects of physical
exercise are linked to brain health.
And it's not obvious that that would be
true, right?
(07:17):
Why would exercising your muscles help your brain?
But it clearly does.
We can talk more about that.
And then, you know, to sort of loop
back to my very long self introduction, what
we're doing at BrainHQ is we're taking an
idea and we're building real world brain training
exercises that really anyone can do on their
computer or their phone.
And they take advantage of this idea of
brain plasticity.
They're adaptive challenging exercises that focus on speed
(07:41):
and attention and working memory.
And they rewire the brain.
We've seen that with brain imaging experiments.
And as a result, they build a healthier
brain and help people think faster, focus better,
and remember more.
But it's really just opened up this huge
vista to starting to think about how should
we take care of our brains throughout our
entire lives, right?
For the moment we're born as a baby,
(08:02):
for the moment we pass away, how can
we maintain, optimize brain health in exactly the
same way that we should be maintaining and
optimizing our physical health so we have a
great vibrant life and we can do all
the things we want to do.
Do you feel like our modern world with
modern technology has really hurt people a lot
when it comes to brain health because we're
(08:22):
no longer, you know, thanks to Google and
my husband and I have a game that
if we ever have a question that we
know we have the answer to it somewhere
in there, we don't let each other just
pick up our phone and look it up
because we're like, it's in that file.
You know, it's in our file and can
have it somewhere.
Give yourself at least five or 10 minutes
and see if you can find it.
Because otherwise, if you're always just finding the
answer because it's so easy on our computers
(08:43):
or on our phone, we're not making our
brains work like they used to have to
work.
Yeah, you know, I certainly think we're living
in a very different technological environment and the
pace of technology change has gotten so fast
that, you know, its impact on our brains
is already distinct than it was from, let's
say, our parents or even a younger generation.
You know, I'm a bit of a moderate
(09:05):
on that.
I normally don't like to say, hey, it's
good or it's bad.
Exactly.
I'm more a believer that, hey, it's different.
We should probably think very carefully about what
those differences mean.
You know, you gave a great example.
An example that often comes to me is
GPS, right?
So I live in San Francisco.
I've lived here for, I guess, almost 30
years now.
(09:26):
And, you know, I lived here before GPS
and I've lived here after GPS.
And it is, I think, striking that we
all use, you know, Google Maps or Apple
Maps when we're driving, even in a city
that we've lived in for a long time.
And on the one hand, sometimes I'll plot
out that route and I'll be like, oh,
I had no idea you could get from
here to there that way.
And other times I wonder exactly like you
(09:47):
saying, hey, am I exercising the parts of
my brain that are involved in navigation and
planning and thinking less because, you know, I
just pop in the in the in the
destination and I never get to experience that.
And, you know, I think that is an
important change for brain health.
You know, it's quite surprising that it turns
out that the part of the brain that's
involved in navigation, like through a city, is
(10:09):
actually the part of the brain that's involved
in forming memories.
It's called the hippocampus.
And there's a lot of sort of deep
seated, almost philosophical thinking among neuroscientists.
Hey, why is making a long term memory
kind of the same to the brain as
finding your way through the city?
But it definitely is.
Perfect sense.
I mean, it's a memory in there how
to get the point and it's kind of
(10:30):
the learning of the point B.
But there was this wonderful study done in
London taxi cab drivers probably 20 years ago
now.
And, you know, as you may know, to
get a taxi cab license in London, at
least back in the day, you had to
demonstrate that you could, you know, get all
across London in all different ways.
In London, it's incredibly big city.
(10:51):
It's an incredibly ancient city.
You know, it's not like Manhattan where we
have vertical and horizontal streets.
And so taxi cab drivers had to demonstrate
they called it the knowledge, right?
And so some scientists in the UK did
an experiment and they actually looked at this
part of the brain, the hippocampus of people
who had the knowledge and ordinary people and
then maybe taxi cab drivers at the beginning
(11:12):
of their career.
And they clearly showed that actually the hippocampus
got bigger and it got thicker as a
result of acquiring this navigational knowledge.
Now, if that's true, and it clearly is,
you have to wonder, well, if we no
longer have to acquire this navigational knowledge, maybe
our hippocampus is not going to be so
big and strong and healthy.
And hey, the hippocampus is the first thing
(11:33):
that starts to deteriorate as we go on
to Alzheimer's disease and certain kinds of dementia.
So maybe we are, you know, as you
say, kind of putting our brain health a
little bit at risk with these kinds of
things.
So I do think that what you say
is exactly right.
I think all of us should be looking
for moments that we can exercise our brains,
(11:54):
put our brains to use and make, you
know, in that sense, contribute to their health.
Exactly the same way in fitness, right?
I mean, I imagine you might tell someone,
hey, if you're going somewhere on the second
floor, or if you're always in the habit
of taking the elevator, because right there in
front of you, hey, maybe think about taking
the stairs, right?
You know, it's not a life-changing thing,
but each little bit of extra exercise you
can get in is going to help your
(12:14):
fitness.
It's going to help preserve your mobility.
And I think absolutely the same thing is
through co-cognition, right?
So like you say, you're trying to remember
who is that actor in that movie for
five years ago.
Worth giving yourself a chance to think it
through, puzzle through while they were also in
this other movie and they were a friend
of person rather than just answering it right
off the bat.
That little bit of extra cognitive exercise is
kind of like taking the stairs in extra
(12:35):
flight and giving yourself some exercise.
Awesome.
My trick for figuring that kind of stuff
out is I'll go through the alphabet.
Who is that actor?
Did it start with an A, B, C?
Okay, I know it started with a C.
CH, and then a lot of times it'll
pop into my head.
I'm curious, and maybe the people listening are
curious as well.
(12:55):
Is there any kind of science that shows
that there's some kind of capacity to our
memory bank, so to speak?
So like we have a limited amount of
memories that we can keep.
And once we hit that, we kind of
start losing memories at the bottom.
Yeah, this works in different ways for different
kinds of memory.
So there are some examples with limitations, but
I think mostly the answer is actually no.
(13:18):
So some common areas where we know their
limitations is like what's called working memory.
So working memory is your ability to keep
a number of things in mind at the
same time and kind of juggle them back
and forth.
Classic example is a phone number, right?
You know, can I remember all the digits?
You tell me your phone number, and can
I remember all the digits by the time
I actually open up my phone and type
it in with my phone?
(13:38):
Right, and hey, there's a ton of very
famous experiments that say, hey, for just about
everyone, the magic number of items you can
keep in your working memory is 7 plus
or minus 2, as they say.
If you have low working memory, maybe 5.
If you have great working memory, maybe 9.
But hey, most people just cannot keep 15
items in their working memory.
And that probably has to do with some,
(13:59):
you know, very fascinating and complex issues about
how brainwaves work and how networks of neurons
kind of fire together to maintain an image
of something in your mind.
So in that sense, that's a well-known
limitation.
Another pretty well-known limitation is, you know,
people kind of be all the time, they're
like, oh, I'm terrible at names and faces,
right?
I just cannot remember people's names.
(14:19):
And I usually say, hey, you are fine,
actually.
You've convinced, that's mindset a lot of times,
too.
It's mindset, but it's also, you know, back
to your comments about the modern world.
You know, we as humans, you know, we
were evolved to live in these, you know,
sort of small hunter-gatherer societies, probably around
100 people in them is what anthropologists say.
And hey, most people can remember 100 names
(14:41):
and faces of people that we know and
have worked with, your childhood friends, your family
members, the people you see every day at
work.
So that's what your brain was evolved to
do.
It's fine at it.
You know, what your brain was not evolved
to do is how we've moved into this
kind of more modern society with cities and
industrial living.
And now our expectation is, I meet someone
once at a, you know, coffee store and
(15:02):
four months later, I see them again and
I should be able to remember their name
and like, no, actually you shouldn't.
Your brain was never evolved to do that.
You're never going to do that.
Don't feel bad about it.
We should all just feel fine about reintroducing
ourselves.
You know, there's chips and tricks, but the
brain just wasn't evolved to do that.
On the other hand, you know, I think
that a lot of people have a metaphor
of their brain that it's like their computer's
hard disk, right?
(15:23):
Hey, I've got a hundred gigabytes on my
hard disk.
And once I fill it all up with
photos, I got to, like you say, I
got to delete the old ones and they
got to go.
And there's not really a lot of evidence
that our brain works that way.
You know, it is not so much that
as we live a longer life that we
get rid of our younger memories and that's
(15:45):
why we can't remember them.
I don't think there's many neuroscientists who see
it that way.
I do think it's true that we often
think of memory with a metaphor that's probably
just wrong, right?
Well, I mean, let's say you're trying to
remember something from your childhood, right?
A metaphor that a person might have as
well, my brain's kind of like a filing
cabinet, right?
I'll pull open the filing cabinet drawer, flick
through it off.
(16:05):
There's that one, I'll pull it out.
Oh, there's me at camp with my best
friend.
That's not really the way memory works.
When you remember something in your brain, your
brain actually fully recreates the experience for you.
And what I mean by that is if
you look at brain imaging and you ask
people to see something and then you ask
them to close their eyes and imagine seeing
(16:26):
it, there's like a lot of overlap between
those situations, right?
That is the memory.
It is recreating the experience as it happened
to you in your brain.
And what that means is remembering is a
very active process, right?
We're not just pulling something out of the
filing cabinet.
We're turning on hundreds of different areas of
the brain that are connected to each other
in all those complex ways.
So because it is an active process, it's
(16:49):
a process that Canon needs to be exercised,
right?
You know, again, from a physical fitness perspective,
let's say you got really good at doing
pull-ups 20 years ago, right?
Good for you.
And I took about 30 today, actually.
That is incredible.
Wow.
I will get some tips from you on
that topic.
Happy to have pull-ups are my thing.
Okay, but then if you didn't do them
(17:10):
for 20 years, you wouldn't say, well, I'll
just hop on and rack out 30 pull
-ups again, right?
Because your body wouldn't be accustomed to anything.
So if you are looking to have those
childhood memories stay fresh, you need to actively
exercise, recreate them.
You need to take little bits of your
day and you need to think, I really
wanna walk through my childhood camp experience where
I met my best friend and you need
(17:30):
to actively bring those memories to life.
What did I hear?
What did I see?
What was I feeling?
What was I thinking?
What did I smell?
And that process itself can strengthen memories.
But in that sense, no, I don't think
we get full in that sense.
Sometimes a science fiction book will come out,
right?
What if we all have to be 200?
What would that be like?
I mean, probably bad in a lot of
(17:51):
ways, but I don't think one of them
would be, you would run out of memories.
That's sad.
This doesn't seem to be how it works.
That's interesting that you said that about remembering
your memories to help you keep your memories.
And again, talking about modern society, I grew
up in the time, I'm what's called an
organ trail millennial where I was, the old
school, I had real photos back in the
(18:12):
day.
I remember a time before the internet and
we have the photo books still that we
are able to look back at.
I was actually just showing my sister-in
-law a couple of weekends ago, my scrapbooks
from college.
And a lot of the kids nowadays, they
don't have that, right?
Because everything's saved in our phone.
And I don't think that families sit down
and, oh, let's scroll through our phone from
(18:33):
when you were in kindergarten.
So I wonder how that will change in
the future as well with people being able
to keep their memories healthy.
You know, I think you're exactly right.
I think that, you know, very heartwarming sense
of, hey, let's sit around and let's get
out the wedding photos, or let's look at
the photo book I had from when you
were in elementary school.
You know, that's a process by which we
(18:54):
exercise our memories that strengthens the memories we
already have.
And to the extent we don't do them,
I think they're more likely to fade.
You know, I think more families probably should
bust out the iPhone and take a look
at those old photos.
In fact, I think at this point, my
favorite thing my phone does is it occasionally
says, hey, wanna know what you were doing
10 years ago?
Look at you climbing this mountain.
I'm like, oh, that's a great memory.
(19:15):
I'm glad you're refreshing that and that helps
it cement it.
But again, it just shows that the brain
and the memory and the thinking and all
this stuff, it's a very active process.
We're not a passive system.
It's not like a computer that does the
same thing over and over again.
You know, this brain as a system is
constantly rebuilding and rewiring itself in response to
what we do, what we learn, and it
(19:36):
reshapes itself in that way.
And that process of brain plasticity, just like
the physical body, reshapes itself in response to
what we ask it to do.
You know, it can either build a healthier
brain for us that can remember these things
and have sharp pivot perceptions and clear thinking,
or it can build a brain that like
doesn't do those things quite as well.
And you know, we start to slide into
various kinds of cognitive impairment issues or brain
(19:58):
health issues.
I definitely wanna talk here in just a
second about some tips on what you can
actually do to improve your brain health, improve
your brain fitness as you move forward with
activities and nutrition.
But I'm also, is there, I was just
thinking about this as we're talking about memories.
You know, sometimes in your childhood, you kind
of look back and you're like, wait, did
this happen?
Or was this a story that my mom
(20:20):
told me?
So what's going on in our brain where
we confuse, you know, the story of somebody
else?
And we've literally, like you've mentioned with memories
create this picture and all of a sudden
we've created that to be a memory that
we had.
You wouldn't think we would ever have false
memories.
You know, if the brain worked like a
file drawer and you had a file drawer
full of things that happened to me and
you had a file drawer full of things
that my mom told me, you'd never get
(20:42):
mixed up, right?
There's two different parts.
But unfortunately, for better or worse, brain doesn't
work anything like that.
You know, when you first have the experience,
as we were saying, you know, all kinds
of brain parts activate your sight, your sense,
your sound, your smell, your thinking, and all
those kinds of parts of the brain, they
kind of fire together and they wire together
(21:03):
and they form this coherent, multi-dimensional, multi
-spectral kind of activity pattern.
And hey, that goes away.
And then when we want to remember it,
we can trigger it, right?
You know, a smell can remind us of
a memory like Proust, right, in the Madeline.
And he remembers all of his childhood in
France.
And so, you know, you might think of
that as that little bit of a sensation
(21:24):
kind of kicks off this reverberation in the
brain, which recruits all these other brain regions
that were active when we were having that
memory.
And hey, we have the memory again.
That's great.
Well, what happens when your mom tells you
something?
They'll say, let's take a good scenario.
You've forgotten the memory, right?
And your mom tells you, oh, don't you
remember when you were a kid, we used
to go out to the market and we
used to buy these, you know, bananas.
(21:46):
So as she's telling you that, well, your
brain is forming that image.
It doesn't really matter whether it happened or
not, right?
You're hearing it and your brain is thinking
about being in the market and buying bananas,
as the case may be.
And if that happens enough, well, your brain
will trigger that as if it happened.
And, you know, if you're an adult and
you're very thoughtful, you might think, well, I
form a conscious memory of not remembering that
(22:08):
even though my mom's telling.
But it's very, very easy for that to
become a thing that your brain can kick
off, that at that point feels exactly like
a memory you might have yourself.
And yeah, I think in most cases that's
really quite benign, right?
I think it's nice when my mom tells
me about something that I kind of remember
and, you know, maybe it fills in some
details and now I have this joint memory
(22:29):
with her.
But of course that can be much more,
you know, problematic in certain situations, right?
Sometimes people are trying to deceive you, right?
And, you know, and you can inadvertently form
a false memory.
There are terrible situations with like forced confessions,
right?
And I think often a person who's not
under stress, who's cognitively healthy thinks, why would
(22:50):
someone ever confess to something they didn't do?
Right, you almost can't imagine that.
But, you know, if your brain is under
sufficient stress and you are being told over
and over again that this thing happened and
you did it, you're forming that image and
that sensation in your mind.
And if your stress is high enough and
your panic is high enough, it can eventually
seem like, well, that does actually kind of
(23:11):
seem like a memory.
How would I tell the difference?
And so we can have very tragic outcomes
for that.
So memory is, you know, it is an
incredible thing that our brains can do, but
it's not like a photo you pull out
of the photo gallery and that's exactly the
way it was.
Right, very, very interesting.
So now as we're getting older, like I
said, that Oregon Trail millennial, what can we
(23:32):
be doing to help ourselves stay as healthy
as we can up here?
Because as my grandmother always used to say,
anytime she'd have a lapse in memory, she'd
be like, just the case of the old
timers.
And I don't want to have a case
of the old timers if I can help
it.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
I think, you know, I think, you know,
our generation as we get older, we are
(23:54):
much more thinking about how we can take
charge of our health and our destiny as
we get older.
You know, I think my parents' generation and
probably your parents too, maybe the last generation
where it was like, well, this is what
getting older is like and I should just
sit back and like, what are you going
to do?
It's part of it, exactly.
Like now the old timers.
(24:15):
So my- It's the same way I'm
supposed to, you know, lose- I'm supposed
to lose mobility.
I'm not going to be able to walk
around anymore.
And I'm probably not going to have everything
so good, but hey, this is the way
our bodies were built.
So we should just make the best of
it.
So my grandfather passed away when I was
about 10 years old and he passed away
of at the time, what was called senile
dementia.
And, you know, we would now call that
(24:35):
Alzheimer's disease.
But when he passed away, it was like,
hey, this is just kind of what happens.
You're going to get old and lose your
memory and be committed to a home.
And I think our generation, we've had this
change with our physical health, right?
I think every person now who's getting older
realizes, hey, I need to maintain physical activity.
I should have a physical health program.
I should walk.
I should take the stairs when I can.
(24:56):
I should swim.
You know, maybe I'll do balance exercises to
reduce my risk of fall.
But fundamentally we believe that we can change
our physical fate by investing effort in our
physical health, right?
And that's great.
It is true.
And people should absolutely do that.
We should get to the point where we
can do 32 pull-ups in the morning
before we do that.
That's incredible.
(25:17):
But I think we're just now at the
point where we realize the same thing is
true for brain health.
And we do not have to accept that
we're necessarily going to go on to dementia.
We don't have to believe that it's all
just in the genes, right?
Your grandfather had dementia, so you are too,
and whatever, it's going to hit you when
it hits you.
So there's quite a few things that we
can do that have been shown to improve
brain health.
And I'll talk about a few of them.
(25:39):
I'll start with physical health, because of course
you're talking about fitness and many of the
people watching or listening to this are thinking
about fitness.
It is very well established at this point
that people who are in better physical health
have reduced rates of cognitive decline, and they
have a lower risk of going on to
Alzheimer's and dementia.
And so why is that, right?
It's counterintuitive, right?
You're out there going up the stairs.
That kind of feels like you're like muscles.
(26:00):
So you can work, right?
And there seem to be probably two things
that are going on.
First of all, when you engage in physical
exercise, it actually releases a growth factor in
your brain called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor.
And that's a protein that literally helps neurons
sprout and helps them make new connections and
in that sense builds the health of the
brain.
(26:21):
Now, why is that true?
That's a great question.
It has something to do with the fact
that again, back in old human times, as
we were out and about in the world,
our brains needed to learn and rewire themselves
as we were getting exercise, because we were
out hunting a mammoth or exploring a new
part of the forest or whatever.
As I say, you're on trails or in
the woods.
You're not walking down a street.
You have to be very aware of, don't
(26:43):
trip over this and die.
Exactly right.
And as a brain scientist, as we talk
about this kind of exercise, I think growing
to the gym is great.
I went to the gym this morning myself,
but it's not like being out hiking on
a trail, right?
Being out hiking on a trail is much
more cognitively demanding.
There's more unexpected things, but on the plus
side, there's more things to notice.
(27:04):
You can use your attention and your working
memory and your speed.
The other thing that happens with physical exercise
and brain health is we make our heart
healthy.
And making the heart healthy, we know has
benefits like lowering blood pressure and reducing the
risk of heart attack and stroke.
And those are incredibly important for brain health.
I mean, obviously a stroke is a disastrous
brain health issue, right?
Literally your brain is damaged because it's deprived
(27:26):
of oxygen for a period of time.
But there are probably little tiny, sometimes we
call them micro strokes.
I hate to call them micro strokes because
they sound so bad.
But from time to time, our brain is
probably just getting a little touch of damage
as a result of a heart health issue.
And if you're exercising and building a healthier
heart, hey, you're gonna have less of those
micro damages to your brain and they'll add
(27:49):
up less over time and you'll be less
risk for dementia.
So physical exercise is a great piece.
You know, a second area that's gotten a
ton of interest, that's been, well, I'll mention
a few of them and then I'll dive
into just one or two depths.
You know, often we think about physical exercise.
We think about diet and nutrition.
We think about stress.
(28:10):
We think about sleep.
We think about social connection.
And then we think about my particular area
of expertise which is cognitive activity and brain
training.
So I'll pick one more and then I'll
talk about brain training because it is so
near and dear to my heart.
You know, after physical exercise, I think one
of the things that comes up most interestingly
to people is, I think one of the
most interesting ones is social connection.
And you know, that's not one again that
(28:31):
maybe 10 or 15 years ago, a lot
of people would have highlighted, but it's become
very, very clear now that our brains are
not designed to exist in isolation at all.
We are social primates.
We're designed to work together and be together,
you know, and play together, have fun together.
Exactly, be angry at each other is the
case maybe.
And that actually ends up being incredibly important
(28:53):
to our brains.
The Surgeon General, you know, wrote a book
where he talked about loneliness as the new
sedentary, the new size, the risk from oldiness
or as bad as your risk from being
a sedentary person, right?
And we do have an epidemic of loneliness,
right?
We are in our houses more, especially after
the COVID pandemic.
We have all kinds of things we can
(29:14):
do around watching movies or, you know, that
don't involve necessarily being out and about with
each other.
We live farther from each other.
I live 3000 miles from my mom.
I don't see her every day the way
I would have a generation ago.
And it's also so funny and kind of
ironic that there's a loneliness epidemic and yet
we've never been so close to people in
terms of like, you know, I've got 5
,000 on those followers on social media.
(29:36):
There's people all around me, but yet I
can be so lonely here in this home.
Yes.
And I, there was so much to say
about social media, but some of it's a
strength.
I think it can bring us together.
I think people probably watch the podcast and
they feel some of that social connection that
they're looking for.
And that's great.
But at the same time, so much of
how we do live our lives does lead
us to, you know, not having so many
(29:56):
authentic personal interactions.
So anyway, people who...
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