Dr. Wendy Suzuki: Boost Attention & Memory with Science-Based Tools

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.880 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.040 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:12.840 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:14.720 | Today, my guest is Dr. Wendy Suzuki.

00:00:17.280 | Dr. Suzuki is a professor of neuroscience and psychology

00:00:20.120 | at New York University,

00:00:21.560 | and one of the leading researchers

00:00:23.080 | in the area of learning and memory.

00:00:25.380 | Her laboratory has contributed fundamental

00:00:27.540 | textbook understanding of how brain areas,

00:00:30.000 | such as the hippocampus, which you will learn about today,

00:00:32.940 | how the hippocampus and related brain circuits allow us

00:00:36.440 | to take certain experiences and commit them to memory

00:00:39.180 | so that we can use that information in the future.

00:00:41.740 | Dr. Suzuki is also an expert public educator

00:00:45.040 | in the realm of science.

00:00:46.680 | A few years back, she had a TED Talk

00:00:49.240 | that essentially went viral.

00:00:50.720 | If you haven't seen it already,

00:00:51.880 | you should absolutely check it out.

00:00:53.680 | In which she describes her experience using exercise

00:00:57.820 | as a way to enhance learning and memory.

00:01:00.300 | And on the basis of that personal experience,

00:01:02.640 | she reshaped her laboratory to explore how things

00:01:05.620 | like meditation, exercise,

00:01:08.060 | and other things that we can do with our physiology

00:01:10.240 | and our psychology can allow us to learn faster,

00:01:13.580 | to commit things to memory longer,

00:01:15.700 | and indeed to reshape our cognitive performance

00:01:18.440 | in a variety of settings.

00:01:20.360 | As such, I am delighted to announce

00:01:22.300 | that Dr. Suzuki is now not only running a laboratory

00:01:25.460 | at New York University,

00:01:26.940 | but she is the incoming Dean of Arts and Science

00:01:29.300 | at New York University.

00:01:30.860 | And of course she was selected for that role

00:01:32.660 | for her many talents.

00:01:34.180 | But one of the important aspects of her program,

00:01:36.740 | she tells me, is going to be to incorporate

00:01:40.140 | the incredible power of exercise, meditation,

00:01:42.820 | and other behavioral practices for enhancing learning,

00:01:46.060 | for improving stress management,

00:01:48.260 | and other things to optimize student performance.

00:01:50.740 | Today, you are going to get access

00:01:52.660 | to much of that information so that you can apply

00:01:55.140 | those tools in your daily life as well.

00:01:58.060 | Dr. Suzuki is also an author of several important books.

00:02:01.900 | The most recent one is entitled "Good Anxiety,

00:02:04.260 | Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion,"

00:02:07.620 | and a previous book entitled "Healthy Brain, Happy Life,

00:02:10.300 | A Personal Program to Activate Your Brain

00:02:12.300 | and Do Everything Better."

00:02:14.100 | And while that is admittedly a very pop science type title,

00:02:18.560 | I will remind you that she is one of the preeminent

00:02:21.380 | memory researchers in the world

00:02:23.540 | and has been for quite a while.

00:02:25.980 | So the information that you'll glean from those books

00:02:28.540 | is both rich in depth and breadth and is highly applicable.

00:02:32.120 | By the end of today's discussion,

00:02:33.760 | you will have learned from Dr. Suzuki

00:02:36.020 | a large amount of knowledge about how memories are formed,

00:02:38.960 | how they are lost,

00:02:40.180 | and you will have a much larger kit of tools to apply

00:02:43.900 | for your efforts to learn better, to remember better,

00:02:47.260 | and to apply that information in the ways

00:02:49.000 | that best serve you.

00:02:50.400 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:02:52.940 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:02:55.860 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:02:58.040 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:03:00.500 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:03:03.340 | In keeping with that theme,

00:03:04.380 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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00:03:13.420 | I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012,

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00:03:42.740 | All of this is very important because we now know

00:03:45.300 | that gut health and the so-called gut-brain axis

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00:07:24.260 | And now for my discussion with Dr. Wendy Suzuki.

00:07:27.980 | Wendy, great to see you again and to have you here.

00:07:30.340 | It's been a little while.

00:07:31.560 | - It's been a while.

00:07:32.620 | So great to be here, Andrew.

00:07:33.940 | Thank you so much for having me.

00:07:35.260 | - Yeah, delighted.

00:07:37.220 | I'd like to start off by talking about memory generally.

00:07:40.820 | And then I'd love to chat about your incredible work

00:07:44.780 | discovering how exercise and memory interface

00:07:48.020 | and what people can do to improve their memory

00:07:49.980 | and brain function generally.

00:07:51.860 | But for those that are not familiar,

00:07:54.980 | maybe you could just step us through

00:07:56.460 | the basic elements of memory.

00:07:58.900 | A few brain structures, perhaps.

00:08:01.180 | What happens when I, for instance,

00:08:02.620 | this mug of tea is pretty unremarkable,

00:08:07.220 | but the fact that now I've talked about it,

00:08:09.700 | I don't know that I'll ever forget about it.

00:08:11.700 | Maybe I will, maybe I won't.

00:08:12.940 | So what happens when I look at this mug

00:08:15.740 | and decide that it's something special for whatever reason?

00:08:19.940 | - Yeah, well, I like to see there are four things

00:08:22.860 | that make things memorable.

00:08:25.060 | Number one is novelty.

00:08:28.060 | If it's something new, the very first thing,

00:08:30.940 | the very first time we've seen something

00:08:32.740 | or experienced something, our brains are drawn to that.

00:08:35.660 | Our attentional systems draw us to that.

00:08:37.900 | And when you are paying attention to something,

00:08:40.020 | that's part of what makes things memorable.

00:08:43.460 | Second is repetition.

00:08:45.220 | If you see that cup of tea every single day

00:08:48.460 | and every single time you do an interview,

00:08:50.300 | you talk about your cup of tea, you're gonna remember it.

00:08:52.460 | That's just how our brains work, repetition works.

00:08:57.140 | Third is association.

00:08:59.780 | So if you meet somebody new

00:09:04.180 | that knows lots of people that you know,

00:09:07.060 | so you and I share many, many, many, many people

00:09:09.980 | that we both know, it's easier to remember you,

00:09:14.420 | especially if you were somebody new

00:09:16.220 | that I hadn't met before, we have met before.

00:09:18.660 | So association.

00:09:20.100 | And then the fourth one is emotional resonance.

00:09:24.700 | So we remember the happiest

00:09:26.900 | and the saddest moments of our lives.

00:09:29.340 | And that also includes funny, surprising things.

00:09:33.700 | That is the interaction between two key brain structures,

00:09:38.460 | the amygdala, which is important for processing

00:09:43.020 | lots of emotional, particularly threatening

00:09:44.820 | kinds of situations.

00:09:46.260 | But those threatening, surprising kinds of situations,

00:09:50.300 | the amygdala takes that information

00:09:52.100 | and makes another key structure called the hippocampus

00:09:56.540 | work better to put new long-term memories in your brain.

00:10:01.540 | So that in fact is the key structure for long-term memory,

00:10:06.620 | the structure called the hippocampus.

00:10:08.940 | - Fantastic, so novelty, repetition,

00:10:10.860 | association and emotional resonance.

00:10:13.180 | - Yes.

00:10:14.140 | - You can tell us a bit more about the hippocampus.

00:10:16.100 | I think at least for my generation,

00:10:19.180 | well, I'm a neuroscientist,

00:10:20.140 | but for most people in my generation,

00:10:21.700 | I think they first heard about the hippocampus

00:10:23.620 | from the movie "Memento."

00:10:24.860 | - Oh yeah.

00:10:25.700 | - The guy says hippocampus.

00:10:27.100 | - Yeah.

00:10:28.140 | - And for those of you that haven't seen that movie,

00:10:29.780 | it's a bizarrely constructed movie,

00:10:32.140 | but an interesting one nonetheless about memory.

00:10:36.180 | But even as a neuroscientist,

00:10:38.300 | sometimes I'm perplexed at how the hippocampus works.

00:10:43.300 | Maybe you could, if you would,

00:10:46.620 | step us through kind of what this structure is,

00:10:48.380 | what it looks like, maybe a few of its sub regions,

00:10:51.300 | because unlike vision, the topic that I've worked

00:10:55.780 | most of my career on, where we know,

00:10:58.220 | okay, the eye does this part and the thalamus does this part

00:11:00.580 | and the cortex does that part,

00:11:01.860 | I've always been a little perplexed

00:11:03.020 | about the hippocampus, frankly.

00:11:04.580 | - Okay.

00:11:05.500 | - And I've read the textbooks and I've heard the lectures,

00:11:07.380 | but I'd love to get the update.

00:11:09.180 | What are the general themes of the hippocampus

00:11:11.180 | as a structure and its function?

00:11:13.860 | What do you think everyone, including neuroscientists,

00:11:16.580 | should know about the hippocampus?

00:11:18.060 | - Absolutely, so let's start with the basics.

00:11:21.220 | The word hippocampus means seahorse.

00:11:24.180 | It is shaped, the structure is shaped

00:11:26.260 | like a kind of curly Q seahorse, that is accurate.

00:11:30.540 | Everybody, including neuroscientists,

00:11:33.700 | should know it's a beautiful structure.

00:11:35.140 | It is visually anatomically beautiful

00:11:38.900 | with these kind of intertwining,

00:11:42.200 | twirly sub regions within it.

00:11:45.580 | And I think that's one of the reasons why early anatomists,

00:11:49.100 | who were the very first neuroscientists,

00:11:50.940 | got attracted to it because it's this interesting

00:11:53.460 | kind of twirly structure deep in the heart of the brain.

00:11:56.980 | So that's anatomically.

00:11:58.820 | Functionally, what does it do?

00:12:01.620 | Well, it's easiest to understand what it does

00:12:05.860 | when you look at what happens

00:12:08.680 | when you don't have a hippocampus anymore.

00:12:10.580 | What if you, what if by some disease

00:12:14.180 | or you have your hippocampus removed by accident,

00:12:18.300 | what happens?

00:12:19.260 | Well, we know this from the most famous

00:12:23.000 | neurological patient of all time.

00:12:26.140 | His initials were H.M.,

00:12:28.020 | so all psychology and neuroscience students know him.

00:12:32.620 | He was operated in 1954,

00:12:37.020 | and the paper was published in 1957.

00:12:40.560 | They removed both his hippocampi

00:12:42.780 | because he had very terrible epilepsy.

00:12:45.700 | And they knew that the hippocampus

00:12:48.020 | was the genesis of epilepsy.

00:12:50.300 | And this was experimental.

00:12:51.740 | His epilepsy was so bad that they decided

00:12:54.940 | not just to remove one hippocampus, but both.

00:12:57.900 | And what happened was immediate,

00:13:00.240 | immediate loss of all ability to form new memories

00:13:06.360 | for facts and events.

00:13:07.860 | Think about that for a second.

00:13:10.020 | All facts or events you're not able to remember.

00:13:13.520 | I can't remember this interaction between us.

00:13:16.660 | I can't remember any of the facts

00:13:18.380 | that we were just chatting about in our neuroscience lives.

00:13:22.420 | None of that can move into our long-term memory.

00:13:27.420 | So this hippocampus does something

00:13:29.900 | with all of these perceptions that are coming at us

00:13:32.900 | every single day, every minute of the day,

00:13:35.380 | and not for all of them, but for some of them

00:13:38.780 | that have these features that we just talked about.

00:13:40.880 | Maybe they're novel, maybe they have associations,

00:13:42.860 | maybe they're emotionally relevant,

00:13:44.580 | maybe they've been repeated.

00:13:48.180 | Some of those things in the realm of facts or events

00:13:51.540 | get encoded in our long-term memory.

00:13:55.820 | And that's the textbook of why

00:13:59.380 | the hippocampus is so important.

00:14:01.360 | I like to always add, and I mean,

00:14:03.420 | this is why I studied it for so many years,

00:14:06.420 | the hippocampus and what it does

00:14:07.900 | really defines our own personal histories.

00:14:11.400 | It means it defines who we are.

00:14:13.700 | Because if we can't remember what we've done,

00:14:16.960 | the information we've learned,

00:14:19.140 | and the events of our lives, it changes us.

00:14:22.820 | That's what really defines us.

00:14:24.660 | That's why I wanted to study the hippocampus.

00:14:27.600 | And I think the exciting new ideas

00:14:31.380 | about the hippocampus was,

00:14:33.820 | is that hippocampus is important for memory.

00:14:37.580 | So if you say that, you'll impress all your people

00:14:40.300 | at your cocktail party.

00:14:42.780 | But what people have started to realize,

00:14:46.020 | that it's not just memory.

00:14:49.000 | It's not just putting together associations

00:14:51.960 | for what, where, and when of events

00:14:54.820 | that happened in our past,

00:14:56.660 | but it's putting together information

00:14:58.660 | that is in our long-term memory banks

00:15:01.500 | in interesting new ways.

00:15:04.220 | I'm talking about imagination.

00:15:06.180 | So without the hippocampus, yes, you can't remember things,

00:15:09.620 | but actually you're not able to imagine events

00:15:13.880 | or situations that you've never experienced before.

00:15:17.640 | So what that says is the hippocampus is important for memory

00:15:21.680 | is a too simple a way to think about it.

00:15:24.060 | What the hippocampus is important for

00:15:26.460 | is what we've already talked about,

00:15:28.060 | associating things together writ large.

00:15:30.780 | Anytime you need to associate something together,

00:15:33.540 | either for your past, your present, or your future,

00:15:37.060 | you are using your hippocampus.

00:15:38.860 | And it takes on this much more important role

00:15:43.060 | in our cognitive lives when we think about it like that.

00:15:45.940 | That is kind of the new, the new hippocampus

00:15:49.540 | that neuroscientists are studying these days.

00:15:52.420 | - That's fantastic.

00:15:53.260 | So it sounds like it really sets context,

00:15:55.740 | but it can do that with elements from the past,

00:15:58.140 | the present, or the future.

00:15:59.820 | - Yes.

00:16:00.660 | - And the, well, for neuroscientists,

00:16:03.100 | the phrase is domain.

00:16:04.460 | We say the time domain,

00:16:05.960 | meaning as opposed to just evaluating things in space.

00:16:08.380 | It sounds like the time domain of hippocampal functioning

00:16:11.740 | is incredibly interesting.

00:16:13.100 | - It is.

00:16:13.940 | - And even the fact that we can have short-term,

00:16:15.940 | medium-term, and long-term memories,

00:16:17.140 | and we could go down any of these rabbit holes.

00:16:19.820 | I'll ask you a true or false,

00:16:21.100 | mostly because I just really want to know the answer.

00:16:23.980 | A few years ago, the theme in various high-profile reviews

00:16:27.420 | seemed to be that the hippocampus was involved in encoding,

00:16:30.800 | in creating memories, but not in storing memories,

00:16:33.760 | and that the memory storage was in the neocortex

00:16:36.420 | or the other overlying areas of the brain.

00:16:38.620 | Is that too general a statement?

00:16:40.620 | - That's a tricky statement,

00:16:45.760 | because I think that ultimately, yes,

00:16:49.940 | that long-term memories are stored in the cortex,

00:16:53.340 | but those memories are stored in the hippocampus

00:16:55.620 | sometimes for a very, very long time.

00:16:58.540 | So how long is too long,

00:17:01.920 | where you say, oh, it's not the hippocampus anymore?

00:17:03.740 | If it's four years, is that?

00:17:06.360 | Does that mean that it's not stored in the hippocampus?

00:17:09.920 | I think that's a tricky question,

00:17:12.180 | and yes, it was coming up a lot

00:17:13.820 | because people were debating it,

00:17:15.580 | and some people did think that you shouldn't think

00:17:18.320 | about the hippocampus as a storage area,

00:17:20.760 | but I think it's a long, long, long-term

00:17:23.500 | kind of intermediate storage area,

00:17:26.360 | maybe not the long-term storage area.

00:17:28.640 | That's why it's hard to answer that question.

00:17:30.460 | - Great.

00:17:31.600 | As I recall, H.M. could remember facts

00:17:35.420 | from before his surgery.

00:17:37.280 | He couldn't form new memories.

00:17:39.300 | And given that he had no hippocampus,

00:17:40.960 | it would at least partially support the idea

00:17:43.380 | that some memories are retained outside the hippocampus.

00:17:47.120 | - However, he did have part of his posterior hippocampus

00:17:51.720 | intact, so that's the tricky thing.

00:17:54.800 | I think initially, in fact, Scoville, the neurosurgeon,

00:17:59.800 | overestimated the number of millimeters

00:18:03.640 | he intended to remove of the hippocampus,

00:18:07.360 | and then when they did the very historic MRI of H.M.

00:18:12.360 | later in his life, they showed that, in fact,

00:18:15.920 | he did have that posterior hippocampus,

00:18:17.880 | part of the posterior hippocampus intact.

00:18:19.960 | So now it makes it a little bit more complicated

00:18:24.120 | to interpret what's going on,

00:18:25.600 | not that it was never uncomplicated.

00:18:28.440 | Any interpretation of a lesion in a patient,

00:18:31.440 | as you know, is complicated,

00:18:33.300 | but H.M. had this mythical role in neuroscience

00:18:38.300 | and neurology, and now it was complicated

00:18:42.320 | because he does have more of the hippocampus intact.

00:18:45.640 | - I did not know that.

00:18:46.860 | There are some memories that can be formed very quickly,

00:18:52.840 | so-called one-trial learning.

00:18:54.600 | And I'm just looking at this list again,

00:18:56.320 | novelty, repetition, association, and emotional resonance.

00:19:00.200 | It seems like some experiences

00:19:03.600 | can bypass the need for multiple repetitions.

00:19:06.060 | - Yeah, absolutely.

00:19:06.900 | - So, and unfortunately, it seems that our nervous system

00:19:11.740 | is skewed toward creating one-trial memories

00:19:15.160 | for negative events, which has a survival-adaptive mechanism.

00:19:19.780 | What is the neural connection that allows that to happen?

00:19:23.200 | Is it the amygdala to hippocampus connection?

00:19:25.740 | I mean, as you and I know,

00:19:26.580 | it seems like every brain area ultimately

00:19:28.700 | is connected to everything else.

00:19:29.780 | It's just a question of through how many nodes,

00:19:31.880 | just like every city is connected to another city.

00:19:33.840 | It's just a question of how many flights

00:19:35.320 | and roads do you have to traverse before you get there?

00:19:40.320 | What is it about one-trial learning?

00:19:42.820 | I mean, at a kind of top contour level,

00:19:45.860 | how can we learn certain things so fast?

00:19:49.760 | And other things are tricky.

00:19:51.360 | And now every time I look at this white mug,

00:19:52.940 | it's queuing up something special

00:19:54.320 | that simply by virtue of saying it.

00:19:56.460 | So is that one-trial memory?

00:19:58.300 | But what is it about very emotionally salient events

00:20:03.300 | that allow memories to get stamped in?

00:20:06.340 | - Yeah, I mean, I think you've already alluded to it,

00:20:10.220 | that is, there is this protective function of our brains

00:20:15.020 | that has evolved over the last 2.5 million years,

00:20:18.260 | that you need to pay attention

00:20:20.380 | and remember certain things for your survival.

00:20:23.980 | So some things that get stamped in,

00:20:27.780 | they're memories, but they're fear memories.

00:20:30.860 | If I get mugged on the subway or there are terrible things

00:20:35.860 | that could happen on the subway, as we just learned.

00:20:38.900 | But if something terrible happens,

00:20:40.160 | if something very scary happens, you remember that.

00:20:43.900 | And that fear and that memory of all those things.

00:20:48.420 | I mean, I have one, when I lived in Washington, DC,

00:20:52.260 | I went to work at NIH on a Sunday afternoon

00:20:54.820 | and I came back and when I rounded the corner

00:20:57.360 | to my door of my apartment, it was crowbarred in.

00:21:01.640 | Somebody had taken a crowbar, opened up my door

00:21:04.740 | and stole all of the nicest things in my apartment,

00:21:09.740 | which wasn't that nice

00:21:10.820 | 'cause I wasn't making that much money.

00:21:13.320 | But ever since then, whenever I rounded that corner,

00:21:18.320 | I still had that memory.

00:21:19.700 | It was terrible because it put me in a terrible state

00:21:22.340 | when I was just coming home.

00:21:24.460 | And that's a survival mechanism.

00:21:26.820 | - Do you want to be alert to possible danger?

00:21:30.460 | Absolutely, yes.

00:21:31.780 | So part of those one trial memories,

00:21:35.440 | I think is often taking advantage

00:21:38.000 | of this evolutionarily developed system

00:21:41.460 | to tamp in things that could be potentially dangerous to you

00:21:45.340 | into your memory.

00:21:46.540 | So you forever will remember this particular corner

00:21:51.220 | or this hallway because that is where something

00:21:54.520 | really bad happened to you.

00:21:56.620 | - It seems like a location.

00:21:58.340 | We talked about conditioned place aversion,

00:22:00.660 | which is just a geek speak for wanting to avoid the place

00:22:03.620 | where something bad happened or condition place preference,

00:22:06.280 | wanting to go back to a place

00:22:07.420 | where something positive happened.

00:22:08.860 | We've been looking at a photograph

00:22:10.140 | of where you had a wonderful time with somebody

00:22:12.540 | and that can evoke all sorts of positive sensations.

00:22:16.020 | It seems like at some level, as complex as the brain is,

00:22:20.620 | the basic elements of feeling good or feeling lousy

00:22:24.220 | are states within the brain and body.

00:22:26.500 | And linking those to places seems like

00:22:28.560 | it's a pretty straightforward formula.

00:22:30.460 | Link place to state, link state to place, et cetera,

00:22:34.260 | as your description just provided.

00:22:36.980 | When we learn more complex information,

00:22:39.620 | a poem, a concept,

00:22:44.420 | or we have to ratchet through a set of ideas,

00:22:47.140 | that also involves memory.

00:22:49.720 | I'm sure that we'll talk more about this,

00:22:53.540 | but is there any way that you're aware of that state,

00:22:58.540 | bodily state, can be leveraged to enhance the speed

00:23:04.020 | or the quality of memories and memory formation?

00:23:09.220 | Because, you know, so to be clear about it,

00:23:12.780 | it seems there's something very important about this fourth,

00:23:16.000 | you know, this emotional resonance component, right?

00:23:19.420 | Novelty, the crowbar into the doors,

00:23:22.100 | thank goodness sounds like it was novel,

00:23:24.060 | it wasn't a repeated thing, thank goodness.

00:23:26.220 | So repetition is out and the association

00:23:28.020 | is very, very strong.

00:23:30.040 | But for people trying to learn information

00:23:32.900 | that they're not that excited about,

00:23:35.060 | or that repetition is hard,

00:23:38.180 | or the novelty is simply that it's painful.

00:23:43.180 | - Yes, I've been there, absolutely.

00:23:45.220 | - Yeah, as have I.

00:23:47.700 | Is there something that we can do to leverage knowledge

00:23:51.500 | of how the memory system works naturally

00:23:53.500 | to make that a more straightforward process?

00:23:56.860 | - So I immediately turn to the things that I've studied

00:24:02.740 | that you talk about so beautifully on your podcast,

00:24:07.220 | which are strategies generally

00:24:12.220 | to make your brain work better.

00:24:14.380 | I was just reminding myself of your podcast about cold

00:24:20.460 | because I use that every morning.

00:24:21.980 | - Oh, you do cold? - I do, I do.

00:24:22.980 | - Just take a moment and just tell us

00:24:24.940 | what is your cold exposure protocol,

00:24:26.380 | then I'll take you back to what you're saying.

00:24:27.620 | - So my cold exposure protocol

00:24:29.900 | is at the end of every morning shower that I take,

00:24:34.900 | you know, the shower is warm,

00:24:37.700 | but I give myself a big blast of cold at the end of that.

00:24:42.520 | And it makes me feel so good.

00:24:45.700 | And because I've been doing it for several years,

00:24:48.100 | it's so much less painful.

00:24:49.580 | Okay, I admit it was really painful at the beginning,

00:24:53.600 | but it's much less painful.

00:24:55.820 | I could handle the cold water

00:24:57.900 | and my pipes give nice, really cold water.

00:25:01.300 | And I could feel the awakeness

00:25:06.820 | kind of come up in me after that.

00:25:09.540 | And I miss it if I forget to do it.

00:25:12.140 | Sometimes I run back in and give myself that cold blast

00:25:16.140 | because it is upping, you know,

00:25:20.260 | I think you talked about this on your podcast,

00:25:21.980 | what's happening in the brain?

00:25:23.700 | - Basically the cold stimulus, that shock,

00:25:26.900 | that, you know, catching your breath, et cetera,

00:25:29.020 | is adrenaline from the adrenals.

00:25:31.520 | But also from what we understand now,

00:25:33.580 | some new neuroimaging,

00:25:35.260 | there's epinephrine and norepinephrine

00:25:37.300 | released from locus coeruleus,

00:25:38.580 | which again is a brain structure in the back of the brain,

00:25:40.740 | got sprinklers the rest of the brain

00:25:42.620 | with a kind of a wake-up chemical.

00:25:44.820 | And there's a long arc on dopamine release.

00:25:47.580 | This paper back in 2000 showed that it's a steady increase

00:25:51.500 | up to about 2.5 X of circulating dopamine.

00:25:54.100 | So they weren't looking directly in the brain admittedly,

00:25:56.500 | but it goes on for four or five hours.

00:25:58.980 | So the improved mood and the feeling of alertness

00:26:02.060 | is a real thing.

00:26:02.940 | - Yeah, yeah, so I use that.

00:26:05.780 | I mean, so basically I use my morning routine.

00:26:09.160 | What is my morning routine?

00:26:10.220 | I get up, I do a 45-minute tea meditation.

00:26:15.220 | So meditating over the brewing and drinking of tea

00:26:18.660 | that I learned from a monk who has an institute in Taiwan

00:26:23.300 | where he teaches tea meditation, love it.

00:26:25.660 | I've learned all about tea, different kinds of tea.

00:26:29.680 | And then I do a 30-minute cardio weights workout.

00:26:34.680 | Then I take my shower with the hot cold contrast.

00:26:40.660 | And oh, and before that, key thing,

00:26:44.380 | if I wanna learn something and I want to be able

00:26:46.980 | to get over the difficulty of repeating things

00:26:51.980 | or just push myself to do stuff, sleep.

00:26:56.600 | So good, good sleep.

00:26:58.740 | I've learned that over the pandemic,

00:27:01.280 | I did sleep experiments on myself

00:27:03.660 | and I learned that I was sleeping an hour less

00:27:05.920 | than I really needed.

00:27:07.020 | So I really need seven and a half to eight hours of sleep.

00:27:09.580 | And I was getting six and a half.

00:27:11.180 | And so now, I get that seven and a half to eight hours

00:27:16.180 | every single night.

00:27:17.820 | And guess what?

00:27:18.940 | I come to different difficult tasks

00:27:21.380 | and I am more willing to give it a try,

00:27:24.460 | to try longer, to try harder.

00:27:26.580 | And my brain works better.

00:27:28.220 | And so I think probably if you go back

00:27:30.300 | to all of your podcasts, you'll learn exactly

00:27:32.700 | why each one of those things that I do,

00:27:34.940 | which I would bet that you probably do too,

00:27:37.780 | is helping my brain.

00:27:39.620 | - I guarantee they are.

00:27:41.780 | And I'm impressed that you do all these things,

00:27:43.420 | although not surprised.

00:27:44.660 | And I should say that the extra hour of sleep

00:27:47.020 | is really impressive and extremely beneficial.

00:27:50.340 | I'm curious, do you get that in the early part of the night

00:27:53.260 | by going to bed earlier?

00:27:54.260 | - Yeah, yeah. - Terrific.

00:27:55.780 | And I should just mention,

00:27:58.100 | 'cause you're too humble to do it,

00:27:59.300 | but I'll say it again,

00:28:00.620 | that yes, not only are you a full professor running,

00:28:03.860 | a tenured full professor and running a laboratory,

00:28:06.340 | you teach undergraduates, you have an important role

00:28:09.460 | in public education, multiple books,

00:28:10.980 | and you're now Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

00:28:14.100 | at NYU.

00:28:14.940 | So the extra hour of sleep is benefiting you

00:28:17.340 | and as a consequence, benefiting everybody else as well.

00:28:21.900 | Thanks for sharing with us your protocol.

00:28:23.620 | I took you off the trajectory of what one can do,

00:28:26.460 | but I think that people and I appreciate knowing

00:28:31.060 | kind of what the practical steps are.

00:28:33.060 | Because knowing the science is important,

00:28:34.620 | the mechanism I do believe is important

00:28:36.580 | for embedding protocols in people's minds

00:28:38.780 | and why they might want to do them.

00:28:39.940 | But really hearing that the mechanics of it is useful.

00:28:43.700 | It sounds like everything together takes about an hour.

00:28:45.740 | It's not an excessive amount of time,

00:28:47.580 | but it probably gives you an outsized positive effect

00:28:50.860 | on your day.

00:28:51.700 | - Absolutely, I definitely notice it

00:28:54.700 | if I'm not able to do it.

00:28:56.420 | And when I don't, so I do this seven days a week.

00:29:00.460 | It's also not just five days, seven days a week.

00:29:04.300 | And when I can't do it, it's usually early morning flights

00:29:08.300 | or things like that.

00:29:09.460 | And I get over it, but it's critical.

00:29:14.060 | Critical for the working of my brain.

00:29:16.180 | - I love it.

00:29:17.020 | And I'll just highlight one thing that you said

00:29:18.740 | before we move on, which is that you said,

00:29:20.380 | sometimes if you get out of the shower before the cold,

00:29:22.820 | you'll get back in.

00:29:24.060 | That's to me a really beautiful example

00:29:26.700 | of condition place preference.

00:29:28.900 | Now the cold showers become something

00:29:30.660 | that you sort of look forward to.

00:29:32.220 | I should say that nobody is immune

00:29:34.660 | from the adrenaline increase of cold.

00:29:36.860 | No matter how cold, this is what's interesting about cold.

00:29:39.340 | It's one of the reasons why it's such an important part

00:29:41.820 | of the screening for special operations,

00:29:43.660 | you know, sort of SEAL teams,

00:29:44.740 | but other branches of military too,

00:29:47.380 | which is that there are very few stimuli

00:29:50.660 | that you can give anyone

00:29:52.660 | and consistently get an adrenaline release from that

00:29:57.660 | without harming them.

00:29:58.700 | You know, with heat, eventually you need to use so much heat

00:30:00.980 | that you damage tissue.

00:30:02.260 | Or with exercise, you have to use,

00:30:03.700 | once you exercise it, you can damage joints.

00:30:05.740 | You know, and it's this very kind of brilliant,

00:30:08.740 | I don't know if it was intentional or not.

00:30:13.100 | It's sort of unintentional genius

00:30:14.700 | that special operations has figured out

00:30:16.660 | that by sending people back into the cold over and over,

00:30:19.500 | it never really gets easier.

00:30:21.140 | But over time, people actually start to crave it.

00:30:23.740 | And it provides this reduction in inflammation, et cetera.

00:30:26.660 | So anyway, beautiful practice.

00:30:28.420 | Thank you.

00:30:29.260 | I want to learn more about your tea meditation

00:30:30.580 | later in the episode.

00:30:31.500 | But in any event,

00:30:33.580 | returning to ways that we can improve memory formation,

00:30:38.580 | maybe if you would tell us your story around this.

00:30:43.420 | I know you've told it before,

00:30:44.860 | but I think a lot of members of the audience

00:30:47.180 | and I would love to hear, you know, how you came to this.

00:30:49.460 | Because growing up in neuroscience,

00:30:51.300 | I knew you as one of the,

00:30:53.260 | I would say one of the three or four,

00:30:55.340 | and they're all alongside one another,

00:30:57.420 | not, this isn't a hierarchical statement,

00:30:59.860 | but three or four top memory researchers in the world, right?

00:31:03.100 | Textbook material is Suzuki in the,

00:31:06.780 | my textbooks are filled with the word Suzuki,

00:31:08.620 | your last name,

00:31:09.820 | according to the information on memory and memory formation.

00:31:14.820 | So you were doing that

00:31:17.140 | and doing the things that academics do.

00:31:19.300 | And then you're still doing that,

00:31:21.460 | but still at a very high level,

00:31:24.500 | but then things took a different direction.

00:31:26.180 | And then maybe we could talk about your story

00:31:28.420 | and how you came to the place you are at now,

00:31:32.780 | because I think it provides a number of tools

00:31:34.380 | that people could implement themselves.

00:31:36.780 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:31:37.900 | So this story happened as I was working to get tenure at NYU.

00:31:42.900 | And as you know, it's a stress-filled process.

00:31:48.420 | They give you six years to, you know, show your stuff

00:31:51.580 | and you are judged in front of all your colleagues.

00:31:53.860 | And either they say, okay, you can join the club,

00:31:56.420 | or they say, sorry, you are, you know,

00:31:58.740 | humiliated in front of everybody.

00:32:00.620 | This was what was going on.

00:32:01.460 | - They actually tell people to leave.

00:32:03.100 | - Yeah.

00:32:03.940 | - If you don't get tenure, you're gone.

00:32:04.780 | - You have to leave your institution.

00:32:06.540 | And so, you know, you work really, really hard.

00:32:09.820 | And so my strategy was,

00:32:12.660 | I'm just gonna not do anything but work

00:32:14.460 | and I'm just gonna work.

00:32:15.620 | And I'm going to just work as hard as I can

00:32:19.260 | for the six years.

00:32:20.460 | And what happens when you work

00:32:22.940 | and you don't have any sort of life outside of work

00:32:26.220 | and you live in New York

00:32:27.900 | where there's all sorts of really good takeout,

00:32:30.260 | you gain 25 pounds, which is exactly what I did.

00:32:32.540 | And you get really, really stressed.

00:32:34.220 | And you start to ask yourself,

00:32:35.460 | how come I'm living in New York City and I love Broadway?

00:32:38.220 | And I've never, I haven't gone to a Broadway show

00:32:40.940 | in two years.

00:32:41.900 | And so I,

00:32:46.540 | 25 pounds overweight.

00:32:48.140 | I decided to go on vacation

00:32:52.020 | and I went by myself 'cause I had no friends.

00:32:54.700 | And I went to, I did a adventure

00:32:58.500 | river rafting trip in Peru.

00:33:02.660 | And so I go by myself and, you know,

00:33:05.100 | meet other interesting people.

00:33:06.900 | And I was the weakest person on this whole trip.

00:33:10.700 | Like I was, there were so much in better shape,

00:33:15.700 | it was embarrassing.

00:33:17.100 | And they won't say this, they won't admit this to me,

00:33:19.460 | but it was true.

00:33:20.460 | And I kind of came back and I said,

00:33:21.900 | okay, I cannot be the weakest person.

00:33:25.020 | I'm in my late thirties, I have to do something.

00:33:27.580 | So I went to the gym and I said,

00:33:30.220 | oh my God, I'm 25 pounds overweight.

00:33:31.900 | Let's try at least to lose this weight.

00:33:35.060 | And so I go to the gym.

00:33:37.100 | I notice how much better I feel

00:33:39.140 | when I go to just a single class.

00:33:40.740 | I remember the very first class I went to

00:33:42.220 | was a hip hop dance class.

00:33:43.540 | I'm a terrible hip hop dancer,

00:33:45.300 | but I still felt good after that class.

00:33:48.700 | And then fast forward year and a half,

00:33:52.220 | I've lost the 25 pounds.

00:33:53.780 | So proud of myself, so much happier.

00:33:57.140 | And I'm sitting in my office doing what you and I do a lot,

00:34:00.380 | which is writing an NIH grant, which is our lifeblood, right?

00:34:04.100 | And writing, writing, writing,

00:34:06.420 | and this thought goes through my mind

00:34:08.300 | that had never gone through my mind before,

00:34:10.540 | which was during this six years of frantic grant writing

00:34:15.020 | when I was trying to get tenure.

00:34:16.500 | And that thought was grant writing went well today.

00:34:20.540 | You know, that felt good.

00:34:22.700 | I was like, I've never had that thought before.

00:34:25.460 | What's going on here?

00:34:26.460 | This is really weird.

00:34:27.740 | - I don't know that anyone has had that thought before.

00:34:29.980 | - No, I'm sure people have had that thought.

00:34:32.020 | But I thought maybe I'm just having a good day.

00:34:36.580 | But when I thought about it, I thought it's not just today.

00:34:40.620 | My grant writing seems to have been getting smoother.

00:34:44.820 | Like I'm able to focus longer.

00:34:47.380 | The sessions feel better to me.

00:34:50.500 | And at that point, the only thing that I changed my life,

00:34:53.860 | it was a huge thing,

00:34:54.700 | but I had become a gym rat rather than a workaholic.

00:34:59.060 | And that's when my spidey sense for neuroscientists

00:35:04.060 | popped up and I said,

00:35:05.860 | what do we know about the effects of exercise on your brain?

00:35:08.860 | Because if I think about it,

00:35:10.820 | what was better about my writing is

00:35:12.860 | I could focus longer and deeper, very important.

00:35:16.140 | And I could remember those little details

00:35:19.060 | that you try and pull together

00:35:20.300 | for your million dollar NIH grant

00:35:22.660 | from 30 different articles

00:35:24.660 | that you have open on your screen all at the same time.

00:35:27.220 | That's the hippocampal memory.

00:35:29.020 | I was studying that.

00:35:29.940 | I was writing the grants on hippocampal memory.

00:35:32.860 | And so that's when I got really interested

00:35:37.300 | in the effects of exercise

00:35:39.580 | on both prefrontal focus and attention function

00:35:42.900 | and hippocampal function,

00:35:44.380 | because of my own observation and this kind of,

00:35:46.940 | I still remember where I was sitting,

00:35:48.860 | which office I was in when I had this revelation.

00:35:52.100 | But the thing that really sealed it for me

00:35:53.940 | that made me think not just,

00:35:56.380 | oh, this is interesting, but I wanna study this,

00:35:59.980 | is right around that time,

00:36:02.940 | I got a phone call from my mom

00:36:04.660 | who said that my dad wasn't feeling well

00:36:09.020 | and that he had told her that he got lost

00:36:13.340 | driving back from the 7-Eleven,

00:36:14.940 | which is literally seven blocks from our house

00:36:17.900 | that I grew up in.

00:36:19.500 | And I knew that was hippocampal function.

00:36:23.180 | I suspected dementia.

00:36:24.900 | I suspected, though didn't wanna admit,

00:36:27.220 | Alzheimer's dementia, which he had.

00:36:29.740 | And it was funny because, I mean, it wasn't funny,

00:36:33.100 | but my mom and dad are two sides of a very different coin.

00:36:39.100 | My dad is the engineer, not so active all his life,

00:36:44.100 | but would love to sit and read books all day.

00:36:48.500 | My mom was the athlete.

00:36:50.180 | She played tennis, team tennis into her 80s.

00:36:54.220 | And it started to show at that point.

00:36:58.660 | And so then I had even a more pressing reason

00:37:03.660 | to think about what the effects of exercise were

00:37:07.740 | because I noticed that all the things

00:37:10.140 | that were improving in my brain suddenly went away.

00:37:12.940 | My dad's brain, really, really smart guy,

00:37:15.660 | engineer in Silicon Valley helped that push

00:37:19.740 | in Silicon Valley in the 70s happen.

00:37:22.300 | He had no more memory.

00:37:24.500 | He couldn't focus his attention.

00:37:26.220 | His mood was rock bottom.

00:37:28.580 | He's a very happy guy.

00:37:30.700 | And everything was the opposite in me.

00:37:32.660 | And I started thinking, this isn't just something

00:37:35.140 | to help somebody who wants to get tenure.

00:37:37.900 | This is something that could help

00:37:41.260 | millions and millions of people.

00:37:43.220 | Most importantly, our aging population.

00:37:46.500 | What if, what's happening?

00:37:48.900 | And so the thing that makes me wake up in the morning

00:37:52.620 | is when I realized that every single time you move your body

00:37:57.620 | you are releasing a whole bunch of neurochemicals.

00:38:01.900 | And some of them we've talked about

00:38:03.660 | that the good mood comes from dopamine

00:38:05.740 | and serotonin and noradrenaline.

00:38:07.940 | But the thing that gets released also,

00:38:09.660 | particularly with aerobic exercise is a growth factor

00:38:13.100 | called brain derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF.

00:38:17.980 | And that is so important because what it does

00:38:20.460 | is it goes directly to your hippocampus

00:38:22.780 | and it helps brand new brain cells grow in your hippocampus.

00:38:26.900 | We all have that.

00:38:27.740 | Even if you're a couch potato,

00:38:28.740 | you can get new brain cells in your hippocampus to grow.

00:38:31.260 | But it's like giving your hippocampus a boost

00:38:35.220 | with this regular BDNF if you are exercising,

00:38:39.060 | which means that we all have the capacity

00:38:41.940 | to grow a bigger, fatter, fluffier hippocampus.

00:38:46.100 | And so what I like to give people is this image

00:38:49.500 | of every single time you move your body

00:38:51.300 | it's like giving your brain this wonderful bubble bath

00:38:54.140 | of neurochemicals.

00:38:55.460 | What's going on?

00:38:56.300 | I need my bubble bath of noradrenaline and dopamine

00:38:59.460 | and serotonin and growth factors.

00:39:02.260 | And with regular bubble baths, what am I doing?

00:39:05.500 | I'm growing a big, fat, fluffy hippocampus.

00:39:08.740 | And I'm not gonna cure my father's dementia,

00:39:12.180 | Alzheimer's dementia, but you know what?

00:39:14.420 | If I go into my 70s with a big, fat, fluffy hippocampus,

00:39:18.660 | even if I have that in my genes and it starts to kick in,

00:39:22.620 | it's gonna take longer for that disease

00:39:24.740 | to start to affect my ability to form

00:39:27.500 | and retain new long-term memories for facts and events,

00:39:29.860 | which is my motivation for getting up

00:39:32.140 | and doing my 30 to 45 minutes of aerobic exercise every day.

00:39:35.660 | - Fantastic.

00:39:36.500 | Quick question about your protocol,

00:39:40.700 | just because, and then we'll discuss

00:39:43.780 | a few mechanistic things related to what signals

00:39:46.700 | the body might be sending the brain

00:39:48.700 | and a little bit more detail on BDNF and some circuitry.

00:39:54.500 | So 30 to 45 minutes, it sounds like cardiovascular exercise

00:39:59.500 | might be special. - Yes.

00:40:01.860 | - But as I say that, and I think about the literature

00:40:05.140 | that I'm aware of in mice and some in monkeys

00:40:08.100 | and certainly in humans, looking at the effects of exercise

00:40:11.600 | on brain function and typically the outcome

00:40:13.900 | is improvement, almost always.

00:40:15.540 | I don't think I've ever seen a paper showing

00:40:16.940 | that when animals or humans exercise more

00:40:19.880 | that their brain gets worse. - No.

00:40:22.100 | - I just can't think of a single paper.

00:40:24.020 | It doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

00:40:25.300 | I'm sure someone will put one in the comment section.

00:40:27.620 | They'll find that one and thank you for if you can find that.

00:40:30.340 | But it seems like it's always cardiovascular exercise

00:40:34.380 | and experimentally in a lab,

00:40:35.620 | it's a lot easier to get a mouse to run on a treadmill

00:40:38.100 | than it is to get a mouse to lift weights.

00:40:39.540 | Although people have put a little ankle weights

00:40:41.180 | on mice and done.

00:40:42.460 | And the ways of getting mice to do resistance work

00:40:44.800 | is actually a little bit barbaric

00:40:46.220 | because oftentimes they'll incapacitate a limb

00:40:49.100 | to overload another limb.

00:40:50.500 | So it's an asymmetric thing.

00:40:51.780 | It's not the same as sending them in to do squats

00:40:55.060 | or deadlifts or something.

00:40:56.300 | So, but cardiovascular exercise might be special.

00:41:00.220 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:41:01.420 | - What are your thoughts on that?

00:41:03.060 | And please first though, tell us your routine.

00:41:06.380 | Your routine is 30 to 45 minutes of,

00:41:08.920 | are you a Peloton cycler?

00:41:11.380 | Does it matter?

00:41:12.420 | - I think that the data suggests that as long

00:41:16.420 | as your heart rate is getting up for these longterm effects

00:41:19.660 | on your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex,

00:41:21.980 | you also get better at shifting and focusing your attention.

00:41:26.900 | For that you need cardiovascular.

00:41:30.000 | And what I use is a video workout that I started

00:41:32.820 | even before the pandemic is called Daily Burn.

00:41:35.080 | And it's just thousands of different workouts.

00:41:37.940 | But I love, they are 30 minutes that I sometimes add on

00:41:42.340 | a 10 to 15 minute stretch at the beginning or at the end.

00:41:46.060 | But I love the variety.

00:41:47.860 | Sometimes I do it with weight.

00:41:49.060 | Sometimes I do it without weights.

00:41:51.380 | I love kickboxing.

00:41:52.340 | So they have a lot of kickboxing in there.

00:41:54.180 | It just fits my routine.

00:41:57.980 | And it's always there.

00:41:59.540 | And I don't have to get all dressed up

00:42:01.820 | to go to the gym to work out.

00:42:04.340 | So that's what I do.

00:42:05.540 | - And that's a daily thing, seven days a week.

00:42:07.820 | Seven days a week, fantastic.

00:42:09.400 | So in terms of the way that some of these changes

00:42:13.220 | are being conveyed from the body to the brain,

00:42:16.540 | that fascinates me, right?

00:42:17.740 | I mean, as you and I know,

00:42:18.940 | and I'm sort of a repeating record on the podcast,

00:42:22.340 | always saying, you got a brain,

00:42:24.340 | but you also have a spinal cord

00:42:25.460 | and then your nervous system connects everything.

00:42:27.100 | Every organ in your body is basically signaled

00:42:30.060 | to by the nervous system and back to the nervous system,

00:42:32.660 | your spleen, everything.

00:42:34.140 | But so let's imagine your morning routine,

00:42:37.300 | you do your cardiovascular exercise.

00:42:39.580 | Okay, so you're pumping more blood.

00:42:41.380 | That's the definition of a higher heart rate.

00:42:43.220 | Stroke volume of the heart goes up over time.

00:42:46.280 | You're getting fitter.

00:42:47.420 | So blood flow to the brain is increasing.

00:42:49.580 | Do we know how that gets translated to a signal

00:42:53.420 | to release more BDNF?

00:42:55.000 | And then it raises this other question,

00:42:57.700 | which is, does it matter where your mind is

00:42:59.780 | when you exercise?

00:43:01.380 | Because ultimately the brain, of course,

00:43:03.700 | you can anchor your attention to the exercise

00:43:05.420 | or you can be listening to a podcast or something else.

00:43:07.740 | I've always wondered about this.

00:43:09.800 | Can we enhance the effects of exercise

00:43:11.440 | by combining the enhanced blood flow

00:43:13.800 | with cognitive work during exercise?

00:43:16.540 | Or is it simply a matter of just getting more blood flow

00:43:18.580 | up to the hippocampus?

00:43:19.860 | - Yeah, I wish I had the answer to that question too.

00:43:23.060 | My instinct is yes, it matters,

00:43:26.720 | partially because of the work of your colleague,

00:43:29.080 | Alia Crum, on mindset and the power of that to change

00:43:33.660 | how physiologically our body is responding.

00:43:37.400 | So how could it not work in her experiments,

00:43:41.540 | or work in her experiments and not work for my morning

00:43:45.200 | or our morning exercise routine?

00:43:47.960 | So, but are there studies point to a study?

00:43:50.320 | I don't know of one.

00:43:51.220 | So exercise neuroscientists out there,

00:43:55.420 | I'd love to see that study done.

00:43:59.120 | So yes, it works.

00:44:00.940 | Before I go into the aerobic thing,

00:44:03.940 | I always like to start with the least amount of exercise

00:44:07.600 | to get something really useful,

00:44:10.180 | because I don't want people to say,

00:44:12.000 | "Oh God, I hate sweating.

00:44:14.140 | "I don't want to listen anymore."

00:44:16.060 | So I always like to start with studies have shown

00:44:20.400 | that just 10 minutes of walking outside can shift your mood.

00:44:24.720 | That is part of that neurochemical bubble bath

00:44:26.980 | that you're getting, dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline.

00:44:30.060 | And 10 minutes, and anybody can walk for 10 minutes.

00:44:33.380 | And so that is, for all of you thinking that out there,

00:44:38.600 | what is the minimum that I could get

00:44:40.120 | some of these brain effects?

00:44:41.060 | 10 minutes of walking, anybody can do it.

00:44:43.400 | - Is outside important?

00:44:44.460 | I'm a big believer in getting photons into the eyes.

00:44:47.460 | - I think that that study was done indoors on a treadmill.

00:44:53.500 | So, and the comparison wasn't done,

00:44:56.040 | but moving your, which is great.

00:44:58.440 | In the middle of the pandemic,

00:45:00.540 | I walked around my apartment for 30 minutes sometimes

00:45:03.260 | just for some variety.

00:45:05.600 | Felt like a rat on a running wheel, but yes.

00:45:09.480 | So that minimum amount of movement in your body

00:45:14.480 | can get you those mood effects.

00:45:18.020 | But what about the big fat fluffy hippocampus?

00:45:21.660 | What about the better performing prefrontal cortex?

00:45:24.100 | That's where you start to need the cardio workout.

00:45:29.100 | And from my reading of the literature,

00:45:31.640 | there haven't been enough studies, you know,

00:45:33.740 | directly comparing, contrasting, kickboxing with running,

00:45:38.100 | with whatever other cardio that you need to do.

00:45:42.100 | But any cardio workout that is done

00:45:44.880 | has these positive effects.

00:45:46.240 | So I'm gonna say, my interpretation of that

00:45:48.300 | is that whatever way you get your heart rate up,

00:45:51.380 | including a power walk,

00:45:53.420 | a power walk can get your heart rate up,

00:45:55.340 | that is beneficial.

00:45:57.300 | And what is happening, there are two pathways

00:45:59.940 | that have been studied about how you go

00:46:02.460 | from moving your body to more BDNF,

00:46:05.340 | that neurotrophin that's increasing the growth

00:46:09.540 | of new hippocampal brain cells.

00:46:11.340 | The two pathways are the following.

00:46:12.820 | One is a myokine, which is a protein released

00:46:16.540 | by the muscles, and not your heart.

00:46:18.960 | These are striated muscles in your body.

00:46:21.740 | And so by running, these were studies done in rats

00:46:25.480 | on running wheels.

00:46:26.880 | They showed that the running rats

00:46:29.020 | had more of this myokine released,

00:46:32.340 | the myokine passed the blood-brain barrier,

00:46:34.880 | so got into the rarefied, very protected bloodstream

00:46:39.620 | of inside the brain.

00:46:41.480 | And that myokine stimulated the release

00:46:44.600 | of BDNF in the brain.

00:46:47.120 | That's pathway number one.

00:46:48.680 | Pathway number two comes through the liver

00:46:52.060 | because exercise is a stress generally.

00:46:56.400 | How do we know that?

00:46:57.240 | Well, cortisol is released whenever we exercise.

00:46:59.980 | We need that sugar in our blood,

00:47:03.700 | and so that's how the physiological mechanisms work.

00:47:07.840 | And so there is a ketone, beta-hydroxybutyrate,

00:47:12.840 | that we've known for a very long time

00:47:15.940 | that gets released by the liver during exercise.

00:47:19.300 | And we also know that that particular ketone

00:47:22.680 | passes that blood-brain barrier,

00:47:24.260 | and it's another stimulant for BDNF.

00:47:26.160 | So kind of the final common pathway seems to be

00:47:31.240 | BDNF stimulation in the hippocampus.

00:47:34.200 | Is it the only one?

00:47:35.800 | Probably not, but that's the one

00:47:37.280 | that has been studied most clearly.

00:47:39.420 | So it comes from all of our physiological systems,

00:47:42.880 | our muscles working, our liver responding

00:47:46.000 | to the stress of exercise, and what is it doing?

00:47:49.500 | It is giving more BDNF precursors to get into our brain

00:47:54.500 | to cause the up-spike of BDNF,

00:47:59.060 | which is part of your bubble bath

00:48:00.340 | that you're getting every time you move.

00:48:02.160 | - I love that description of a factor from muscle

00:48:05.160 | and a factor from liver,

00:48:06.160 | because anytime we're thinking about movement of the body

00:48:09.920 | and translating that to the brain,

00:48:12.320 | as you so clearly pointed out,

00:48:14.520 | that needs to be, it needs to traverse

00:48:17.660 | the blood-brain barrier.

00:48:18.680 | Not everything that happens in the body

00:48:20.200 | is communicated to the brain,

00:48:21.920 | and these seem like really important signals.

00:48:25.000 | Beta-hydroxybutyrate, you mentioned, is a ketone.

00:48:28.680 | I just want to underscore, that doesn't mean, folks,

00:48:31.340 | that you need to be on a ketogenic diet.

00:48:33.380 | I think people hear ketone and they think,

00:48:35.840 | I know some people are, most people are not, I imagine.

00:48:38.920 | There are ketones that are released in your brain and body

00:48:42.280 | that can function even if you're ingesting carbohydrates

00:48:45.620 | and not ketogenic, just for a point of clarification.

00:48:48.600 | This issue of new neurons is one that you hear a lot.

00:48:53.920 | Neurogenesis, you're going to grow new neurons, new neurons.

00:48:56.560 | And my understanding is that the rodent literature

00:49:00.020 | is very clear, that animals that run on wheels more often,

00:49:04.160 | it turns out rodents love to run on wheels.

00:49:05.840 | Do you know these studies by Hoppe Hofster,

00:49:07.600 | which are pretty funny?

00:49:08.880 | They're very cool, by the way, Hoppe,

00:49:10.840 | how a huge investigator, I'm not making light of them.

00:49:14.380 | They put running wheels in a field

00:49:17.400 | and wild rodents will run to the running wheel

00:49:20.800 | and run on that running wheel.

00:49:22.440 | So they really enjoy it, which I find amusing

00:49:25.640 | for reasons that probably only

00:49:26.920 | a neuroscientist would find amusing.

00:49:29.440 | In any case, in rodents, it seems that running more

00:49:33.640 | on a wheel can trigger neurogenesis,

00:49:36.640 | literally the birth of new neurons

00:49:39.280 | and the addition of new neurons to the hippocampus.

00:49:41.960 | In monkeys, this has been controversial.

00:49:44.740 | It seems it does happen in the hippocampus

00:49:46.640 | and in the olfactory bulb, probably not in the neocortex,

00:49:49.920 | thinking back to the decades or more controversy

00:49:52.840 | between Liz Gould and Pashko Rakesh.

00:49:55.040 | I hope they settled their differences there.

00:49:57.560 | Neuroscientists love to argue, it's what we do.

00:50:01.460 | And in humans, I think it's been a bit controversial.

00:50:05.920 | Some people say absolutely yes,

00:50:07.920 | other people say absolutely no,

00:50:09.280 | there are new neurons added to the adult brain.

00:50:12.020 | I haven't followed that literature down to the detail,

00:50:17.040 | but I do remember one study that I don't think is contested,

00:50:21.200 | which is the work of Rusty Gage at the Salk Institute,

00:50:24.380 | where they actually injected a sort of dye type marker

00:50:28.800 | into the brains of terminally ill humans

00:50:31.720 | who very graciously offered to have their brains removed

00:50:34.920 | and dissected after death.

00:50:36.880 | And in these, in some cases, very old,

00:50:40.880 | terminally ill humans, they did see evidence

00:50:43.280 | for new neurons being born in the hippocampus.

00:50:46.600 | Can I trust that idea still?

00:50:48.780 | Is that generally accepted?

00:50:50.480 | Well, so after that study, which was quite a while ago,

00:50:54.860 | there are more recent studies, still controversial,

00:50:58.020 | but showing and demonstrating using even new

00:51:01.860 | and better techniques than were used

00:51:03.600 | in that original Rusty Gage study,

00:51:05.500 | which was groundbreaking at the time,

00:51:07.720 | that suggest and I think show

00:51:11.780 | that there are new neurons born in adult human brains

00:51:16.780 | into the ninth decade of life.

00:51:19.540 | So they not only did this,

00:51:21.100 | I think those patients were in their 60s,

00:51:23.380 | then they died of cancer,

00:51:25.480 | but these new studies looking across the timeline,

00:51:30.140 | can we see, because the other thing was,

00:51:31.980 | yeah, maybe you have some when you're 20,

00:51:34.220 | but by the time you're older

00:51:35.860 | and you might need these new neurons,

00:51:37.940 | you have no new neuron growth.

00:51:39.900 | And so these studies seem to suggest that yes, yes, you did.

00:51:44.700 | Yes, you do, and we all do, even into old age.

00:51:48.460 | So yeah. - Great.

00:51:49.860 | And I'll just take a moment to say

00:51:51.500 | that I am personally not aware of any studies

00:51:53.980 | looking at other forms of exercise

00:51:57.060 | besides cardiovascular exercise for sake of brain health.

00:52:00.300 | And this I think is an important gap in the literature

00:52:03.100 | that ought to be filled, whether or not, for instance,

00:52:05.420 | high intensity interval training,

00:52:07.340 | or whether or not weight training,

00:52:09.640 | which has other effects on the musculature.

00:52:12.700 | So you can imagine perhaps the myokine to BDNF pathway,

00:52:15.500 | the pathway one that you mentioned might be signaled,

00:52:17.500 | but maybe not the liver pathway.

00:52:19.020 | Maybe, yes, I'm speculating here.

00:52:20.900 | Those studies need to be done.

00:52:22.140 | To my knowledge, they just haven't been done yet,

00:52:25.140 | but they should be done.

00:52:26.340 | If you would, could you tell us about

00:52:28.700 | some of the more specific effects of exercise on memory?

00:52:33.700 | You know, when memory is a broad category

00:52:36.540 | of effects and phenomena.

00:52:38.740 | So things like, what comes to mind is short-term,

00:52:41.500 | medium and long-term memory, reaction time.

00:52:45.560 | Learning math, at least for me, is quite a bit different

00:52:48.060 | than learning history.

00:52:51.020 | Although there's certainly overlap

00:52:52.500 | in the neural underpinnings.

00:52:54.740 | What has been demonstrated in the laboratory

00:52:57.500 | in animal models, but especially in humans?

00:53:00.220 | And if you want to share with us any results

00:53:02.560 | from your lab, published or unpublished,

00:53:05.220 | I'm sure that the audience would be delighted

00:53:06.760 | to learn about them.

00:53:07.660 | - Absolutely.

00:53:08.500 | Let me start with kind of the immediate effects,

00:53:11.560 | acute effects as they're called, of exercise on the brain.

00:53:14.980 | So this is asking, what does a one-off exercise session do

00:53:19.540 | for your brain?

00:53:20.880 | And there, there are three major effects

00:53:25.520 | that have been reproduced.

00:53:26.820 | I've seen it in my lab, many labs have reproduced this.

00:53:30.020 | So what do you get with a one-off?

00:53:32.080 | This is usually an aerobic type exercise session,

00:53:35.640 | 30, 30 to 45 minutes.

00:53:37.500 | What you get is that mood boost, very, very consistent.

00:53:41.300 | You get improved prefrontal function,

00:53:46.100 | typically tested with a Stroop test,

00:53:49.380 | which is a test that asks you to shift

00:53:51.800 | and focus your attention in specific ways.

00:53:54.740 | It's a challenging task and clearly dependent

00:53:57.100 | on the prefrontal cortex, largely.

00:53:59.500 | And significant improvements in reaction time.

00:54:03.060 | So your speed at responding, often a motor kind of,

00:54:07.700 | but cognitive motor response is improved.

00:54:11.940 | Over the pandemic, one of the unpublished studies that I did

00:54:15.180 | looking at the effects of 30 minutes

00:54:18.140 | of age-appropriate workout in subjects ranging in age

00:54:23.140 | from their 20s all the way up to their 90s.

00:54:27.140 | So what are the things that I saw most consistently?

00:54:31.880 | Irrespective of your age, everybody got a decreased anxiety

00:54:37.060 | and depression and a hostility score,

00:54:40.020 | which is very important.

00:54:41.780 | So it's not just decreasing your anxiety and depression,

00:54:44.740 | but decreasing your hostility levels.

00:54:47.080 | - Making the world a better place.

00:54:48.260 | - Making the world a better place.

00:54:50.500 | Energy, the feeling of energy went up.

00:54:54.460 | And what we found is in the older population,

00:54:58.400 | even more than in the younger population,

00:55:00.860 | we saw improved performance on both Stroop

00:55:04.280 | and Erickson-Flanker task, which is another task

00:55:08.200 | dependent on really focusing in on different letters

00:55:12.540 | and paying attention to what letter is being shown.

00:55:15.440 | So these are consistent effects.

00:55:19.020 | How long do they last?

00:55:20.120 | One of the studies that I did publish in my lab

00:55:21.880 | showed that the immediate effects of exercise

00:55:24.740 | lasted up to two hours.

00:55:27.520 | Unfortunately, that was the longest that we last.

00:55:29.240 | They were still there at two hours.

00:55:31.800 | So that's a pretty big bang for your buck.

00:55:35.820 | - That is. - One 30 minute.

00:55:37.440 | - Sorry to interrupt. - Yeah, yeah.

00:55:38.280 | - I just want to make sure I understand.

00:55:39.460 | So when you say the effects lasted up to two hours,

00:55:42.360 | does that mean up to two hours after you finished exercise

00:55:45.820 | or up to two hours of memory challenging work?

00:55:49.980 | - Ah. - Yeah, just to be clear.

00:55:54.580 | - Yeah, that's a great question.

00:55:55.800 | So my study looked at two hours after exercise,

00:56:01.000 | two hours after you finish your workout,

00:56:03.440 | we gave you these cognitive tests.

00:56:05.040 | During that two hour period,

00:56:07.120 | you were free to do anything except exercise or eat.

00:56:10.040 | And so there was no extra load on people.

00:56:14.540 | But two hours later, you did do significantly better

00:56:17.680 | on these focused attention tasks

00:56:20.160 | compared to a group that watched videos

00:56:24.920 | for the exercise period.

00:56:26.560 | This was an hour of cycling that they did.

00:56:29.720 | These were young subjects in their 20s.

00:56:31.920 | - Okay, so if I finish my exercise at 9 a.m.,

00:56:36.920 | even if I start this cognitive work,

00:56:39.480 | this mental work at 11, I'll still see benefits.

00:56:42.680 | - Yes, at least by 11,

00:56:44.400 | because I didn't go farther than two hours.

00:56:47.420 | So it could last even longer than that.

00:56:49.440 | But I have evidence that it lasts for two hours.

00:56:51.960 | - And perhaps if I had started the cognitive work

00:56:54.680 | and 45 minutes after my exercise ended,

00:56:57.360 | it would also be helpful?

00:56:58.840 | - Yes.

00:56:59.680 | - So there's no reason to think that you have to wait

00:57:01.560 | before starting cognitive work.

00:57:02.680 | - Yeah, no reason at all.

00:57:03.620 | - I'm asking questions of the sort that I get

00:57:05.560 | in the comments that we are going to get

00:57:07.160 | in the comments section.

00:57:08.000 | We always strive for clarity here.

00:57:10.200 | So what this tells me is that exercising early in the day

00:57:14.560 | may have a special effect.

00:57:17.040 | - Right.

00:57:18.000 | - I realize that some people cannot exercise

00:57:20.080 | until later in the evening.

00:57:21.760 | But you mentioned something earlier

00:57:23.740 | that I want to cue people to.

00:57:25.000 | It's very, very important.

00:57:26.040 | I don't think I've ever mentioned this on the podcast,

00:57:27.800 | which is any kind of physical activity

00:57:30.720 | will increase cortisol to varying degrees.

00:57:34.000 | And so sometimes it's a healthy increase.

00:57:35.540 | Sometimes it's an unhealthy increase

00:57:36.920 | if you do two hours of really intense exercise

00:57:39.060 | and you're not prepared for it.

00:57:40.520 | That's a big spike in cortisol,

00:57:42.040 | probably not a good thing for most people.

00:57:45.120 | But if you are going to do your cardiovascular

00:57:47.580 | or weight training later in the day,

00:57:50.120 | that increase in cortisol can promote too much wakefulness

00:57:53.300 | for sleep, et cetera.

00:57:54.640 | Shifting that cortisol spike early in the day

00:57:57.480 | is associated with a number of important things

00:57:59.200 | related to mood, et cetera.

00:58:02.000 | But more and more what I'm thinking and hearing

00:58:05.080 | is that exercise early in the day is key.

00:58:07.080 | Our former Dean of the Medical School, Phil Pizzo,

00:58:09.720 | was and is kind of famous still for jogging

00:58:14.080 | between the hours of like four and five a.m.

00:58:16.240 | or five and six, and then running the medical school.

00:58:19.080 | So, and you're up early doing your exercise

00:58:22.060 | and cold shower and meditation.

00:58:23.680 | We'll talk about meditation.

00:58:25.060 | But this is more and more of a push, I feel like,

00:58:28.260 | or a stimulus for us to think about moving our exercise

00:58:32.260 | earlier in the day.

00:58:33.260 | - Yeah, I mean, I like to say that,

00:58:35.860 | I know there are moms and dads out there

00:58:39.620 | and they just say, "Look, I have a kid.

00:58:41.780 | "The kid's more important than my doing my exercise."

00:58:44.420 | So you will get benefits if you do it whenever you can.

00:58:49.420 | So that's great, more power to you.

00:58:52.040 | But what all the neuroscience data suggests

00:58:55.160 | is the best time to do your exercise

00:58:58.320 | is right before you need to use your brain

00:59:01.120 | in the most important way that you need to use it every day.

00:59:04.360 | And so that is why the morning, for most of us,

00:59:07.960 | is beneficial.

00:59:08.800 | That's why I do it in the morning.

00:59:09.980 | I'm lucky enough to be able to do that.

00:59:12.840 | But yeah, it makes sense with all,

00:59:16.120 | everything we know about how this works

00:59:18.360 | and how it benefits our brain.

00:59:20.140 | - I think about our colleague, Eric Kandel,

00:59:23.900 | who not incidentally has a Nobel Prize in studies memory.

00:59:27.520 | And rumor has it that he's been a swimmer

00:59:32.140 | for a lot of years that he'll put in,

00:59:33.760 | I think nowadays he's in his 90s now,

00:59:36.780 | he'll put in half a mile,

00:59:38.300 | but he used to swim a mile a day or something of that sort.

00:59:41.020 | - I heard that too, that he was a swimmer

00:59:42.860 | and he does it very, very religiously.

00:59:44.820 | - Okay, so there are a few other neuroscientists

00:59:46.700 | that do that.

00:59:47.540 | I can think of a lot of neuroscientists

00:59:48.540 | that probably should exercise more.

00:59:49.980 | And I don't say that to poke at them.

00:59:51.300 | I just would love to see them doing their incredible work

00:59:53.700 | for many more decades.

00:59:55.060 | And everything that we're talking about today

00:59:56.300 | indicates that if one doesn't,

00:59:58.180 | unless you have incredible genetics,

01:00:02.240 | we all experience age-related dementia, right?

01:00:05.060 | I mean, the story of your father is a salient one.

01:00:09.300 | And we should remember that as we go forward.

01:00:11.820 | But I also want to emphasize,

01:00:13.660 | I'd love to get your thoughts on

01:00:14.980 | just memory and memory loss in general.

01:00:17.780 | It seems we all get worse at remembering

01:00:20.620 | and learning things, even if we don't get Alzheimer's.

01:00:24.500 | When does that typically start for humans?

01:00:27.560 | - You know, I think there's so much variability,

01:00:30.560 | not only because we are individuals,

01:00:34.600 | but because our stress levels are different.

01:00:39.280 | And well, everybody's anxiety level has gone up

01:00:42.540 | in the last couple of years,

01:00:44.900 | but that also has an effect.

01:00:46.820 | We don't remember as much in a highly stressful,

01:00:50.300 | highly anxious situation.

01:00:52.380 | So, as you know, it's hard to answer that question.

01:00:56.080 | People say, okay,

01:00:56.920 | just tell me how much exercise I have to do.

01:00:58.780 | Okay, just do it. - 30 to 40 miles a day.

01:01:00.740 | But I love that per day.

01:01:03.380 | I've been doing this whole thing of telling people,

01:01:05.420 | oh, the data say 150 to 200 minutes of zone two cardio,

01:01:09.420 | which is kind of moderately hard, but not excessively hard.

01:01:12.900 | But I love this everyday theme

01:01:16.060 | because whenever I do that, the questions that come back are,

01:01:18.460 | well, what if I take a long hike on the weekends?

01:01:20.540 | And so people start negotiating.

01:01:22.080 | There's something that's very powerful

01:01:23.300 | about non-negotiable every day.

01:01:25.340 | Sun in your eyes every day, even through cloud cover.

01:01:27.540 | Exercise for 30 to 45 minutes.

01:01:29.660 | Cold shower every day. - Every day, yeah.

01:01:31.900 | - My understanding of the literature

01:01:36.020 | is that somewhere in our fifties or sixties,

01:01:38.820 | we start noticing little hiccups in memory.

01:01:43.100 | For some people younger, for some people later.

01:01:46.300 | But I have to imagine that doing the exercise

01:01:49.900 | throughout one's entire life

01:01:51.340 | is going to help offset some of this

01:01:53.220 | simply because of the BDNF and other downstream effects.

01:01:56.580 | - Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's what it suggests.

01:01:59.740 | One of my favorite studies,

01:02:01.300 | and then I want to get back to you wanted,

01:02:03.740 | you invited me to share some of my unpublished data

01:02:06.700 | on the effects of long-term exercise.

01:02:08.900 | But first I want to share one of my favorite studies,

01:02:11.580 | which is a longitudinal study done in Swedish women.

01:02:16.500 | And this was published in 2018.

01:02:18.920 | And what they did was back in the 1960s,

01:02:22.740 | they found Swedish women, 300 Swedish women in their forties.

01:02:27.740 | And they characterized them as low fit, mid fit, high fit.

01:02:32.140 | And then 40 years later,

01:02:33.540 | they came back and found these women.

01:02:34.860 | They let them live their lives.

01:02:36.860 | And they asked what happened to these women

01:02:39.560 | as a function of whether they were low fit, mid fit,

01:02:42.340 | high fit in their forties.

01:02:44.660 | They're now in their eighties.

01:02:46.180 | And what they found was that relative to the low fit

01:02:51.180 | or mid fit women, the women that were high fit

01:02:55.980 | gained nine more years of good cognition later in life.

01:03:00.980 | Now, this is not a randomized control study.

01:03:06.240 | This is a correlational study.

01:03:08.460 | But does it agree with everything

01:03:10.300 | that we've been talking about today?

01:03:12.640 | Yes.

01:03:13.480 | Does it agree with this idea that, you know,

01:03:15.280 | the women that were high fit were giving their brains

01:03:17.380 | this bubble bath, you know, maybe not every day,

01:03:21.380 | but very, very regularly for that entire 40 years.

01:03:24.480 | And that built up their big, fat, beautiful hippocampi.

01:03:28.040 | Yes, it does.

01:03:29.040 | So that's one of my favorite studies.

01:03:31.220 | - Yeah.

01:03:32.060 | Another cause for getting the exercise in consistently.

01:03:37.060 | - Yes.

01:03:38.320 | - I am impressed by this 10 minute walk

01:03:42.140 | and the improvements in mood from just a 10 minute walk.

01:03:45.740 | But again, I think that daily repetition,

01:03:49.480 | also I have to imagine has effects on the very pathways

01:03:54.480 | that allow plasticity.

01:03:56.060 | This is something we, in the realm of neuroplasticity,

01:03:58.660 | we don't often hear about or think about,

01:04:00.540 | even as neuroscientists, which is that the pathways

01:04:02.940 | for engaging plasticity probably can be,

01:04:05.580 | probably I'm speculating here, can be made better

01:04:09.080 | by engaging in the sorts of behavior

01:04:11.120 | that stimulate plasticity.

01:04:12.440 | In other words, if one gets better at calming themselves

01:04:14.260 | down under stress, those circuits get better at doing that.

01:04:17.840 | - Yes, absolutely.

01:04:18.680 | - Neural circuits gain proficiency.

01:04:20.320 | - Yeah.

01:04:21.160 | - And so because blood vessels can grow,

01:04:23.560 | capillaries can grow in the brain,

01:04:25.400 | you can imagine that more pumping of blood to the brain,

01:04:29.280 | delivery of these various muscle and liver factors

01:04:33.540 | would also establish larger or more efficient portals

01:04:37.960 | to getting that stuff there.

01:04:39.500 | So you could imagine a kind of an amplifying effect

01:04:42.600 | of exercise.

01:04:43.440 | And again, I'm speculating here,

01:04:44.380 | but I've seen this over and over again in colleagues,

01:04:47.340 | the ones who exercise consistently

01:04:50.340 | seem to be really, really smart and doing amazing work

01:04:53.360 | well into their 80s and 90s.

01:04:55.180 | And the ones who aren't, some of whom actually

01:04:57.820 | pride themselves on how little they exercise,

01:05:01.460 | they get worse over time.

01:05:03.120 | You see them each meeting each decade

01:05:05.360 | and I'm not poking fun at them at all.

01:05:06.680 | It's actually quite hard to see.

01:05:08.920 | And they're kind of a fading light.

01:05:10.320 | They're starting to flicker.

01:05:12.260 | So there is this incredible relationship

01:05:13.920 | between body vitality and brain vitality.

01:05:16.940 | That is, of course, is not an excuse

01:05:18.620 | for spending all day in the gym, right?

01:05:20.640 | The gym rats, I enjoy working out,

01:05:24.280 | so I could imagine doing that.

01:05:25.560 | But that doesn't make us smarter, unfortunately.

01:05:28.800 | You actually have to do the cognitive work also, right?

01:05:31.400 | It's not just exercise.

01:05:32.600 | - Right, right.

01:05:33.440 | - So I'd love to hear about some of these

01:05:34.480 | new unpublished data.

01:05:35.880 | - Yeah, yeah, okay.

01:05:37.120 | So when I jumped into the exercise work,

01:05:40.880 | everybody was studying people 65 or older

01:05:44.880 | because that's when cognitive decline begins.

01:05:47.440 | And if the idea is exercise can help you

01:05:49.840 | with your cognition, then it makes sense.

01:05:52.360 | However, I thought, well, you know, it's great.

01:05:56.760 | There's lots of work there.

01:05:58.800 | I wanted to know what happens in people in their 40s

01:06:02.480 | and their 50s, maybe even their 30s and their 20s.

01:06:06.400 | Why, because that's when we as humans are able,

01:06:10.680 | ready, willing, and able to increase our exercise

01:06:14.200 | and gets us set up to build our brains

01:06:18.560 | as we go into our 60s.

01:06:20.560 | And so the first study that I did

01:06:23.480 | looked at low-fit participants

01:06:27.280 | from their 30s to mid-50s.

01:06:30.720 | And we wanted to ask this question, you know,

01:06:34.200 | how much exercise do you really need

01:06:35.760 | to start seeing benefits?

01:06:37.120 | Do you see benefits?

01:06:37.960 | Or maybe you have to wait

01:06:39.360 | until you start seeing cognitive decline to get benefits.

01:06:42.200 | That was one of the theories out there.

01:06:44.520 | And so that's what I wanted to do.

01:06:46.440 | And so what we did was three months

01:06:49.360 | of two to three times a week cardio.

01:06:52.480 | It was a spin class, so spin classes are great for cardio.

01:06:56.560 | And the comparison group was two to three times a week

01:06:59.880 | of competitive video scrabble.

01:07:02.600 | So no heart rate change, but they had to come into my lab

01:07:07.000 | and be in a group just like they were in a group

01:07:09.120 | for the spin class.

01:07:11.960 | We tested them cognitively

01:07:15.000 | at the beginning of the end of the session.

01:07:17.040 | What we found was two to three times a week of cardio.

01:07:21.520 | In these people, they're a low-fit,

01:07:23.000 | which means specifically that they were exercising

01:07:26.320 | less than 30 minutes a week for the three months

01:07:29.960 | previous to the experiment.

01:07:31.640 | So they went from that to two to three times a week

01:07:34.040 | of spin class.

01:07:35.240 | And what we found was changes in baseline rates

01:07:39.960 | of their positive mood states went up

01:07:42.560 | relative to the video scrabble group.

01:07:45.360 | Their body image got more positive

01:07:48.800 | because they were exercising, which is great.

01:07:50.840 | And really important, their motivation to exercise

01:07:54.920 | went up significantly compared to the video scrabble group,

01:07:58.440 | which is great.

01:07:59.640 | So the more you exercise,

01:08:01.080 | the more motivated you are to exercise.

01:08:03.840 | What about cognition?

01:08:04.760 | What changed in the cognitive circuits of their brain?

01:08:07.980 | Number one, we got improved performance on the Stroop task,

01:08:11.920 | but we're headed towards my favorite structure,

01:08:15.320 | which is the hippocampus.

01:08:17.000 | What we found was improved performance

01:08:19.920 | on both a recognition memory task,

01:08:22.840 | which was a memory encoding task.

01:08:26.080 | And that is, can you differentiate similar items

01:08:31.080 | that we're asking you to remember?

01:08:34.440 | And an spatial episodic memory task,

01:08:37.860 | where we had them play one of those doom-like games

01:08:40.840 | when they went into this spatial maze

01:08:42.880 | and they had to do things in a virtual city.

01:08:45.480 | Their performance there got better,

01:08:47.080 | which is very, very classically dependent

01:08:49.560 | on the hippocampus.

01:08:51.280 | So this, it was so satisfying to do this study

01:08:56.020 | because I've been wanting to answer this question.

01:08:59.520 | What is a minimum amount or doable amount of exercise

01:09:04.520 | that will get you these cognitive benefits?

01:09:07.640 | And now I can say in 30 to 50 year olds

01:09:11.640 | that are low fit two to three times a week,

01:09:14.680 | is that doable?

01:09:15.720 | Absolutely.

01:09:16.700 | Will it be hard if you're low fit?

01:09:18.260 | Yeah, it's gonna be challenging,

01:09:20.120 | but absolutely doable.

01:09:22.040 | And so that is, it makes sense with all of the mechanisms

01:09:27.040 | that we are, I didn't study the mechanisms just to be clear,

01:09:31.520 | but with all the mechanisms we are imagining

01:09:34.760 | are playing a role here, that absolutely makes sense

01:09:37.880 | and it is doable.

01:09:39.520 | This is not like you have to become marathon runner

01:09:43.220 | to get any of these benefits.

01:09:45.080 | This is, you have to start moving your body

01:09:47.160 | on a regular basis, two to three times a week.

01:09:50.560 | And I, so I love that for its realness.

01:09:54.780 | - How long are those sessions again?

01:09:56.400 | - 45 minutes.

01:09:57.240 | - 45 minutes.

01:09:58.080 | - Yeah, 45 minutes.

01:09:59.240 | It's a typical spin kind of class.

01:10:02.320 | There's a warmup for five minutes

01:10:03.760 | and a cool down for five minutes.

01:10:05.040 | So it's really 35 minutes, 35 minutes of, you know,

01:10:10.040 | they're really pushing you.

01:10:12.360 | Yeah.

01:10:13.200 | - So, and so they're breathing reasonably hard.

01:10:15.280 | Heart rate, heart rate is up.

01:10:16.600 | - Heart rate is definitely up, yeah, yeah.

01:10:19.160 | - I find that all of those results are really interesting.

01:10:22.680 | The result showing improvement in motivation to exercise

01:10:27.680 | is interesting 'cause it gets back to this issue

01:10:29.760 | of kind of a self amplifying effect.

01:10:31.960 | And the neuroscientist in me wants to think about

01:10:36.500 | kind of pre-motor circuits and the fact that, you know,

01:10:39.420 | we have a motor system that can obviously do things

01:10:42.200 | like lift cups and walk and run if we want to or need to.

01:10:45.760 | But that it's possible to create a kind of anticipatory

01:10:50.280 | activity in our nervous system where our body

01:10:53.240 | craves a certain stimulus.

01:10:55.280 | You mentioned the cold and how you crave the cold.

01:10:57.640 | Now whether or not that's the adrenaline and the dopamine,

01:11:00.560 | et cetera, or whether or not somebody who exercises

01:11:04.440 | started going from zero, less than 30 minutes per week

01:11:07.240 | to two to three times a week, 45 minutes as you described

01:11:11.080 | for this study.

01:11:12.920 | - I've had that experience before of if I'm,

01:11:16.680 | the cardio that I tend to battle the most,

01:11:19.060 | and I love lifting heavy objects, at least heavy for me.

01:11:23.360 | I'm happy to go to the gym every other day

01:11:26.020 | and just lift heavy objects for an hour.

01:11:27.600 | It just makes me happy.

01:11:28.480 | I like the way it feels.

01:11:29.760 | And I've been doing it since I was in my teens,

01:11:32.120 | so 30 years.

01:11:33.440 | Cardio is a little bit trickier.

01:11:34.620 | I like to run, but if I stop running for a little while,

01:11:38.360 | I find it very hard to get back into.

01:11:40.160 | But if I start running three times a week

01:11:42.240 | for 30 to 45 minutes, and I do this pretty consistently

01:11:45.260 | on the days I don't weight train,

01:11:46.760 | I find that I start to crave it.

01:11:48.640 | It's almost as if my body needs that in order to,

01:11:52.320 | I always say clear out the cobwebs,

01:11:53.840 | but it's like my mind doesn't function as well, clearly.

01:11:56.040 | Now I understand why and why exercise helps.

01:11:59.760 | But also physically, I almost feel like my body needs

01:12:03.080 | to engage in that movement.

01:12:04.160 | Like the pre-motor circuits are kind of revving,

01:12:06.720 | kind of like revving the engine or car while it's in park.

01:12:09.240 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:12:10.660 | So the motivation to exercise obviously

01:12:12.800 | could be multifaceted.

01:12:14.740 | It could be purely psychological.

01:12:16.480 | But do you think there's any reason to speculate at least

01:12:19.300 | or believe that we can build an anticipatory,

01:12:23.800 | reverberatory activity into our nervous system?

01:12:26.140 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:12:27.640 | You know, I agree with that because I also have

01:12:32.120 | those same kinds of thoughts.

01:12:35.060 | And I do have anticipatory exercise when I can't do it.

01:12:40.600 | So I just got back from a week and a half in Paris

01:12:44.760 | where I got to do a book launch of my last book,

01:12:47.460 | "Good Anxiety."

01:12:48.640 | And I walked around a lot,

01:12:53.640 | but I did not do my exercise for that whole week and a half.

01:12:57.840 | But there was a lot of stress

01:13:00.780 | 'cause I had to do all these interviews in French.

01:13:02.280 | So I gave myself a break.

01:13:03.480 | - You speak French?

01:13:04.320 | - I speak French, yes.

01:13:05.140 | - I was gonna say, otherwise it would be really stressful.

01:13:05.980 | - Yes, that would be really stressful.

01:13:07.400 | - Now then I'd be really impressed.

01:13:09.260 | Then I would definitely start exercising.

01:13:11.620 | Actually, I would follow your morning routine to a T,

01:13:14.060 | but okay, very impressive nonetheless.

01:13:16.740 | - But I got back and coming back this direction from Paris,

01:13:21.740 | I live in New York, is much easier.

01:13:25.380 | And so I was able to get up at a normal time the next day.

01:13:28.560 | And that exercise session that first day,

01:13:30.740 | it's like, okay, I'm back in my home.

01:13:32.220 | I'm back in my environment.

01:13:34.260 | And it felt so good.

01:13:36.300 | It's like, I wanted to come back.

01:13:38.800 | And I know it's because I worked up over years.

01:13:43.800 | Now I could truthfully say seven days a week,

01:13:47.080 | but it was, first it was four to five,

01:13:50.320 | then it was five to six.

01:13:51.840 | And yeah, seven, but that includes a yoga day

01:13:56.220 | or sometimes I have to do it for 10 minutes

01:13:57.820 | instead of 30 because I have to leave.

01:14:00.100 | But that habit of you do that, even for five minutes,

01:14:04.960 | you do either the wait 10 minute thing

01:14:08.080 | or a five minute thing or a stretch.

01:14:11.180 | That is a tiny habit.

01:14:14.100 | Is that somebody at Stanford

01:14:15.380 | that invented this idea of tiny habits?

01:14:17.780 | I thought it was.

01:14:18.780 | - Well, we've got a number of people there.

01:14:20.980 | And I apologize in advance to all the people

01:14:23.260 | I neglect in this statement,

01:14:25.380 | but I'm happy to put in the comments, folks.

01:14:28.400 | BJ Fogg is there, has done-

01:14:29.980 | - Yes, that's who I-

01:14:31.660 | - Yeah, BJ has done really great work.

01:14:34.580 | And then James Clear wrote a book about habits

01:14:38.080 | and has a very popular newsletter about habits.

01:14:40.840 | We've done an episode about habits

01:14:42.080 | that covers some of their work

01:14:44.240 | and some of the more laboratory-ish, not ish,

01:14:47.840 | laboratory science, peer-reviewed work on it.

01:14:50.480 | Daily behaviors, also daily behaviors performed

01:14:53.280 | at roughly the same time of day.

01:14:55.320 | I mean, one thing we know for sure

01:14:56.720 | is that the circadian system is part of our nervous system's

01:15:01.720 | way of anticipating when things will happen,

01:15:03.960 | not just what will happen.

01:15:05.300 | I'm telling you things you obviously know already,

01:15:07.860 | but for the audience, performing your exercise

01:15:10.580 | at roughly the same time each day will make it easier.

01:15:14.020 | As opposed to just saying,

01:15:14.860 | "I'm going to do it seven days a week sometime today."

01:15:17.020 | But of course, getting it done sometime

01:15:18.880 | is better than not getting it done.

01:15:20.080 | - Yes, absolutely, absolutely.

01:15:22.700 | - Well, those are impressive effects.

01:15:24.700 | And I love that you're starting to look in populations

01:15:27.120 | that are a bit younger,

01:15:27.960 | not because some of these older populations aren't important,

01:15:31.600 | but I think that building good habits

01:15:34.840 | across one's entire life is really what it's about.

01:15:37.500 | As I always say, with anything related to longevity

01:15:41.380 | or offsetting an age-related decline,

01:15:44.600 | it's hard to know if things work

01:15:47.240 | because there's no within-subject control.

01:15:50.480 | But what we also know for sure

01:15:52.380 | is that you don't want to be the control experiment.

01:15:55.640 | You absolutely don't want to be the control experiment,

01:15:57.800 | especially for something that's purely behavioral.

01:16:00.480 | I mean, you're not talking about ingesting

01:16:02.280 | a particular supplement.

01:16:03.360 | You're not talking about changing your diet in any way,

01:16:06.120 | but I am curious.

01:16:07.160 | Diet is a very barbed wire topic on the internet,

01:16:13.440 | which diets, whether or not they work, et cetera.

01:16:15.640 | But in general, in any of these studies,

01:16:18.680 | do they evaluate whether or not

01:16:19.800 | people change their eating habits

01:16:21.320 | when they start to exercise more?

01:16:22.960 | - Yeah.

01:16:23.800 | I think I've seen one study that controlled for that,

01:16:29.340 | but I feel for them because it's hard enough

01:16:32.260 | to get people to exercise at the level

01:16:35.280 | and at the time that you need for your study.

01:16:40.100 | If you also ask them, "Okay, fill out this survey

01:16:42.420 | "to tell us exactly what you ate all day,"

01:16:44.840 | they're gonna say, "Forget you.

01:16:46.620 | "I'm not joining your study."

01:16:48.680 | So it's a critical question.

01:16:51.300 | And again, there's only been one that I've seen.

01:16:55.360 | And the evidence was that diets got better

01:16:59.180 | when they, less processed foods,

01:17:01.160 | when they did adhere to this exercise.

01:17:03.840 | But a lot more information needs to be gathered

01:17:07.160 | in that realm.

01:17:08.540 | The second study that I wanted to share,

01:17:10.580 | unpublished, we're writing it up right now,

01:17:13.200 | is part two of that study that I just described,

01:17:16.560 | which was the low-fit people.

01:17:18.480 | Next, we move to mid-fit people.

01:17:20.160 | Like, what about us?

01:17:21.300 | We're already exercising.

01:17:23.240 | How am I gonna benefit from increasing my exercise?

01:17:27.640 | So here again, we collaborated with a great spin studio

01:17:31.860 | that had a whole bunch of mid-fit people

01:17:33.720 | that, by our definition, were exercising

01:17:37.420 | two to three times a week on a regular basis.

01:17:39.740 | That's great.

01:17:40.580 | All you people out there that are doing that,

01:17:42.260 | you should know you're already benefiting your brain.

01:17:45.260 | But our question was, what if we invited them

01:17:48.280 | to exercise as much as they wanted at the spin studio

01:17:51.680 | for three months, from two to three times,

01:17:54.480 | all the way up to seven times a week?

01:17:56.440 | And let's just see what happened.

01:17:58.160 | And the control group, we asked them

01:18:01.800 | not to change their exercise.

01:18:04.320 | And so what we ended up with was a nice, big array

01:18:09.240 | of starting with mid-fit people

01:18:12.380 | that exercise between staying at two to three times a week

01:18:15.280 | all the way up to seven times a week.

01:18:17.500 | And the bottom line from that study is

01:18:21.520 | every drop of sweat counted.

01:18:23.560 | That is, the more you change and you increase your workout

01:18:27.440 | up to seven times a week, the better your mood was.

01:18:31.080 | You had lower amounts of depression and anxiety,

01:18:35.920 | higher amounts of good affect.

01:18:39.680 | And the better your hippocampal memory was

01:18:43.180 | with the more you worked out.

01:18:45.040 | Again, this was for three months.

01:18:46.980 | So I love that too, because it gives power

01:18:50.160 | to those of us that are regularly exercising and wondering,

01:18:54.520 | do I really need to, I mean, is it really gonna help me?

01:18:57.520 | And the answer is yes.

01:18:58.600 | I mean, not all of us can exercise,

01:19:00.600 | go to a spin class seven times a week.

01:19:03.220 | But I love the message that our body's responsive to that.

01:19:08.220 | And you can get better hippocampal function,

01:19:11.600 | better overall baseline mood affect with a higher level.

01:19:16.460 | So it works for the mid-fit people as well.

01:19:20.400 | - Fantastic.

01:19:21.240 | The more I learned from you,

01:19:22.720 | the more I've been starting to conceptualize the brain

01:19:25.200 | as an organ that is privileged in so many ways,

01:19:28.560 | has this unique blood-brain barrier,

01:19:31.360 | has this incredible quality of being able to predict things.

01:19:35.160 | And its job mainly is, of course,

01:19:36.760 | to predict things among other functions, of course.

01:19:40.160 | But that our brain isn't necessarily going to stay stable

01:19:45.160 | or get better over time, that it needs a signal.

01:19:49.680 | That it isn't sufficient to just say

01:19:52.580 | that we can't take it for granted.

01:19:53.860 | That our brain is actually an organ that requires a signal

01:19:58.620 | in order to maintain its own function.

01:20:00.980 | And it sounds like enhanced blood flow

01:20:03.180 | and these pathways that you described earlier,

01:20:05.180 | these two pathways,

01:20:06.740 | are at least among the more critical signals.

01:20:10.460 | I'm tempted now to move my frequency

01:20:13.380 | of cardiovascular exercise from,

01:20:15.020 | I confess it's about three days, 35 minutes lately,

01:20:18.920 | and it should be more, to daily.

01:20:22.080 | There's something really, again,

01:20:23.000 | really special about daily because it's non-negotiable.

01:20:25.500 | You just do it.

01:20:26.340 | And it sounds like if one were to do

01:20:29.940 | higher intensity exercise,

01:20:32.240 | in a spin class, I've never taken a spin class,

01:20:33.960 | but I've seen there are times when they're standing up

01:20:35.760 | on the bike and pedaling very hard.

01:20:37.360 | So that is included in these kinds of workouts, right?

01:20:39.480 | - Absolutely, yeah.

01:20:40.700 | I mean, that's what the instructor is doing.

01:20:43.560 | I cannot control.

01:20:45.800 | We did not monitor heart rate of all the subjects.

01:20:49.160 | And it was clearly, compared to the video Scrabble,

01:20:52.680 | it was highly significant.

01:20:54.020 | - I would hope so.

01:20:54.860 | - Yes.

01:20:55.700 | - I guess it depends on how intense that game of Scrabble is.

01:20:58.180 | Could we just briefly talk about mindset and affirmations?

01:21:04.320 | - Yeah, sure.

01:21:05.160 | - You've talked a bit before about affirmations.

01:21:09.060 | And as you mentioned, the beautiful work of my colleague

01:21:12.320 | at Stanford, Alia Crum,

01:21:13.680 | we can summarize her work pretty simply,

01:21:16.920 | although we won't do it complete justice,

01:21:18.560 | she's already been on the podcast,

01:21:19.800 | that just to say that one's beliefs about a behavior

01:21:24.120 | also impact the outcomes of that behavior.

01:21:26.640 | If you learn a lot of true facts

01:21:29.800 | about stress being good for you,

01:21:32.120 | then you will experience stress as better for you

01:21:35.120 | than if you only focus on or learn

01:21:37.120 | about the negative effects of stress.

01:21:38.540 | If you learn about the positive effects of exercise,

01:21:40.900 | you actually derive greater benefit from exercise,

01:21:43.980 | believe it or not.

01:21:45.220 | It's incredible effects, but they make sense

01:21:47.920 | when you understand what the brain is doing,

01:21:49.500 | which is a lot of this predictive coding

01:21:51.300 | and mindsets don't seem as mysterious and woo anymore

01:21:54.860 | once you understand what the brain is really doing.

01:21:56.980 | But what is, if any, the value of affirmation,

01:22:01.980 | of telling yourself something positive about yourself

01:22:06.500 | or of exercise on, not the exercise itself,

01:22:10.260 | but on mood, self-image, memory, and brain function.

01:22:14.200 | - Yeah, so I looked into this

01:22:18.660 | because I am also a certified exercise instructor

01:22:22.680 | and the form of exercise that I teach is called Intensati,

01:22:26.360 | that it's a form of exercise that was developed

01:22:28.960 | by this amazing instructor, Patricia Moreno.

01:22:33.100 | And she combined physical movements from kickbox and dance

01:22:36.840 | and yoga and martial arts with positive spoken affirmations.

01:22:41.060 | So each move, if you're punching back and forth,

01:22:43.020 | as you would do in a kickbox class, you don't just punch,

01:22:46.380 | you say something like, "I am strong now,"

01:22:49.500 | which every punch is associated with a word.

01:22:52.060 | And you can create your own series of affirmations

01:22:57.060 | with the moves that you put together.

01:22:59.140 | And the first time I did it, I just wandered into her class.

01:23:02.940 | I didn't know what it was.

01:23:04.060 | And I felt idiotic.

01:23:06.800 | It's like, I came into the wrong class.

01:23:09.080 | I clearly, I don't wanna come into this class.

01:23:11.500 | But then I saw, they didn't care

01:23:14.000 | whether I thought they looked silly saying these,

01:23:18.100 | not saying, yelling these affirmations out loud

01:23:21.520 | while doing the choreography at the same time.

01:23:24.500 | And then I tried it, okay, I didn't yell out.

01:23:27.080 | I kind of whispered it at first.

01:23:29.880 | But by the end, I was really yelling it out.

01:23:32.380 | There's something about the declaration using your own voice

01:23:36.380 | of saying things that you don't often say to yourself,

01:23:40.980 | like, "I'm strong, I'm inspired, I believe I will succeed,"

01:23:44.520 | are all the kinds of affirmations you say.

01:23:47.020 | And you walk out of that class,

01:23:48.620 | or I walked out of that class thinking,

01:23:51.280 | "Ah, I feel really good now.

01:23:54.380 | Man, I can't wait to come back to this class,"

01:23:57.360 | which is why I ultimately took teacher training

01:24:00.300 | to be able to teach that class.

01:24:02.340 | And so I started to look into

01:24:06.460 | what was known about affirmations.

01:24:08.180 | And they were never combined with physical activity.

01:24:11.980 | But it was clear that there was a literature showing

01:24:15.520 | that positive affirmations,

01:24:18.020 | saying them or reading them could change mood

01:24:21.940 | in the same way as we're talking about Aliyah Crum's work.

01:24:25.380 | If you have this, it's a belief.

01:24:29.140 | Once you start saying these things,

01:24:30.780 | these are not difficult things to believe,

01:24:34.460 | but it's amazing how much you don't say these kinds of things

01:24:38.900 | to yourself or with your own voice.

01:24:41.540 | You might say them about somebody else.

01:24:43.060 | "Oh, you're strong, you're so smart."

01:24:45.660 | Do you say that about yourself?

01:24:47.220 | And that's the thing about the self-affirmations.

01:24:50.620 | It really gets you into a habit

01:24:54.060 | of saying good things about yourself.

01:24:56.700 | And then you start to realize, "Oh my God,

01:24:59.660 | I'm so mean to myself."

01:25:01.620 | I have lots of negative thoughts going on

01:25:04.740 | about myself in my head,

01:25:06.860 | which was part of the other reason

01:25:09.060 | why I loved this particular form of exercise.

01:25:13.280 | So what you get in Tenzati is the mood boost

01:25:18.280 | from the positive spoken affirmations

01:25:20.820 | together with all the other brain and affect boosts

01:25:25.180 | that we've been talking about for this whole podcast

01:25:28.700 | from the exercise, because it's a sweaty workout as well.

01:25:32.360 | - Interesting.

01:25:33.460 | There's a book, I confess I haven't read it,

01:25:35.580 | but I have had the pleasure of having a discussion

01:25:38.100 | with a psychologist from, I believe it was

01:25:39.540 | at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Ethan Cross,

01:25:43.380 | wrote a book called "Chatter,"

01:25:44.820 | which focuses on the fact that so much

01:25:48.260 | of our inner dialogue is indeed negative.

01:25:50.820 | He certainly wasn't the first to point that out,

01:25:54.340 | but that explicit statements to counter

01:25:57.600 | that negative chatter, I believe,

01:25:59.220 | is one of the hallmarks of readjusting one's own,

01:26:02.980 | not just internal reference frame,

01:26:05.120 | but actually self-image generally.

01:26:07.260 | And it's a fascinating, and I think a very important area

01:26:11.500 | of psychology and neuroscience because,

01:26:13.900 | and I acknowledge this as we're talking about this too,

01:26:16.540 | laboratory neuroscientists who record from neurons

01:26:19.120 | and label neurons and look at stuff down the microscope,

01:26:21.980 | we are now deep in the territory,

01:26:23.980 | in the deep water of what some of our colleagues

01:26:26.780 | and people who think about neuroscience would consider

01:26:29.700 | like really out there on the kind of subjective edges.

01:26:33.300 | And yet I think it's worth pointing out

01:26:36.740 | that the brain does all these things.

01:26:39.480 | It's responsible for simple reflexes and motor behaviors,

01:26:41.900 | but also high-level conceptual ideas about the universe

01:26:46.180 | and what it might look like in 10 years

01:26:47.620 | or a hundred years or a thousand years,

01:26:49.260 | but also high-level conceptual understanding

01:26:52.000 | of who we are and what we are about.

01:26:54.960 | And so even though it might seem a little bit out

01:26:57.180 | on the fringes, dare I say,

01:26:59.540 | I think that these are some of the more important

01:27:01.780 | untried landscapes of neuroscience.

01:27:04.380 | And I just want to acknowledge my appreciation

01:27:07.460 | for the fact that I'm going to connect the dots here

01:27:11.420 | and say, you went from somebody who didn't exercise,

01:27:13.680 | who went on this rafting trip,

01:27:15.380 | that discovered exercise and its benefits

01:27:17.500 | for your grant writing and then on and on and on,

01:27:20.700 | and then became a certified-

01:27:22.400 | - Yeah, exercise instructor.

01:27:23.860 | - Instructor.

01:27:25.000 | So you don't do anything halfway either as it's clear.

01:27:28.960 | I'd like to touch on something you mentioned earlier,

01:27:33.580 | but we haven't dove into it all in any depth,

01:27:37.440 | which is meditation.

01:27:38.580 | You mentioned this tea meditation.

01:27:42.760 | You had a publication recently on a 10-minute meditation,

01:27:47.500 | right?

01:27:48.340 | Maybe you could tell us about this 10-minute meditation

01:27:50.160 | because it seems like such a tractable amount of time.

01:27:52.980 | - Right.

01:27:53.920 | - And then if you would,

01:27:54.760 | maybe tell us a little bit about the tea meditation,

01:27:56.660 | but it sounds like you've discovered

01:27:59.120 | a close to minimum threshold of meditation

01:28:03.260 | that can really benefit us.

01:28:04.300 | So maybe you could tell us about that study.

01:28:07.660 | - So the study was, as you very astutely pointed out,

01:28:12.660 | very practical study.

01:28:14.940 | Just 10 minutes, not 30 minutes, not an hour of meditation.

01:28:18.300 | That's too hard.

01:28:19.300 | 10 minutes guided meditation.

01:28:21.740 | They logged into a site so we can tell that they logged in

01:28:24.420 | and they listened to a, it's a body scan,

01:28:28.280 | very basic but easy to follow kind of meditation.

01:28:32.180 | And we asked them to do it how often?

01:28:35.560 | Daily, seven days a week, just 10 minutes a day.

01:28:39.260 | And the most shocking thing about this study

01:28:41.700 | is that we got more adherence

01:28:45.660 | to the 10-minute daily meditation

01:28:47.860 | than the 10-minute daily podcast listening,

01:28:50.720 | which was our control.

01:28:51.920 | So the highest retention rate I've ever gotten

01:28:54.580 | in any, this kind of study that I've done,

01:28:57.180 | exercise or meditation, they wanted to do it.

01:29:00.300 | 10 minutes a day, it was great.

01:29:02.500 | - I'm gonna just start leading meditations

01:29:04.740 | for three hours as it was during three-hour podcasts.

01:29:08.100 | - So we looked at cognitive effects before and after this.

01:29:15.100 | It was eight weeks of daily, it was actually

01:29:18.100 | 12-minute meditation, 12 minutes of body scan meditation.

01:29:22.180 | And what we found was significant decreases

01:29:26.620 | in stress response.

01:29:27.780 | We did the stress test to see how you responded

01:29:32.780 | to an unexpected stressful situation.

01:29:35.340 | The meditators did much better.

01:29:37.820 | Their mood was better and their cognitive performance

01:29:41.880 | was also better.

01:29:43.520 | And this was my first little foray into meditation

01:29:47.540 | after I had started my personal team meditation

01:29:51.860 | that really shifted my relationship with meditation.

01:29:58.080 | But it's consistent with many other studies

01:30:03.840 | showing the beneficial effects of meditation.

01:30:08.140 | But the unique thing was we tried to make it doable,

01:30:11.240 | that many, many people out there

01:30:12.920 | could actually follow this typical regimen.

01:30:17.180 | And so we're continuing that.

01:30:21.140 | In fact, my research in my lab right now

01:30:24.280 | is all about those doable, short things

01:30:28.860 | that NYU college students will do,

01:30:32.340 | not just at the beginning of the semester

01:30:34.260 | but at the end of the semester

01:30:36.300 | when the stress and anxiety levels

01:30:38.560 | are now at record-breaking high levels

01:30:41.580 | and they need something to bring that level down

01:30:44.660 | so that they could show their professors

01:30:46.840 | what their brains can actually do.

01:30:49.040 | And so it includes very short meditations,

01:30:51.480 | sound meditations, visual meditations, walking,

01:30:56.340 | things that any college student,

01:30:58.420 | but we're obviously focused on NYU students, will do.

01:31:02.420 | I wanna get at graduation rates.

01:31:06.220 | I wanna get at class performance

01:31:09.020 | with these kinds of interventions.

01:31:11.700 | But it started with that study

01:31:12.900 | that I just described, meditation.

01:31:14.860 | - If you would, and here's where we can highlight this again

01:31:21.320 | as some highly educated speculation, it's coming from you.

01:31:25.680 | What do you think is going on during meditation?

01:31:29.300 | So a body scan involves an interoceptive awareness,

01:31:33.420 | like interoception of course being an attention

01:31:35.780 | to what's going on on the surface of

01:31:37.780 | and within the confines of our skin

01:31:39.220 | as opposed to the outside world.

01:31:41.000 | Drawing our attention to anything inside us or outside us

01:31:46.340 | involves forebrain function, prefrontal cortex,

01:31:48.820 | presumably and other things.

01:31:50.620 | Typically eyes are closed.

01:31:52.460 | Typically it's relaxing.

01:31:53.860 | So there are a lot of variables that could be feeding

01:31:55.860 | into a number of different effects.

01:31:58.500 | But as a neuroscientist, what do you think is going on

01:32:03.420 | that this period of kind of a self-induced,

01:32:07.660 | somewhat unusual state,

01:32:09.240 | what do you think is going on in terms of network behavior

01:32:13.940 | and networks within the brain

01:32:16.400 | that it can have these long-term effects?

01:32:18.580 | Because we got to some of the ones

01:32:19.700 | who relate downstream of exercise.

01:32:21.420 | And I think there's so much evidence.

01:32:26.060 | I know there's so much evidence

01:32:27.180 | that meditation is beneficial.

01:32:28.780 | How do you think it's working?

01:32:31.180 | Or what do you think it's doing?

01:32:32.620 | - Yeah, I think that one of the most important things

01:32:36.480 | that gets worked when we're doing a simple 10 minute

01:32:41.380 | or 12 minute body scan meditation regularly,

01:32:45.060 | this 10 minutes a day, 12 minutes a day,

01:32:47.720 | is the habit building and the practice

01:32:52.700 | of focusing on the present moment.

01:32:56.420 | I think that is very hard for us modern humans to do

01:33:00.600 | because I'm worrying about the thing that's due

01:33:03.940 | at the end of the week that I need to do

01:33:07.760 | and how many hours am I gonna have to be able to do that.

01:33:10.800 | Or I'm worried about whatever the email

01:33:14.180 | that wasn't as polite as it should be that I sent

01:33:16.320 | and what were the repercussions for that.

01:33:19.340 | Instead of focusing on this moment, which is fun,

01:33:24.340 | I get to talk to you.

01:33:26.880 | It's a beautiful day outside.

01:33:29.600 | I'm feeling good right at this moment.

01:33:32.020 | And I think that those, all of the meditative practices

01:33:36.860 | that I've done, and this one also,

01:33:40.800 | whether you know it or not,

01:33:43.380 | is getting you to focus on this moment.

01:33:48.260 | And I think it's even more important in this day and age

01:33:52.100 | where anxiety levels and the next variant might come out

01:33:55.940 | and what are the repercussions there.

01:33:57.640 | And I have a mother who's older

01:33:59.700 | and she's more susceptible to it and there's a war

01:34:02.640 | and what's gonna happen there.

01:34:04.440 | Those are all future possibilities.

01:34:09.140 | And we should be worried about that.

01:34:11.660 | That is a possibility, you need to plan for that.

01:34:14.200 | But you also need to focus on this moment right now.

01:34:19.120 | I'm healthy, I can breathe.

01:34:21.640 | I get to have this interesting conversation

01:34:24.060 | right in this moment.

01:34:24.980 | If I start thinking about other things,

01:34:26.940 | then it takes away from this moment.

01:34:30.200 | Do I know what circuits are involved?

01:34:33.780 | Not exactly, that is not my area.

01:34:36.580 | I think there are some studies that have focused

01:34:39.120 | on that present moment kind of activity.

01:34:44.120 | But that is what I think is most important

01:34:46.720 | about the practice of meditation,

01:34:49.040 | or one of the important things that calms us down.

01:34:52.900 | Because if you know how to do that,

01:34:54.860 | that gives you this powerful tool for the rest of your day.

01:34:58.860 | You're not locked into that fearful future thinking

01:35:03.080 | that so many of us have,

01:35:04.300 | or that just reliving of the terrible past,

01:35:08.240 | but you could enjoy the present moment.

01:35:12.320 | - Yeah, that really resonates.

01:35:14.140 | I think that going back to the earlier part

01:35:16.700 | of our conversation,

01:35:18.200 | the hippocampus has this incredible storage capacity

01:35:22.400 | and ability to set context about past, present, and future.

01:35:25.940 | And that's a beautiful thing,

01:35:27.680 | because as much as I like to think he had some semblance

01:35:30.960 | of a healthy life, none of us want to be HM.

01:35:33.840 | None of us want to be in the position

01:35:35.440 | of not being able to form new memories

01:35:36.960 | and have no context to the past or the present.

01:35:40.240 | So we're grateful that we should all be grateful

01:35:42.660 | that our hippocampus can draw from past, present, and future

01:35:46.200 | in various combinations,

01:35:47.360 | and we should support it through the daily exercise

01:35:50.000 | and other habits, let's call them habits

01:35:52.920 | so that people make them habits that you've highlighted.

01:35:55.440 | But if we are not deliberately anchoring

01:35:58.840 | within past, present, and future according to what we need,

01:36:03.320 | and we're just shuffling between past, present, and future,

01:36:06.340 | that is not a good way to live.

01:36:08.520 | - No. - It's not effective.

01:36:10.080 | - No. - It sounds like meditation

01:36:11.520 | can really help us go to the right stacks.

01:36:15.000 | I guess people don't go to libraries anymore,

01:36:17.000 | but in the old days, you need to go to the right location

01:36:20.180 | in the library.

01:36:21.020 | You actually can't get distracted by the books

01:36:22.840 | that you're interested in if you need to go,

01:36:24.640 | just reflexively, if you need to go study a particular topic.

01:36:27.340 | So that's kind of how I think about it.

01:36:29.300 | It makes us more linear, perhaps, in our way of being.

01:36:33.040 | - I think so, and it actually counteracts,

01:36:35.460 | not that I'm against technology, but having our phones

01:36:40.700 | and being connected to every good and bad thing

01:36:44.760 | going along, going on in the world today

01:36:47.800 | is incredibly distracting and takes you away

01:36:51.040 | from the present moment, virtually 24 hours a day.

01:36:54.760 | And so we have to work extra hard right now

01:36:57.440 | compared to in the 40s when we didn't have

01:37:00.100 | all this technology or at the same level.

01:37:02.460 | So yeah, it becomes even more important practice,

01:37:06.240 | I think, for everyday life.

01:37:07.840 | - Yeah, or even 10, 15 years ago,

01:37:09.920 | it felt like smartphones weren't as intrusive.

01:37:13.260 | - Yeah.

01:37:14.640 | - One final question and maybe a request

01:37:18.600 | as the new incoming Dean of College of Letters and Sciences.

01:37:23.020 | And I must say, I'm delighted, thrilled, actually,

01:37:26.200 | to hear that a lot of the practices

01:37:28.360 | that we've been discussing today and that you've pioneered

01:37:30.720 | are going to be incorporated into undergraduate education.

01:37:33.280 | I predict and I'd be willing to wager

01:37:35.520 | that that will become a template for how universities

01:37:38.840 | and non-university systems should function

01:37:41.600 | because if indeed, and it is true

01:37:44.800 | that there's this incredible relationship

01:37:47.320 | between physical movement and mental deliberate practices

01:37:51.120 | and performance, any corporation, school, household

01:37:55.400 | would be crazy, would be self-limiting

01:37:59.180 | and even self-destructive to not incorporate those.

01:38:02.040 | I'm so happy that you're gonna do this and collect data.

01:38:05.240 | Please, we'll have to touch back with you

01:38:06.960 | and hear what comes of that.

01:38:09.520 | But one of the main things that I hear so much about today

01:38:13.080 | are issues with attention.

01:38:15.280 | And we haven't talked about attention.

01:38:16.360 | We've mainly been talking about memory and cognition.

01:38:18.400 | - Yes, yes.

01:38:19.240 | - But you know a lot about attention.

01:38:20.900 | And here, I'm not being disparaging.

01:38:24.240 | I think people have done what I'm about to say

01:38:26.560 | as a consequence of need and lack of other resources.

01:38:30.760 | There's an immense amount of Adderall use,

01:38:33.280 | Ritalin use, modafinil use, and caffeine abuse.

01:38:36.360 | Now, I happen to like caffeine.

01:38:37.880 | I don't use the other compounds I described.

01:38:40.640 | But it's just incredible to me how the data on this,

01:38:44.320 | a colleague of mine at Stanford claims that

01:38:46.600 | something like two-thirds or more of college students

01:38:49.480 | use these without prescription for ADHD.

01:38:52.360 | What can we expect in terms of the effects

01:38:58.480 | of regular exercise on attention?

01:39:00.520 | And are there any other things besides exercise

01:39:03.000 | and meditation that you would like to see people do

01:39:05.300 | in terms of trying to increase their powers of attention?

01:39:07.960 | Because I think the ability to focus and attend

01:39:11.400 | is really the distinguishing feature

01:39:13.640 | between those that will succeed in any endeavor

01:39:16.400 | and those that won't.

01:39:18.000 | And that's a scary thing for a lot of people to hear

01:39:19.920 | because a lot of people think they have ADHD.

01:39:22.240 | They may, they may not.

01:39:23.680 | But I bet that a number of students at both Stanford

01:39:26.300 | and NYU feel challenged with holding their attention

01:39:30.940 | to the thing that they need to hold their attention to.

01:39:32.840 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:39:34.040 | So I would say the top three tools that everybody

01:39:39.040 | right this minute today can use to up their capacity

01:39:44.040 | to attend where they want to include exercise

01:39:48.080 | for the reasons we've talked about.

01:39:49.360 | It has a direct effect on

01:39:50.700 | functioning of the prefrontal cortex.

01:39:52.180 | Meditation also, clear clinical studies

01:39:55.140 | showing improved ability to focus

01:39:58.260 | and particularly focus on the present moment.

01:40:01.600 | And the third has to be sleep.

01:40:03.760 | So sleep is, you can't, it's out of the three,

01:40:08.740 | it is the most physiological.

01:40:11.000 | I mean, I could live my whole life

01:40:13.540 | without meditating one minute.

01:40:15.640 | Could I survive without sleep?

01:40:17.680 | No, none of us could.

01:40:19.280 | So it's more basic physiological.

01:40:22.320 | But it is so important for all core cognitive functions,

01:40:27.320 | including attention, including creativity,

01:40:32.780 | including just good basic brain function.

01:40:37.780 | That is why it's so critical to get that information,

01:40:46.660 | that basic neuroscience information

01:40:49.540 | into the heads of these students

01:40:51.660 | that are trying their best to show us how their brain work,

01:40:55.660 | but being hampered because they're not moving enough,

01:41:00.300 | they're not meditating and there's all these

01:41:03.700 | distracting things that they include in their lives,

01:41:06.720 | some of which a little bit is good,

01:41:09.260 | but 24 hours a day on your phone and LinkedIn,

01:41:14.260 | not LinkedIn, but linked to your phone

01:41:16.680 | is damaging to your attention.

01:41:20.800 | So exercise, meditation, sleep can help you learn,

01:41:27.140 | retain and perform better

01:41:30.460 | than if you do not have these three things in your life.

01:41:33.980 | - Wonderful.

01:41:34.820 | Music to my ears and also either very low cost or zero cost,

01:41:39.820 | considering that the exercise doesn't require a class.

01:41:43.820 | One could use the freely available resource of gravity

01:41:48.820 | to do jumping jacks or burpees or push-ups or whatever,

01:41:52.860 | or sit-ups or all of those in combination.

01:41:54.180 | - And don't forget YouTube,

01:41:55.220 | the freely accessible millions of YouTube videos,

01:41:59.340 | if you don't want to do your jumping jacks by yourself,

01:42:02.400 | I always say this, I talk about breath meditation

01:42:05.220 | for my book, "Good Anxiety,"

01:42:08.220 | and if you don't like the one that I suggest,

01:42:11.180 | there's only about a million more on YouTube

01:42:13.180 | with ratings from one star to five stars,

01:42:16.100 | so use that resource.

01:42:18.380 | - It is a wonderful resource.

01:42:20.180 | And you are an amazing resource.

01:42:23.100 | Wendy, thank you so much for coming here today

01:42:26.020 | to have this discussion and share your knowledge

01:42:28.880 | about not just existing data,

01:42:30.820 | but new data coming out soon,

01:42:33.440 | and for your leadership in the university system,

01:42:37.500 | for your leadership in public education,

01:42:39.340 | for the decades of important work

01:42:41.580 | on memory and neural circuitry,

01:42:43.260 | which we got to learn about today as well.

01:42:46.740 | Thank you ever so much.

01:42:48.300 | - Thank you, Andrew.

01:42:49.480 | Fun conversation.

01:42:51.100 | - Thank you for joining me today

01:42:52.140 | for my discussion about learning and memory

01:42:54.140 | and how to get better at learning and remembering

01:42:56.260 | with Dr. Wendy Suzuki.

01:42:57.920 | If you'd like to learn more about Dr. Suzuki's work,

01:43:00.220 | you can go to wendysizuki.com.

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01:43:04.460 | and links to her popular books,

01:43:06.160 | as well as her social media handles.

01:43:08.060 | We've also placed those in the show note captions.

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01:43:51.080 | On many episodes of the Huberman Lab Podcast,

01:43:53.020 | we discuss supplements.

01:43:54.460 | While supplements are certainly not necessary for everybody,

01:43:57.220 | many people derive tremendous benefit from them

01:43:59.620 | for things like accelerating the transition into sleep

01:44:02.940 | and getting better, deeper sleep,

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01:46:22.880 | So once again, thank you for joining me today

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01:46:28.480 | and tools to get better at learning and memory.

01:46:31.000 | And as always, thank you for your interest in science.

01:46:34.040 | [upbeat music]

01:46:36.620 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

Dr. Wendy Suzuki: Boost Attention & Memory with Science-Based Tools | Huberman Lab Podcast #73

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