I get asked a lot about the safety or lack thereof of Bluetooth headphones. You work on the brain. You're a brain surgeon. That's valuable real estate in there, and you understand about electromagnetic fields. Any discussion about EMFs immediately puts us in the category of, uh-oh, get their tinfoil hats.

And yet, I've been researching EMFs for a future episode of the podcast, and EMFs are a real thing. That's not a valuable statement. Everything's a real thing at some level, even an idea. But there does seem to be some evidence that electromagnetic fields of sufficient strength can alter the function of, maybe the health of, but the function of neural tissue, given that neural tissue is electrically signaling among itself.

So I'll just ask this in a very straightforward way. Do you use Bluetooth headphones or wired headphones? Yeah, Bluetooth. And you're not worried about any kind of EMF fields across the skull? No. I mean, I think the energy levels involved are so tiny that ionizing radiation aside, we're way out of the realm of ionizing radiation that people would worry about tumor-causing EMF fields.

Even just the electromagnetic field itself, as is very well described in a Bluetooth frequency range, the power levels are tiny in these devices. And so we are awash in these signals, whether you use Bluetooth headphones or not. For that matter, you're getting bombarded with ionizing radiation in a very tiny amount, no matter where you live on Earth, unless you live under huge amounts of water.

It's unavoidable. And so I think you just have to trust that your body has the DNA repair mechanisms that it needs to deal with the constant bath of ionizing radiation that you're in as a result of being in the universe and exposed to cosmic rays. In terms of electromagnetic fields, the energy levels are way, way out of the range where I would be worried about this.

What about heat? I don't use the earbuds any longer for a couple of reasons. As you know, I take a lot of supplements and I reached into my left pocket once and swallowed a handful of supplements that included a Bluetooth, an AirPod Pro. I knew it. I swallowed it the moment after I gulped it down.

By the way, folks, please don't do this. It was not a good idea. It wasn't an idea. It was a mistake. But I could see it on my phone as registering there. Never saw it again, so I'm assuming it's no longer in my body, but anyway, there's a bad joke there to be sure.

But in any event, I tend to lose them or misplace them. So that's the main reason. But I did notice when I used them that there's some heat generated there. I also am not convinced that plugging your ears all day long is good. There's some ventilation through the sinus systems that include the ears.

So it sounds to me like you're not concerned about the use of earbuds. But what about heat near the brain? I mean, there's the cochlea, the auditory mechanisms that sit pretty close to the surface there. Heat and neural tissue are not friends. I'd much rather get my brain cold than hot in terms of keeping the cells healthy and alive.

Should we be thinking about the heat effects of some of these devices or other things? Is there anything we're overlooking? Well, think about it this way. I use cars as an analogy a lot and mostly internal combustion engine cars. So these analogies are going to start to be foreign and useless for another generation of people that grew up in the era of electric cars.

But using cars as a platform to talk about fluid cooling systems, your body has a massive distributed fluid cooling system similar to a car's radiator. You're pumping blood all around your body all the time at a very strictly controlled temperature. That blood carries, it's mostly water. So it carries a huge amount of the heat away or cold away from any area of the body that's focused heating or focused cooling.

So you could put an ice cube on your skin until it completely melts away and the blood is going to bring heat back to that area. You can stand in the sun under much more scary heating rays from the sun itself that contain UV radiation that's definitely damaging your DNA.

If you're looking for things to be afraid of, the sun is a good one. You're talking to the guy that tells everybody to get sunlight in their eyes every morning. But I don't want people to get burned or give themselves skin cancer. I encourage people to protect their skin accordingly.

And different individuals require different levels of protection from the sun. Some people do very well in a lot of sunshine, never get basal cell or anything like that. Some people, and it's not just people with very fair skin, a minimum of sun exposure can cause some issues. And here I'm talking about sun exposure to the skin.

Of course, staring at the sun is a bad idea. I never recommend it. But thinking about the sun just as a heater for a moment to compare it with Bluetooth headphones, your body is very capable of carrying that heat away and dissipating it. You know, via sweat evaporation or temperature equalization.

So any heat that's locally generated in the ear, one, there's a pretty large bony barrier there. But two, there's a ton of blood flow in the scalp and in the head in general and definitely in the brain that's going to regulate that temperature. So I think certainly there can be a tiny temperature variation, but I doubt very seriously that it's enough to cause a significant problem.