[Music] even at 60 or 70 years old a few simple lifestyle changes with patients or with public has been shown to increase their performance on cognitive tests and i think that's really empowering for people when they think oh well i didn't do this i've had a stressful life yeah wait a minute there are still things you could do so let's go through what are some of the things that people can do let's do a 24-hour day consider skipping breakfast a couple of times a week in neuroscience journals and from what we know about the biology
of it that intermittent fasting going 16 hours a couple of times a week without eating glucose will your liver will run out of its glucose reserves it'll burn fat into these things called ketones the brain is a hybrid vehicle it's not all gas it's not all electric it likes both and so if you have dinner at eight and it's monday evening consider having your next meal be midday the next day that's an easy way to get to 16 hours it doesn't mean you're fasting for days and days there is neuroscientific literature that intermittent fasting is
good for attention and focus i would consider taking five minutes um to just breathe deeply like you're doing now just take deep breaths a couple of times a day three times a day for three minutes make it easy see how that works for you just the pause might be helpful now it's time to eat the food you choose is important and there's delicious food to eat that's actually good for your brain and how do i know that well we don't have a pill for alzheimer's but we do have the mind diet which is essentially mediterranean
food that if you look at a group of thousands of people over a long period of time they had less dementia so now that you've figured out the cadence of eating which is intermittent fasting skipping breakfast a couple of uh days a week now that you've brought in uh pre-lunch three minutes of just deep breathing that's meditative breathing choose plants choose nuts choose occasional fatty fish the fatty fish has omega-3s which is an essential component of your of of your brain it's the wrapping around all those connections that keeps those electrical signals firing faster and
if you want to eat meat uh consider the mediterranean diet where it's fatty fish and poultry pass on the beef pass on the fried food pass on the um processed food now if you do have a burger you're not gonna undo what you did just make those things an indulgence rather than a habit a bit of exercise is great the brain likes exercise because it is flesh don't don't clog the plumbing to your garden because swaths of your garden will wither so people have strokes and injuries it's because blood flow is not getting into their
brain that's the way to hurt the structure of your brain so what's good for the heart is good for the brain then the other thing it does is it bathes itself in these uh neurotrophic factors that's what my science is on bdnf brain derived and so that's what my grants are on when the brain exercises it showers itself it's not like thigh muscles release healthy brain chemicals that swim up there it's got its own pharmacy you give it the right behavior and interaction it'll reward itself so exercise keeps the plumbing open to the flesh of
the brain as well as releases molecules that serve as miracle growth for the brain a couple times a week is a good place to start do we know what specific exercise is good for the brain good for bdnf levels some people are starting to suggest uh some strength training is an essential component so if you're just running a marathon you might want to throw in some light weights but more a little bit more exercise than you're currently doing is is what the brain's going to say hey i like this direction i'm going to shower myself
with bdnf yeah exactly and i think we can look strength training i'm a huge fan of strength training i do think we undervalue muscle mass in society and in health but generally speaking for most of us if we just increase how much we move get vertical even yeah get out of the chair that's going to help just the postural elements of standing yeah is a first step next thing you know you're walking make sure you know you're taking the stairs uh so these are simple things these are free things uh if you can i like
to read something completely unfamiliar we've got a stack of old magazines and just flip through just just new new content for your mind and i think it's since it's thinking flesh and of course it likes blood it likes to be irrigated of course it likes a certain kind of diet because of the components and needs but it also wants to think if you ask usain bolt and how you get your thigh muscles stronger to take some stairs well how do you get your brain to be healthier think and everybody's level the next level of thought
and challenge is individual we don't all have to do the same puzzles we don't all have to have the same career but get out of your comfort zone if you will just with the thoughts so flip through something different on your phone read something different on your phone develop a new habit i think that's important and then for those of us who have um creativity as an ambition and i have the luxury of having creativity as an ambition because we're all wildly creative in our dreams and people are finding that when you on the transition
from awake to a sleep and from sleep to waking up it's called hypnagogic and hypnopompic there's actually those same alpha waves that we've been talking about just for 10 20 minutes as you drift into sleep and your tasks are done and salvador dali mentioned that like he uses sleep as a psychedelic tool for creativity to solve problems it's not going to happen every time but i like to look at my riddles at the end of the night in my and i have a notes app and i write a few things and i wake up and
i write a few things that transition is like sort of a strange portal to your subconscious and again based on science if you put some electrodes on a brain at that time you have those alpha waves that we talked about awake but focused and calm and you also have these other waves these delta waves that waves that are um light sleeping early dreaming it's the only time where you have both awake and asleep waves and i've heard in one of your articles sorry i've read to one of your ask us that you say leave a
pen next to your bed so that you can actually take advantage when those creative thoughts come just before that or just when you wake up you can actually just jot them down and yeah and uh yeah that's that's incredible you said learn new things yeah and how important can learning a new language be oh it's an essential thing and whether you get it right is actually secondary it's the it's the process of trying to learn so language music the act of learning makes your brain say god i got to pull from different pathways i got
to get to different corners of my mind it's actually an energy consuming activity and and that's what engages the the greatest corners and recesses of your mind is to learn new things particularly music particularly languages social interactions we know these things and now i'm just trying to give you a biological basis brains efficient if it wants to fall into its rut and breaking the rut in a constructive way is going to be good for your brain globally as your mind thoughts and emotions as well as the flesh that's that's one strong way to stave off
dementia yeah and that's very powerful you know keeping your brain active trying new things and i think what you said was super empowering it's not about whether you can actually master that language it's not about whether you master playing the piano just the process of trying to yeah that's going to do all the groundwork and all the sort of heavy lifting in the brain which which is super empowering what impact does music have on our brains that we know and there's actually uh somebody in san francisco or somewhere else he's putting musicians in fmri scanners
and those scanners don't tell the whole story but they do tell something new compared to just putting electrodes on somebody's head our brain flesh is electric it's i think of it as a jellyfish it's the tentacles are spraying chemicals and electricity we can detect it from the surface of the brain and we can actually put people in machines and look at blood flow and when you do that for musicians it's really interesting because it's a physical performance if you're learning to play music i think i want to pivot from listening to movie music to learning
to play to me learning to play music that seems to be the thing that leads to the most left right right left connections and electrical currents passing through the corpus callosum your brain's like a walnut there's a bridge in the middle and music hearing it playing it thinking about it using your fingers to control it seems to pull from the most corners of our mind and i can't imagine that not being good for you because as you know with the brain if you don't use it you lose it it will down regulate it will let
wither certain corners of the brain if they're not actively engaged so i think music especially when you're a kid learning to play music has to be good for the brain you know what kids learning a new skill whether it's a sport or a musical instrument is likely to yield benefits um i think one of the one of the reasons for me that might apply is because it often puts you into flow states um you know and i think for adults as well you know when when something's that you know it's not too difficult that it's
unachievable it's a little bit a little bit harder that we have to concentrate you have to you access that flow state i find those people who get into the flow state and i think some people have uh you know may not know what that means and it may think that's kind of fluffy but there is a measurement for that so uh when you're awake the and resting in focus those are alpha waves if you look at for example sharpshooters just the moment before they hit a target likely athletes of football are scoring something nfl quarterback
ballerina the the release from the constraints of thought that come from your frontal lobe and letting a well-trained behavior exert itself the brain is actually less active it lights up less brightly it's more efficient in its pathways and that flow state is an alpha wave that's detectable similarly with buddhist monks likely with deep divers before they do their dive it's a state of being focused awake and calm and i think our phones and the technology and everything we're doing is pushing us away from that so if we can find skills and habits that let us
harness that channel it know how to get into it that would be great i think learning music and like they say with uh music learn it and then let it go that's that alpha wave flow state that i think could be very beneficial for anybody to learn music when we learn a new skill we are you know rationally we're thinking about it we're trying to learn all those movements that we need but then when we need to perform you know we just want to have absorb that forget about you know rationally thinking about everything and
just let it go is is that the key to allowing our brain to function at its peak it's you learn and you then develop mastery and then you let it go so you just allow it to perform yeah and i think let's let's dig into that a little bit deeper i don't think when a surgeon is is moving swiftly and with minimal trauma to tissue or a footballer is making their moves and you're thinking well this seems effortless they look relaxed they're moving in a way that is is efficient it's not it's not strained you
can see it in their face they're not trying and thinking most people will have a flow state when they're not under pressure and the lights aren't on the challenging thing for athletes is how to deliver that under the stress of a game-winning situation and and clutch performance to me that flow state is not performing better than what you would do in practice but just doing what you would normally do under these extremely anxiety-provoking stressful conditions so for people listening to this who are not high-performing athletes i think there's a lot of take-home there for them
so i submit that we all want peak performance in our lives whatever whatever our life entails whatever we need to do whether it's be a father whether it's to be a good office worker what be a neurosurgeon whatever it is we are all i think on some level wanting to perform at our peak so what can somebody listening to this or watching this on the video learn from what you've just said that athletes can do how can they use that to help them in their daily lives the lessons we learn from athletes and ballerinas and
other people apply to everybody and so when we speak about what people can do when they're stressed out on an la freeway when they're about to go into a meeting with a boss and you're anticipating something not going well when you're coming home and your relationship hasn't been good the time-tested method and the one that we now know see i don't want to just tell you things without telling you how i know and why i have the privilege to even ask that question to me is meditative breathing it's a very powerful way to quell that
anxiety storm that those instinctive structures have done i'm going to see my boss and those subcortical structures are firing and they're unhappy much like you'd see a snake or you're at the edge of a cliff there's certain things that should be released in your body but those have been repurposed in a negative destructive way where we feel that at work we feel that at home we feel that when we look at certain social media how do we tap that down just like we would slowly walk away from a fear of heights how do we walk
away from just the general anxiety that's filled our life during the day i deeply uh believe and particularly now because there's hardcore data i'll go into this a little bit is meditative breathing i don't know what mindfulness is i don't know what your mind is thinking or my mind is thinking or your mind is thinking but i know that that the brain is connected to the lungs and the heart through this thing called a wandering nerve it comes down and that that the brain can send signals down to your heart and buddhist monks can slow
down their heartbeat i know when i put a little coil on there for people with epilepsy kids with epilepsy a vagal nerve stimulator and we send electricity the electricity can actually go upward into your brain and quell epilepsy epilepsy seizures and aberrant uh electrical activity of your brain think of it as an arrhythmia your heart is epilepsy of the brain it's called a vagal nerve stimulator it's been around for a while this is something you can look up right now we put electrical coil on this nerve and it calms electricity it's not even in the
brain but meditative breathing deep breathing an in in a count of four to go in a count of three or two one to hold and slow release if you do that just a little bit before you engage in that next stress provoking task it too works like a vagal nerve stimulator without us having to do a little surgery to calm the electricity in your brain and you're saying okay that sounds where did you get that well well you know you know meditation's been going on for a long time we've seen buddhist monks do certain things
and others deep divers are a great example of that but we we know this now because the study came out last year they went through like meditative breathing with these patients and these kids and these young people and they're watching the electricity change and get closer to that alpha wave get closer to the calmer electrical signals in their brain after just deep slow deliberate breathing it is a resource available to you that has been harnessed for for millennia and that now you have crazy brain surgeons providing you the electrical proof if you're a skeptical kind
of person to me that's magic yeah absolutely and i think you know it brings a lot of weight to this to this term just breathe i mean it's it's deceptively simple but it really works and i know this year i'll be giving a lot of um talks to companies about wellness and how they can improve productivity and what's really interesting is that a breath that i sort of use with my patients something i've written about a lot is the three four five breath when you breathe into three you hold for four and you breathe out
for five yeah and when i'm talking to people a group i'll i'll often will collectively do just one of those breaths together which takes about 10 or 12 seconds and i asked people straight away how do you feel uh how can you feel a difference just on one breath and about 80 percent of people put their hand up and that's just one breath you do that a few times as i say to them five of those three four five breaths takes one minute you will put your body in a different state because breathing is like
information for your body and it's responding so it's interesting that you know you as a neurosurgeon before a big operation will use breathing yeah thank you for that and thank you for um allowing people to find things about themselves uh that can help themselves you know because that in itself is power also i always like to lead the listener with some really actionable practical tips that they can apply in their own lives immediately to improve the way that they feel or improve the way that their brain functions so what are your top four tips for
people listening to this that they can think about applying into their own life um one would be uh get vertical that's the most essential thing when i see our patients who can come out of a bed and stand they grow you can see a withering flower come back to life if they can get vertical being standing and moving is very important for a frame wherever you're at just do a little bit more two make subtle but important changes in your diet get rid of the red meat and fried food add in some more of the
mediterranean diet you're still going to enjoy what you're eating you can have a glass of wine salmon red wine yogurt fruit it's not a tough thing it's just changing the direction of what you're eating find some puzzles find some content read a book do something unusual that will also be good and the fourth one i would say is you know try to find happiness it's the most elusive thing but we also know that people who have mental health issues or people who are depressed their brains start to change they are brain injured from the way
they are thinking so if it's within your power to be happier to pursue relationships and crafts that make you happy that will probably be the best thing for your brain really hope you enjoyed that conversation please do think about one thing that you can take and apply into your life inspiration is not enough you need to take action if you did enjoy that please do press subscribe hit that notification bell i want to check out this conversation that i picked out that acts as the perfect follow-up
