How to Improve Memory & Focus Using Science Protocols | Dr. Charan Ranganath

24:57The theory that we have is when you get that bump into dopamine activity, you're motivated, you're energized to get the answer, and you're driven towards a state of plasticity. And now a giving you something has nothing to do with this question, and boom, you got it, you know. So when people ask me and they ask me a lot, how best to elevate their brain dopamine, one reasonable answer based on this study is curiosity, to engage curiosity. Do you know the quote by Dorothy Parker? The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. I believe it was Dorothy Parker. I love that. If it wasn't, I'm sure we'll find out quickly in the comments on YouTube.

25:44Older people show the effect just as much as younger people do. Kids show it just as much as older people do. It's just something that sticks around. So speaking to your point, if you are surrounding yourself with things that will stimulate your curiosity and if you're open to that curiosity, we can talk about knowledge gaps and all these things that stimulate curiosity. Novelty is another one. Richard Morris has some beautiful data on this with rats, but Emerald Doosal and I too have some data with humans. Surprise. All of these things. I have a little chapter in my book on this. Drive that system.

26:21So the dopamine system. The dopamine system. So basically, if you expose yourself to opportunities to be proven wrong, you expose yourself to new people, places, situations, and you allow yourself to be energized by these things and not be scared and anxious, not be like, oh, this person's saying something that I disagree with. I can't deal with this, you know, or we figured this out 30 years ago. We don't need nothing's new here. If you can be open to that, I would argue that you're going to be engaging lots of plasticity and that's something that's preserved in old age. Recently, we had one of the world's experts on romantic relationships on this podcast, Esther Perrell, to be specific.

27:04And we talked about a lot of things related to romantic relationships, but she said that one of the most sustaining factors for romantic relationships over long periods of time is a sense of curiosity, both about the other person, but also about oneself and how one changes in the context of the relationship and also curiosity about where the relationship could eventually go, where one's to continue to invest in it. So this word of curiosity seems to be a resounding theme. I'm struck by, although it makes total sense, that curiosity would drive dopamine release in these pathways, that novelty would drive dopamine release in these pathways.

27:42And that also in the physical realm, dopamine is so important for physical movement. Yes. I don't think this is a coincidence, right? Somehow evolution organized this neuromodulator dopamine to be involved the way I think about it is in both a physical movement. It's required for it, in fact, as well as cognitive movement. What we're really talking about is cognitive forward movement, if there is such a thing. Is there a, we're both neuroscientists, but you're the memory researcher. Is there sort of a word or a framework for thinking about cognitive movement forward, meaning as opposed to just recycling past ideas and memories, the notion of taking memories and actually putting them as you said earlier into the present to anticipate the future, actually forward mental movement.

28:31That's a really interesting question. Well, first of all, I want to be careful in not to say, dopamine does this because it's going to your own, it's a trap, right? Well, to be clear, you observed heightened activity in a dopamine urge circuit. So the idea that it would not involve dopamine is a bit of a stretch, but you didn't directly show that it was dopamine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wouldn't be exact and just say that assigning a single function to a chemical is risky. But that said, I do believe there's a link. One of the things that you see is in Parkinson's disease, dopamine or trigonotransmitter emission is shot.

29:08And depression is also a symptom of Parkinson's disease. It's quite a severe one, in fact. And so what I think one theory goes is that dopamine energizes us to seek rewards or to seek information, right? So a big part of movement is you move to get something. It's approach, right? They talk about approach and avoidance is basic, kind of things that you want to program. And so a person with Parkinson's disease has a problem with willful movement, tremors and stuff too. But I think that dopamine is involved in this kind of energizing you to move. I think it's involved in energizing you to seek information.

29:51I think it's involved in energizing you to seek rewards. And so I do think there's some kind of a common pathway there. And it speaks to this issue of the difference which you've talked about. And I talk about a lot as wanting versus liking. And so can't bear it. I mean, I think it's a great work on this, right? Gobs and gobs of manipulations of dopamine activity. And what he finds is an animal, let's say that is deprived of dopamine. It will go for rewards just fine. It just won't work for them. It won't do the work that you need to get a reward. But if you just put it in front of them, they'll take it.

30:28So what dopamine, it is heavily involved with these opioid systems that does drive reward responses. And it's heavily involved in learning about rewards. And that's why you get a big dopamine or a chick bump when an animal gets a reward. Because you're learning about the reward. And what predicted the reward? There's a little bit of a credit assignment process that takes place. What's interesting is you get this too with actually my colleague at Davis, Brian Wiltson. It's a beautiful work where he's looked at trace conditioning, which is when you have like a, let's say if you play a tone and you wait a long time, and then the animal gets a shock, right?

31:06And so what you, what you find is is that the animal learns to be afraid of the tone. But it's such a long time in his thing, I think it's on the order of 10 seconds or above. The animal has to be somehow doing something to be able to blame that tone for getting shocked, right? And so what he found was that there's this burst of dopamine activity in the locust ruleus, which I actually known for norepinephrine. But there's really cool work on dopamine in the LC now modulating hippocampus. Sorry, do you have all the nerdy here? No, no, no, no, no. Trust me, this audience likes nerdy. I think that's why part of why they're listening.

31:45Locust ruleus is just an area of the brain that tends to sprinkler large brain areas with epinephrine, which is, or norepinephrine, noreadrenaline for alertness, so somewhat distinct from the dopamine system, but you're telling us it can also release dopamine. Yes, that's right. And sometimes they co -release from the same neurons from what I understand. And so what seems to be happening is, and he's studying this now, but what seems to be happening is, it's not that the animal's going, oh, I just heard a tone, I heard a tone, and then they get shocked. It may be more like they get a shock, and then they get an immediate, what just happened, and then they get a memory retrieval of the tone, and that allows them to put the two together to learn that this tone caused the shock.

32:28And dopamine seems to be playing a part in that learning process, too. So it's not just about reward. It's really kind of, you know, the next time you hear that tone, you might, if it were a real threat, you could actually escape from it, right? And there's this whole active avoidance literature that you can look at with these approach circuits. They're actually quite useful for avoiding threats and avoiding punishment. So it's really, to me, I see this role for energizing, and that's often rewards. I mean, I like rewards as much as the next guy, right? I mean, look at how much coffee I drank when I got here.

33:04So it's not that, but it's just that it's mobilizing you, I think. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. By now, many of you have heard me say that if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1. The reason for that is AG1 is the highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available. What that means is that it contains not just vitamins and minerals, but also probiotics, prebiotics, and adaptogens to cover any gaps you may have in your diet and provide support for a demanding life. For me, even if I eat mostly whole foods and minimally processed foods, which I do for most of my food intake, it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits and vegetables, vitamins and minerals, micronutrients, and adaptogens from food alone.

33:47For that reason, I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, and often twice a day, once in the morning or mid -morning, and again in the afternoon or evening. When I do that, it clearly bolsters my energy, my immune system, and my gut microbiome. These are all critical to brain function, mood, physical performance, and much more. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1 .com slash Huberman to claim their special offer. Right now, they're giving away 5 free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1 .com slash Huberman to claim that special offer. One thing that we talked about just briefly earlier was this non -sleep deep rest protocol.

34:27That in yoga tradition is called the yoga knee -dra or yoga sleep, because you lie down, it's self -directed relaxation, long exhale breathing, just slow your heart rate, etc., etc. I called it NSDR, not to appropriate it, but because the language of yoga knee -dra is a little bit of a separator for people. It sounds a little bit esoteric, and non -sleep deep rest tells you what it is. There's a study, the University of Copenhagen, I can try to link to it in the show note captions, and I'd love your thoughts on it, to show that people who do this practice, this is a pet imaging study, it's a positron emission tomography for those that don't know, and they see significant increases in strideal dopamine in the condition of people that do this self -directed relaxation as opposed to a more traditional meditation.

35:12And this is why I say that NSDR is useful for restoring mental and physical vigor, which translates to this idea that dopamine prepares us for, or is a reservoir for potential movement, typically toward rewards. And I love that we're talking about some of the other facets of dopamine, because all too often people think about it as pleasure or motivation, and certainly it's involved in motivation. And I'm very happy to learn that it's also involved in learning. Oh, that's a novel perspective on dopamine, and we hear so much about dopamine. Do you think that when dopamine is released as a consequence of curiosity in a way that primes the memory system, that we become entrenched in particular behaviors or routes of pursuing curiosity to the exclusion of others?

36:04What I'm thinking about here is a kid, we've seen these data, kids with ADHD, actually have terrific ability to focus if it's something that they're really excited about, really curious about. So you give a kid with ADHD who loves video games, a video game, and they're like a laser. So it's not that they lack the capacity to focus, it's that they have a harder time dropping into focus. But it seems that because of the learning, so dimension to dopamine, that these circuits could potentially, quote unquote, learn, that it's video games that provides that feeling of focus to the exclusion of other things.

36:37Meaning how does one keep a diversification of inputs to the dopamine system? So that we're continually driving dopamine through lots of different things as opposed to just social media or just video games or just pick your favorite thing. Because becoming a functional human being involves the requirement to focus on many things, not just the things we were curious about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, to me, I talk about this a little bit in the book, but to me, and if you look at the literature, you can see this, a big part of being curious is the appraisal process. So to speak, and what I mean by that is saying something happens, right?

37:19Let's say something in your environment happens. If you're going to, you have a decision to make, is this interesting? Is this important? Is this scary? And I think the thing is, is that you need to be open to that possibility that it's interesting. So, let me just give you an example that I often give. Let's say you're walking in a neighborhood, you're traveling, like you do for many of your events, and you walk into a new neighborhood you haven't been to, it's nighttime, kind of poorly lit, and you hear a loud noise, right? You could be like, well, that's a gunshot, I better hide or I better run, or you could be like, oh, maybe there's a club nearby and there's like a cool band playing.

37:58I should go check this out. That appraisal is really critical for how you respond, and so it's not just a matter of curiosity happens. It's a process of cultivation, and it's a process of appraisal. And so, I mean, this is, I think, you know, I'm not a wellness guru or anything, but it's like, I think this is one of the cool things about mindfulness training, is it forces you to take the mundane and be curious about it. And when you start paying attention to your breathing, my friend, Mishijas, really kind of turned me on to this. She wrote a book on mindfulness and meditation, and one of the things that happens is your breathing, you realize, wait a minute.

38:42This one isn't the same as the last one, right? Or you can do these med - I'm sure you've done this, right? This part of, like, the sound is different. I'll sit in the backyard doing, thanks to you, I do this morning, 10 minute thing, and I'll be out in the backyard, and I'll be like, hearing some sound, and I'll be like, oh, that sound. There's a bird there, I didn't even notice that. And then there's some other sound. I'm hearing the freeway, that's annoying, but I heard it. So, it's really a matter of paying attention in some ways, and being open to it. And I think this speaks back to this thing about as you get older.

39:17Sometimes people find it scary to be in a new place. People find it scary to meet a person who's different from them, or so forth. I mean, I love listening to music that's a little bit out of my comfort zone, so people hate it, you know? So, I think some of it is sort of cultivating, being comfortable with discomfort. It's such an important theme. I feel like nowadays, in part because of the algorithms on social media, we are fed things that feed our progressively greater and greater scrolling and dwell time, as it's called, you know, the algorithms are measuring clearly how long we dwell on a given image and what's in that image, and et cetera.

40:03But it would be nice to cultivate an algorithm for curiosity. Surely it can be done. I mean, you've got all these smart computer scientists and AI folks. And we come into this world naturally curious. All primates, including humans, will visually fixate on anything that's novel. And study it. I'm trying to make predictions and gain understanding. Maybe now would be a good time for us to discuss a little bit about the circuitry involved in memory, so that we have that as a template to digest some other themes in memory. Most people are probably familiar with the so -called hippocampus, which is, I mean, seahorse.

40:48It looks a little bit like a seahorse, although the anatomist had a little bit of an imagination there in my opinion. But hippocampus, let's add to it prefrontal cortex, which you've already mentioned, and then these neuromodulatory systems. So if we were going to assign a one sentence definition, functional definition to each of those areas, what would you say the hippocampus does? Well, first of all, a lot of other neocortical areas. Please, and let's add those in. But if you can start with three, I think then folks who can digest it. The hippocampus is controversial. I mean, it's the most studied area of the brain, arguably, except for maybe V1.

41:27Visual cortex, V1. Yeah, yeah. But I believe in my colleagues do, I wrote a big paper with Howard. I can delete Howard, I can bomb it. And he had a leonus on this, who, you know, from Davis. And we believe that it's about linking various experiences to a context. And what I mean by that is you've got information about smell, high -level vision, high -level semantic knowledge information, right? And the hippocampus's wiring is really set up to not understand what's going on. So the late David Marrow's pioneer in computational neuroscience proposed that what the hippocampus is about is what's he called simple memory.

42:08It's basically saying, I know Andy Huberman, sorry, it was a hippocampus. He used to call me Andy, that's fine. Yeah, a long story. That's the Davis thing, you wouldn't understand. So I know Andy Huberman, right? But to have a memory of this moment that's separate from, let's say, I saw you at some neuroscience retreat when we were in, when you were in grad school, I have to have some part of the brain that doesn't know who you are to some extent, right? Because I got to keep them separate. And so there are the hippocampus, what it'll do is it'll form a memory that's not an Andy Huberman memory.

42:45It's an Andy in this place at this time, in this context. And that's what allows it to support what's called episodic memory, which is your ability to say, I went to Washington, DC once, and I remember going to the Smithsonian, as opposed to your knowledge about what generally happens in Washington, DC, or the president's there. Oh, that's where a lot of politics happen. Oh, the Smithsonian is a place in DC. It's a memory of your being there at a particular place in time. Now, there's other parts of the brain that allow you to associate that information in a meaningful way, and to be able to actually expand on that context and create these narratives and these stories about it.

43:34And where the prefrontal cortex comes in, and it's a huge area, it's about one third of the primate brain. So it's just massive. There are a lot of people who go, well, there's no real, there's a bunch of different areas and I'll do different things. And I subscribe to the view that that is very true. And at the same time, there's a global function of the prefrontal cortex, which is what's called cognitive control. It's this ability to say, I'm going to regulate my movements, and I'm going to regulate my perceptions and my thoughts based on what's important to me. In terms of this higher order goal, right?

44:14So when I tested, for instance, patients with prefrontal lesions, I'm sure Mark Despizito talked to you about this. It's like the hallmark of them, you know, they used to say, well, the prefrontal cortex, it's important for working memory. And you could record from neurons in the prefrontal cortex, or look at FMRI signal. And if a person or an animal is holding something in their mind, like a phone number, neurons or bold signal in MRI will be highly elevated. Their activity will be elevated throughout this period of time where they're holding in mind. But it turns out if you just ask somebody with a major prefrontal lesion, here's a bunch of numbers, five, two, seven, eight.

44:56And then I ask you to tell them back to me in right order. They can do it just fine. But now I start to distract them, I move my hands around, there's a plane going on, you know, flying outside the window. I mean, I had that literally happen once. Now they start to bomb it because their attention is not controlled by their goal. It's controlled by the environment around them. And so this is where things get really interesting. So I once tested a patient, and I'd heard about this, but until you see it, it like doesn't register, it really blew my mind. So there's a test called the Wisconsin card sorting test.

45:32And we don't have to get into all the details of it. But basically it's this test where people learn some rule about where to put a card on his table, right? And they don't get told the rule, they just learn it. And patients learn this with prefrontal damage, learn it just fine. Is it that they get a error signal or a correct signal if they're doing it in the right direction over time? They just kind of the brain figures it out. Yeah, yeah. So maybe I'll give a little bit more background, but I don't want to go in the weeks. No, that's okay. If I'm correct, if I'm wrong, I forget the Wisconsin card sorting test details.

46:02But you know, like they, they're told they just start throwing the cards and that the, the, the, the, the correct algorithm will reveal itself by a series of error and correct signals. And so maybe I'm taking all the red cards and putting in one pile black cards and putting in another getting error signals. So then maybe I go odds, even, maybe I divide by suit if it's depending on what kind of cards they are. Yeah, organized by even alteration. And sooner or later the brain figures it out. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And you don't need a prefrontal cortex to do that. We're just surprising, but you don't.

46:33You can do it. And so there's context dependent action and learning without the prefrontal cortex. Yes, but let's, let's unpack this context then, right? So now you've been, let's say putting all the diamonds in one pile, you've been putting all the spades in another pile, right? So now I changed the rule, but I don't tell you and you put the diamonds, the queen of diamonds in the diamond pile, let's say. And now I say, nope, that's wrong. So now you have to, wait a minute. That was right all this time. What's going on? It's like life. This is like life, right? The thing that used to be used to work for you no longer works.

47:13So you keep doing this and a person with an intact brain will eventually figure out, okay, that's not working. I'll try another strategy and then they'll learn the new rule, right? It's not easy. It's a pain, but people will do it. This patient in particular kept on using the old rule. And so you have to give a series of hints going like, hmm, what's your strategy here? And they're like, they'll tell you I'm putting it according to the color. And then you, okay, well, does that appear to be working for you? And they'll go, no, I'll just keep doing it. They perseverate. They perseverate. But the interesting thing is he knows it's not working.

47:53But he can't help himself from doing it. And so what the prefrontal cortex says, it's not about this declarative knowledge about what you should do. And I think this is very deep because I think often we get more realistic about people's actions, especially for people who have head injuries or something like that. And it's like, you can have all of these beliefs that you want to have. But you need the prefrontal cortex to translate these high order beliefs, things that are very abstract into actual concrete action. Otherwise, what you do is not going to be dictated by that knowledge. So how this relates to memory is we're constantly barrage by information.

48:35I think it's, it might have sits me like 35 terabytes. I don't know, but it's a big number and the estimates get bigger and bigger every year. So we're barrage by information. There's no way you can even pay attention to it all, right? So you really rely on the prefrontal cortex to be able to say, this is what I'm doing right now. And everything else, it's noise. Here's the signal that I need to focus on. And that's super important for memory because one of the things you see in old ages, older people are bad at most memory tests. But it turns out in the labs, we kind of overestimate that. And the reason we overestimate it is we're giving them a test, which is something hard.

49:14It requires a lot of focus and it's not something they do every day. But Karen Campbell and Lynn Hasher, these great cognitive psychologists, did this cool experiment where they had a bunch of other things that they did. And the other stuff that people were supposed to ignore in this memory task, where they're studying a bunch of things, they're trying to memorize a bunch of stuff, but they're stuff going on, they're supposed to ignore. The older people were just as good as the younger people that are remembering the stuff they're supposed to ignore. They were just bad at the stuff that they're supposed to be attention to.

49:42That's so interesting. Maybe you could say that another time. You said it very clearly. I got it, but say it one more time because if anyone missed it, this is super important. Older people can... They were bad at remembering the stuff that they were supposed to remember, but they were just as good as the older, as the younger people. Maybe even better, but definitely as good as the younger people at remembering the things that they weren't supposed to pay attention to. Gosh, it speaks to almost two parallel processing streams for memory if I'm not mistaken. So what's going on there is that one form of memory involves the suppression of information in that circuit is actually quite active in these older people and young people, whereas curiosity for...

50:30Oh, that's so... ...and the ability to remember and integrate new information is somehow diminished in older people earlier. We were talking about how that's not the case, that curiosity is intact. Memory is intact and growing. Yeah. Well, okay. I should say the benefit of curiosity on memory is intact in older people. I got that wrong. I don't know if Matthias could tell me if I just email him at a break or something, but I don't know if curiosity itself is as high in older adults. I would just... I would just know, but this is why I asked about movement earlier. It's also... curiosity is also linked to your ability to access novel scenarios.

51:12Of course, online you can just thumb scroll or click and access all sorts of novelty. Is there any... there must be data as to whether or not people in their 70s, 80s and 90s are scrolling social media to the same extent that younger people are. I don't know, but I can say two things to this. One is that definitely there's a lot of work on media multitasking and the short answer is bad for memory. Okay. So, scrolling is bad for memory. Well, media multitasking is bad for memory. The tech thing is a super fascinating area in general. It's really how we interact with the tech that's bad. But if you're an older adult, your frontal function is not going to be as good.

52:01You will be more distractable. You will be more likely to go off course. And so that scrolling is going to be more potent because as you pointed out, the algorithms are all designed to suck up our attention. So, psychologists heard Simon came up with this beautiful term called the attention economy, right? And so, the idea is that the more information that you have in front of you, the more impoverished you are in terms of your attention. So, there's no such thing as free speech because it's like you have a limited supply of attention. So, everything has a cost. So, the more information you have in front of you, the harder it is to pay attention to what's important.

52:37And that's where I think the older adults really lose some of their functioning. Because basically, I talk about in the book and it's not a perfect analogy is neurons are functioning kind of like a democracy in the sense that, you know, real democracies involve these political coalitions. Or alliances, right? And people talk about the right and the left with this dumb because it's like there's just alliances between people who like different things. And they just form these convenient alliances with each other. But let's just imagine neurons kind of do this in the brain, right? And so, you have, in theory, to be able to pay attention to something, some coalition of neurons has to be firing a lot that is corresponding to the thing that you're trying to pay attention to.

53:23But if something is salient, bright, shiny, loud, it's just grabbing your attention. What's going to happen is that those neurons start to shout down the neurons that are trying to keep you on what's not shiny, but it's important, right? And so, what happens is, with the prefrontal cortex, you can bias that competition. That's the term that people have used in literature. That allows you, so what people have found for us is just a really cool finding again is you can find in the visual cortex neurons that fire when you're seeing something red, neurons that fire when you see something blue, let's say, right?

54:00Kind of distorting the picture, but you get the idea. So, if an animal is trying to hold in mind something, I'd say, hold on a mental picture of something that's blue, what happens is the blue neurons are firing in visual cortex, even though the animal's not seeing blue, right? It's just they're thinking about blue. You damage the prefrontal cortex, nothing. So, you lose that selectivity. So, what's happening is the prefrontal cortex is biasing the competition and saying, I know blue is not shining in front of you. There's no shiny blue thing in front of you right now. But I need these neurons to stay active.

54:37And so, it's doing this modulation to help out the neurons that are keeping the information that's going to relevant. So, what happens when that communication goes? Let's say, do the hypertension diabetes, you get all this white matter damage that happens with old age. And this is really a big thing that is very preventable with the right protocols, so to speak. I'll just really white matter are the fiber tracks, the wires that essentially that connect neurons across long and short distances. Exactly, yeah. And so, if you damage those long range tracks, the prefrontal cortex is not efficiently able to buy us that competition.

55:16And so, now the inane gets remembered at the expense of the important. That's I think the key thing. And a lot of that's why people talk about the prefrontal cortex as the central executive. As many people who work to job knows, it's like the executives are useless. Right? He's trying to get an executive to do, I mean, except for some who are useful, but then they don't really run companies very well. There's some CEOs that are doing spectacular things, but. Yeah, well, okay, we won't go there. Controversial shall we say. But anyway, so like a good executive, their job isn't to micro manage. Their job is to say, here's the big picture.

55:56Here's my vision for the company. And I want everyone to be working towards this goal, not, you know, sifting through the mail room, not paying the bills. Right? And so, what happens is is that when you have certain kinds of things that happen with aging, like damage to the white matter that happens through essentially tiny cerebral vascular events, most likely. And we've done some research on this in our lab in collaboration with Bill J. Agust is down Berkeley and Charlie to Carly. And you can measure this in MRIs with a measure called white matter hyperintensities. You use a scan that shows up little bright spots where the white matter is probably damage.

56:36And what you find is that these people with white matter hyperintensities actually have memory performance that's as poor as people who have hippocampal atrophy, probably in the release stages of Alzheimer's. And they're also bad at controlling information when they don't have to remember something. So it's like a double whammy. And it's kind of like the executives trapped in, you know, remote place. And they got no internet access and no phone. And so they can't communicate with the company as our is doing their own thing. Right. And that's, that's a little bit of what can happen with aging. It doesn't have to.

57:14But that can happen. And you see this to a really great extent in many disorders. This is why so many disorders really affect control and frontal function multiple sclerosis diabetes. Many kinds of things we talked about brain fog and many kinds of inflammatory conditions will affect it. Depression clinical depression. I've seen people older adults with depression who are cognitively more impaired than people in the MCI stage of Alzheimer's. Really? Yes. So depression is dangerous for memory. It's terrible for memory. And it seems to be a risk factor for Alzheimer's as well. Do you think that depression is dangerous for memory and a risk factor for Alzheimer's because it is my definition anti -curiosity?

58:02I would probably not say that. And I would say also I don't know what, what, I mean, you know, once you kind of get into these things in the epidemiological world, everything interacts with each other. Right. And there's genetics and there's environment and blood pressure means poor sleep, which means poor learning, which is a big part of it. You know, I think that's a big part. But you do. Okay. So let's go back to your question because I do think curiosity is affected by depression. I don't know the research on this, but I would be shocked if it isn't. And I do think that dopamine activity is disrupted in depression.

58:36And your motivation to get and hedonia is the home, one of the hallmark symptoms of depression as is rumination, by the way, which is memory retrieval of preferential negative retrieval of negative events and cogitating over them. I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors function. I recently became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. While I've long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in depth program for analyzing blood urine and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health, my hormone status, my immune system regulation, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral status and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality.

59:20Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from talk doctors on your results. For example, in one of my first tests with function, I learned that I had two high levels of mercury in my blood. It was totally surprising to me. I had no idea prior to taking the test function not only helped me detect this, but offered medical doctor informed insights on how to best reduce those mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption. I had been eating a lot of tuna while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC and acetylcystine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification and work to reduce my mercury levels.

1:00:03Comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health, and while I've been doing it for years, I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive. I've been so impressed by function, both at the level of ease of use, that is getting the test done, as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are, that I recently joined their advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try function, go to functionhealth .com slash huberman function currently has a wait list of over 250 ,000 people, but they're offering early access to huberman lab listeners.

1:00:34Again, that's functionhealth .com slash huberman to get early access to function. You probably think a fair amount about age -related cognitive decline and Alzheimer's, and I'm just curious at a personal level, what are the sorts of things that you do to try and offset cognitive decline? You seem to be a very vivacious and curious person. I've known you a long time, and I don't know whether or not you were caffeinated every time we met, but you have a lot of energy. You're a very curious person. You just wrote a book. We'll talk more about it, and you're going on podcasts. You're doing a lot of things besides running a world -class research laboratory.

1:01:14Clearly, a lot of curiosity. What do the data say about ways to maintain or enhance one's memory capacity? With the understanding that curiosity is probably involved, as we talked about earlier, but at a really basic level. A number of things leap to mind, but I'm just curious what you're, if you had to pick three to five things, that are clearly substantiated in the data as supporting the maintenance or enhancement of memory as we get older. What are those? As a memory researcher, I almost find myself ashamed when I talk about these things, because as you know, so many of the most important factors are ones that are related to just health.

1:01:59For instance, you mentioned sleep. That's a big one. There's a beautiful study that speaks to this that was done 29 ,000 subjects in China, and they followed them up for 10 years. Now, at the beginning of the... So they divided people into three groups. They said, okay, here's... Well, what they said is there's six lifestyle factors that we're going to investigate. One was, I think, engagement in cognitive activities. I think one was social engagement. One was physical exercise, not smoking, I think, no alcohol. But they identified these lifestyle factors that were basically just kind of good lifestyle factors.

1:02:38So they get people who have four to six of these lifestyle factors going versus zero to one of these lifestyle factors. Let's take the extreme. When they start, they're all the same. Ten years later, the people with four to six lifestyle factors going for them are performing almost twice as high on memory tests as the people with zero to one lifestyle. So these people exercising paying attention to their sleep, social engagement, what are some of the other... I'm guessing low inflammatory diet. Yeah, yeah, definitely not smoking. And smoking and alcohol, I think, we're big ones. The smoking one is interesting because we know smoking can cause cancer, and cardiovascular risk is real.

1:03:23There, although there are some data as I understand that nicotine itself, not smoking, vaping, dipping, or snuffing, but that nicotine can be pro cognition and maybe even pro memory. And nowadays, people are using nicotine more and more. I'm not a big proponent of this because the blood pressure increase and the typical routes of administration are dangerous. But nicotine, I've been told, is protective for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Is that true? Well, let me, by the way, I just have to say I forgot healthy diet. Healthy diet was a big one too. Which I define as people wonder what is that. And there are all these online debates about vegan vegetarian, carnivore, but I think most people in the world are omnivores.

1:04:07Most, and I think it's very clear that the number one thing for healthy diet is to try and get most of one's food from non -processed or minimally processed sources. It sort of sets you in the right direction. Yeah, yeah. So I was actually emailing with Dean and Aisha Shersai who really talk a lot about those. Yeah, they do great work. They do great work. And so they were actually sending me some stuff. And I had known about some of this. But like, Mediterranean diet has worked really well. Olive oil fruits, vegetables, fish, eggs, limited amounts of meat. Although I happen to have Argentines.

1:04:39Yeah, you like your steaks. I do. Yeah. Which I think, you know, is, let me come back to this point because I think it's super important. But leafy greens were a big one. They pointed out a rush press, veterinarian study that I didn't know about that put people on, I think it was called the dash diet. And it included leafy greens as a big part of it. And that had a dramatic increase in cognitive, I mean, dramatically preserved cognitive performance in people who are on that diet. So the healthy diet is a big part. Now, nicotine is interesting. So if you notice a lot of people with schizophrenia smoke.

1:05:15And one of the things that's been found is that nicotine does seem to improve functioning in people cognitive functioning in people with schizophrenia. Now, I think the big thing to remember about any kind of drug in this goes for food effects probably too. But especially drugs is there's huge individual differences. It's huge. And so, I mean, just to give you an example, I could not function without that coffee that I had this morning and then coming in here. But my daughter would not be functional after those cups of coffee. Some people really are affected by these different things differently.

1:05:55And then of course, there's always a dose response curve. And they often follow these inverted use, so Mark Despazito, who was my postdoc mentor, did a lot of work with the open -airgic drugs. And a lot of people had done these drug studies early on on cognition. They would find no effects or sometimes they'd make people worse. And what he found was that if you looked more carefully, there was an inverted U -effect where some people, and it depended on their working memory capacity, were actually benefiting from the drug. And then these other people who were, let's say, I can't remember his higher lower, were doing worse.

1:06:29And there's a genetic component to that, unsurprisingly. Don't mean transporters play a role and so forth. And so now you start to get into all of these gene, environment, drug interactions that are just, I would really caution people against saying nicotine is good. nicotine is bad. I think it really, really is a much more complex issue. You're just like marijuana, right? So you can look at smoking weed and adolescents for people who are at high genetic risk for psychosis. It dramatically increases your risk for psychosis. That's my understanding. Yeah. Although the times I've said that on the internet, I caught a lot of pushback from some of the cannabis researchers.

1:07:10But then having invited one of them on this podcast, I then got subsequent input from other researchers, which counter their narrative, which we can both say because we're both research scientists. That's what you call a field. Sorry, baby, cut out any misinformation I might have said. No, no, no, you didn't. I think the point is just that it's very clear that there are certain individuals for whom high THC consumption can trigger psychotic episodes. Yeah, and we're seeing this with not everyone. Yeah, I mean, I mean, we're now interestingly seeing this with psychedelics where it's like all these positive effects of psychedelics were being brought up.

1:07:49But you know, a lot of people remember the negative effects on people like rock, Ericsson from the 13th floor elevators or like said Barrett from pain Floyd, who became psychotic after doing large amounts of LSD. What was the first example of rock, Ericsson from the 13th floor elevators, great psychedelic band. Oh, psychedelic. Okay, we'll talk more about that. That, that, that, Charne is a, is a himself a rock and roll musician and loves rock and roll. Hence the reference to Rick Rubin earlier. And there's a photo of Rick here in the studio that our photographer might play back took. So we were looking at that together.

1:08:22So yes, psychedelics have claimed the minds of certain people made them help contribute to their preexisting presumably psychosis. I should also say in fairness to the other compounds out there, methamphetamines have also significantly contributed to the progression of psychosis in many people. So it's not just psychedelics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then of course there are those who have somehow managed to take psychedelics and become more sane. Yeah, I know. At least remain at least as sane as they were before. Yeah, and of course, sanity is in the eye of the beholder too. But what I'll say is that yeah, and you can see this actually there's some new concern about Adderall and stimulants.

1:09:02And if you're giving it to people who might be at high risk for schizophrenia, it might also promote psychosis. That makes sense. Giving them the noradgenergic dopaminergic involvement is schizophrenia and those drugs are proto noradgenergic dopaminergic in general. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So it's really a much more complicated interaction. And I think this is where this whole realm of personalized medicine will be super helpful. But there does seem to be a broad general effect for certain dietary interventions. Barry seemed to be good. Leafy greens seem to be healthy. We talked about the exercise.

1:09:38Yeah, yeah. And my understanding, I've been looking at this in detail lately, but I'd love your thoughts is that while everybody we now believe men, women, etc. should both should do both cardiovascular exercise, so to speak, elevate heart rate for 12 to 60 minutes kind of thing, depending on the intensity, as well as resistance training to maintain your muscular function, off set, psychopenia, etc. To me, the really impressive effects of exercise on learning capacity and the brain in terms of brain health seem to come from cardiovascular exercise. And that could just be because that's what's been emphasized in the studies.

1:10:14But even when one looks at some compares the best human studies, it really does seem like getting blood flow up to the brain. And getting a nice release of neuromodulators into the brain facilitates learning. And then of course people have to do something with that learning. So do you make an effort to exercise for the specific purpose of maintaining or enhancing brain function? Yes, actually. So I like when I finished my book, I went to the finish line. I had all sorts of crazy stuff happen. I won't depress the readers with all the crazy stuff that I have. And I think the other people would be curious, what does it take to finish a book and how much did you mean you took a toll on your body?

1:10:53It took probably, I mean, I would probably lost some biological years in that. But it was really like, I mean, it was great. I mean, it was really an emotional roller coaster though. But then I had a bunch of, you know, I'm trying to do science, write this book basically in my spare time, which doesn't really exist, as you know how it goes. Sure. And then I had life happen. You know, my mom was in the hospital, my cat died on my birthday. I mean, it was just like, yes, I didn't want to impress people with all this stuff. It's really a real life. I'm just already here. Yeah, no, no, no, it's okay.

1:11:24So then I finished my book. And I was like just thoroughly thrashed. And I had a sabbatical because I wanted to have time to promote the book and educate people about what's in the book. And which I'd never gotten a chance to do before. It's like doing this fantastic. Right. I get to talk to people. So I really wanted to make some changes. And actually this gets something we were talking about before we started recording, which is after I wrote the book, it's all, you know, it's going in the proofing stage. I was talking to my daughter and just, you know, out of the blue, she said, we're talking about ADHD.

1:12:01It's just like, Dad, you totally have ADHD. And I'm like, what, you know, and I'm like, Gen Z, you know, overdiagnosis of ADHD, whatever. Right. And then I remembered when I was a kid, my school contacted my parents and said, you have ADHD, he has ADHD. And it was interesting because it was like I actually was ahead in school by a year. And I got held back because I just was so socially bad. I couldn't stop talking in class. And I was just like really awkward and impulsive. And so, but you know, it was the 70s. Nobody did anything. And I had all sorts of behavior issues and so forth. And there are other factors going on too.

1:12:44But it really got me thinking, oh my God, I kind of make some changes. I'm living this unsustainable life where I'm jumping from crisis to crisis crisis. And I say, I don't have time for. And so my again, it's going to sound depressing, but it's got a happier ending. So my dog had died in 2019 of cancer. And that was my first dog. And so I thought I'm never getting a dog again. And in 2020 and the pandemic, I got another dog. Yeah. And she's both of these were shelter dogs. They're all mixes. I'm sure there's some pit bull in her because that's every shelter dog either as pit bull or or to all what exactly.

1:13:28So, but she looks very Belgian Malinois. She moves like a Belgian Malinois. Beautiful dogs. Yeah. And they're so smart and super athletic. I mean, she can like jump vertically. You know, just like it's so like it would all come home. She'll like jump up and then push herself off me, which is like a very classic thing. So that's why they can jump like she can climb up like seven feet up a tree to chase a squirrel. Yeah, they use these for military operations and tear one military. Yeah, yeah, they're trained to jump out of planes. Yeah, parachutes. Yeah, yeah. And she's, but she's a smaller dog.

1:13:59So our big or older dog looked like kind of she wasn't. She was actually a kelpy mix, I think, but she looked like a rot wiler. And so I was scared of her. Even though she's the sweetest dog. So this one, she's like smaller, even though she looks kind of shepherd like everyone's like, oh, your dog is so sweet. She's like, you know, but this one's the ninja. Yeah, yeah. I mean, all sheltered dogs have a little bit of a crazy switch and then don't it's like it's it's tough for them. They're like feral people, feral dogs. Yeah. But they have big hearts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And you know, one of the things that I was thinking is I missed walking the dog.

1:14:39I missed that activity. And so I make sure to do that every morning. And this is goes back to some of the activity things that we're talking about. I know I'm totally drifting away from. No, no, I see where you're just ironic. I see where you're going with this. Yeah. So, but this is this is a little bit different, but it's related, which is having a sense of purpose is very important for healthy brain aging. There's a transit cognitive science article. It's one of these things that neuroscientists don't talk about because it's not we don't understand it. But it's hugely important as part of this whole phenomenon, what they call cognitive reserve.

1:15:15And you know, having this dog that I'm taking care of, especially because you know, my kid gone to college, she's growing up, living independently. Walking this dog every day, it gives me obviously I'm married and I love my family and I've got lots of them. I got my students and so forth. But it gave me more and I'm exercising in a way that's kind of fun. I'm listening to podcasts and I'm moving. And so that's something right there. It's not just the exercise, but it's the whole thing right. I'm not doing something that I hate. So then I'm like, I hate running. I hate. I have this inertia because my ADHD brain doesn't like to do stuff unless it's shiny and fun, right.

1:15:56I could go to work. I could write this book because it's fun for me, you know. But so I'm like, how can I do this? And so I ended up shelling out for a personal trainer. I blew my advance on a personal trainer who's great. And I go to see her and she tells me what to do. So I don't have to think about it and it's fun. You're in great shape. Oh, you're a few years older than I am and I haven't seen you in a while. And I always have this like slight fear when I run into a colleague again after a while. Because there was this joke that we didn't tell professors until we became professors about the so -called tenured look.

1:16:28You see someone coming as a postdoc. You see them as a junior professor. And then you see them after ten years. Tenures, a big milestone, right. Of course, on the academic freedom, et cetera. It's a wonderful milestone. It's a wonderful thing that we both have this. But you see some people who got tenured and just go, oh goodness, they look like they're, you know, age 25 years in five years. We also see this with former presidents, not all of them, but a lot of them. And so to run into, well, I saw you in like Friedman's podcast, but then to see you, I'm like, Charne's taking great care of himself.

1:16:58It makes me happy. It's not a judgment. It makes me happy because I love my colleagues and I want to see them live a very long time because I don't subscribe to the idea that science progresses one funeral time of my favorite scientist. Okay, let's not attach that saying to me. No, I'm saying I'm saying that there's certain scientists. I love my fellow scientists. I love it. I do too. If you're out there anywhere, don't give me. There's certain scientists that you'd love to see live forever and you're one of them. So you said walk in the dog, which presumably gets you some sunlight, a lot of sunlight in Davis, even in the winter.

1:17:33The cloud covers right up there. It gets you on a regular sleep rhythm. So, but you said this sense of purpose. Right. So, and I'm curious about how you now frame exercise. You said you don't like working out. You made an investment in your health by paying a trainer. So now you train regularly. And that's also an investment in your brain health. And if we were to go back to this notion of sense of purpose, are you talking about a larger sense of purpose? Like, okay, I want to contribute to understanding of how the brain works, your brain explorer after all. And therefore the exercise and the money you put towards a trainer is linked to the ability to do that.

1:18:11Are you linking these nodes or is this are these kind of separate entities? Like, yeah, I want to be healthier. And here's a way to be healthier and ergo. I'll be around longer to study the brain. To me, and again, you know, I'm not a social psychologist. So this a little bit off out of my wheelhouse. But to me, the sense of purpose is kind of this existential thing of like, you know, I got to take care of this dog. And I got to, you know, and I'm when I look at this dog and she's moping around in the corner, I feel bad. But I feel like it's my responsibility to do something with my students. Yeah, with my students, I have, you know, I had was very, very fortunate to have many people leave my lab after the pandemic, which destroyed so many careers and many people left my lab and I got faculty positions.

1:18:58And I'm like so happy for them. But also, you're mentoring as well. Oh, thank you. You know, you do well because you have good people in lab as you know. And so, but what was interesting was I'd finished the book and my lab was relatively empty and I did feel purposeless. I felt that absence of that sense of this bigger thing. And so part of the work is, you know, and this was like a thing that I felt doing the book promotion is, I feel a sense of purpose in explaining science people. I got an email this morning as I was getting on the plane from some of you asking me a question about memory. And I was just like, this is so cool.

1:19:36You know, after you spend years lecturing students and some of them are sleeping in class and you wonder if anybody really impacted by this. And this has been a beautiful thing. That gives me a sense of purpose. I've come up with, I've really rededicated myself to research and we're doing these huge computational models of learning. And I'm trying to get we're doing VR stuff and we're going to be doing all sorts of new things in the research. And that gives me a sense of purpose. But a lot of it to me about the connection thing that you bring up is super important because often I find myself again because of a G thing.

1:20:09I mean, for all of these things that I like, there's things that you have to do that suck. And for me, that suckiness is utterly painful. And I know there's a lot of people like, I know ADHD is over diagnosed right now for reasons that are interesting. And I know a lot of people, it's very kind of fashionable to say stuff, something like that. Maybe I don't know. People can be judging about this stuff. But for me, it really is painful. I mean, I've actually found that it's hard for me to work with certain people if they talk slowly. It's that tough. So I've really had to think about, so I actually hooked up with an ADHD coach who has been phenomenal for me.

1:20:50And I know coaches are another controversial thing. I don't really like, I'm not in my world. You want to learn something you learn something from somebody who's skilled in how to improve somebody. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I mean, I didn't know what to expect because it's like an unregulated world, so to speak, or minimally regulated. But the person I found was just amazing. And the first thing she had me do was she put down, had me write down a sheet of all my values and order them and rank them. And so I'm thinking, this is such a waste of time. It's our glory. But as they get it. This is such a waste of time.

1:21:24Why am I doing this? I don't really value it. I don't know. I just do things. I don't necessarily value them or whatever. But then I started writing them down. And then later I was talking to her about like this, you know, some of my troubles with motivation and getting things done that I don't want to do. And I'm kind of infamous for having trouble getting things done that I don't want to do in terms of like administrative tasks and so forth. You're a real scientist. Like, ADHD scientist that likes administrative stuff. I think I'm willing to call out as, you know, what are they doing in science?

1:21:57Cause that's like you're supposed to be focusing on experiments. So Bravo. So so values then motivation. So yeah. So basically it's like, so I'm sure then I put the two together and I said, I'm not giving myself credit for why I'm doing this. So this goes back to the, I mean, in a way it goes back to the prefrontal cortex conversation is, what's my goal? If I'm going to see someone and have a meeting and I don't feel like going to the meeting some tired and I'm bored or I want to just look at this YouTube video or when going social media, whatever dumb thing that I waste my time on right. I say to myself, well, why am I doing this?

1:22:35And I remind myself of that motivation. And it kicks everything in gear because now I have that goal in place because the goal just doesn't pop up for me automatically. And so relating what I do to values is a game changer for me, but it's a conscious thing that I have to work on to remind myself of those values and connect them. And that's part of what I think people lose when they retire, for instance, I see this in people, people I'm close to who have retired. And so afterwards they feel purposeless and then they're just doing things like, you know, doom scrolling or, you know, being radicalized on the internet or like, you know, going into like, but it's just like whatever captures their attention.

1:23:23And I think. So a big part of that sense of purpose for me has really been to get in touch with what do I really want. And I mean, this goes back to another thing with memory. And I know this is a total ADHD pre -association thing, but it's like, I can people often ask me, okay, fine, give me all this stuff for brain aging. And we didn't even get into hearing aids and vision testing and all hygiene and so forth. We'll talk about those three things. But what I tell people is I can tell you lots of strategies for remembering names, for remembering where you've been, for trying to remember, like to do something in the future, some the hardest memory challenges we have.

1:24:07But unless you do them, do those strategies, I can't help you. And the problem is is that in this speaks to I really liked what you said we do have to talk about some exceptions like retrieval and do is forgetting and some interesting things like the pre testing effect, but your thing on study skills I listen to the podcast and I was like the beautiful thing that you did with that. One of them was that you said assume that you will forget because if you go back to the earliest research on memory by Ebbinghaus, he tested himself and he actually created these weird words called trigrams that weren't really words, try to memorize them.

1:24:43And what he found was within 20 minutes he had forgotten about half of what he memorized within I don't mean just forgotten like he couldn't bring it to mind. It took him as long to re -memorize them as it was if he had never done it right. So sometimes we have partial memory, we can't recall it, but we get some savings and it's easier for us to learn. He didn't even have that for a lot of the stuff. So then he waited 24 hours and he had lost two thirds of what he had memorized, right. So translate this into the real world, there are some things that are caveats that we do better in the real world, I would say, at the big things the gist of what we encounter.

1:25:24But the details we lose most of them, most of the details of your life will be gone. And this is true for even I would argue this is even true for people with highly spirulodobiographical memory, you don't know for sure, but I can tell you more about that. This is true for everyone who's been studied as far as I know. And so if that's the case, the question is not like why am I so forgetful, it's why do we remember the first one? Why that title did for the book? And the question is what do you want to remember? What are the memories that you want to take with you, whether it's memorizing things for a class like in study skills, or whether it's your kids birthday party, which I talk about chapter one.

1:26:10These are, it's about intention is what I say it's the difference in attention, which can be grabbed by anything versus intention, which is saying this is what I want to take with me, right. Let's let's hover on that attention versus intention. We hear these words all the time. Attention is the directing of one's perception, a particular sensations or things in one environment is the way loosely defined. Accurate but not exhaustive intention is understanding why we're having a cognitive sense, maybe a cognitive emotional sense of why I am directing my perception to particular things. Is that right.

1:26:49Yes, it is directing your attention based on some reason that's an internal goal. Right. And that's where the prefrontal cortex really comes in. So it's very easy in some ways to pay attention to me if I'm like just articulating and I'm talking very loudly because it's grabbing your attention constantly. I mean, I know lots of people in my life who hate this because I'm so loud and just. Particularly loud. Who are these people giving you this feedback send me their names and numbers. I have words for them. And listen, I would say given you run a world class laboratory, you're successful in your family life, you're successfully raising your second doll, you've written a spectacular book, you're going on podcasts, you're educating the public, I would say you're doing great.

1:27:36So keep going. And whoever these people are, we'll have words with that. I need, I need like, who bravines like words of encouragement on my phone that I could just open up. Well, I don't want to take us off track, but you know, I spend a lot of time each morning, I first do a non -sleep deep rest or some sort of meditation. Rick Rubin taught me this to get into intention. And there are other people who have come into my life recently. This notion of intention. The reason I said, let's hover on it is so important. Yeah. Because we are in a world where things will grab our attention, especially on social media.

1:28:10Yeah. It's basically a war for attention. Yeah. I don't think it's an attention economy anymore. Or Simon's brilliant. I'm not trying to take anything away from that. But it's a war for attention. And one of the ways that you rob your competitors is by taking their attention. I used to joke when I was in a very competitive area as a postdoc. I was competing against a big lab at Harvard and this and that, trying to find genetic markers for retinal neurons, et cetera. And I said, if I could just get them excited about the wire, remember that show the wire? Yeah. Because it'll suck like 15 hours of those postdocs time.

1:28:40So I thought, you know, be really diabolical. I didn't do it. But you know, telling people like, you have to see the wire. You know, this and that, you know, because you get someone on a really good Netflix program. And if they're a competitor, you just got a competitive advantage. Yeah. Yeah. This is being done all day long. Yeah. In any case, attention is our ability to for our perception to be drawn to whatever is most moving most loudest, most salient. Intention is different. Yeah. And this is, by the way, this isn't a technical term. This is just I like it. Sure. Because it rhymes. Then a friend might came up with it.

1:29:13So, but yes, intention is your ability to say, this is what's important to me right now. And that's why I need to pay attention to it. Hence the values list. Hence the values list. Because if I don't keep that in mind, my so we tend to think of control as being just like willpower or like you want to do the right thing or whatever. It's not it's really a big part. There's so many parts of it really, but a big part of it is motivation. And motivation is not a trivial thing. It's not simply wanting to do the right thing, but being able to keep that value in mind and retrieve that value. Because everything has a value associated with right.

1:29:52And sometimes things that are, you know, I'm thirsty and there's water in front of me that has a big value and that should grab my attention. So it's not that having your attention shift, you want it to be flexible, but you want to keep these higher goals in mind. And so it's this balance between stability and flexibility. Now the key is, or the, let's get to your specific example of like technology, right. So ever since I got a phone, that is a smart phone. My first iPhone was that mine was 2010. Mine was, well, you did better than me, I think maybe it was around the same as the iPhone three, I think was my first.

1:30:31Okay. Yeah, we'll have to look up. I think I had the iPhone three, which was whenever that came out. So until then I would check email when I was at a computer when I'm not. I don't think about it. Now it's always there. And I get, you know, and you get alerts on your phone, right. So let's, let's play this out now. We're having this great conversation. Let's say we leave, we talk about skateboarding and punk rock and like, yes, why didn't we talk about this on the podcast? We're every great conversation, right. But now let's say I didn't put my phone on focus mode and I start getting all these little beeps on my phone.

1:31:08I know people I know played with in a band with somebody at ADHD and you would consult any time we were in a conversation, you would just check his text messages. As many as your text in front of me, right. So what happens is every time you do that, you're essentially shifting your task, your mindset changes, your, your intention is somewhat changed by this new task, right. So now I've shifted and there's a cost associated with that. In fact, actually people who study this, there's like four or five different costs that go on. It makes you slower to do the new thing, right. Now I go back to the conversation.

1:31:46Well, now I have another cost associated with that. And so I'm not there where you are in this moment. I'm several seconds behind you and I'm still catching up while you're talking and that requires even more control to get caught up and get back up to speed. So I'm straining my natural resources. I'm straining my cognitive control by shifting back and forth. But here's an even worse part of it. So a memory, we haven't even talked about this, but it's like a lot of our forgetting happens because we have these blurry memories. They're not distinctive. They don't. You don't get a population of neurons that shouts out loud.

1:32:24Hey, that's this conversation I had with Andy, right. It's like, it's just kind of this blurry sense of I talked to someone on a podcast and not saying this will happen now because of one. But so I have this blurry memory. Well, why does that happen? Well, part of it is you have to catch the distinctive moments of these events and you have to associate them together into this cohesive narrative. One of the things we found in our research and other people found this is when let's say if you're watching a movie and somebody changes the topic of conversation or a character comes in, something that shifts your attentional focus and shifts your understanding what's going on.

1:33:02You see this big peak in activation in the hippocampus. And what that seems to be related to is encoding a memory for what happened up to that point. And so we call that an event boundary. And so once you have an event boundary, it turns out you like you go on to the next event and you have trouble remembering the stuff that happened right before the event boundary. It's why people end up in the kitchen and they're like, what was my reason for coming here? And it's because they passed through three different rooms and their sense of where they were was changing their mental context updated at the point where now they have to work to figure it out.

1:33:37So this is what's happening when we are shifting between different tasks. I'm texting and I'm emailing and then I'm talking to you. Or as you've probably seen and going to conferences, people, scientists, scientists who know better are sitting typing emails while someone is giving I've done this because I'm intentionally impaired or I'm actually ADHD is a cognitive control issue, I think. But nonetheless, it's like, I do this right. So it's like, I get it. But it's like, you are now creating this fragments of memories where it's not I have a cohesive conversation. I have a little bit. I got a little bit more.

1:34:16I got a little bit more. And those fragments of memory don't play together well in memory they can compete with each other and that competition is a big part of forgetting. And so that's why it's super important to just do one thing and then do another. If you want to do social media, fine, do it. Then do whatever it is you are supposed to do for work, right. But it's the shifting that really kills you because it creates saps your cognitive control. It actually creates these fragmented memories. It also actually increases stress levels. So there's all sorts of, you know, things I know there's a lot of tech bros who are just like, oh no, I multitask.

1:34:57I'm great. I'm here not. Well, so I, you know, I'm from the Bay Area and spent a lot of time with those folks, men and women in tech. I think that the best ones, like the truly exceptional ones, are very good at dropping into a trench of attention. They're very disciplined with their phone use. And the ones that are doing a lot of tasks, which in often aren't don't have complete lives. They really got there. They're not taking care of their health also and they are sort of under the sense that like they're working all the time when they're not as a graduate student, I didn't have a smartphone.

1:35:26I did something recently. I tweeted about this. You may have commented about it. I don't know. But this has helped me a lot. I took an old phone. Oh, and I put social media on the old phone. Yeah, yeah. And only social media. So it doesn't operate as a phone. I can air drop things to it. Yeah. So I use that for looking at social media and for posting. That phone is in a box. And then my, my main phone is for texting and other forms of communication. So I still have that distraction around me. But social media is now a dedicated thing that I spend a specific amount of time and I have a timer on that phone.

1:36:03So I allow I allocate myself a certain amount of time each day. So for every moment, I start that timer. Yeah. Once it hits zero, that's it. And I'm starting to shorten that amount of time. Hi. The impact on productivity in terms of writing in terms of researching in terms of just dropping into conversation. It has been enormous with that simple switch. And I just find it easier to just segregate social media from the phone. The part of the problem is the phone is it's like in a walking office. It's not even it's a phone. It's a computer. It's a this. It's just too much access. Well, and here's the thing.

1:36:37And this is really gets back to this idea of engineering your environment. And because so much of our lives, we're out of control, even though we feel like we're in control, right. And it's really if I have a higher goal, sometimes you have to do exactly what you did, which is hack your environment to allow to enable you to regain control, right. So what I mean by this is it's like, I even though I might not check my phone. I might have alerts off. If I have a habit, I'm thinking about it. And every time I think about it that urge pops into mind, I'm getting a little distracted. I'm losing a little bit of executive control.

1:37:15So you don't even have to do it, right. You can just think about it. So in multitasking is just one thing. There's other things like one thing is this I talk about in the book is taking pictures. So you've probably been to concerts. I know I have where it's like, you know, people are like just filming the whole things on their phone. Or like now you see the rise of Instagram walls where you go into places and there's a wall that exists. So people go post Instagram. Nothing wrong with this. But most not all the research, interestingly, and I can get into why shows that taking pictures actually impoverishes people's memory.

1:37:52Really? Yeah. What about looking at pictures of I think it was Larry Squire when I was down at San Diego that said that hanging a few pictures in your office of things that are really pleasant memories can really enhance your work environment because you look them. You know, I remember that thing like because of all the context it brings about you're saying that the act of taking pictures to pleats our memory for that experience. Let me be more specific about this. Right. So let's say I'm mindlessly taking pictures. So I go in I'm seeing the grand Canyon. I just a lot of people like intuitively on average will say that they will remember it better because they took pictures.

1:38:32But what often happens is they're not really focusing on the distinctive elements of their experience. They're just grabbing as much stuff as they can. Right. Let's get the concert is another example. If you are filming the concert and you're just trying to grab what's being sung, you will have a recording of the concert. But what's the memory you want to have? Do you want to have a memory of the song that you already can stream any time or do you want the memory of how you felt the friends you were with the connection that you had with the artist because you were there. I know this sounds real hippie -dippy, but it's real in the sense that this is what you want to remember.

1:39:19I think at least I don't want to lecture people if they want to remember taking pictures of things. That's fine. I'm sure everybody remembers taking pictures at these things, but what did you take a picture of? And so you can use the phone. And this is where the studies show good effects is if I mightfully use the phone and I say like there's something here that that will be a good cue that will remind me later of this great conversation. I focus the camera on that. I take a picture. Mindfully, I use the camera not as a way of spreading my attention and just grabbing everything in this shotgun approach, but rather use it to find what's distinctive and what's important and actually focus me on it.

1:40:00That's a really good thing. So what I try to do is selectively document, not over document. I'll take a picture of people laughing or people eating. I like to go to conferences now. John Lisman used to do this late John Lisman and so he passed away. It's now I try to do this. I think more about these things. And so I try to take pictures of people randomly, you know, they're drinking a beer and then they spit out laughing or something like that. And these are not things that are like landmarks. They're not things that are tourist up, but they are great retrieval cues. And so what happens is the next part of it is seeing the picture.

1:40:37Well, what do you do when you see the picture, right? Do you scroll right or do you use it as a cue to effectively test yourself to recall what happened during that event and integrate it. Now what's interesting is is that active recollecting the event in itself will change the memory. And it can make it more accessible, but it can also make it a little bit more abstract and story like. And so there is an interesting trade off where you have these things where you have these memories and you could even documented. But if you use the the more you retrieve it, the more accessible it will be. But sometimes it'll be less immersive and more like a story that you've told a hundred times.

1:41:15So is it so it sounds like if we have we go on an. On a vacation or to a show or something that taking a photo as long as it's intentional of something specific that will look the key is to look at it later, not just post it, but to look at it later and to spend a few moments or more. Drawing to mind some of the emotional and cognitive experiences around that memory that however changes the memory right anytime we create a story we're changing the memory, but perhaps provided was a good experience that's better than to not access the photo at all. But I'm struck by as you are that the number of people you're taking photos at a concert a friend of mine who's a very successful photographer who shoots a lot of photos of musicians thinks this is the craziest thing as if any one of those photos is going to be meaningful right that they're outside of the experience and concert, which is exactly what you're describing maybe you just have a memory of taking a lot of photos.

1:42:15Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what happens people will remember something, but it's not they're feeling it's not like the friends they were with and what they talked about, you know, it's it's more like, you know, I use this example in an interview so apologies people have seen this, but it's like I just I got to see the descendants and I'm guessing since you skateboarded you probably heard. The band my low. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I grew up listening to them in high school, but I never got to see them because all the great brands bands I got into broke up right before black flag and the minute man and so forth.

1:42:50And so when they reunited I was like I had an opportunity to see them in a club in Sacramento. And so I saw them for the first time. And what was I wasn't one of the kids taking photos I was actually watching, but then there is a moment where Bill Stevenson the drummer who's super intense guy and really one of the creative forces beyond the band. And he gets up and he starts walking towards the crowd and my low is like sit down and go back behind the drums and he's like no I want to say something. And I was like I kind of take a picture of this because this is going to be like he's really connecting with us.

1:43:27And he talked about how cool it was to just be able to have this moment where he's now at this age able to appreciate this connection that he has with the audience that he couldn't appreciate before he was younger. And I was like I'm taking a picture of this because that's what I want to remember. You won't remember everything. But if I look at that photo technically I haven't looked at that photo again, but just taking the picture of it forced me to really think about that. And that's the biggest takeaway I have. You know a lot of the songs they played they did a really good job on. But what I really took away from that was this connection that I really wanted when I was a kid.

1:44:06And re -experiencing that feeling of being a kid and hearing these songs when they were fresh and new for me. And so that's I know I'm sounding like kind of a hippie or something. Not a hippie sound like a punk rocker. I'm confused too. That's good. I got a digressig all over the place. No, no, I have a question that I'm hoping buying some of this together related taking photos and memories. I keep many photos. I like printed photos. I have these in a drawer. They mean very much to me. Some of them are in the studio. When I keep most of them in a drawer at home. Polaroids are an interesting example I think of what you're describing.

1:44:50The act of taking a Polaroid is more than just clicking or pressing with your thumb on a camera. There's a waiting process. There's a you actually get to see the photo emerge over time. I would bet even though I haven't run the study I would bet that people keep Polaroids more than they and look at Polaroids more than they keep other photos. Which if you think about it is if it's true, if it's true, is counter logic because usually people want to do another photo because they don't like the way they looked in the previous photo. With Polaroids you can't do too many of those. Right, it's kind of one and done, maybe two and done.

1:45:29But I feel like the act of taking the Polaroid waiting for the photo to emerge kind of stamps it in your memory of the experience itself and the act of taking the photo is more involved. It's more of a process than just a click that then you see the photo later. Now of course with digital photography you see it but you can take 100 you can take photos like that. If we were to export this theme of limiting our tasks switching as a way to enhance our memory setting up our environment in a way where we put our phone away perhaps or and we were we also are focused on intention why we are in something.

1:46:04Do you think that there's something positively reinforcing about getting into a trench as I call it? Because I find that conversations like this one of the reasons I do this podcast the solo episodes and that these interviews is that they provide something that my life prior to it did not provide which was depth. I mean we're just here there's no phones here and if there are there off right and I feel like anytime we go into these trenches could be a video game could be an interaction with a loved one. A various kinds of but when we go into these tunnels of attention there's something that's so deeply satisfying about it especially to those who have attention deficit issues that it feels like something real happened and the rest is just noise.

1:46:52Is there any relationship of this of the focus system to release of dopamine I know release of dopamine can drive focus but is the reverse also true that if you're in a state of focus do you enhance the release of dopamine correct. That's the question. Yeah. I well I don't know I wish I could give you an answer I don't know and it would be really hard to disentangle the chicken in the egg right because if you're measuring dopamine activity you'd have to well okay so here's what I can say is that I think that we often think of you know we think of like let's say an emotion right or any other mental state and we think of it like it just happens.

1:47:40But in fact there's a time scale to these things right so it's like there is a basic response that you get when somebody points a gun at you but then there's an interpretation that you have that can take that threat response and make it into something more and then you're like really jacking up your noradrenergic activity right you could test your fuzzy yeah but it's like I mean well in that case it could be a catastrophe. But if you survive the you've heard of the catastrophe the question is does the potential catastrophe live within you or does it die within you you only need to live within you sufficiently enough that you avoid the threat in the future right but that's the that's the the double edge sort of noradrenergic systems is that they capture lots of memory and they open up thoughts about what could have gone wrong yeah but if it didn't go wrong it didn't go wrong you're alive you only need to remember to avoid whatever puts you in that circumstance.

1:48:31Yeah but that that can still be scary right sure and and this is where I think it's like this we talked about this before the surprise all is very important you know in the case of focus it's a little bit different but just to make this very concrete the prefrontal cortex has top down inputs to many of the neuromodulatory system so on average people tend to the think of the neuromodulatory systems like dopamine and or up and effort is being very bottom up they just send signals everywhere and say that's the right thing. If you want to set the brain into focus or not focus or whatever but the prefrontal cortex has some anatomically at least some capability of regulating those systems both directly and indirectly and so that does I think speak to this idea that if you have a very strong goal focus you can in fact regulate the dopamine system I think it's a reasonable and nor an or an effort into noradrenergic systems so I think it's a reasonable thing and I think it's a general example.

1:49:31I bet you Amy Arnston has done some related work on this topic. I'll check it out. Earlier you mentioned, and I want to make sure that we return to this notion of taking care of one's vision and one's hearing as a way to offset memory loss. Very important concepts. Could you share with us what's known about that? This is just starting to be a thing, but the effect sizes, for instance, for hearing raids are really strong both in reducing AD risk, I believe, and in Alzheimer's due to all Alzheimer's risk and in just good cognitive aging and risk keeping your memory as you get older. So don't listen to your headphones too loud.

1:50:10This is what, right? Well, actually, okay, so speaking of things I did to preserve my brain health, I'm playing in a band now and we're pretty damn loud. So I got, I went to an audiologist and I got custom earplugs. Oh yeah, yeah, all the top music. I mean, friends with some some really amazing musicians, they all wear insert earplugs. Oh yeah, yeah, but I think these customers will be more effective at both preserving the spectrum of all the frequencies. Well, I just mean protect your hearing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but yeah, but they're related because if you can't hear your frequencies, you might end up turning up and you get this paradoxical thing.

1:50:44So too much information I know, but basically that is, yeah, so there is this issue with, in fact, actually there's an article that shares I sent me on in the Lancet that one of their public health recommendations is to get into a preventative mode for preventing Alzheimer's disease. And one of the things they say is screen for hearing and give people hearing aids and make people use them if they encourage people to use them. Vision is starting to be a big one. People who are older get cataracts, get treated, you know, a lot of this preventative healthcare, which we, our system is not really equipped for it, but it can really save so much money.

1:51:24It can save so much emotional pain for so many people. It's really amazing. Another one we mentioned, I mentioned briefly, is oral hygiene. Gum disease, it turns out, increases your risk for, I believe it's Alzheimer's and also for cognitive brain health in general. I did an episode on oral health and the effects on, as you said, on brain health are amazing because streptococcus mutants, which is the bacteria that causes cavities, can funnel its way into the bloodstream and potentially cross the blood brain barrier, which is I think why people think it might be detrimental to brain health. Yeah, I mean, I don't know the detailed mechanisms, but I think that makes sense.

1:52:00And there's this vaguenotion of cognitive reserve, which is basically some people seem to be quite immune to the effects of cognitive aging and some people seem to be very protected against Alzheimer's disease. What is it? One of the things that seems to come up as far as depleting cognitive reserve, or putting it at a higher risk, seems to be inflammation, neuroinflammation. So, chemicalister, as you know, was doing work on this topic of neuroimmune interactions. Basically, the immune system expresses itself in the brain. You get microglia activation that can cause these inflammatory responses.

1:52:35There's reasonable evidence suggests that it's interacting with tau and amyloid and this kind of cascade of stuff that happens in Alzheimer's disease, right? And one of the things that we're learning now, and we don't know nearly enough, but the data out there is quite scary. In fact, is long COVID associated with significant cognitive effects? And brain, is that the explanation for the brain fog that people report many many months? Well, they report a subjective brain fog, and you can see this, you can measure this as a significant cognitive deficit that they're experiencing, right? And we've seen in the past, like HIV, was there was actually a whole variety of dementia that was associated with HIV from the viral transmission.

1:53:21We can, like you can see with multiple sclerosis where you have autoimmune responses in the brain affect mental function dramatically. We're seeing more and more evidence of this. So this is again, another one of those things is like, you'll go, oh, COVID, I don't care about it. I mean, this is a healthy thing that can really affect people and I don't think anybody, it's not a political issue to get brain fog. It's just sucks, right? Nobody wants this. So I think that there's a lot we're learning about viruses and bacteria. One of the cool things I was talking about before we started recording is I was at a conference and at the coolest guy, and I'm blanking on his name, but I'll send it to you after I say, but he's, he did this great study and he was studying the effects of nutrition on brain health and memory, especially cognition.

1:54:11And so I do, what's the most interesting finding that you've gotten? I love to ask people this, because I'm curious, I said it stimulates my curiosity and I usually get a good answer. So he told me to do the study where he has these rats and he gives them sugary water during the day about the equivalent he said to a can of coca day. So they're getting the sugar. When they reach adulthood, you know, these teenage rats, they reach adulthood and they have memory problems and they do, they have hippocampal atrophy. So you go, okay, well, the hippocampus is affected, memory is affected, sugar, blah, blah, blah, no problem.

1:54:47So that's what he does is he takes the gut bacteria from the sugar animals and puts it in an animal that doesn't get this diet. And he finds the same kind of pathology and the same kind of memory deficit in these animals. So there's something about that process of like the gut brain interaction that also seems to be playing a part in ways that I don't understand. I think they're still figuring it out. But again, this really shows this tight neuroimmune link. You know, and we're seeing this now with pollution. Air pollution is a big factor. So even if people don't believe in global warming, it's nothing good about being in a place with a lot of smoke in there.

1:55:25You know, it's it definitely can and this is one of the risk factors that is noted in the Lancet report for Alzheimer's disease. One of my colleagues, Pam Lien is doing research on this at UC Davis showing that you get like she actually takes real pollution from the Caldecaut tunnel, which connects Oakland and yeah, and finds that rats exposed to this pollution have a ample damage. So it's there's so many of these environmental factors that can trigger the inflammatory response. We talked about blood sugar. Blood sugar also seems to be related to these issues. So and diabetes is like so bad in so many ways.

1:56:07It's associated with those white matter hyper intensities that we talked about. And so that's bad. And we've done some research on that. And but it also affects it can cause little if you can get if you get severe diabetic ketoacidosis, you can actually have a hippocampal damage from that directly. And it also dramatically increases Alzheimer's risk. I'm even epidemic of diabetes right now. This probably explains at least to my mind why these lifestyle factors like improved sleep, cardiovascular and resistance training exercise, but certainly cardiovascular exercise, you know, eating a lot of leafy foods, etc.

1:56:51We know all of those things offset inflammation to some degree or another, right? I mean one of the best ways to inflame your brain and body is to not get enough sleep and eat, you know, a lot of highly processed foods, for instance. To date, are there any even semi satisfactory prescription drugs or other compounds that can slow the progression of Alzheimer's dementia once it's started? There are now some drugs that are, I think they're targeting amyloid that are producing some modest effects installing the progression of the disease. See the problem with Alzheimer's as you know is once you lose neurons, you're not getting them back, and it's like yeah, there's neurogenesis and you can run around, but it's not much.

1:57:37It's not much. If you're depending on that, you're host, you know. So, like, but getting back to the exercise thing, it's neuroprotective. And so, like, let's say with a drug, right? I mean, everybody wants a drug. If I told you I give you this drug, you're 60 years old, and it's going to have some terrible side effects, you're going to get diarrhea, nausea, all this stuff, but it'll reduce your risk of Alzheimer's by 40%. A lot of people have been motivated to take it. Now I tell you, okay, well, here's a lifestyle intervention that's going to involve what Sarah Madden calls down states. It doesn't have to, we can actually get into that and memory reactivation during down states, but involve sleep, diet, exercise, social stimulation, right?

1:58:24And these things, by the way, also reinforce each other. Having better sleep makes it easier to exercise, having extra eyes, makes it easier, better to sleep. All of these improved mood, right? So, these will improve your mental function, your mood, as well as your mental function, relatively soon, and reduce your risk by at least 40 % if not more. If you go to, I can send you this Lancet article, but it's like the amount, the proportion of variants, meaning the degree of risk that you can reduce with fully preventable or fully in our control lifestyle issues is huge. It's as big or bigger than the genetics.

1:59:08I think people really need to hear and internalize that because I think everyone's waiting for this miracle drug that is unlikely to ever arrive, frankly. I mean, you know, to date, we have some okay treatments for Parkinson's to try and offset the loss of dopamine orgic neurons, but they can even transplant, essentially, dopamine orgic neurons into the substantial eye grow. But none of those things, aldopa, etc, have proved to be cures for Parkinson's, not getting hit in the head is helpful. Oh, yeah, traumatic brain injuries, another one of the big cracks factor. So, there are a lot of don'ts.

1:59:41I'm grateful that today you're sharing a number of do's, both in the context of offsetting age -related cognitive decline Alzheimer's, but also in terms of how to enhance focus and enhance memory. I want to make sure that we touch on a few topics related to memory that a little bit off the trajectory we're on now, but that come up a lot when people start thinking about memory. And one that's kind of intriguing, very intriguing, is deja vu. Do we have any understanding about what deja vu is? Is it just like a recollection of something similar that spontaneously gets triggered? What is deja vu? Well, it's not fully understood, but I'll give you my best guess that science based and not just my wildly speculating completely.

2:00:27But basically, one of the early findings that gave you sense about what deja vu is is Hewling's Jackson, who's a great neurologist, who did pioneering work in behavioral neurology, observed that many patients who get epilepsy would have this aura, this mental sensations right before a seizure, where they would get an intense feeling of deja vu. It doesn't happen in everyone, but a certain number. And this is associated with temporal lobe epilepsy, and the hippocampus, as you know, is in the temporal lobe. But there's also these areas around it that are super important for memory, including the amygdala, but also really the peruronal cortex is a key key player in this.

2:01:10And so then you have wilder penfield and other people who started to do these surgeries for epilepsy. And they said, well, I want to make sure I'm not taking out good brain, right? So penfield wasn't responsible for HM, and that was like kind of an irresponsible surgery. HM is a now dead famous patient and literally chapter in the history of neuroscience that somebody who had his hippocampi bilaterally one on each side of the brain removed to treat epilepsy, fixed the epilepsy, but he had lost all capacity to remember prior events. Yeah. And so in fact, he had this dense, dense amnesia, right?

2:01:57And actually one of the little known things, even in memory research, is he actually lost, he had what's called a temporal lebactamine, where they just hack off the front part of the temporal lobe, it might have been cauterized, right? I can't remember the, I think he cauterized it, but anyway, they do that temporal lebactamine. He actually had the posterior one -third of his hippocampus, but he had lost his peruronal cortex bilaterally. And that turned out to be Betsy Murray at NIH later and other people turned out to be huge thing. So one of the reasons I think that he became so densely amnestic is that it was bilaterally.

2:02:35So if you think about the brain like you have a side of the brain that's causing seizures, well, you kind of got a spare tire on the other side where it's like that other healthy tissue on the other side can sometimes pick up the slack. But if you take out both hemispheres, now you're in really bad shape. So scovol did that. You actually did it for people who are HM had epilepsy and it was a legit operation and that's what he did for people who had I think psychosis, due to depression. I mean, back then they just did all kinds of crazy stuff. So but Pennfield was like, no, I want to make sure I take out only the tissue that needs to go.

2:03:10So what do you do? You stimulate different parts of the brain and you see does it produce anything other than a seizure. And if so, that's not an area you want to remove. And so if you go into the anterior temporal lobes and stimulate and people would have sometimes they would have an intense real memory. But sometimes they would have this intense sense of deja vu where it's like they feel this I feel like I'm lived out this whole thing that's happening right now. I've lived it before. When you know that's not true, right? So what is this? Well, a number of people my lab was heavily involved with this and Andy on Alenus at UC Davis was, you know, really central to a lot of the found that the peri -rhynal cortex, which is this area, as I said, it's a big player with the hippocampus seems to be very critical for this general sense of familiarity that we have.

2:04:01And so, you know, I use in the book an example of like, if I say, have you eaten a rambutan before? Now you being a worldly guy might have you ever eaten a rambutan? I don't know what that is. Okay. So how quick was it that you were able to say no that you were able to think about it? I've never eaten a rambutan. Less than a second. Okay. So you didn't have to search your entire memory for whether or not you've eaten a rambutan. You know, because it's so unfamiliar, right? So things that are highly familiar, like, you know, maybe I'll ask if you've eaten a banana before, grapes before, you can say yes, because and partly you don't even have to remember any instance.

2:04:40It just feels right, you know, those are very familiar things to you. Have you ever seen a grape before? Yes, of course you have, Apple, very familiar to people. So we just have that general fluency and you can look at this like, you go into the grocery store and you see someone and you're like, I know I've seen this person before, where have I seen them before? And then you leave and eventually you're like, oh, well, that was somebody who I met at this conference or something like that. But you weren't expecting them at this context. It's and no episodic memory is triggered. But there was something about the features that felt very fluent and natural to you and triggered that sense of familiarity.

2:05:22And that seems to be processed and you can see brain activity associated with that in the Parironal cortex. And people with damage to the Parironal cortex seem to not differentiate between the rambutan and the banana. It's all kind of unfamiliar to them. They might remember I've eaten a banana, but they don't necessarily have that sense of familiarity. And Rebecca Burwell at Brown University of the Coolest Experiment that doesn't nearly get, you know how in science, you get these unsung hero experiments. Well, this was one of them where she stimulated in rats the Parironal cortex at this frequency called the beta frequency, which is kind of a relatively low frequency oscillation.

2:06:05And basically put two objects in front of the animal. And so, like, typically if there's a new object, the animal will spend more time exploring it, right? And depending on how she timed the stimulation, she could make the animal think that a familiar object was novel. She stimulates it a different frequency, I think, was gamma. And the animal now thinks, or actually, it was like, yeah, so she thinks, now the animal thinks that a familiar thing is novel. With beta, it was that it thought a novel thing was familiar. Wow. So, could literally use the stimulation to change the way the animal is interacting with and presumably a memory driven way with this object, right?

2:06:50So for those looking for novelty in different domains of life, maybe this is the solution. Maybe, yeah. And so, Anne Cleary, just to close the loop here, who's a great researcher at Colorado State, developed this beautiful paradigm, or what she does is she said, okay, well, does that relate to deja vu? Well, let's see, so what she does is use virtual reality. And so, in virtual reality, you can create these environments and put objects in particular places. And so, she creates these virtual environments where their particular objects in particular places. And let's say, one's a museum, right? So, a person can go through passively and watch a movie or they actively navigate through these spaces.

2:07:27And then what she does is she has them go through, let's say, a video arcade. But unbeknownst to the subject, the objects that are in the room are in exactly the same positions as the objects in the museum. But it's a video arcade, so it looks different. But the room shape, the spatial layout, you know, everything is identical. It's got a different skin on it, so to speak, for video gamers. So what happens is people are much more likely, very likely, to produce a deja vu sensation when they're in these places, these virtual environments that look very much like where they've been, but they're mismatching in some critical way.

2:08:08So it's like, you've got enough to trigger the strong sets of familiarity. But the mismatch is suppressing recollection. And so, that seems to be a crucial part of why you get this uncanny feeling of remembering is the strong familiarity you get. And by the way, I've watched these movies and I cannot for life of me see that the museum is the same as the arcade. It just feels so different cognitively. But, you know, I can imagine being like, if I really did it immersively, having that sense of familiarity. So you're really pitting these things in opposition to each other. And so what likely happens with deja vu is something uncanny that triggers a little bit of memory retrieval or a strong fluency.

2:08:53But then there's a mismatch that suppresses it and prevents that a context from coming up. I'd like to talk about the relationship between memory and mental health for the following reason. I'm very struck by the fact that in experiments such as the work that Carl Diceroff, who was actually the first guest on this podcast, brilliant neuroengineer, of course, and psychiatrist, described in which he's talking to a patient who's depressed. This patient has a stimulator for the vagus nerve that can crank up stimulation, the vagus nerve in. And essentially, the narrative goes from this patient, I believe it was a woman in this case, talking about being suicidally depressed.

2:09:37She can't anticipate doing anything of any interest or excitement to her, increasing vagal stimulation, which by the way, folks does not just calm people down. Vagal stimulation actually creates a lot of alertness. So this is a vast misconception out there that vagal stimulation is all about calming. In any case, as the vagal stimulation goes up, her narrative literally changes in real time. To, yeah, I could see myself going out and applying for a job. I'm kind of excited about the future, etc. So complete transformation of one's outlook, but also in some instances, memory of prior events. So how we cast prior events is so interesting.

2:10:17And the bridge I'd like to build right now conceptually is that there are two papers that intrigue me. One is a paper from Lombardtoma Feys Lab in Pisa, which had a paradigm for exploring learned helplessness in rodents, which is sort of a model for depression. How long a rodent is willing to swim in water to save its life, right, before it gives up. And there's a learned helplessness that eventually arrives, these yes or not kind experiments. But at some point they give up and then they've essentially learned their helpless. And of course they save the animal before it dies. But these animals given essentially an SSRI like Prozac can restore some sense of hope meaning they'll swim longer after having learned to be helpless.

2:11:08Is it recovery of depression we don't know, but in humans, you see some of the same thing when SSRIs have been effective and they're not always effective. You also see this in some of the psilocybin trials where people have done the psilocybin therapies. Oh yeah, we got to talk about that in the correct context. And now all of a sudden people have this completely different emotional version of the same events like yep, a bunch of terrible things happened or with the MDMA trials for PTSD controversial right now FDA didn't approve it. But a good number of patients describe saying yeah, this really terrible set of things that happened.

2:11:40Those happened. But I accept it and I'm taking the lessons and I'm moving on and then there's maybe even forgiveness, etc, etc. So to me this is a this is a shift in memory brought about by a dramatic shift in neuromodulators SSRIs of course increase serotonin psilocybin increases serotonin and it's interesting to me that MDMA while it increases dopamine most dramatically increases serotonin and say seven X or more in terms of the now I'm not suggesting anyone do these drugs. And you could blow out the serotonin system with too much of it with too much MDMA. Although the studies on this is interesting because the study that claimed that MD MDMA did that actually was retracted.

2:12:23Oh, it turns out they had inadvertently used methamphetamine. Keep in mind folks that MDMA is methylene dioxy methamphetamine. So I'm not suggesting anyone do these drugs. I'm using this as a conceptual. Yeah, I mean this is abuse for talking about. Yeah, right, right, right. I mean so in clinical trials it's clearly been shown both for SSRIs as well as for psilocybin these are still emerging clinical trials and MDMA that in a significant percentage of individuals, especially when combined with therapy, people can now feel differently about the same memory. So feeling different about the same memory and feeling different about therefore the sense of possibility going forward.

2:13:03This to me is incredible and it speaks to the fact that much of depression, the lack of a positive anticipation about the future etc, is based on memories about failures of past or harms of past. Yeah, rumination basically. Right. So what is the relationship between the serotonin system and memory or what is the relationship more broadly of the these neuromodulatory systems or the vagal system that can create these incredible like reversals of what we previously thought of as terrible as like manageable and therefore we're going to lean into life again. What is that again, you know serotonins like a neuromodulator, it enhances plasticity and what I mean by that is that if you have like a transient learning event, you will get a change in the connections between neurons that were active during that event and super interesting work right now going on in behavioral timescale plasticity and all this stuff.

2:14:02So it's not just cells that wire together fire it's more interesting actually or fire together wire together. It's more interesting but those changes can often be transient and what people so like Eric Kendell, for instance, one who studied serotonin in particular and emphasized this but basically many neuromodulators, if you give a little bath, if these bathe these neurons in in serotonin or other neuromodulators, you stabilize that plasticity and that allows you know increases in receptor density between these neurons that allow them to communicate more effectively. Now you can get weakening in LCD2, we'll get into that but but serotonin definitely promotes plasticity right and so one of the things I talk about in my book is that memories are when we all have plasticity as I said retrieving a memory can allow us to change the memory in certain ways and it can change when you get into the details of it it comes complicated in interesting ways.

2:15:03But the short version is you can change it. We get a small part of what happened when we remember but there's that feeling of the context, there's that emotional response that we have that's both a kind of a basic raw motivational my heart's racing or something like that. That's why people often say well emotional emotional memories are stored in the body. Well it's just part of the memory. It's a retrieval cue so to speak and it can be also be part of the retrieved experience. But you have all of these factors going on that are part of this emotional memory and then you have a story that you create a narrative that you used to make sense of it and that affects all these physiological systems too right.

2:15:43So every time I use I talk in the book about an example of how group therapy is so powerful as a means of memory updating social interactions where it's like people can change the narrative. They say well you know I gave you this narrative about how I'm loud and you told me well I remember hanging out with you and you were loud then you're not loud now and so now I can update these memories maybe by spacious. Yeah exactly I can reframe it right and these framing effects are huge. So in theory people can take and experience those traumatic and many people do and say this made me who I am and I'm happy with who I am now even though this is a horrible thing.

2:16:23I'm stronger for it or I'm a survivor or you know I couldn't have done anything about it and it's not my fault and or you can have these narratives of shame and so forth and guilt and anger and so forth. Nothing's I'm not judging anybody's reaction to trauma but what I am saying is that's part of the emotional response it's part of the memory that people construct. The problem is is that with traumatic memories when they do stick it's hard to change because there's so much plasticity driven by the neuromodulators during that event. With PTSD and we could talk about that that's a whole other thing but just let's just take traumatic memories.

2:17:04There's it's so intense and the amygdala response drives the physiology in many cases of that arousal which makes you feel like this immediacy of it right and infects sleep and nightmares all this up and we stay out of PTSD for a while because that's a whole other thing but those memories are very resistant because of that intensity and often the more you retrieve them we retraumatize ourselves. So reframing in a cognitive therapy sense is very difficult because they feel this and their brain is telling them I'm under threat or I'm ashamed because they've reinforced this narrative so many times and you can work through the logic but sometimes you need to create some big prediction error to generate some error driven learning which we can talk about or you need some kind of help.

2:17:59So if you're driving neuromodulatory systems like that theoretically could give you a broader window plasticity. In fact actually we're trying prosack at my dog and one of the things that that seem very anxious and very like like she'll just and it's to the point where she'll not exercise even though she's a very active dog she'll stop on a walk if she hears a garbage truck anywhere and so it's very low dose and I'm not necessarily saying go drug your dogs but I'm just saying that the story that I've heard is that you get this period of plasticity where you can kind of rewrite some of these behavioral patterns and make them more open to training and so forth and so it doesn't even have to be a permanent thing right and I think a lot of these things like you're talking about learn helplessness studies probably transient effects of not being on it for years or something but it's not very effective in terms of SSRIs but psilocybin and psychedelics have shown a lot of promises being bigger effects right and these produce massive plasticity.

2:19:04There's two things I think that are really interesting about it so my neighbor David by the way Davis I will just say I'm biased but it's one of the top three places in the world for learning a memory research. So next to our neighbor David Olsett it turns out as studying psychedelic effects on plasticity and and you know so he really emphasizes that there's these massive neurotrophic factors BDNF like all these factors that are going on they're promoting plasticity and you know for people who've taken them that's what they report is that there's this period of integration afterwards for your brains just like you know you could feel it everything you change you change yeah you change if if the integration is guided properly one thing that I do want to make sure I highlight and it's not just for you know public safety reasons although that as well is that people are so intrigued by the idea of quote unquote opening plasticity plasticity is just an opportunity for learning new contingencies right but it just taking psychedelics is an experience but certainly but the learning of new contingencies occurs in the integration phase as well as within the session that's why the clinical trials that showed some efficacy for some people were guided intensely by therapists the mere act of having plasticity plasticity is an opportunity for learning it's not the actual learning that's right it opens up like significant opportunities for reshaping but the second part of it which maybe I think is really interesting is there is also a dissociative element of these drugs so ketamine isn't a psychedelic but I think there are some interesting plasticity effects and and definitely produces this dissociative element too but with psychedelics there's often a major perspective shift and perspective is hugely important for memory because a lot of our sense of the emotional impact of our memory is based on a perspective that we adopt when we remember and research has shown that you can take the same encoding event meaning like I tell you a story let's just take a very simple thing very you know I give you a story and it's like I tell you now viewed from the perspective of someone else and you're trying to remember it you can remember things that you didn't experience remember the first time or changing your perspective can literally change what you remember it can also change the narrative that you produce so now let's say you pull up this traumatic memory but you're viewing it from the outside you're feeling your heart's racing your eyes are dilating is a crazy effects from psychedelic but you're seeing it and it's not you there's some deeper self -fear feeling whether it's true or you have a sense of agency in there yeah some of the psychedelics I've never tried this one but there are interesting studies of I regain eboga where the universal experiences I understand is that people it's 22 hours long it's actually cardiovascular risk there's some things that need to be offset there so don't run out to do this folks but people I'm told get a high definition movie of specific events in their life that actually happened only when they close their eyes so no hallucinating with eyes open interesting and then they have agency within those movies and once they exact the change they wanted to have it rotates like a cube very interesting perhaps to a memory researcher why this would be and then they get another event of past where they have agency in that event incredible it's I mean you know there's so much that we don't know and I think it's you know and I will say that some of the psychedelic stuff is overhyped and there's not some of the science is quite bad in that field right now the number of papers are being retracted now yeah yeah I do think that some of the concerns they had in the FDA I I have to take issue with but what I will say is that you have a drug that dramatically increases plasticity but it changes dramatically the mental context that you have when you pull up the memory so you have a real opportunity for memory updating now there's a phenomenon in the animal literature called reconsolidation where essentially the act of retrieving a memory opens it up to requiring some kinds of neuromodulators again to really promote resealing of the memory so to speak but it can also if you interrupted you can erase the memories and theoretically if you can do that you could also change the memories pretty significantly so if I can vividly access some neural population that's giving me this normally gives me this physiological response it sets off this train of thoughts and it's associated with this physical and mental context and I can dramatically I can access those neurons but dramatically reshape the context and dramatically reshape the narrative I've created the opportunity for massive change and I don't know if that's true but it sure makes sense to me that that's the case now having said that if you and me share our traumatic elements of our childhood I'm sure we go on or drink and do this for quite a few hours right that in and of itself will also produce some change in our memories it's very powerful and I saw this in the clinic where I was doing group therapy with Vietnam vets and I'm like I'm a total fraud I'm like I don't know 27 years old 28 years old and I'm like in with these like you know Vietnam vets in their 50s who've really seen stuff you know and they live in combat zones now in Chicago and what I realized was everyone was telling their story but they're hearing reflections of their story for me but also from other members of the group who they can relate to that are different from their narrative and now all of a sudden what happens is the memory is no longer theirs it's a collective memory that's shared by all these people because the memory now incorporates elements of their reactions as well it allows people to remember it in a new context right and I mean and we can just take a much more water down version of this where how many times you had a terrible experience and it became a great story I basically say that there's no point in having a bad experience in life if you don't get a great story out of that right so I talk to the book about it near death experience I had paddleboard again as everything about this was stupid I can say the degree I can send you pictures of it and you've been like oh my god what was he thinking I've made I've made foolish errors in outdoor adventures in my past where afterwards I thought that was a really dumb move to even go to that location to dive let alone what we did when we did there like you know I mean that some of the stupid stuff that we did even NS kids like bridge jumps and without testing water depth I mean stupid stupid stuff yeah that I don't recommend anyone repeat but you're right the the surviving stories are you carry those forward yeah yeah exactly exactly the other stories we can talk about people who are paralyzed dead etc those stories exist too yeah yeah well so I mean to be clear it's like I felt horrible during that experience and it was one of the most immediately fear inducing experiences I've had but later me and Randy O 'Reilly computational neuroscience were friends we both did the stupid thing together we would tell the story tag team it you know we told it to students and friends and so forth and it just became funny and so each time we told it it just became kind of funny or funny you know you start to embellish things and so forth and so that change of perspective was really drawn out by sharing and seeing people laugh and see if you were like what were you thinking you're such a smart person and you did this and and it becomes part of the narrative and you know keep in mind there are people who do this that they say like I've had a really traumatic experience but I've learned from I've had a horrible emotionally abusive relationship but I've learned from it right and I don't mean to trivialize anybody's experience who didn't have that thing and they're just traumatized by it and they carry it with them but what I am saying is that the memory so to speak I think in neuroscience right now there's a big hot topic about N grams as if a bunch of neurons is the memory but every time we ever memory we're painting a new picture we're creating a new novel well and I think this is where people have to be very careful not to cowboy post -traumatic stress disorder treatment in a way that allows the narrative to make it worse because people at previous guests on this podcast has this notion of indescribing this of story fondling where people can go further and further into the description of how terrible something is reinforced by others and then the memory changes to become much worse than either the real events were or just simply worse within their body and mind and then they have to live that forward so it can go both ways which is really points to the key which is to do this with really trained professionals.

2:28:33Yeah yeah and it's all about like because you can retraumatize yourself and this is also why rumination is so bad in depression is because you recall a negative memory and that gets you in a negative mood because you pull up the context and then that makes it easier to recall more negative memories and then every time you recall them now they're getting more power because they're associated with these negative mood. So rec collection is really a double age blade. Oh yeah yeah I mean look at like so if you take something like reminiscence or nostalgia so the original term nostalgia I credit Philippe de Brigard for till he's a philosopher neuroscientist he told me that nostalgia used to be a term for disease that was coined by a Swiss physician and he used it to talk about a kind of post -traumatic experience that soldiers had where they would get so wistful about their home that it just made them miserable in the places that they were at.

2:29:30It's been referred to as the pain of an old wound. Yeah yeah yeah exactly. I didn't say that someone else. Yeah yeah and so it can the research shows it can have very positive effects on mental health right and it can have positive effects on mental health if you use that as a way of saying hey this is just a great thing that's happened I'm grateful for that but it can become toxic if you're like my life used to be so great and now it's terrible even if it's positive reminiscence if you come into it with the wrong attributions it can become negative it toxic and it can contaminate your present right I mean the past has got good and it's got bad and it's just like the present has got good and it's got bad in it and it's really all about what are the narratives you're constructing for it in many ways and that plays a big part in the dynamic malleable constantly shape shifting nature of memory.

2:30:30Incredible. I want to make sure that we talk about something at first glance very different than all of this but it's land squarely in the conversation we've had until now which is your love for and your participation in rock and roll. You have a band right Pavlov's dogs. Yep actually a couple of bands now thank please. Okay. Yeah what are the other ones called? Well so Pavlov's dogs also versus like a band of neuroscientists and psychologists who met actually most of us met at a memory meeting. And so we get together at conferences and we'll rent out a club and we'll play basically Brad calls it skinny tie music it's like is it original music or covers covers that one's a cover band covers okay and so we'll play like the Ramones the clash gang of four.

2:31:28Great. It's it's a lot of we're you know we had a blondie and she's still touring. Yeah she's amazing. Yeah a friend of mine went on tour with her. Yeah there's a bank called surfboard surfboard who is on tour with blondie. Oh so I know them. Yeah oh that's a friend of mine. Yeah Danie from surfboard know yeah that great band and she toured with blondie blondie is amazing she's still super vivacious as a surfboard and and Danny what instrument do you play? I play guitar and I also do vocals. Lead vocal? Yes or yeah. And reluctant because sometimes it's talking or being off key but yeah. Can people find links to any Pavlov dog live shows or recordings online?

2:32:10I think we have some recordings on YouTube and if you look on our Facebook page maybe our Instagram too we have live recordings. Okay and you have a show coming up we'll put a link to that because people will listen to this long after that presumably that's coming up in Chicago on October. I think it's the seventh is it a month it's the Monday. We'll put a link to that. Yeah sorry but but because they can't make it because most of us aren't in Chicago including me unfortunately we'll keep an eye out for Pavlov's dogs. I love that you play music and I just have for sake of time one question about your love for rock and roll and playing music when you're playing rock and roll live are you thinking about anything else?

2:32:56Sometimes and that's when I suck. Actually you know one thing one hack that I came up with because it's like with the cover band we practice like we cram it's the worst thing it's not space learning it's like we go through the songs and we keep adding and taking away songs but it's like we'll cram for like I don't know about eight hours of practices over three days or something and so it's for me it's like a constant memory thing because my brain doesn't want to play covers wants to play the songs that I've written and so there's always a very thing it's and then I get nervous I get really nervous it's so I move a lot and then that distracts and then I'll see friends and that kills me because then I start thinking what are they thinking and so I started last show I did with Pavlov's dogs I wore sunglasses and it was great it was because then I wasn't attuned to them and I was it just goes back to what we're talking about kind of with the camera and stuff I was feeling it and I was thinking I was I was not I was in the flow in the zone and feeling it and doing it and not thinking about it and there's a whole interesting literature choking under pressure that actually relates to this idea of like you know sometimes having too much cognitive control going on is like really bad when you're under stress and if you know something fairly well you're going to be better off if you just go into an automatic state I love that when I do live shows I like to have the house lights relatively dim I don't want to see anybody at first and then as they get more comfortable I'm happy to have the house lights come on you play I didn't know you play I don't play anything I do live events where I talk about science and scientists okay a couple of things are right in the front of my mind and I'd be remiss if I didn't say them right now first of all it's absolutely clear that we need to get you back here for more discussion about memory and learning there's just so much that we didn't have the opportunity to cover in this conversation but we most certainly will in a future conversation we didn't bring up the turkeys of Davis that the turn we didn't second of all I want to thank you for writing your book why we remember because it's a fantastic exploration of the modern understanding of memory still some of the mysteries that remain but this is a field that's evolved a lot and you capture so much of the incredible findings there over the years in a very pleasurable way so it's a pleasure to read and then also want to thank you for coming here today to share with us your understanding about memory and also your sharing of your experience with ADHD and some of the tools you use some of the struggles I think all too often people hear about these you know scientists or physicians or people who are authorities on a topic and they don't hear about the the challenges they face and I assure you that a great great many people will appreciate the fact that you yourself have a struggle with certain issues related to attention but that you've overcome them at least as well to be able to be a functional parent and family man professor author now public educator dog owner second time around and you know for that and for a great many other reasons you've educated us and you've given us a great many practical tools it's also great to see you as a fellow punk rocker and old friend and I even let you call me Andy so thank you so thanks for coming here today and please do come back again Charne oh I'd love to thank you Andrew it's been great to be here thank you for joining me for today's discussion about memory and ADHD with Dr.

2:36:31Charne wrong enough to learn more about his work and to find a link to his book as well as social media accounts please see the links in the show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zero cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple and on both Spotify and Apple you can leave us up to a five star review please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Hubertman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments for those of you that haven't heard I have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled protocols and operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now available by pre -sale at protocols book dot com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols and operating manual for the human body if you're not already following me on social media I am Hubertman Lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X formerly known as Twitter threads Facebook and LinkedIn and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the Hubertman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content on the Hubertman Lab podcast again that's Hubertman Lab on all social media channels if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter our neural network newsletter is a zero -cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as protocols in the form of brief one to three page PDFs those protocol PDFs are on things like neuroplasticity and learning optimizing dopamine improving your sleep deliberate cold exposure deliberate heat exposure we have a foundational fitness protocol that describes a template routine that includes cardiovascular training and resistance training with sets and reps all backed by science and all of which again is completely zero cost to subscribe simply go to Hubertman Lab dot com go to the menu tab up in the upper right corner scroll down a newsletter and provide your email and I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with dr.

2:38:58Charne Ranganath and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science