#988 - Dr Rahul Jandial - Brain Surgeon: Inside The Dreaming Brain

29:25It was just sort of a, you gotta, and so that was chapter two. Nightmares are, it's a tough thing to explain because it obviously like why would we cook that up? And so the way I think about it is,

29:45you have to look at the mind as something that needs cultivating in children, just like walking and talking. And so just like we're not fully formed, and we have to be taught to walk and challenge to walk and talk and engaged. At the same time in the mind, there are certain cognitive developments that are happening. So in, they're called longitudinal studies, they had families allow their children to be woken up for like 22 years and report like what they're dreaming about different times. And like when they were two or three, like it's just like it's a blanket. It's not very dynamic, it's not a lot of movement.

30:28And then around four and five, six, nightmares arrive for every child. It's rare to find out. I did a lot of pediatric neurosurgery still do. I have three sons in their 20s. They have to be told that nightmares always arrive in children, healthy children, unhealthy children, some of my patients who had brain injuries. It seems to be a part of the mines development that's built in. It arrives for everybody. And then almost invariably, very few kids have nightmare disorder. It doesn't linger into the next day and ruin their day like it does for adults. So it's sort of like a wave of thinking that a species of dreams that arrives.

31:10And then around 11 or 12, you have erotic dreams that arrive, whether kids are having sex or not or teenagers are thinking about sex or not, they arrive. And the last one I see is sort of the matri - like adolescents. The brain looks the same, but we change who we are. So I think there are three waves of sort of the development of the mind and what happens around that age of four five and six is also the development of something called the default mode network like until then Children have a hard time reading minds. They can't tell if smiling uncle means well or means harm and that capacity Arise at the same time as nightmares and so my big hypothesis.

31:48It'll be hard to prove is that nightmares create a sentence of self versus other by having these harrowing difficult experiences, it sort of creates that the world around me is separate from who I am. And this engagement of monsters and different things creates this default mode network that allows us to start to see ourselves as separate from the world around us and to be a little bit more critical in evaluating the threats and the people and their intentions around us. That's my big thesis. And that would make sense adoptively because before age 456, kids are so unindependent that the need to be able to distinguish between I am here and that is something else is kind of pointless because you're not let out of the sight of Momodad.

32:38Yeah, you're in the rap still. You're very close. You're not being led. I mean, I think that's a good point. The other point is that that it's just like every every every kid has to be told it was It's only a dream. It's only a nightmare. And that there's this, just like we talked about, liminal states in the beginning, like in psychosis, people can't separate out, awake versus dreaming, and that to stitch autobiographical memory, we need to know these are awake thoughts, and these are dream thoughts. And dream thoughts should not disrupt your awake thoughts if there are these things that happen in your mind, but they're not actually the daily steps that link your life together, right?

33:19That in children, I don't know if before nightmares, they know the difference between waking thoughts and dream thoughts. Like maybe nightmares inform the child, it was only a dream. So it's always been a puzzle to me. Until then, do they not know that what they experienced in their thoughts while sleeping was actually not real? Well, I would be discarded. I guess that the creativity networking kids is so much more light even when they are awake. You watch in the space of an afternoon, a child's a firefighter, an postman, an astronaut, and a sports star, and a rock star, and a sleep, and then awake again, and back to being a postman.

34:01And yeah, I dream of being, I literally do dream of being able to have that level of creative access again. And I think so that nightmares are serving something fundamental because they arrive in all of us. It is the universal dream. We can all talk about what they serve and the purpose. And the last thing I would say about that, to be a nightmare, it has to wake you up. It's not a bad dream. Like you wake up the next thing, you're like, oh, that was a rough nightmare. It's have to wake you up. Sear your memory to be considered a nightmare. It's the dream that has to wake you up and be vividly remembered.

34:34So I think there's some mental cultivation going on with this process that we all share. We'll get back to talking in just a minute, but first, some things are built for summer. Sunburns, hot girl walks, your ex posting there, you were road trip, and now lemonade and salt. Element just dropped their brand new lemonade salt flavour and it's everything that you want on a hot day. Tart, salty and stupidly refreshing. It's like a grown up lemonade stand in a stick. With actual function behind the flavour. Because let's be real if you're sweating through workouts, sauna sessions or just walking to your car in July, then you are losing more than just water.

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35:37Right now, you can get a free sample pack of elements most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom that's drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. Do you think it's important to remember our dreams? Have they got deeper wisdom to tell us or should we just allow them to be a sandbox that sort of lives on its own? I think based on what I've learned, I think it's the ultimate wellness habit that goes underutilized, you know, because first, and just to give you some examples, that, you know, the sleep entry period, this liminal state, were based on measurements.

36:23We could show your connoisseur, your kind of dreaming sleeping. I mean, people like Edison in Inception, Inception the movie was the falling chair was a concept based off of Dolly or Edison where they'd be working on some creative project and and they'd have a key in his hand and a little metal basin and when he'd fall asleep on the rock while rocking on a chair he'll fall forward the key would drop and then he'd write down his thoughts he felt that there was something that could be extracted from that dream entry, sleep entry state. Lucid dreaming is something we could talk about later, but that seems to be something that people report wellness with, people athletes, people who are visual spatial tend to have more lucid dreams.

37:11I think that's an interesting thought that we can learn that ability. There's a little bit of sleep disruption about it, and then when we sleep exit, which is a time I use quite a bit, it is I have the luxury of not always hitting the alarm. And I take those last five, 10 minutes of thoughts and I write them down first before going on social media or looking at my email. And that seems to be an idea generator for me. I think there's sort of those practical elements that you can do. But if for me, just at a philosophical level, when my brain, with my memory, with my imagination, not somebody else's memory, not somebody else's imagination, runs in a different mode, hyper -emotional, hyper -magetive, and something leaks out of that that I can hold on to.

37:58I think it's worth taking a look at, and even just a process of reflection, I think could hold some insight, but I would tease that out. It would be that the dreams that leave a strong emotional residue with a central image, I think it's okay to say, why did I have that dream? You know, be your own therapist in that capacity. because it's coming from your imagination and your mind. This concrete example I will give is some people who are feeling well, feeling like they're coping well, will have nightmares pop up in their lives, which serve as sort of a thermometer. And so the nightmares, if they're progressive, like headaches, occasional nightmares is whatever it is.

38:39Occasional headache is whatever it is. But if there's a progressive uptick in nightmares, that can happen while the patient is having, the person's having such a fantastic life during the day. So that can be sort of a warning sign or a signal that maybe you're not coping well. So I think we're just starting to get into those features of maybe people's dream life should be part of the vital size. When I started training, it was like bread pressure and temperature. Now we ask about pain, we ask about wellness, we ask about living situation at home. I don't think in the world of mental health, it would be a stretch to start asking and engaging people with their dream life.

39:23Dream experience is predictive of something in health. You mentioned an uptick in nightmares across the whole board. Somebody is dreaming more, dreaming less. And remember it more. They're remembering less, more lucid dreaming less. whatever question, more nightmares. Are there any correlations between that and someone's overall health? Good question. The dream pattern related with overall health would be nightmares. So two types of nightmares. Pediatric nightmares, we talked about age 456, which I think are cultivating the mind. They don't really lead to nightmare disorder where the next day is ruined.

39:59And then nightmares in adults, They could happen once in a while. That doesn't seem to be problem, but 4 or 5 % have nightmare disorder where it disrupts the next day. And in that situation, whether it's in PTSD or whether it's in trauma or whether you're going through a difficult situation, tracking nightmares, they're uptick or their improvement can be sort of a measure of how people are doing. But as far as what I've read about dream recall, dream patterns, that changes throughout our lives. So a lot of adults say they don't remember many other dreams. My cancer patients, when they get to end of life They tend to have these things genre dreams are called end of life dreams They tend to be of reconciliation.

40:43They tend to be more hopeful than you would suspect after getting a surgery and chemotherapy so Your dream Within our lives from nightmares to erotic dreams to the way we dream as adults, to drugs that change the way we dream and how much we remember all the way to end of life dreams. If you don't think you have a lot of dream recall now, that doesn't mean it won't be there for you, it can't be cultivated. You just have to track dream experiences and prevalence throughout a whole lifetime and you start to see that they come in waves, which is interesting. How real is dream interpretation? I don't think it's real at all.

41:24I mean, because I, you know, I mean, I can't do it for myself, you know? So what hope is there of a lady in a show being able to do it on your behalf? Well, I mean, I think just we have to look at it conceptually and I think we were just talking about that it's my imagination, it's my memory. So like, let's, how do you know what this snake means to me? Not just what it means to me, what it meant to me five years ago. I'm not the same person I was five years ago. Like a bridge. Let's take a bridge, for example. For some of my patients, it's, you know, they might be thinking about suicide or it could be reconciliation with a loved one.

42:00It could mean so many things within that context. How can a bridge for you and me mean the same thing? But past that, a bridge for me means very different things within the context of my own life. I don't think a static symbol can reveal a dynamic mental life. Well, this would fit in with your perspective that it's kind of a gymnasium training ground, sandbox for the mind that... I intentionally trained for the mind. Yeah, maybe we shouldn't give all that much credence to it. Maybe the brain is just kind of running away with itself, because in its strange, people have intrusive thoughts all the time.

42:41They see somebody stood next to the edge of the road and they think, I wonder what would happen if I pushed them in. I mean, I'm not going to do it, but I wonder what would happen if I pushed them in. Oh, God, this would happen. And that would happen. It wouldn't be thrilling. And you go, okay, are you making some sort of inference about the sort of person that you are for having had that thought? Most people would say, no, you know, I just have intrusive thoughts that occur during the day and you go, okay, I can't go to jail for that. So your intrusive thoughts, when you're awake and conscious are not that indicative of the sort of person that you are.

43:14And yet you're telling me that the dreams that you have when you're not conscious are worthy of interpretation. That I've never thought of that before, but yeah, we're prepared to give, we're prepared to dissect something which we have way less control over when we're asleep. But then on the other side, the devil's advocate position would be, there are very few windows that we have into the subconscious. the subconscious can often tell us things about ourselves that maybe we have repressed, not been prepared to feel, and perhaps there is some deeper wisdom to be gleaned from when we're asleep.

43:53I agree with that, but I don't agree that, you know, the lady in the show. I don't agree that it can be made universal, right? I dream of a bridge, you dream of a bridge, and it's filled with emotion. It's a vibrant bridge. Okay, go ahead and explore it. You explore it for yourself within the context of your life, and I'll explore it in the context of my life. For me, it might mean suicide. For me, it might mean San Francisco where I went to college. For you, it might mean something else. So I think the, the, the, the, the dream residue being a window to our own individual at that moment, subconscious, hyper emotional, hyper visual, hyper sexual state.

44:45Yes. But a symbol that captures it between two people, let alone between your form or self. I just don't understand how that can happen conceptually. What about erotic dreams? What, what, what have we come to learn about? I want to feel the, yeah. I mean, it's firing. I mean, you know, why not? I mean, that's a, this is, that was chapter three because I remember we were talking about, like, I wanted to hit everything up, right off the top. Why we dream, nightmares, really? Nimers? And then erotic dreams. I was fascinating because it's another thing that happens before the erotic act. kids don't have, kids have never seen a monster and have a puppy.

45:33They'll have nightmares. They're a wild. That's coming, that's descending through our psychological inheritance. Irrotic dreams, people have them before the erotic act. It's almost like an instruction guide and what's fascinating to me is that there's not a lot out there. 90 something percent, when you go from sexual dreams to neurotic dreams, over 90 % report having them. The term of all difference. Well, I don't know. I think it's more inclusive. So when you do surveys and other cultures, they're more willing to sort of say yes. A neurotic dream. The term seems to be more, it's easier for them to say yes to that.

46:14Right. Okay, because it's a little less porn vibe. Yeah, and it would also imply hugging, cut, kissing, that intimacy that's not. Exactly, they're not doing it with the partner perhaps. Well, and then the next thing is when you ask, and as we get into more online surveys, this is gonna be great, and more people are included, but like 80 % report infidelity. And then the infidelity is with a small group of people, like a repugnant boss or like family, it's weird. The tribe, the characters, the characters in the, the cast and crew is narrow, the extra wild. And so when you take that data, healthy relationships have infidelity dreams, and healthy relationships have infidelity.

46:56Those are sort of the surveys out there. And that leads to a lot of cool conversations, but from a neuroscience point of view, is this the part that really trips me out, is that around the time of erotic dreams, even before the pituitary is dripped the hormones that release all the hormones, a cascade in our body that leads to the sort of changes of maturity, is that the same fingertips that do touch can now do caress. And it's not like a new nerve got built in there. It's the capacity to perceive sensuality, changes where the sensory nerves land in the brain. It goes to the opposite side of a motor sensory strip in the sensory region.

47:45So around the time of erotic dreams, we develop the ability to have erogenous zones where a light touch on a back can be a turn on rather than just bumping in somebody in the subway. That capacity doesn't really exist at age six or seven. And no new nerves are being deposited. It's a perceptual change in the brain. That's interesting. Yeah. So to me, I like thinking about, I don't have any big answers for that. I just want people to walk away from that and say, so those changes, the ability to be aroused happens around the time of erotic dreams. And often it's before you're actually mature. So it just seems to me again, that erotic dreams are arriving almost universally in adolescence to prepare for the act of procreation and to create the drive in our mind that we later carry out in our bodies.

48:35That's the way I see it. I wonder whether, but I mean, And this is still more certainly going to have been the case. Throughout history, if you've got a particularly prudish society, Victorian England, they still get it popping. Well, of course, you're not going to be able to, but I wonder how many people that had these erotic dreams back then would have, there would have been a real source of shame for them because I'm cursed. My subconscious is contravening the norms of my culture. And God is looking down on me, especially if you're told that God is watching, if you masturbate, God is watching who you're attracted to.

49:20You know, you inferdality is one of the worst things that you should ever do. You should be loyal to your husband or your wife. And these dreams are like 80 % inferdality, and it's all with people around you. It's your mom, it's your boss, you know what I mean? It's the boss you hate, yeah. Yeah, I think it must have led to a lot of inner conflict. So when I write about erotic dreams, and you look at it in different cultures, my feeling is this is a way that just like we learn to walk and talk, nightmares do something because they're a universal dream. Erotic dreams do something. They happen in all cultures.

49:56They've happened over hundreds of years. They're happening within an porn. They're happening in Victorian ages. and that to really start to think of the patterns, the patterns of our dreams are not infinitely wild. And then what really teaches me is the patterns of our day are not infinitely wild. We build and break habits in similar ways. We fail in similar ways. The brain is not infinite. It does have some boundaries in the way it works in the very least godrails. Yeah, or for example, dreams are not infinitely wild in the sense that you don't do math in your dreams. So there is at least one boundary, right?

50:35And then they tend to have certain patterns and now I'm using that to think about that we fail in different ways while we're awake in our lives. And if you look at 10 ,000 people, the ways that people fail and succeed also start to follow some patterns that I think can guide us to like, hey, our brains and minds work a certain way. And when we learn about that, then you can say, where are we in this? How is our thermostat? Is a victory today just getting out of bed or not saying, hey, wellness, I gotta feel well or just, I gotta get out of bed and get on the bus and get to the cancer center? Like, so I wanna personalize that whether you're the addict, this is just a side -rift, man.

51:19But whether you're like, there are these people in recovery who are really good with horses in the Kentucky Derby, whether you're in the horses in racing or not, but some other horses can tell somebody who's been through something and has earned and trained themselves to become. Like they have a better rapport with the animals. No way. Yeah, it was it was featured when it came out. And so then and then there's like then you know like I was in San Francisco. I saw this person really struggling to not use you know just really just fighting that. And then I got a buddy in London who was like this North Saharan seven marathons in a row you know just to show everybody and when he's pushing to complete that seventh marathon or that the person using is really pushing to not inject, I think it's actually the same brain processes and patterns that are working inside.

52:06And if we can learn how those work, how those can be deployed, how those falter, then we have a universal toolkit. And that's what this dreaming book, that's why I told you earlier, was like, it's really important for me, is because it's helped me actually understand that if the dreaming brain follows patterns, which seems infinitely wild, right, that you brought up, then okay, so then our waking brain, we follow certain patterns. And we're not incarcerated by it, but if we learn those rules, rules of survival, rules of our, of, of how our day can be empowered or watch out for that booby trap and that falter and watch out for this attention magnet because it's going to trip you up like, like you could have a, you could have a toolkit, you could have a guidebook to your own, to your, to your, to your own mind.

52:56And I, that's where I wanna take things going forward. And that's what the Dreamy Book has taught me. I click aside, you are probably not eating in a fruit and vegetables and you know it. And this is going to help. Good news, A .G .1 just released their next gen formula. And for the first time ever,

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54:33I don't know if it's a power dynamic, you know, or it's, you know, I don't know, or the family. I mean, my idea was sometimes, yeah, the repugnant boss, but the narrow list of characters I thought hypothesis, again, there's many things we can talk about that can't be proven, but evolution at bottlenecks. Like, there were times when, like it's crazy, if you think about it, like how many different, how many species there were at one time, and maybe homo sapiens were down to a few hundred thousand or a few thousand at that time. And maybe it was an evolutionary advantage to only procreate within the tribe.

55:16Like that's a very hypothetical scenario. But there's a field called evolutionary psychology that are cognitive archaeology, that the way we think was an advantage that led us to thrive and competition with other hominids. Because people are like, oh, bigger brain, the brain is shrinking. Stop that. The end of the thoughts, that bigger brains. But something with our minds was the advantage. It wasn't just the size compared to the end of the thoughts. And that's why I love like evolutionary psychology. you, and the way we're thinking now is something we've inherited that was advantageous hundreds of thousands of years ago, but we have to now adapt that to the modern life.

56:02Okay, so if we're thinking adaptively, I'm also a huge EP fan. If we think adaptively, the repugnant boss or the family member very well may be, we're not particularly well used to having 200 ,000 people available on hinge or Tinder or in our local city that are rage and hot trot. There's usually only a very, very small group of people that are here and perhaps the sleep dream of that is, well, what if I test this out? How does that make me feel? What does that mean for me? Because there aren't that many other people that are available and and probably should see if this is actually gonna work or not.

56:46Oh, I mean, it's possible. I mean, now, as far as the characters in our Rodic dreams, whoever writes this book next, it's gonna have a lot more surveys from a lot of different types of people speaking a lot more openly about these things. And then they're gonna have to figure out, like, you know, I mean, it's celebrities are part of the Rodic dream. They're considered part of the tribe, like Brad Pitt or whatever, like celebrity show up. Something to do with you familiar. Something to do with status maybe. Or familiarity that you see them so much, you feel like they are dangerous. I don't know, so we're just riffing, but I'm curious to see that with social media stuff, how influencers do they show up in a similar capacity as conventional celebrities that I grew up in.

57:30Let me warn you right now, you do know on the pillow talk of a podcaster in your dream or not. People gonna call in, they're gonna write in. No, thank you. No, thank you. You went to Pogginboss, Chris? Yeah, you slept with a podcast though. What did you expect to happen after? God, it's three hours and he's still going, he's still going on about the biggest gun of World War II. Well, you shut the fuck up. Like, hey, look, I mean, you asked for that. You knew what you were getting into. On the erotic dreams thing, I don't know whether we have enough longitudinal data to work this out. I would be fascinated to see what impact the prevalence of porn has had in changing the sort of erotic dream, men cycling through even more partners in one sexual fantasy are they being influenced by what they see on screen.

58:14I certainly know that if I read it, well, if I have a massive book, get just 10 years, somebody just needs to rock that. I like to read fiction before I go to bed and I've been, I have an admission to make. I've been getting into chick stuff, a lot of chick stuff, freedom like fadden, the housemaid, housemaid's tail, Alex Michael -Adeys who wrote the silent patient, like thrillers, like I'm really good by jokes, but not necessarily only for women. Really good. Really good. It's like it's come from everyone. Easy, easy read in. Usually, a woman in her early 30s that's kind of locked over who fixes some sort of crazy murder thing that happens.

58:52That impacts my sleep like fuck, dude. I go to bed and I've got... But it's usually interesting. It's a particular... So you think, okay, if the thing that I read before I go to bed, I'm also watching the Tour de France Unchained on Netflix at the moment. And for some reason, I'm not having many cycling dreams. If these two things are happening, we have to assume that people who have used on a lot the volume, how is that not impacting my dreams? I think that's the, I think that's the experiment that's ongoing and somebody younger than me will see that that's the opportunity here to look at that.

59:32And in the context of dreams, it's super physiologic, stimuli is another concept. You know, you can't look away because it's just so, it's just like a coked up version of something. And so you may have some finesse and emotional regulation and you may be able to sort of in your own competition it wants to be like, I'm not going to look over there because yes, I feel desire and lust for that image. but that pops up once or twice. But when it's just like on loop, and you can't, I'm surprised this, a corn addiction is only 5%, all right? Given just the super physiologic stimuli that it is. But yes, the impact on dreamscape, the modern world's impact on dreamscape is as big as the, when there were rumors, I went black and white television, went to color that dreams also became to color.

1:00:29There's some urban legend about that. I mean, the world was in color, but when color magazines and color TV came out, there are small reports that are dreams remorning color. Wow. So that's, but the point is whether that, whether somebody can further explore that or not, but right now this is a, this is a PhD thesis for somebody right now if they want to run it. How unsurprising that the things you consume will influence the way the subconscious works at night. but sometimes not. Right? Like it's an inconsistent process of feeding your dreams. And that's what I like about it is that you think, like this, you think your dreams are only going to have the thing that you're worried about and it doesn't.

1:01:12So it has, it's metaphorical. Like you might have a lot of anxiety about something, and then your dream is filled with anxiety. But it's like Vietnam veterans, when they were going through divorces, they would have their PTSD come back. They weren't dreaming about fighting with their lovers or spouses. So dreams arise in a way that's metaphorical and requires interpretation by the person who's having the dreams. What do you think that says about where the inspiration for dream material comes from? I think it's a constant, so I think during the day we are, just stay with me now. Now, if we took a brain, we flattened it out and we said, well, they were continents, right?

1:02:00Thinking of the brain as this spot or that spot, sometimes if we endure a certain spot, like a nail, I used to take care of a dill out trauma, nail gun injuries, they come in with like a nail stuck in, you know, or they'd have a fall and a blood clot would come out. You would say, you take out a certain part and they would lose a certain capacity. You say, oh, this is what does this? It's not like that. It's like Heathrow or London, you know, Now, if you have an issue at LAX, it's going to disrupt something globally, but it's not that LAX does flights. LAX is a hub that controls flight throughout the planet.

1:02:34Similarly, there are spots in the brain hubs that control broad processes throughout the brain. And what I like about it is that these injuries have informed us about how the brain works. And when you have an injury in that Dorsal Adopry frontal cortex, which is these little spots here that's the conductor of your whole brain while you're awake, those people struggle with math. And so it's okay. It plays a role in that. And if you flatten out the brain and you have these different continents and lobes and structures, hypothetically, you have certain parts that are ramped up during the day during executive network.

1:03:14They're not in one area. They're connected by a lot of things. Like, where's the economy? I mean, it's in the cities of Wall Street. It's everywhere, but there are some hubs. So the executive network is one, it's like in Las Vegas, where Bellazza where those waterfalls go up, think of the executive network as those neurons and their connections, they're like 51%, they're running shit right now. And the imagination network is 49. And when you dream, it kind of flips. You have 49, 51 hypothetically, okay? But when you're daytime and it's executive network, you're still pulling from imagination to run to get the task done.

1:03:56You're still thinking, if I went left, if I went right, it's called counterfactual thinking. If I go this way, last time I got hurt, you know, you're still imagining plus executive network. And what happens with dreams is when the executive network falls back, your brain uses imagination as own mental workspace and the biggest example of that is dreaming. So think of the brain as always on and there's always a balance between executive network and imagination network. And the most dominant time when your executive network is happening is under threat when you have to navigate a crisis. And the biggest example of when your imagination network is most dominant, let's say 54 to 46, is when you're dreaming.

1:04:47But everything in between is a dance between, you know, execution and idea. And this is just a side riff, like they did this thing, but analyzing poetry or book cover designs. And they would put these people in FMRM machines and the idea generation is mostly imagination network. But to figure out if you came up with a good idea, you had to toggle back to dominant executive network. Otherwise, you just gotta bunk idea, right? And so what I don't want people to walk away thinking that we're in liminal states, that we're all one or all the other. And there's a thermostat in our life and how to cope.

1:05:29But there's also a balance of executive network an imagination network. And there are things created people do to bring in the imagination network. But imagination requires executive function. And really great executive function still requires imagination. What are some of the ways that people who want to activate their imagination network more effectively when they're awake can do that? All right, so I got some stories for this one. There are some examples that speak to, again, a damaged executive network, liberating a lot of imagination. One example is alcohol. It dampens the executive network.

1:06:14And some people feel that they're more creative on alcohol. And it's dose dependent. You know, not 10 drinks, not one drink. I mean, alcohol has to be really handled with care at different doses. It makes you feel different things. Number two, frontal temporal dementia that Bruce Willis has. These patients in Alzheimer's clinics, when they have a certain injury to that part of their brain, there are publications of people going on and looking up. They show them in their like artistic abilities, they can paint a lot better. Dementia, an injury to the executive network, leads to a liberation of hidden artistic, like painting, drawing talents.

1:06:53So those are two examples. Some people get hit with lightning bolts and even if it's one person, the electrical shift can release, can change that executive network to. Yeah, I mean, they're out there for savants. So when I say this, I want people to look it up, you know, and that's also one flew over the cookies and the cookies nest where that movie made a portrayal of shock therapy is very negative and it generally was. but now we create, we send in electricity and create a seizure to break people out of suicidal thoughts and stuff. So there are a lot of things and those people sometimes have more creative ideation.

1:07:30So we know that there are hidden, hidden creative abilities in all of us. And executive network is is reigning them in to get the task done to get to drive on the freeway to be on the tube. So how can we extract those? I would go back to sleep entry where that's a window where Salvador Dali thought you have good idea generation. Sleep exit is also an eye, it is a time where the executive network hasn't fully come back online, if you will. So your ideas will, I have a lot of ideas during that time, bad ideas, good ideas, but it's an idea generator. And then during the day, what you have to realize is, you're not going to hit an undirected thought is actually the thought you want when you're trying to be creative.

1:08:16It's hard to have a triple espresso and then drop creative stuff. It's the liminal time waking up, meditating, exercising, focusing on something like a flow state, partially, but not, you know, not exclusive driving during the dishes playing pickleball. But partially engaged. And then something and then something and then you can't demand it. You have to cultivate it. You can't live right. You can't white knuckle creativity. It's highly, highly irritating. Another espresso. Let's run it back. Fuck it. Yeah, that's, that's, it's only something I've found to be true. Sitting down and demanding yourself to be creative is a reliable way to ensure that you're not creative.

1:09:01You like to flirt with it. I mean, that's why it's not, that's why it's not a gift everyone has, but it can be cultivated, you know. What's, you mentioned there about some of the trans cranial electric stuff as a neurosurgeony person in that world. What do you make of this sort of new revolution? I know that depression, anxiety, some compulsions are being treated with this now. What do you make of this? It's real, but it's also very easy to go on Amazon and get one for $4 .99, where they got the little headband and being positioned in the same way. So So the stuff where it's real is rigorous, it's intense, it's at massive elite centers.

1:09:47We usually 30 days of back -to -back treatment as well. Yeah, and not a 30 -day refund like on Amazon, right? So every time neurosurgeoning was a neurosurgeoning was a funny word, we have to be able to talk about things like instinct and hunch because that leads to the fullest capacity, smarts plus instinct, who doesn't want that? Sports has the best thing like, you know, under pressure, how people perform that camp, that can't be white knuckle to either. The, the brain has to be thought about in scale. You cannot answer all of these questions with the brain. Like people talk about it's like, you can't, it's not a homogenous organ.

1:10:28It's not a liver. If you dice up the liver of different areas and you put it under magnifying glass, it's the same cell essentially for the most part. The brain has so many different cell types, So many different architectural components floating inside a You know, it's buoyant. It's floating. I tried liquid. It doesn't actually sit on the skull You know and like so it's an it's an ecosystem of little electrical molecular machines like tiny jellyfish that are spraying Electricity and chemicals at each other as we talked about before with those stickers you can record electricity You can also So deliver electricity, and that would be shock therapy.

1:11:09And now what's less disruptive is delivering using magnets. So for people who are familiar with physics, I'm not. I took all the classes to go to medical school, but electromagnetic fields, they can influence each other. So you can pulse a magnet through the skull, and it can change the local electricity of a certain region. So you can't actually put a magnet on the surface, no incision required, and pulse to the motor strip and make somebody's arm move. Because back to, it's an electrical currency that leads to dreams. It's measured at night with dreams. It can be tickled. And so now, what Stanford's doing some good stuff with in other places is, well, what if you have obsessive, compulsive disorder?

1:12:01Somebody else makes the diagnosis. The term is not used casually, let's say it's not like I'm obsessed, but somebody really is like, man, I turned that door knob 120 times today. So they're looking at the pulse can be used to dampen the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex when it can be used to heighten. So if you pulse that area every day for 30 days and you dampen it a little bit and at the same time somebody gets therapy and you do cognitive re -apraisal like the parts of therapy that I like are some of the ways where you're basically training yourself and you say, hey, that's not dirty. Don't worry about it or that door is locked.

1:12:42You don't need to wash your hands 80 times a day. Like you've been struggling with that fight the whole time. People with OCD, they know they shouldn't. And now if you pulse that area that's kind of made it, you know, difficult for them to control, that combination is leading to results that we haven't been able to find by just giving medicine. So it's real, but the thought that you can buy this and then do it for yourself. Self -administer. Yeah, or with the device that looks the same, but is not delivering the same technology. But that is the future of mental health, is a combination of therapy, magnetic pulsing, occasional medicine, and that as a cocktail, not just like three different types of antidepressants, which were helpful for people, but a mixture of talk therapy, a mixture of exercise, talk therapy, magnetic pulsing, all non -invasive, and if you can get a 10, 20 % improvement in what we're already, what's going on right now, I think this fantastic.

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1:14:18Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with function it is only $500 and right now the first thousand people can get an additional $100 off, meaning it's only $400 to get the exact same blood panel that I use. Just go to the link in the description below. I head to functionhealth .com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth .com Slash, monomistum. You've triggered dreams while people were awake during brain surgery. What's that tell us about? I mean, this is how the, I mean, this was a story back in, I noticed in my 20s when I was in training, so there's this thing, you know, some patients benefit from being woken up with their skull open in surgery.

1:15:05This, how could you benefit from that? Because whereas this Dorsal Lato prefrontal cortex, we kind of know where it is, whereas the movement area, like the hand region, we kind of know where it is, you know, just based on an MRI, it's consistent in you and me and others. Language is in a neighborhood. It's in the left temporal lobe right around here. And there is no, there is no specific address for it. It's different in both of us. And so to figure out where language is, So you don't hurt it as you're trying to enter the deep brain through that area, you have to map the brain. And so what we're trying to do is to get to it, so the neurons, the bodies of the jellyfish, molecular jellyfish are almost surface, and then their axons and tentacles converge into the middle of the brain.

1:15:56So the cortex, the canopy, the tree tops is where all the thoughts are happening, if you will. And so what we're trying to do is identify the parts of the tree top right here, the cortex, that when you stun the activity in this tiny little area, it doesn't lead to any issues with them talking or understanding. And this isn't just like they'll still be able to text, you can hurt the whole capacity of language. So the only way to do that is to wake them up in surgery. There's a you numb the scalp you put them under as the easier you open the skull is like ice fishing Then there's a little covering on the brain called the dura matters like up It's like you know like a sort of Sky diving parachute material you can pick it up and stitch it at the end You open it up and then there it is beautiful.

1:16:49It's stunning. It's white speckled with blood vessels and And then you let them wake up slowly over 30 minutes. You know, the propa fall is lightened and then somebody engages them and you have them count and sing and sometimes you even play the guitar. Like you see, they've got a YouTube video with somebody doing that, like bigger capacities, right? Not just like pinch your finger, but. And so they'll sing, like they'll sing or they'll count and they'll do it in multiple languages. One, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six. And then you'll take a little spot, a little electrical pen, faint has been electricity, and the brain can't feel when it's being touched.

1:17:29It only feels through the nerves it sends out. So when you dissect the brain on an awake patient, they have no idea what's going on. And you tickle the spot, and you stun those like collection of neurons there, maybe the size are like a tiny pea, and they keep counting, one, two, three, four, five, one, and you say, okay, I can go through this little piece to the deeper brain, and I won't hurt their language abilities. So you put a little white piece of confetti on there, a number, and then you go next to it. And then you'll find areas that cause speech arrest. You'll say, it'll be like, one, two, three, four, you'll budget it, go, one, two, three, three, three, three, three, that's for real.

1:18:08You guys can look all that up. That's been going on for 60, 70 years. And you say that caused speech arrest. You put a little red piece of confetti. So at the end, the surface of the brain, as you're going deeper, looks like Swiss cheese, and you've identified the portals through which you can dissect to take out the deeper tumor and not injure their language. Why is the language such an important indicator? Ooh, that's a big question. I mean, I think it kind of makes us who we are. I mean, it was sort of a differentiating thing for mammals. It is language and then all the complexity that comes with language.

1:18:45but it is housed in a neighborhood. And unlike the frontal lobes, there's not a lot of redundancy. So the motor strip is the same. Apes, humans the same. Language, it's kind of a fuzzy address. One frontal lobe can be injured with a spike, with a tumor, and people are mostly fine. I mean, they go home, they drive, they go to work. So there's a maximum redundancy in these, the prefrontal cortex is an important word. It's front of the front. It's the things that pushed our forehead forward. And it has three very interesting components, a dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, which is mostly out here, dorsal, up, lateral.

1:19:34It's just fancy. Then there's an orbital frontal cortex, which sort of sits above the eyes, and that does a lot of like, when people are injured there, they can't change their political views or they don't get like social faux pas. Like there's a lot of complex social things that happen up here with a lot of redundancy. And then language and feelings of spirituality and stimulating here where people like have nightmares, smell burnt toast, that's temporal lobe. And that's a fuzzy area without a lot of redundancy. And then the motor strip is a very precise area. So there are different regions you have to learn how to dissect around and through.

1:20:12And some of them can have a little bit of damage and you still function relatively well. And some of them even a tiny bit of damage, and it's right. And that's the craft is, how do I get to the deeper brain? Which without damaging anything that doesn't have redundancy? How do dreams differ in people that have got brain injuries or really so yet trauma? That's a good question. the range of injuries vary, the range of drugs vary. I couldn't figure out, like the dreams on drugs was just so wild, I couldn't find a pattern. I mean, you know, people smoke weed, they don't remember much, are they having fewer dreams or fewer less dream recall, and then there were stimulants and antidepressants and all the different combinations.

1:21:00I couldn't find a consistent pattern for it to become a chapter. I think that'll be for the next author. And similarly, in brain injury, there wasn't really a consistent pattern. With exception to one, the phallamous is sort of like this. The pineal gland that they talk about being the third eye, we remove that. Melatonin goes away, we remove that, patients are fine. So I'm not saying that people shouldn't believe in that concept and decard and the third eye, but the pineal gland is essentially evisted, you know, it's like a appendix, but the central, like, the size of an egg, there's something all the thalamus, which is sort of the gate for all the sensations coming up and it refines the movements going out.

1:21:47When you have injury in that area, they tend to have a lot more lucid dreams, immediately afterwards. So like, like, it's almost like there's too much arousal permitted in the sleeping state because the thalamus is injured, right? The gatekeeper is stopped keeping the gate. Right, because the gate is, again, nothing is ever off. If there's an alarm that goes off, or you smell smoke, you're gonna pop up out of your sleep and dreams. And that, what is let through? I think you do all kinds of weird things, like have people sleep and they put their hand in a glass of water or a bucket and see what that changed.

1:22:21The point there is a thalamus is the gatekeeper that lets certain things through. If that part is injured, let certain things through and it says time to wake up. There's an alarm. If you injure that part, you get more lucid dreaming. Awareness seems to creep into the dreaming state a little bit more readily. Hmm. Could you see in some ways the thoughts that people have in their dreams being more real or more accurate to their sense of self than their waking thoughts that unencumbered by the executive network, tampering everything down, their sense of self, the story that they have awaked together.

1:22:58This is who I am and this is what it means to be me. out of conversation with Dr. David Spiegel about hypnosis. And it sounds not too dissimilar that maybe in some ways were liberated. So yeah, I wonder whether some of the thoughts we have in dreams could be more real than the ones that we have on our awake. Well, I don't know, but I will tell you that some dreams require no interpretation, right? You're stressed out about giving a talk. You should have naked at the podium. Your end of live dreams, those tie up. But as we discussed earlier, let's not hold dreams to a standard we wouldn't waking thought.

1:23:37We have all kinds of junk thoughts and thoughts that we don't want to hold onto, though it's that don't reflect who we really are. And I think similarly for dreams, it's a wild landscape. What it is is your brain in a hyper emotional, hyper visual, hyper sexual, hyper imaginative state that is creating experiences at the neuronal level, not at the, your paralyzer, you know, living them out. But it's from your memory. It's from your life story, right? It's drawing upon all that imagination that's liberated from the bank of memories and experiences you've had. And I think in that way, it's personal, this individual and maybe doesn't give a true insight, but it gives a different insight.

1:24:21So you got to think about your life when you're awake, when you're waking up, when you're falling asleep, hold on to that dream that stuck around a little bit longer. And just use all those portals to put, to stitch the story of, are you liking where you're at? And maybe you need to change, or maybe you need to be a piece with yourself. I think the main thing that it makes me think is that it's a reminder we have way less control than we think we do. I love that. I think that's the main thing. Oh, that. shit is firing, we are not driving. I mean, and during the day too, right? I think that goes back to the, but if we learn the ways in which at this time, I have less emotional regulation.

1:25:00At this time, I have more emotional, right? Like if we knew it's not that we have a lot less control, but it's almost like writing, it's like the stream of conscious, like there are some boundaries and you are, you are sort of riding on a river. You're being tossed around, but you have some, you can drop a hand and control and pivot and move around a little bit. So I think if it allows for failure, not to be permanent, it allows for triumphs, not to be permanent, and it allows for us to say that it's okay to not have a linear goal of self -improvement and growth mindset. Like to me, it's cyclical.

1:25:39There's the winter in our life. Victory is sometimes just getting up. Victory is sometimes not, you know, just not falling apart if you get a cancer diagnosis or your child get sick. So I'm trying to come up with universal ways of understanding how our brains and minds work. So it applies to the elite, and I hundred running a hundred mile athlete or the person saying, you know, I don't want to use this oxycontent that I got after surgery that I'm trying to give this up, you know, that it's the same universal processes that play and takes the judgment out of it too. But going a bit more broad than just dreams, someone that spent a lot of time looking at the brain, what are the myths that are widely held about the brain that I don't know you the most?

1:26:24What do you wish people would stop believing about that? That's a great, I wish they would stop talking about it as the brain, as if it's a homogenous singular entity, the brain, the heart. On I think it requires just one level more. And the way I would say is, I'd love for people to have a sense of scale in their explanations and podcasts and stuff. Is it at the neuronal level? Is it at the network level, executive network or imagination network? Is it at the low level, anatomical level, temporal lobe and language? is it at the global electricity level, seizures, dreams, and so on. People say, well, the brain prefers this.

1:27:14The brain thinks this, like, it doesn't make sense to me because it's not descriptive of the tremendous diversity in this ecosystem in our skull. So I would love to see one more level of, not proof, but a little detail of precision. Depth of explanation that goes beyond the brain as if it's muscle or liver. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, so then that way you'll know if people have really thought it out. That's one, and then the number two is this myth that we only use 20 % of our brain. No, I mean, the whole brain lights up, but to do one thing, we may only use 20 % because it's really an energy hog.

1:27:55So the brain wants to be efficient and fall into patterns. And the last one is that it's limitless, you know? Your body's limitless, your mind is limitless. Actually, no, I think you can be closest to limitless in your behavior. If you realize that there are patterns and proclivities and tendencies that all human brains and minds have, and to try to identify when somebody does it well, what are their coping strategies, when somebody's struggling the way in which they falter with their goals. maybe I'm not falling apart now, but there's a lesson there for me because I don't know what's coming down the road.

1:28:39I haven't gotten knocked down yet. And that's called ecological validity, where it has to constantly be tested in real -world scenarios. So to me, the learning that the brain is not limitless, limitless, and the brain creates a mind that is reciprocal, brain makes the mind, and mine can change the brain a little bit. And then the biggest conundrum is why the mind doesn't always translate to behavior. You're like convinced I'm not gonna do this or I'm gonna do this, you just can't get it done. That bridge between mine and behavior is also another an area that I'm looking at. And that's where the coping strategies go.

1:29:13Rather than saying, oh, don't drink, don't smoke. It would be nice to say, when the thought of smoking a cigarette comes in your mind, these are the processes going on. break it at the cognitive level with step one, two, three. Avoid the attention magnet, do this, don't look at it. Definitely don't let that smell come into your nose. Okay, now it's in your body. You had a whiff of smoke that your partner's having. Now your body's Jonesing for it. Your hair is sticking up. Bring in these strategies here, somatic therapies, deep breathing. Like to know the ways in which we falter and then to apply strategies because the brain has, is not limitless.

1:29:54It falters in a certain way, triumphs in a certain way. It's a little bit more prescriptive to the way what stage in your failure or triumph you're at would give a little bit more precision to rather because it can get overwhelming. I would never tell my cancer patient like, you know, just be well or you can do it. They have to be coached through the process. So I'm trying to come up with a universal toolkit to understand this is what I'm feeling. This is the way most brains and minds and people falter when they're at this stage of addiction, of desire. And at this step, I wanna use these strategies.

1:30:32Okay, now I'm gonna get the cigarette. Okay, now I wanna use mitigation, give away the pack. But not to just give a global strategy, don't smoke. Don't smoke, but if you're being pulled in that direction, here's the game plan. That's what I want to build, a universal toolkit. Do you think the neuroscience industry is overselling some of the new tech that's coming along FMRIs, brain scans of all different types? We can detect onset of Parkinson's, CT scan with contrast, all of this stuff. Are we... Are they making promises that the sort of insights can't cache? I think so. It started like 20, 30 years ago, we needed these scans to do surgery.

1:31:24To do brain surgery. So, I'll tell you this is another story. My professors, when you had a blood clot, they would see like somebody's eyeball was, pupil was big, and they would call it exploratory trefination. With a hand drill, just start with the patient's families consent, 34 years ago, there were no CT scans, and they would just make random holes till they hit blood like drilling for oil. Then a CT scan came out and changed everything. You could see which side the blood clot was on. It was fantastic, right? They're coming out of hospitals for neurosurgery. Then we try to figure out like function, unless we're FMRI started, and because MRIs don't have radiation, you can elect to be in there.

1:32:08You can get MRI every day. Katzgen has radiation. And so neuroscientists started putting people in there. And what I would say is what's happened is the term is being thrown around brain scans, but the information nobody's explaining it, that this area is activated. But what if you activate the area that stops a function, that's different than activate an area that grows a function, right? So there's a modulation of the brain. You don't, not all activation is good, not all inhibition is good, right? And so those nuances are not getting out, but the term brain scan can be used by any author now.

1:32:53And I'm not saying that, I mean, everybody's an expert in the brain, right? Because we have one. So I don't, I'm not saying that we should limit that, but the question should be one step further. that what is the meaning of that? A brain scan shows this, and the way to understand, in my opinion, what the meaning is, is to ask, how is that experiment set up? Right, like just to say, so you have a thousand people who think of puppies in an FMRI, and then you have a thousand people who don't think of puppies and think of snakes in FMRIs, And then you're looking at the differences, puppies effects on mental health versus snakes effect on mental, that experiment can't be set up.

1:33:40Because you can't stop the person thing on my puppy, you think about snakes and you can't really control the person thing on my snakes, thinking about puppies. There's no way to set that experiment up. So when it says brain scans show this, I think if I were an interviewer, I'd say, well, how was that experiment set up? And I think that way we would get past some of the fluff that's out there. Because it has, there has to be an experiment when it justifies the answer and then just throwing out brain scan, I don't think is enough. What role does lifestyle really play when it comes to cognitive decline?

1:34:12Massive. I'm seeing a lot now. I'm big behavioral genetics stand as well. I think that heritability has got a fetid past, but it's real important. I think that more people should learn about behavioral genetics than do. I think it's there's a lot being laid at the feet of lifestyle because it's something that we do have control over in a Maritocracy Where people feel like they want to be able to author their own life this idea that you are being Puppeted by some stuff that happened literally before you were born like as you were conceived Is very disempowering as an idea to a lot of people But I also think it's super informative and if you can kind of get past the initial discomfort of There's some stuff that I didn't choose that I'm at the mercy of, but on the flip side of that, lifestyle as well.

1:35:04So talk to me about cognitive decline and its contributing elements, lifestyle, genetics. How do you come to think about it? DNA is not destiny. Especially when it comes to the brain in mind. I mean, DNA might be destiny for like heart attacks or stuff like that or certain, there There are certain medical conditions that are very linked to genetics, epigenetics. But whether you have a proclivity or a tendency to have Alzheimer's or dementia or not, whether you want to stave that off because you don't want to know based on a new Alzheimer's test or whether you've been given a diagnosis and you're trying to work through it, the The treatment is all lifestyle and behavioral.

1:35:50The medicines are limited. They exist for early diagnosis and Alzheimer's, but the treatment is all lifestyle. The way I think about it, the five key things to do or a handful of key things to do is one, you got to keep the arteries open. We've been talking about the beautiful brain. You have four arteries coming up. They go into this beautiful branching pattern. and it's squizzed parts of the loop over each other. It looks like a chandelier we call it the candelabra. And they get narrower and narrower. So you got to irrigate the flesh. So whatever is good for keeping hard arteries open and kidney arteries open is also good for keeping brain arteries open, exercise.

1:36:32Yeah, or taking the anticholestropyls that are long established and mostly safe, like pretty safe, you know. So exercise, yeah. But exercise does a couple of them. So, you got to keep the plumbing open to irrigate these neurons. Number two is you have to eat a certain way. And I know there's a lot of diet stuff out there and there's a whole theme. But the thing that over decades has been proven to preserve or even increase cognitive health, cognitive function is the mind diet. which is the closest thing to it is pescatarian. It's mostly plants, fatty fish. And the reason, so I like to take a one step deeper.

1:37:21The reason it's fatty fish in a megal threes, as you mentioned the word myelin before, and so the neurons and the axons, the way they make the electricity communicate faster is that the cable is wrapped with a fatty sheath, that's called myelin, and then the electricity actually jumps across the little gaps they have and it goes faster than if it does not mile encoded. Thought can actually deposit mile in, preferring that thought to happen again. That mile in sheet is made from omega -3s. So there's a specific fat that's needed for mile in and that's omega -3s and fatty fish. You can get in in flaxseed and other things too.

1:38:01So keeping the plumbing open, giving the brain the material it needs. Now we're at the scale level, right? Okay, and then you go in a little deeper. The timing of eating is interesting. I do think there's some pretty strong neuroscience evidence of intermittent fasting. I know a lot of diet things out there, but skipping bread, if you have the luxury of skipping breakfast, skipping going 16 hour windows will, if you don't eat, you're not gonna just drop dead. And the brain is a hybrid vehicle. The brain can live off of neurons can thrive and use glucose or ketones. And so after 16 hours, your liver will turn out ketones if you haven't eaten.

1:38:49So that's how you live past the 16 hour window if you don't consume anything. And that switching back and forth in intermittent fasting, the cognitive test now, now we're getting from flesh to mind, people seem to have more focus, people seem to have more, it's not about weight loss, but intermittent fasting, it's letting the brain have glucose and ketones a couple of days a week. That's interesting. So your suggestion here is that all ketones, someone that's doing a folketosis or carnivore style diet or somebody that's doing a classic sort of omnivore style diet, which when you're grazing, typically you're not going to drop into ketosis unless you forget to eat carbs for a couple of days or something.

1:39:33You're suggesting that there is a principle, brain benefit and neurological benefit to the switching between these two fuel sources. Correct. That's interesting. Weight loss is separate. And autophagy and that. Yeah, but also, I mean, there's a lot of ways to lose weight. But this is, we're talking about how to stay sharp. Keep in the flesh healthy, keep in the plumbing open, those arteries, vascular health. Exercise can do that. What we eat, giving your brain the right materials and the mostly plants will clear out the sludge and the anox. The plants work because they have anoxidants and tanins in these things that clear the sludge that these little molecular machines called neurons make, right?

1:40:18That's why plants are good for your brain. Are there any that you prioritize in plants? Yes. I don't think it really matters. It's hard, again, I can't find the experiment where they got a thousand people eating spinach and they got a thousand. But I can tell you over 30 years whether it's blue zones or the Mediterranean diet, now specifically called the mind diet. It's Mediterranean diet and those people, they get a lot less Alzheimer's than people who don't. So I can't distill it down to that, but Michael Pollan, he's great, mostly plants and some fish. And then the indulgence of the burger or the caviar or the vegan burger patty, it's all up to you, but the staple is pescatarian.

1:41:04Then we talked about the timing of eating, what to eat, the timing of eating. And then I think the other one that's... We're just on the timing of eating thing, outside of the intimate and fasting thing, is there anything else to say on that? It's primarily, at some points, a couple of 16, or I was like, he tones. Couple of six in a week is probably a good idea. Yeah, and relatively easy to do, you can have black coffee in the morning. I feel great when I do, when I fast, I feel really, really great. Yeah, and that's another theme. I'm trying to tie in like things that have worked for the ancients, you know, whether it's again, back to Aristotle or fasting and different things.

1:41:42Again, for people with luxury of this, right? Most, there's a lot of food insecurity. I'm just giving you the conceptual answer. And then the, you know, the fourth thing is movement. So exercise is his movement, but for my patients, what we've seen is that when you're vertical, like people think like it's got it, you know, you got to have you got to have the gear, you're out there, you're just, you look like like you're additionally for the Equinox, commercial or whatever, like that's great. I'm not talking that. But for most people just standing for my patients, the trajectories of patients who can stand and get up from a toilet and stand and get to the couch is so much better.

1:42:21Being vertical requires postural muscle activity. So what I would say is walking and movement are also cognitive protective. And you mentioned exercise. Now, exercise and movement does a couple of things. One, it keeps those arteries open and then we talked about as far as the food, number two, what to eat, pescatarian, third, and mind diet. People are gonna look all these terms up. Third, when to eat, intermittent fasting for ketones and the cognitive benefits, thinking benefits, not structural. Fourth, it's exercises that this ecosystem requires nutrients, not neurotransmitters that are being sprayed between neurons, but in the milieu, in the garden, if you will.

1:43:10And there are things like growth factors. Obviously, BDNF is a popular one. I had a grant from the Department of Defense studying it. I'm familiar with it. What I want people to know is, when you exercise, it's not like it's released from your thigh muscle and swims up to your brain and says, hey, I'm helping you out now, that these chemicals are housed in the brain. And exercise is the cue is the signal for your brace brain to release them on themselves. BDNF is released from the brain for the brain when you exercise. And I think that's a thing that's powerful. Outside of the cardiac and weight loss, I'm just talking about a little bit of movement a couple of times a week.

1:43:54And all of a sudden it starts to feel like, hey, I could do these things. They're pretty low bows to entry. But high impact and proven. And then the last one is you got to think man, you got to challenge yourself. I mean, if you know, you say bowl, you know, you ask how to run faster, say train, you're train your biceps. I mean, it's a thinking flesh. If you don't, if you don't push it to the next level of complexity and thought and challenge, not too hard where you quit, just like video games. If it's too hard to get to level up, we tap out. If it's too easy, we're not engaged. So finding whatever you're engaged in from puzzles to complex conversations that it needs to be challenged With thought with ideas with creativity with reading those novels you're reading at night.

1:44:42So the fresh content That's engaging and requires you to think Think differently Think wildly think in ways you haven't before, I think that's an essential part of also. That doesn't mean everybody who was a professor lived longer, did better than, you know, people were just rocking out and not approaching it that way. But creative ideation, I think, is as valuable as just raw processing power. It's not all about doing math and puzzles. I think challenge yourself to be creative is an intelligence in itself. What about the impact of stress on brain aging? Well, I mean, this is a big question now.

1:45:28So this whole thing about cortisol is like, okay, I don't have an answer for that. I know people who live in a constant stress, it seems like constant stress is bad for you in a lot of ways. I also know thrill seekers, surgeons, athletes, every time they do something exciting, cortisol is up. Okay. And they don't have accelerated brain aging. So I don't have an answer for whether cortisol is doing it, whether stress is doing it, whether it's just a rough life, whether it's struggling with thoughts you can't control, which revert back to your brain and injure your brain. I don't have an answer for that.

1:46:14But I think what the story I would tell you about that is there's a tumor called fiochromos I told him, and it sits on top of the kidneys and it releases all this, all these, what basically look like, you're extremely stressed out. And it's not how it feels as well. That's the essential question, my man. They don't come in like, ah! That is the essential question, my man. That's a banger. That's total. I don't have the answer, but I'm leaving you with things I hope I want to know the answer. But the brain contextualizes all of this surge of stuff that's happening. Interesting. Do you know Rick Hansen?

1:46:50You're familiar with Rick, Neuro, Science Guy, he wrote Hard Wiring Happiness. I read that and spoke to him, he became a good friend, and then the more neuroscientists that I speak to, the more I realized that a lot of the stories that we tell ourselves are kind of repurposing mechanistically what's happening in the mind. But the weird thing is nobody talks about the story you tell yourself about your knee injury, right? You know, someone snapped their ACL and it's not about thinking your ACL back into contact. We understand that there's a mechanism that's going on in here and that that really needs to be fixed and that there's a pretty well established process that you go through in terms of rehab and it's progressive overload and tendons really love to be under time and attention.

1:47:36So you're going to do this and you're going to get ranged back and there's a combination of stretching that you get with strength and the more range that you get, the less. You know, all of this mechanistically very well understood, but the thing is there is no massively phenomenological sense of having an ACL. There is one for everything that happens in the brain. And I really got into psychology, human nature, you know, Angela Duckworth or like James Clears of the world, Morgan Housels, you know, a lot of people that write very astutely about human nature and about psychology and they go into evolutionary psychology, which is even maybe one step further removed, right?

1:48:16That's like the source code and a lot of accusations of just stories and things like that. And that's really cool and compelling. The more that I spend time thinking about this stuff, the more I try and come back to mechanistically what's happening in the brain because it really does feel like, for instance, with gratitude from Rick's understanding here, he basically sees happiness as your ease of access to being grateful about what's going on. And he has a very simple process that is well understood and just reflects the mechanism of what goes on in the brain, of having experience in rich it and absorb it.

1:48:53And it's just this little acronym that you go through. I thought, that's so great. That feels to me, one of the problems that a lot of people have when they read stuff to do with human nature and psychology is it feels so fucking wishy -washy. You're like, I, I, I, give me something to grab onto. It's like my puppy's example. But let me just jump in right there. I like that. Now, what really just gets me jacked in a positive way is when I see that our behavior and our minds work in a way that's actually reflected at the neuronal level. You know, so like if you stress stem cell reservoirs just enough, they'll make one of themselves and release a new neuron.

1:49:42So they're always replenishing them. They're inexhaustible in that way, right? They're stem cells. but if you stress them out too much, they'll go into senescence or they'll die. And then you start to realize, wait, that's kind of how life is, right? Then I like to take it all the way to like, International Space Station. There's not enough gravity, those bone cells, in space, in our thigh bone, when they come back on the ground, they got a rehab for a week or two. The lack of gravitational stress leads to withering of osteocytes for astronauts. And so the same concepts in bone cells in space or stress in the human brain that there is a necessary amount of stress that leads to growth.

1:50:27But if it's too much, we fracture. If it's not enough, we don't blossom. And I like to take those concepts to then coping. And so for example, like this thing about resilience was tripping me up for a little while, like, what does that mean? You know, like, be resilient. Like, I always try to think, like, I got to be able to say this to my sons. I got to be able to say to newly diagnosed brain cancer patient. And what I learned from that is, it's sort of their systemic and processive resilience, which is basically like the resilience you bring to the fight, you know, the strength you bring to the fight, and then the process, what the fight reveals in you.

1:51:05And what I like about that is that each cell, each person, each human is in their own individual path and has accumulated a set of experiences. And my hope is universal coping skills and they're ready to engage the world in front of them. And that could be a lottery, that could be falling in love, that could be being diagnosed with cancer, and they're coming equipped with some skills. in that cyclical nature of stress and growth that happens repeatedly in our bodies. Like that's actually what's happening in our lives. There's a cyclical nature of a spring time in our cells in our body, a winter in our cells in our body in life, and that there is no like linear trajectory towards wellness or a moment of arrival or final clarity because you just don't know what the challenge or the gift in front of you is.

1:51:57Well, certainly one thing that I can say with almost absolute certainty is that you do not develop capacity to deal with things while you're dealing with things. Your capacity to deal with things is almost always developed in advance and revealed during. So there's one of the best justifications for mindfulness that mindfulness is preparing for the worst day of your life. That's what meditation is. Meditation is preparing for the worst day of your life. It's the day that you lose your job and your dad passes away on the same morning. It's a day that your partner gets a cancer diagnosis and you find out that you're no longer employed.

1:52:35Whatever it might be. If you're in the thick of it right now, I've been in the thick of it for a good bit of the last 18 months, you're doing your very best to not go under. And then you fight, fight, fight. And then when you get a break and it's really, actually, this is interesting, It's only difficult times that reveal to you, holy fuck, I couldn't really make much progress during that. I was just trying to survive. The urgent outweighed the important so much that all I could do was kind of trying to hold it together. Okay, so what's the implication of that? When you do not have something that's super urgent in front of you, when you're not putting out fires, it's a really, really, really good time to develop some more.

1:53:23Psychological resolve. Yes, that's the time that you try to get your meditation habit in that the time that you work on your health You refine your training for the fight that has yet to come. Yep. That was with the toolkit that I'm I'll never finally make But I mean that's what I'm trying to get at and back to the cells cells go through a period of dormancy Mm -hmm and at that point Not dying is is actually the victory and then there's a spring time just like in nature and this happens in our biology and I think it happens in our psychology that you're talking about. And that those moments, there's a temporal nature.

1:54:00There's like reflection and going back and saying, okay, what are the lessons I learned? How would I handle it better? Forward, I love all that. I'm actually trying to come up with when you feel like you're drowning or about to fall apart in that short temporal window. Are there things we can do at that time? I'll do we interject, right, then. Yeah. The time -sensitive maneuvers. Yeah, I like, I very much like being able to step in on stuff that's acute. It's all well and good talking about building up your resilience and all the rest of it. But if you're in the fucking fight, you go, hey, I can't go back six months ago and start a meditation practice.

1:54:35Tell me what to do right now. Right. And so what I would say is if, you know, I would say is that

1:54:45urges that hijack the body are very fascinating to me. When the thought is now recruits the body, just a whole new fight, whether that's addiction, whether that's desire, because now there's a feeling that if I don't go in this harmful direction that I will feel ill. So now you're not just trying to stop a thought. Let's take the example of having a cigarette again. It's not just, I don't have a cigarette, I don't have a cigarette, it could cause cancer down the road. It's bad, it's bad, you promised everybody, but you wouldn't, they might smell it on you, whatever you're thinking, don't look at it.

1:55:21Look at those shiny boxes of the gas station, right? But then when you have that waft and it goes from the nerves in your old factory bulb to your front aloe, and now you're just like, oh man, that reminds you of so much. People have physiologic changes. So now the fight is controlling your mind and body, and I believe the maneuvers are different when it goes from your mind to your body. and the management of bodily urges

1:55:49requires bodily techniques. Breathing techniques are the same ones I use in surgery. Sometimes when I was learning and you feel like that, ooh, around that corner, that tumor's gonna run away from you. I mean, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, it's gonna, either you're gonna freak out, you're not gonna freak out. And the simplest thing I can tell you is like when you hyperventilate, it creates a feeling of anxiety. Well, you got to take it the other way. The first maneuver is just control your breathing. Nobody knows. The room is just like, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, and you're just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, this could run away from me.

1:56:23And so I have my own maneuver that I do in that moment is just stop talking, you know, and there's something I call out. I say, I need 15, and they're like, okay, everybody pay attention. Back to your positions that he might say, I need this from the wall, I need this from the wall, And the whole thing is just get that breathing paste. I'm not talking about one nostril. I'm not getting in, no, I'm just trying to tell you physiologically if I paste my breathing, I can slow down this swell of fear and panic that's in my guts when things run away from me. I try to use the same thing with a lover and with a conflict, but that's a specific toolkit that has a physiologic basis that I can explain that the ancients use is in the acute moment and I'm hunting now the next year or so, but are there other maneuvers that we're all equipped with that can work while you're, you know, while you feel like you're falling apart or you're drowning or you're struggling, you know, at that moment, not in rearview, not in the future I will right now.

1:57:27Right now, what do I do? Is there anything you've ever seen in surgery that shook your belief in signs?

1:57:38not in surgery. Surgery is a physical performance is ballet, but I have had patients in psychological Logical sciences I've had patients where I just look I'm like I don't The I don't know how the great majority of cancer patients get dressed come in And I'm ready to get the worst news your lives every three months when we do the scans It's come back for didn't go away. I mean it's just it's just so heavy and the What the fight brings out in them or the coping skills they brought and it's inconsistent and I'll get to the more philosophical way. So it's inconsistent. Somebody comes in, they've got the wellness techniques, they're the CEO, they get hit with that C word.

1:58:35It's, you don't know what you're gonna get. And then somebody comes in, they're struggling with something, they look disheveled, you're like, this person's not gonna handle as well. It brings out something in them. So I think this feeling that arrival in some sort of wellness and achievement or clarity understanding of life is misguided because we don't know what's coming next. I think it's cyclical, develop your skills, time -sensitive skills in the review, being prepared for what's forward. That's the way I've been approaching it. And as far as shook my belief in science, I would say something recently has liberated my view in science, that it's through science, we can have understanding that we might not.

1:59:15So there are these near -death experiences, those electrodes are being recorded, people in Canada, and studies starting to come out, that one, the heart stops for the first few minutes and it's afterwards, the brain just deploys all its chemicals and electricity. So whereas other organs whimper to death, like the brain is struggling, the heart stops, and then if you measure the electricity, because you can actually have a DNR, you can say, like, if I have a heart attack, don't touch me. Do not resuscitate. And they're still monitoring. You still get a life feed of the brain electricity. So you would think the heart stops, then the brain electricity stops, but it goes for a minute or two afterwards.

1:59:52And it's wild. it's fierce. It's not like, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a measurement. What does it mean? That's for everybody to explore it, but to me, it's like, okay, so there's, there'll always be just amazing neuroscience information coming from hospitals and patients. That's a little bit more than just scanners, right? And when those people are resuscitated and why do they all universally say I saw it's a film strip of my own life and you know, There's a consistent pattern of what happens if you drown or if you have a near -death experience and our resuscitated in whichever manner They come back reporting the same thing film strip of their life wide stories.

2:00:32They saw loved ones And when you look at the electricity it's very consistent with dreaming and memories So to me, I love the fact that now we might be able to explain why near -death experiences are a consistent perception or or experience for for people so I love seeing that stuff come out Yeah, I'm interested in what working with terminal patients has taught you about living life well? Everything.

2:01:04Yeah, everything.

2:01:08You know, it's thousands now. I mean, I'm 52, massive experience of about three adult sons, massive life experience. But since 25 I've been taking care of some of the sickest people in the hospital Brain injury for 10 years. How's your life? Yeah, I was a kid when I started, you know, I mean I look at my I look at people in their 20s. I'm like woof I was like 26 or 27. I wrote about it for a vice article. I would do care I mean I helped families Land their patients I mean their family members and remove the breathing tubes and say their last rights and wishes and all the different cultural elements that come into it and I see you, so I was 27 years old.

2:01:50And I started to see there were patterns in the ways the brain and mind respond when the finish line comes closer. It's not trauma. You're gone. You don't know it. It's okay. Three years. Two to five, seven. You can't quantify it, but you know it's coming now. It's in sight. And they had a universal, all of them say the same thing again. When that finish line comes in a view, and it's the lessons I think everybody else talks about, but they have a similar thing about reconciliation, forgiveness about having spent more time with their children, usually it was like busy dads at that time, my 20s, you know.

2:02:38And I corporate that, I had a lab, I raised my kids, didn't take them just to the baseball games, but the practices spent a lot of time to them. And that they seemed unencumbered. They weren't so, the little things don't get to them as much. And the question then becomes, how do we take those lessons without actually having, you know, if hypothetically the finished God willing is 25 years away from me, how can I actually live it like it's five years from now? And that's the lesson that my cancer patients had taught me is one, start now with what you would if you had, you know, you do five -year curves, and two, build your coping skills, because the ones that I saw do well, they had techniques.

2:03:26I mean, I'm just coming back to this, and like I learned one from one, like every three months, the scans, let's just imagine, brain scan, two, three hours, six hours, who knows what it's gonna e -show up in clinic, it's another hour to wait to hear it for somebody. And so they would do this thing where like, the 11 weeks in between, I can hold on to myself and say, this is not the time to be stressed, but I need to have a week when I'm just completely losing it. Like you can't just not be stressed about that, but they were able to compartmentalize it to have like 11 good weeks and then another shitty week because oh my God, I got another big of a brain scan at C.

2:04:06Dr. John D .O. And so I started to see those techniques that we're using To make the most of their cancer journey support when network is nice, but the support network can be surprising It's not always if you think it is you know, once that cancer where it arrives Relationships break up surprising relationships form and so You know no triumph is forever and no tragedies forever, but if you come equipped with your own personal and psychological tool kit You know we make the most of this run Yeah, Dr. John DeL, ladies and gentlemen, why should people go? You don't want to keep up to date with everything you've got going on?

2:04:40Just, uh, I don't know. I'm just, uh, you know, I'm a surgeon at City of Old Cancer Center. I think that's the easiest thing is look up Dr. John DeL at City of Hope and then, you know, things will pop up, but appreciate you having me on. I appreciate you, Timon.