Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,
where we discuss science
and science-based tools
for everyday life.
[upbeat rock music]
I’m Andrew Huberman,
and I’m a professor of
neurobiology and ophthalmology at
at Stanford School of Medicine.
Today, my guest is Dr.
Wendy Suzuki.
Dr.
Suzuki is a professor of
neuroscience and psychology
at New York University and
one of the leading researchers
in the area of learning and memory.
Her laboratory has contributed fundamental
textbook understanding of how brain areas
such as the hippocampus, which
you will learn about today,
how the hippocampus and
related brain circuits allow us
to take certain experiences
and commit them to memory
so that we can use that
information in the future.
Dr.
Suzuki is also an
expert public educator
in the realm of science.
A few years back, she had a TED talk
that essentially went viral.
If you haven’t seen it
already, you should absolutely
check it out in which she
describes her experience
using exercise as a way to
enhance learning and memory.
And on the basis of that
personal experience,
she reshaped her laboratory
to explore how things
like meditation,
exercise, and other things
that we can do with our
physiology and our psychology
can allow us to learn faster,
to commit things to memory longer,
and, indeed, to reshape
our cognitive performance
in a variety of settings.
As such, I am delighted to
announce that Dr.
Suzuki
is now not only running a
laboratory at New York University,
but she is the incoming
Dean of Arts and Science
at New York University.
And of course she was
selected for that role
for her many talents, but
one of the important aspects
of her program, she
tells me, is going to be
to incorporate the incredible
power of exercise, meditation,
and other behavioral practices
for enhancing learning,
for improving stress
management, and other things
to optimize student performance.
Today, you are going to get access to much
of that information so that
you can apply those tools
in your daily life, as well.
Dr.
Suzuki is also an author
of several important books.
The most recent one is entitled
“Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power
“of the Most Misunderstood
Emotion,” and a previous book
entitled “Healthy Brain, Happy Life:
“A Personal Program to Activate your Brain
“and Do Everything Better.”
And while that is admittedly
a very pop science-type title,
I will remind you that she is one
of the preeminent memory
researchers in the world
and has been for quite a while,
so the information that
you’ll glean from those books
is both rich in depth and
breadth and is highly applicable.
By the end of today’s discussion,
you will have learned from
Dr.
Suzuki a large amount
of knowledge about how
memories are formed,
how they are lost, and you
will have a much larger kit
of tools to apply for your
efforts to learn better,
to remember better, and
to apply that information
in the ways that best serve you.
Before we begin, I’d like to
emphasize that this podcast
is separate from my teaching
and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my
desire and effort to bring
zero-cost-to-consumer
information about science
and science-related tools
to the general public.
In keeping with that theme,
I’d like to thank the sponsors
of today’s podcast.
Our first sponsor is Athletic Greens.
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I’ve been taking Athletic
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And now for my discussion
with Dr.
Wendy Suzuki.
Wendy, great to see you
again and to have you here,
it’s been a little while.
– It’s been a while, so
great to be here, Andrew.
thank you so much for having me.
– Yeah, delighted.
I’d like to start off by
talking about memory generally,
and then I’d love to chat
about your incredible work,
discovering how exercise
and memory interface
and what people can do
to improve their memory
and brain function generally.
– Yes.
– But for those
that are not familiar, maybe
you could just step us through
the basic elements of memory,
a few brain structures, perhaps.
– Sure.
– You know, what happens
when I, for instance, this mug of tea
is pretty unremarkable.
But the fact that now
I’ve talked about it,
I don’t know that I’ll
ever forget about it.
Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.
So what happens when I
look at this mug and decide
that it’s something special
for whatever reason?
– Yeah, well, I like to
say there are four things
that make things memorable.
Number one is novelty.
If it’s something new,
the very first thing,
the very first time we’ve seen something
or experienced something,
our brains are drawn to that,
our attentional systems draw us to that.
And when you are paying
attention to something,
that’s part of what
makes things memorable.
Second is repetition.
If you see that cup of
tea every single day,
and every single time you do an interview
you talk about your cup of tea,
you’re going to remember it.
That’s just how our brains
work, repetition works.
Third is association.
So if you meet somebody new
that knows lots of people that you know,
so you and I share many, many, many,
many people that we both know.
It’s easy to remember, it’s
easier to remember you,
especially if you were
somebody new that I hadn’t
met before, we have met
before, so association.
And then the fourth one
is emotional resonance.
So we remember the happiest
and the saddest moments of our lives,
and that also includes
funny, surprising things.
That is the interaction between
two key brain structures,
the amygdala, which is
important for processing
lots of emotional,
particularly threatening kinds
of situations, but those threatening,
surprising kinds of
situations, the amygdala takes
that information and makes
another key structure
called the hippocampus work better
to put new long-term
memories in your brain.
So that, in fact, is the key
structure for long-term memory,
this structure called the hippocampus.
– Fantastic, so novelty,
repetition, association,
and emotional resonance.
– Yes.
– Could you tell us a bit
more about the hippocampus?
I think, at least for my generation, well,
I’m a neuroscientist, but for
most people of my generation,
I think they first heard
about the hippocampus
from the movie “Memento.”
– Oh yeah, yeah.
– Where the guy
says hippocampus, and for those of you
that haven’t seen that movie,
it’s a bizarrely constructed movie,
but an interesting one,
nonetheless, about memory.
But even as a neuroscientist,
sometimes I’m perplexed at
how the hippocampus works.
Maybe you could, if you would,
step us through kind of
what this structure is,
what it looks like, maybe
a few of its subregions,
because unlike vision,
the topic that I’ve worked
most of my career on, where we know, okay,
the eye does this part, and
the thalamus does this part,
and the cortex does that
part, I’ve always been
a little perplexed about
the hippocampus, frankly.
And I’ve read the textbooks
and I’ve heard the lectures,
but I’d love to get the update.
What are the general
themes of the hippocampus
as a structure and its function?
What do you think everyone,
including neuroscientists,
should know about the hippocampus?
– Absolutely, so let’s
start with the basics.
The word hippocampus means seahorse.
It is shaped, the structure is shaped,
like a kind of curlicue
seahorse, that is accurate.
Everybody, including
neuroscientists, should know
it’s a beautiful structure.
It is visually, anatomically beautiful
with these kind of intertwining
twirly subregions within it.
And I think that’s one of the
reasons why early anatomists,
who were the very first
neuroscientists, got attracted to it
because it’s this interesting
kind of twirly structure
deep in the heart of the brain.
So that’s anatomically.
Functionally, what does it do?
Well, it’s easiest to
understand what it does
when you look at what happens
when you don’t have a hippocampus anymore.
What if you, by some disease,
or you have your hippocampus
removed by accident,
what happens?
Well, we know this from the most famous
neurological patient of all
time, his initials were HM,
so all psychology and
neuroscience students know him.
He was operated in 1954 and the
paper was published in 1957.
They removed both his
hippocampi because he had
very terrible epilepsy and
they knew that the hippocampus
was the genesis of epilepsy.
And this was experimental,
his epilepsy was so bad
that they decided not just to remove
one hippocampus, but both.
And what happened was
immediate loss of all ability
to form new memories for facts and events.
Think about that for a
second, all facts or events
you’re not able to remember.
I can’t remember this
interaction between us.
I can’t remember any of
the facts that we were
just chatting about in
our neuroscience lives.
None of that can move
into our long-term memory.
So this hippocampus does something
with all of these perceptions
that are coming at us
every single day, every minute of the day,
and not for all of them,
but for some of them
that have these features
that we just talked about,
maybe they’re novel, maybe
they have associations,
maybe they’re emotionally relevant,
maybe they’ve been repeated,
some of those things in the realm of facts
or events get encoded
in our long-term memory.
And that’s the textbook of why
the hippocampus is so important.
I like to always add, and I mean,
this is why I studied
it for so many years,
the hippocampus and what it does
really defines our own personal histories.
It means it defines who we are,
because if we can’t
remember what we’ve done,
the information we’ve learned,
and the events of our lives,
it changes us, that’s
what really defines us.
That’s why I wanted to
study the hippocampus.
And I think the exciting, new
ideas about the hippocampus
is that it’s, you know, hippocampus
is important for memory,
so if you say that,
you’ll impress all your
people at your cocktail party,
but what people have started
to realize that it’s not
just memory, it’s not just
putting together associations
for what, where, and when
of events that happened
in our past, but it’s
putting together information
that is in our long-term memory banks
in interesting new ways.
I’m talking about imagination.
So without the hippocampus,
yes, you can’t remember things,
but actually you’re not able
to imagine events or situations
that you’ve never experienced before.
So what that says is the
hippocampus is important for memory
is too simple a way to think about it.
What the hippocampus is
important for is what we’ve
already talked about, associating things
together writ large.
Anytime you need to
associate something together,
either for your past, your
present, or your future,
you are using your hippocampus.
And it takes on this
much more important role
in our cognitive lives when
we think about it like that.
That is kind of the new hippocampus
that neuroscientists
are studying these days.
– That’s fantastic, so
it sounds like it really
sets context, but it can do that
with elements from the past,
the present, or the future.
– Yes.
– And for neuroscientists
the phrase is domain,
we say the time domain
meaning as opposed to just
evaluating things in space,
it sounds like the time domain
of hippocampal functioning
is incredibly interesting.
– It is.
– And even the fact that
we can have short-term,
medium-term, and long-term memories,
and we could go down any
of these rabbit holes.
I’ll ask you a true or
false, mostly because
I just really want to know the answer.
A few years ago, the theme in
various high-profile reviews
seemed to be that the
hippocampus was involved
in encoding, in creating memories,
but not in storing memories
and that the memory storage
was in the neocortex
or the other overlying areas of the brain.
Is that too general a statement?
– That’s a tricky statement
because I think that ultimately,
yes, that long-term memories
are stored in the cortex,
but those memories are
stored in the hippocampus
sometimes for a very, very long time.
So how long is too long where you say, oh,
it’s not the hippocampus anymore?
If it’s four years, does that mean that
it’s not stored in the hippocampus?
I think that’s a tricky question.
And yes, it was coming
up a lot because people
were debating it and some people did think
that you shouldn’t think
about the hippocampus
as a storage area, but I think it’s
a long, long, long-term kind
of intermediate storage area,
maybe not the long-term storage area.
That’s why it’s hard to
answer that question.
– Great, as I recall,
HM could remember facts
from before his surgery.
– Yes.
– He couldn’t form
new memories.
– Correct.
– And given that he had no hippocampus,
it would at least
partially support the idea
that some memories are retained
outside the hippocampus.
– However, he did have part
of his posterior hippocampus intact.
So that’s the tricky thing.
I think initially, in fact, Scoville,
the neurosurgeon overestimated
the number of millimeters
he intended to remove of the hippocampus.
And then when they did this,
the very historic MRI of HM
later in his life, they
showed that, in fact,
he did have that part of the
posterior hippocampus intact.
So now it makes it a
little bit more complicated
to interpret what’s going on.
Not that it was never
uncomplicated, any interpretation
of a lesion in a patient,
as you know, is complicated,
but HM had this mythical role
in neuroscience and neurology
and now it was complicated
because he does have
more of the hippocampus intact.
– Got it, I did not know that.
There are some memories that
can be formed very quickly,
so called one-trial learning,
and I’m just looking at
this list again, novelty,
repetition, association,
and emotional resonance.
It seems like some experiences
can bypass the need
for multiple repetitions.
– Yeah, absolutely.
– And unfortunately it seems
that our nervous system
is skewed toward creating
one-trial memories
for negative events.
– Right.
– Which has a survival adaptive mechanism.
What is the neural connection
that allows that to happen?
Is it the amygdala to
hippocampus connection?
I mean, as you and I know, it
seems like every brain area
ultimately is connected
to everything else.
It’s just a question of
through how many nodes,
just like every city is
connected to another city,
it’s just a question of
how many flights and roads
do you have to traverse
before you get there.
What is it about one-trial learning?
I mean, at a kind of top contour level,
how can we learn certain things so fast
and other things are tricky?
And now every time I
look at this white mug,
it’s queuing up something special
simply by virtue of saying it.
So is that one-trial memory?
What is it about very
emotionally salient events
that allow memories to get stamped in?
– Yeah, I mean, I think
you’ve already alluded to it.
That is there is this protective
function of our brains
that has evolved over the
last 2.5 million years
that you need to pay attention
and remember certain
things for your survival.
So some things that get
stamped in, they’re memories,
but they’re fear memories.
If I get mugged on the
subway or, you know,
there are terrible things that
could happen on the subway
as we just learned.
But if something terrible happens,
if something very scary
happens, you remember that,
and that fear and that
memory of all those things,
I mean, I have one when I
lived in Washington, DC,
I went to work at NIH on a
Sunday afternoon and I came back
and when I rounded the corner
to my door of my apartment,
it was crowbarred in.
Somebody had taken a crowbar,
opened up my door, and stole
all of the nicest things
in my apartment, which wasn’t that nice,
’cause I wasn’t making that much money.
But ever since then, whenever
I rounded that corner,
I still had that memory.
It was terrible because it
put me in a terrible state
when I was just coming home
and that’s a survival mechanism.
Do you want to be alert
to possible danger?
Absolutely yes.
So part of those one-trial
memories, I think,
is often taking advantage of this
evolutionarily developed
system to tamp in things
that could be potentially
dangerous to you into your memory.
So you forever will remember
this particular corner
or this hallway because
that is where something
really bad happened to you.
– It seems like a location.
We talk about conditioned place aversion,
which is just a geek speak
for wanting to avoid the place
where something bad happened,
or conditioned place
preference, wanting to go back
to a place where something
positive happened.
Or even looking at a
photograph of where you had
a wonderful time with
somebody and that can evoke
all sorts of positive sensations.
It seems like at some level,
as complex as the brain is,
the basic elements of
feeling good or feeling lousy
are states within the brain
and body and linking those
to places seems like it’s a
pretty straightforward formula,
you know, link place to state,
link state to place, etc.,
as your description just provided.
When we learn more complex information,
a poem, a concept, or we
have to ratchet through
a set of ideas, that also involves memory.
I’m sure that we’ll talk more about this,
but is there any way that
you are aware of that state,
bodily state can be leveraged
to enhance the speed
or the quality of memories
and memory formation?
So to be clear about it,
it seems there’s something very
important about this fourth,
this emotional resonance component.
Novelty, the crowbar into the doors,
thank goodness sounds like it was novel,
it wasn’t repeated thing, thank goodness.
So repetition is out and the association
is very, very strong.
But for people trying to learn
information that they’re not
that excited about, or
that repetition is hard,
or the novelty is simply
that it’s painful.
– Yes, I’ve been there, absolutely.
– Yeah, as have I.
Is there something that
we can do to leverage
knowledge of how the memory
system works naturally
to make that a more
straightforward process?
– So, I immediately turn to
the things that I’ve studied
that you talk about so
beautifully on your podcast,
which are strategies generally to make
your brain work better.
I was just reminding myself
of your podcast about cold
because I use that every morning.
– Oh, you do cold?
– I do, I do.
– Just take a moment
and, and just tell us,
what is your cold exposure protocol,
then I’ll take you back
to what you’re saying.
– So my cold exposure
protocol is at the end
of every morning shower that I take,
the shower is warm, but I give
myself a big blast of cold
at the end of that and
it makes me feel so good.
And because I’ve been
doing it for several years,
it’s so much less painful.
Okay, I admit, it was really
painful at the beginning,
but it’s much less painful.
I could handle the cold water and my pipes
give nice, really cold water.
And it just, I could feel
the awakedness kind of
come up in me after that.
And I miss it, if I forget to do it,
sometimes I run back in and
give myself that cold blast
because it is upping,
I think you talked about
this on your podcast,
what’s happening in the brain?
– Basically the cold stimulus, that shock,
that catching your breath, etc.,
is adrenaline from the adrenals.
But also from what we understand now,
some new neuroimaging, there’s epinephrine
and norepinephrine released
from locus ceruleus,
which again is a brain structure
in the back of the brain,
kind of sprinklers the rest of the brain
with a kind of a wake-up chemical.
And there’s a long arc
on dopamine release.
This paper back in 2000 showed
that it’s a steady increase
up to about 2.5x of circulating dopamine.
So they weren’t looking directly
in the brain admittedly,
but it goes on for four or five hours.
– Wow, yeah.
– So the improved mood
and the feeling of
alertness is a real thing.
– Yeah, yeah, so I use that.
I mean, so basically I
use my morning routine.
What is my morning routine?
I get up, I do a 45-minute tea meditation.
So meditating over the
brewing and drinking of tea
that I learned from a monk
who has an institute in Taiwan
where he teaches tea meditation, love it.
I’ve learned all about tea,
different kinds of tea.
And then I do a 30-minute
cardio weights workout.
Then I take my shower with
the hot-cold contrast.
And, oh, and before that, key thing,
if I want to learn something
and I want to be able
to get over the difficulty
of repeating things,
or just push myself to do stuff, sleep,
so good, good sleep.
I’ve learned that over the pandemic,
I did sleep experiments on
myself and I learned that I was
sleeping an hour less
than I really needed.
So I really need seven-and-a-half
to eight hours of sleep.
And I was getting six and a half.
And so now, I get that
seven-and-a-half to eight hours
every single night, and guess what?
I come to different difficult
tasks and I am more willing
to give it a try, to try longer,
to try harder, and my brain works better.
And so I think probably if you go back
to all of your podcasts,
you’ll learn exactly why
each one of those things that I do,
which I would bet that
you probably do, too,
is helping my brain.
– I guarantee they are.
And I’m impressed that
you do all these things,
although not surprised.
And I should say that
the extra hour of sleep
is really impressive and
extremely beneficial.
I’m curious, do you get that
in the early part of the night
by going to bed earlier?
– Yeah.
– Terrific, and I should just mention,
’cause you’re too humble to
do it, but I’ll say it again
that not only are you a full professor,
tenured full professor
and running a laboratory,
you teach undergraduates,
you have an important
role in public education,
multiple books, and you’re now
dean of the College of
Arts and Sciences at NYU.
So the extra hour of
sleep is benefiting you
and as a consequence benefiting
everybody else as well.
Thanks for sharing with us your protocol.
I took you off the trajectory
of what one can do,
but I think that people
and I appreciate knowing
kind of what the practical steps are.
Because knowing the science is important,
mechanism I do believe is
important for embedding protocols
in people’s minds and why
they might want to do them,
but really hearing the
mechanics of it is useful.
It sounds like everything
together takes about an hour,
it’s not an excessive amount of time,
but it probably gives you an outsized
positive effect on your day.
– Absolutely, I definitely notice it
if I’m not able to do it.
And when I don’t, so I do
this seven days a week,
it’s also not just five
days, seven days a week.
And when I can’t do it,
it’s usually early-morning
flights or things like that.
And I get over it, but it’s
critical for the working of my brain.
– I love it and I’ll just
highlight one thing that you said
before we move on, which is
that you said when sometimes
if you get out of the
shower before the cold,
you’ll get back in.
That’s, to me, a really beautiful example
of conditioned place preference.
Now the cold shower has
become something that
you sort of look forward to.
I should say that nobody is
immune from the adrenaline
increase of cold, no matter how cold,
this is what’s interesting about cold.
It’s one of the reasons why
it’s such an important part
of the screening for special operations,
so our SEAL teams, but other
branches in military too,
which is that there are very
few stimuli that you can give
anyone and consistently get an adrenaline
– Oh, interesting.
– Release from that
without harming them.
With heat, eventually you
need to use so much heat
that you damage tissue.
Or with exercise, you have
to use so much exercise
that you can damage joints.
And it’s this very kind of brilliant,
I don’t know if it was intentional or not,
it’s sort of unintentional
genius that special operations
has figured out that by sending
people back into the cold
over and over, it never
really gets easier,
but over time people
actually start to crave it
and it provides this reduction
in inflammation, etc.
So anyway, beautiful practice, thank you.
I want to learn more
about your tea meditation
later in the episode.
But in any event returning to ways that
we can improve memory formation.
Maybe if you would tell
us your story around this.
I know you’ve told it before,
but I think a lot of members
of the audience and I
would love to hear how you came to this.
Because growing up in
neuroscience, I knew you
as one of the, I would say
one of the three or four,
and they’re all alongside one another,
this isn’t a hierarchical statement,
three or four top memory
researchers in the world.
Textbook material is Suzuki.
My textbooks are filled
with the word Suzuki,
your last name,
according to the information
on memory and memory formation.
So you were doing that
and doing the things
that academics do, and then
you’re still doing that,
and still at a very high level,
but then things took
a different direction.
And maybe we could talk about
your story and how you came
to the place you are at now
because I think it
provides a number of tools
that people could implement themselves.
– Yeah, so this story
happened as I was working
to get tenure at NYU.
And, as you know, it’s
a stress-filled process.
They give you six years to show your stuff
and you are judged in front
of all your colleagues.
And either they say, okay,
you can join the club
or they say, sorry, you are humiliated
in front of everybody.
This was what was going on in my life.
– They actually tell people to leave.
If you don’t get tenure, you’re gone.
– You have to leave your institution.
And so, you work really, really hard.
And so my strategy was,
I’m just going to not do anything but work
and I’m just going to work.
And I’m going to just work as hard
as I can for the six years.
And what happens when you
work and you don’t have
any sort of life outside of work
and you live in New York
where there’s all sorts
of really good takeout,
you gain 25 pounds,
which is exactly what I did.
And you get really, really stressed.
And you start to ask
yourself how come I’m living
in New York City, and I love Broadway,
and I haven’t gone to a
Broadway show in two years?
And so I, 25 pounds overweight,
I decided to go on vacation.
And I went by myself
’cause I had no friends.
And I went to, I did
an adventure river rafting trip in Peru.
And so I go by myself and
meet other interesting people
and I was the weakest
person on this whole trip.
Like they were so much in better
shape, it was embarrassing
and they won’t say this,
they won’t admit this
to me, but it was true.
And I kind of came back and I said, okay,
I cannot be the weakest person.
I’m in my late 30s, I
have to do something.
So I went to the gym
and I said, oh my God,
I’m 25 pounds overweight,
let’s try at least to lose this weight.
And so I go to the gym, I
notice how much better I feel
when I go to just a single class.
I remember the very first class I went to
was a hip hop dance class.
I’m a terrible hip hop dancer,
but I still felt good after that class.
And then fast forward a year and a half,
I’ve lost the 25 pounds,
so proud of myself,
so much happier.
And I’m sitting in my office
doing what you and I do a lot,
which is writing an NIH
grant, which is our lifeblood.
And writing, writing, writing,
and this thought goes
through my mind that had
never gone through my mind before
during this six years
of frantic grant writing
when I was trying to get tenure,
and that thought was grant
writing went well today.
You know, that felt good.
I was like, I’ve never
had that thought before,
what’s going on here,
this is really weird?
– I don’t know that anyone
has had that thought before.
– No, I’m sure people
have had that thought.
But I thought maybe I’m
just having a good day.
But when I thought about it,
I thought it’s not just today.
My grant writing seems to
have been getting smoother,
like I’m able to focus longer,
the sessions feel better to me.
And at that point, the only
thing that I changed in my life,
it was a huge thing, but I had become
a gym rat rather than a workaholic.
And that’s when my spidey
sense for neuroscientists
popped up and I said, what
do we know about the effects
of exercise on your brain?
Because if I think about it,
what was better about my
writing is I could focus longer
and deeper, very important,
and I could remember those
little details that you try
and pull together for your
million dollar NIH grant
from 30 different articles
that you have open
on your screen all at the same time,
that’s the hippocampal memory.
I was studying that, I
was writing the grant
on hippocampal memory.
And so that’s when I got really
interested in the effects
of exercise on both prefrontal
focus and attention function
and hippocampal function
because of my own observation.
I still remember where I was sitting,
which office I was in,
when I had this revelation.
But the thing that
really sealed it for me,
that made me think not just,
oh, this is interesting,
but I want to study this,
is right around that time
I got a phone call from my
mom who said that my dad
wasn’t feeling well and
that he had told her
that he got lost driving
back from the 7-11,
which was literally seven
blocks from our house
that I grew up in.
And I knew that was hippocampal function.
I suspected dementia.
I suspected, oh,
didn’t want to admit Alzheimer’s dementia,
which he had.
And it was funny because,
I mean it wasn’t funny,
but my mom and dad are two
sides of a very different coin.
My dad is the engineer,
not so active all his life,
but would loved and sit
and read books all day.
My mom was the athlete.
She played team tennis into her 80s.
And it started to show at that point.
And so then I had even
a more pressing reason
to think about what the
effects of exercise were
because I noticed that all
the things that were improving
in my brain suddenly went
away in my dad’s brain.
Really, really smart guy,
engineer in Silicon Valley,
helped that push in Silicon
Valley in the ’70s happen,
he had no more memory.
He couldn’t focus his attention.
His mood was rock bottom,
he’s a very happy guy.
And everything was the opposite in me.
And I started thinking this
isn’t just something to help
somebody who wants to get
tenure, this is something
that could help millions
and millions of people,
most importantly, our aging population.
What if, you know, what’s happening?
And so the thing that makes
me wake up in the morning is
when I realized that every
single time you move your body,
you are releasing a whole
bunch of neurochemicals.
And some of them we’ve talked about,
the good mood comes from
dopamine, and serotonin,
and noradrenaline, but the
thing that gets released also,
particularly with aerobic
exercise, is a growth factor
called brain derived
neurotrophic factor, or BDNF.
And that is so important
because what it does is it goes
directly to your hippocampus
and it helps brand new
brain cells grow in your hippocampus.
We all have that.
Even if you’re a couch potato,
you can get new brain cells
in your hippocampus to grow.
But it’s like giving
your hippocampus a boost
with this regular BDNF,
if you are exercising.
Which means that we all
have the capacity to grow
a bigger, fatter, fluffier hippocampus.
And so what I like to
give people is this image
of every single time you move your body,
it’s like giving your brain
this wonderful bubble bath
of neurochemicals, what’s going on,
I need my bubble bath of
noradrenaline, and dopamine,
and serotonin, and growth factors.
And with regular bubble
baths, what am I doing?
I’m growing a big fat, fluffy hippocampus.
And I’m not going to cure
my father’s dementia,
Alzheimer’s dementia, but you know what?
If I go into my 70s with a
big fat, fluffy hippocampus,
even if I had that in my genes
and it starts to kick in,
it’s going to take longer for
that disease to start to affect
my ability to form and
retain new long-term memories
for facts and events, which is
my motivation for getting up
and doing my 30 to 45 minutes
of aerobic exercise every day.
– Fantastic.
Quick question about your
protocol just because.
And then we’ll discuss a few
mechanistic things related
to what signals the body
might be sending the brain
and a little bit more detail
on BDNF and some circuitry.
So 30 to 45 minutes of, it sounds like
cardiovascular exercise might be special.
But as I say that and I
think about the literature
that I’m aware of in
mice and some in monkeys,
and certainly in humans, looking
at the effects of exercise
on brain function and
typically the outcome
is improvement, almost always.
I don’t think I’ve ever
seen a paper showing
that when animals or humans exercise more,
that their brain gets worse.
I just can’t think of a single paper.
It doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
I’m sure someone will put
one in the comment section.
They’ll find that one,
and thank you for if you can find that,
but it seems like it’s always
cardiovascular exercise
and experimentally in a lab
it’s a lot easier to get a mouse
to run on a treadmill than it is
to get a mouse to lift weights.
Although people have put
little ankle weights on mice
and the ways of getting
mice to do resistance work
is actually a little bit barbaric
– Little stressful.
– ‘Cause oftentimes
they’ll incapacitate a limb
to overload another limb,
so it’s an asymmetric thing.
It’s not the same as sending
them in to do squats,
or deadlifts, or something.
But cardiovascular
exercise might be special.
And what are your thoughts on that?
And please first, though,
tell us your routine.
Your routine is 30 to 45 minutes of,
are you a Peloton cycler?
Does it matter?
– I think that the data
suggests that as long
as your heart rate is getting
up for these long-term effects
on your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex,
you also get better at
shifting and focusing
your attention, for that
you need cardiovascular.
And what I use is a video
workout that I started
even before the pandemic,
it’s called “Daily Burn,”
and is just thousands
of different workouts.
But I love they are 30 minutes
that I sometimes add on
a 10 to 15 minute stretch at
the beginning or at the end.
But I love the variety.
Sometimes I do it with weight.
Sometimes I do it without weights.
I love kickboxing,
so they have a lot of kickboxing in there.
It just fits my routine,
and it’s always there,
and I don’t have to get
all dressed up to go
to the gym to work out.
So that’s what I do.
– And that’s a daily
thing, seven days a week?
– Yeah, yeah.
– Seven days
a week, fantastic.
So in terms of he way
that some of these changes
are being conveyed from
the body to the brain,
that fascinates me.
I mean, as you and I know, and I’m sort of
a repeating record on the
podcast always saying,
you got a brain but you
also have a spinal cord
and then your nervous
system connects everything.
Every organ in your body
is basically signaled to
by the nervous system and
back to the nervous system,
you’re explaining everything.
But so let’s imagine your morning routine,
you do your cardiovascular exercise,
so you’re pumping more blood,
that’s the definition
of a higher heart rate,
stroke volume of the
heart goes up over time,
you’re getting fitter, so blood flow
to the brain is increasing.
Do we know how that gets
translated to a signal
to release more BDNF?
And then it raises this
other question, which is,
does it matter where your
mind is when you exercise?
Because ultimately the brain, of course,
you can anchor your attention
to the exercise or you can be
listening to a podcast or something else.
I’ve always wondered about this.
Can we enhance the effects
of exercise by combining
the enhanced blood flow with
cognitive work during exercise?
Or is it simply a matter of
just getting more blood flow
up to the hippocampus?
– Yeah, I wish I had the
answer to that question, too.
My instinct is, yes, it matters partially
because of the work of
your colleague, Alia Crum,
on mindset and the power of that to change
how physiologically
our body is responding.
So how could it not
work in her experiments
or work in her experiments and not work
for my morning or our
morning exercise routine.
But are there studies, point to a study,
I don’t know of one.
So exercise neuroscientists out there,
I’d love to see that study done.
So yes, it works.
Before I go into the aerobic thing,
I always like to start with
the least amount of exercise
to get something really useful,
because I don’t want people to say,
oh God, I hate sweating,
I don’t want to listen anymore.
So I always like to start
with studies have shown
that just 10 minutes of walking
outside can shift your mood.
That is part of that
neurochemical bubble bath
that you’re getting dopamine,
serotonin, noradrenaline
and anybody can walk for 10 minutes.
And so that is for all of
you thinking that out there,
what is the minimum that I could get
some of these brain effects?
10 minutes of walking, anybody can do it.
– Now is outside important?
I’m a big believer in getting
photons into the eyes.
– I think that that study was
done indoors on a treadmill.
And the comparison wasn’t
done, but moving your,
which is great, in the
middle of the pandemic
I walked around my apartment
for 30 minutes sometimes
just for some variety,
felt like a rat on a
running wheel, but yes.
So that minimum amount
of movement in your body
can get you those mood effects.
But what about the big,
fat, fluffy hippocampus?
What about the better
performing prefrontal cortex?
That’s where you start to
need the cardio workout.
And from my reading of the literature,
there haven’t been enough studies
directly comparing and contrasting
kickboxing with running,
with whatever other cardio
that you need to do,
but any cardio workout that is done
has these positive effects.
So I’m going to say my
interpretation of that is that
whatever way you get your heart rate up,
including a power walk,
a power walk can get
your heart rate up, that is beneficial.
And what is happening, there
are two pathways that have been
studied about how you go from
moving your body to more BDNF,
that neurotrophin that’s
increasing the growth
of new hippocampal brain cells.
The two pathways are the following.
One is a myokine, which is a protein
released by the muscles.
And not your heart, these are
striated muscles in your body.
And so by running, these
were studies done in rats
on running wheels, they
showed that the running rats
had more of this myokine,
released the myokine past
the blood-brain barrier.
so got into the rarefied,
very protected bloodstream
of inside the brain, and that
myokine stimulated the release
of BDNF in the brain,
that’s pathway number one.
Pathway number two comes through the liver
because exercise is a stress generally.
How do we know that,
well, cortisol is released
whenever we exercise.
We need that sugar in our blood
and so that’s how the
physiological mechanisms work.
And so there is a ketone,
beta-hydroxybutyrate,
that we’ve known for a very
long time that gets released
by the liver during exercise.
And we also know that that
particular ketone passes
that blood-brain barrier.
And it’s another stimulant for BDNF.
So kind of the final
common pathway seems to be
BDNF stimulation in the hippocampus.
Is it the only one, probably not,
but that’s the one that has
been studied most clearly.
So it comes from all of
our physiological systems,
our muscles working, our
liver responding to the stress
of exercise, and what is it doing,
it is giving more BDNF
precursors to get into our brain,
to cause the upspike
of BDNF, which is part
of your bubble bath that you’re
getting every time you move.
– I love that description
of a factor from muscle
and a factor from liver,
because anytime we’re thinking
about movement of the
body and translating that
to the brain, as you
so clearly pointed out,
that needs to traverse
the blood-brain barrier.
Not everything that happens in the body
is communicated to the brain
and these seem like
really important signals.
Beta-hydroxybutyrate, you
mentioned is a ketone,
I just want to underscore
that doesn’t mean, folks,
that you need to be on a ketogenic diet.
I think people hear ketone and they think,
I know some people are, most
people are not, I imagine.
There are ketones that
are released in your brain
and body that can function,
even if you’re ingesting
carbohydrates and not ketogenic,
just for a point of clarification.
This issue of new neurons
is one that you hear a lot,
you know, neurogenesis,
you’re going to grow
new neurons, new neurons.
And my understanding is
that the rodent literature
is very clear that animals
that run on wheels more often,
it turns out rodents
love to run on wheels.
Do you know these
studies by Hoppy Holster,
which are pretty funny,
they’re very cool, by the way, Hoppy,
Howard Hughes investigator,
I’m not making light of them.
They put running wheels in
a field and wild rodents
will run to the running wheel
and run on that running wheel.
– Oh, that’s great.
– They really enjoy it.
Which I find amusing for
reasons that probably
only a neuroscientist would find amusing.
In any case, in rodents,
it seems that running more
on a wheel can trigger neurogenesis,
literally the birth of new
neurons and the addition
of new neurons to the hippocampus.
In monkeys, this has been controversial.
It seems it does happen in the hippocampus
and in the olfactory bulb,
probably not in the neocortex.
Thinking back to the
decades or more controversy
between Liz Gould and Pasko Rakic.
I hope they settled
their differences there.
Neuroscientists love to argue.
It’s kind of what we do.
And in humans, I think it’s
been a bit controversial.
Some people say absolutely, yes.
Other people say absolutely no,
there are new neurons
added to the adult brain.
I haven’t followed that
literature down to the detail.
But I do remember one study
that I don’t think is contested,
which is the work of Rusty
Gage at the Salk Institute
where they actually injected
a sort of due type marker
into the brains of terminally ill humans
who very graciously offered
to have their brains removed
and dissected after death.
And in some cases, these very
old terminally ill humans,
they did see evidence for new neurons
being born in the hippocampus.
Can I trust that idea still?
Is that generally accepted?
– Well, so after that study,
which was quite a while ago,
there are more recent
studies, still controversial,
but showing and
demonstrating, using even new
and better techniques than were used
in that original Rusty Gage study,
which was groundbreaking
at the time, that suggest,
and I think show, that
there are new neurons born
in adult human brains into
the ninth decade of life.
So they not only did this, I think
those patients were in their
60s, then they died of cancer.
But these new studies
looking across the timeline,
can we see, because the
other thing was, yeah,
maybe you have some when you’re 20,
but by the time you’re
older and you might need
these new neurons, you
have no new neuron growth.
And so these studies seem to
suggest that, yes, yes you do.
And we all do even into old age.
– Great, and I’ll just
take a moment to say
that I am personally
not aware of any studies
looking at other forms of exercise
besides cardiovascular exercise
for sake of brain health.
And this, I think, is an
important gap in the literature
that ought to be filled,
whether or not for instance,
high intensity interval training,
or whether or not weight training,
which has other effects
on the musculature,
so you can imagine perhaps
the myokine to BDNF pathway,
the pathway one that you
mentioned, might be signaled,
but maybe not the liver pathway, maybe.
Yes, I’m speculating here.
Those studies need to be done.
To my knowledge, they just
haven’t been done yet.
But they should be done.
If you would, could you tell us about
some of the more specific
effects of exercise on memory?
Memory is a broad category
of effects and phenomena.
So things like what comes to mind is
short-term, medium- and long-term memory,
reaction time, learning
math, at least for me,
is quite a bit different
than learning history,
although there’s certainly overlap
in the neural underpinnings.
What has been demonstrated
in the laboratory
in animal models, but
especially in humans,
and if you want to share
with us any results
from your lab, published or unpublished,
I’m sure that the audience
would be delighted
to learn about them.
– Absolutely, let me start with kind of
the immediate effects, acute
effects as they’re called,
of exercise on the brain.
So this is asking what does
a one-off exercise session
do for your brain?
And there, there are three major effects
that have been reproduced.
I’ve seen it in my lab, many
labs have reproduced this.
So what do you get with the one-off?
This is usually an
aerobic-type exercise session,
30 to 45 minutes.
What you get is that mood
boost, very, very consistent.
You get improved prefrontal function,
typically tested with a Stroop test,
which is a test that asks
you to shift and focus
your attention in specific ways.
It’s a challenging task
and clearly dependent
on the prefrontal cortex largely.
And significant improvements
in reaction time,
so your speed at responding,
often a motor kind of,
but cognitive motor response is improved.
Over the pandemic, one of the
unpublished studies that I did
looking at the effects of 30 minutes
of age-appropriate workout in subjects
ranging in age from their 20s
all the way up to their 90s.
So what are the things that
I saw more consistently?
Irrespective of your age,
everybody got a decreased anxiety
and depression and hostility
score, which is very important.
So it’s not just decreasing
your anxiety and depression
but decreasing your hostility levels.
– Making the world a better place.
– Making the world a better place.
Energy, the feeling of energy went up.
And what we found is in
the older population,
even more than in the younger population,
we saw improved performance on both Stroop
and Eriksen flanker task,
which is another task dependent
on really focusing in on different letters
and paying attention to
what letter is being shown.
So these are consistent effects.
How long do they last?
One of the studies that I did
publish in my lab showed that
the immediate effects of
exercise lasted up to two hours.
Unfortunately, that was
the longest that we last,
they were still there at two hours.
So that’s a pretty big bang for your buck.
– That is.
– One 30 minute.
– Sorry to interrupt, I just
want to make sure I understand.
So when you say the effects
lasted up to two hours,
does that mean up to two hours
after you finished exercise?
Or up to two hours of
memory challenging work?
Just to be clear.
– Yeah, that’s a great question.
So my study looked at two hours
after you finish your workout
we gave you these cognitive tests.
During that two-hour period,
you were free to do anything
except exercise or eat.
And so there was no extra load on people.
But two hours later, you
did do significantly better
on these focused attention
tasks compared to a group
that watched videos for
the exercise period.
This was an hour of cycling that they did.
These were young subjects in their 20s.
– Okay, so if I finish
my exercise at 9:00 AM,
even if I start this cognitive
work, this mental work at 11,
I’ll still see benefits.
– Yes, at least by 11,
because I didn’t go
farther than two hours.
So it could last even longer than that,
but I have evidence that
it lasts for two hours.
– And perhaps if I had
started the cognitive work
45 minutes after my exercise ended,
it would also be helpful.
– Yes.
– So there’s no reason
to think that there’s a,
that you have to wait before
starting cognitive work.
– Yeah, no reason at all.
– I’m asking questions
of the sort that I get
in the comments, that we are going to get
in the comment section.
We always strive for clarity here.
So what this tells me is that
exercising early in the day
may have a special effect.
I realize that some people cannot exercise
until later in the evening,
but you mentioned something
earlier that I want
to cue people to, it’s
very, very important.
I don’t think I’ve ever
mentioned this on the podcast,
which is any kind of physical
activity will increase
cortisol to varying degrees.
And so sometimes it’s a healthy increase,
sometimes it’s an unhealthy increase.
If you do two hours of
really intense exercise
and you’re not prepared for it,
that’s a big spike in cortisol,
probably not a good thing
for most people.
But if you are going to
do your cardiovascular
or weight training later in the day,
that increase in cortisol can promote
too much wakefulness for sleep, etc.
Shifting that cortisol
spike early in the day
is associated with a
number of important things
related to mood, etc.
But more and more, what
I’m thinking and hearing
is that exercise early in the day is key.
Our former dean of the
medical school, Phil Pizzo,
was and is kind of
famous still for jogging
between the hours of, like, 4 and 5:00 AM,
or five and six, and then
running the medical school.
And you’re up early doing your
exercise, and cold shower,
and meditation, we’ll
talk about meditation,
but this is more and more
of a push, I feel like,
or a stimulus for us to think about moving
our exercise earlier in the day.
– Yeah, I mean, I like to say that,
I know there are moms and dads
out there and they just say,
look, I have a kid, the
kid’s more important
than my doing my exercise.
So you will get benefits if
you do it whenever you can.
So that’s great, more power to you.
But what all the neuroscience
data suggests is the best time
to do your exercise is
right before you need
to use your brain in
the most important way
that you need to use it every day.
And so that is why the morning
for most of us is beneficial.
That’s why I do it in the morning
and I’m lucky enough
to be able to do that.
But yeah, it makes sense with all,
everything we know about how this works
and how it benefits our brain.
– I think about our
colleague, Eric Kandel,
who not incidentally has a
Nobel Prize and studies memory.
And rumor has it that he’s been a swimmer
for a lot of years.
That he’ll put in, I think
nowadays he’s in his ’90s,
now he’ll put in half a mile,
but he used to do swim a mile a day
or something of that sort.
– Wow, I heard that, too,
that he was a swimmer
and he does it very, very religiously.
– Okay, so there are a
few other neuroscientists
that do that, I can think
of a lot of neuroscientists
that probably should exercise more.
And I don’t say that to poke at them,
I just would love to see them
doing their incredible work
for many more decades.
And everything that we’re
talking about today indicates
that if one doesn’t, unless
you have incredible genetics,
we all experience
age-related dementia, right.
I mean, the story of your
father is a salient one.
And we should remember
that as we go forward.
I also want to emphasize, and
I’d love to get your thoughts
on just memory and memory loss in general.
It seems we all get worse at remembering
and learning things, even
if we don’t get Alzheimer’s.
When does that typically start for humans?
– You know, I think there’s
so much variability,
not only because we are individuals,
but because our stress
levels are different
and, well, everybody’s
anxiety level has gone up
in the last couple of years,
but that also has an effect.
We don’t remember as much
in a highly stressful,
highly anxious situation.
So, as you know, it’s hard
to answer that question.
People say, okay, just tell me
how much exercise I have to do.
– 30 to 45 minutes a day.
But I love that per day,
I’ve been doing this whole
thing of telling people, oh,
the data say 150 to 200
minutes of zone two cardio,
which is kind of moderately hard
but not excessively hard, but
I love this everyday theme.
Because whenever I do that,
the questions that come back
are, well, what if I take a
long hike on the weekends?
And so people start negotiating.
There’s something that’s very powerful
about non-negotiable, everyday.
Sun in your eyes every day
even through cloud cover.
Exercise for 30 to 45 minutes.
Cold shower every day.
– Every day, yeah.
– My understanding of the
literature is that somewhere
in our 50s or 60s, we start noticing
little hiccups in memory,
for some people younger,
for some people later.
But I have to imagine
that doing the exercise
throughout one’s entire
life is going to help
offset some of this
simply ’cause of the BDNF
and other downstream effects.
– Yeah, I mean, that’s what it suggests.
One of my favorite studies,
and then I want to get back to you wanted,
you invited me to share
some of my unpublished data
on the effects of long-term exercise,
but first I want to share
one of my favorite studies,
which is a longitudinal
study done in Swedish women.
And this was published in 2018.
And what they did was back in the 1960s,
they found Swedish women,
300 Swedish women in their 40s.
And they characterized them
as low fit, mid fit, high fit.
Okay, and then 40 years later,
they came back and found these women,
they let them do, live their lives.
And they asked what happened
to these women as a function
of whether they were low fit, mid fit,
high fit in their 40s,
they’re now in their 80s.
And what they found was
that relative to the low fit
or mid fit women, the
women that were high fit
gained nine more years of
good cognition later in life.
Now this is not a
randomized controlled study.
This is a correlational study.
But does it agree with everything
that we’ve been talking about today?
Yes, does it agree with
this idea that the women
that were high fit were
giving their brains
this bubble bath, maybe not every day,
but very, very regularly
for that entire 40 years
and that built up their big,
fat, beautiful hippocampi?
Yes, it does.
So that’s one of my favorite studies.
– Yeah, another cause for getting
the exercise in consistently.
I am impressed by this 10-minute walk
and the improvements in mood
from just a 10-minute walk.
But again, I think that
daily repetition also
I have to imagine has
effects on the very pathways
that allow plasticity.
This is something we, in the
realm of neuroplasticity,
we don’t often hear about or think about,
even as a neuroscientist,
which is that the pathways
for engaging plasticity probably can be,
probably I’m speculating
here, can be made better
by engaging in the sorts of behavior
that stimulate plasticity.
In other words, if one gets
better at calming themselves
down under stress, those circuits
get better at doing that.
– Yes, absolutely.
– Neural circuits
gain proficiency.
And so, because blood vessels can grow,
capillaries can grow in the brain,
you can imagine that more
pumping of blood to the brain,
delivery of these various
muscle and liver factors
would also establish larger
or more efficient portals
to getting that stuff there.
So you could imagine kind
of an amplifying effect
of exercise, and again,
I’m speculating here,
but I’ve seen this over and
over again in colleagues,
the ones who exercise consistently
seem to be really, really
smart and doing amazing work
well into their 80s and 90s
and the ones who aren’t, some of whom
actually pride themselves
on how little they exercise,
they get worse over time.
You see them each meeting,
each decade and I’m not poking
fun at them at all, it’s actually
quite, quite hard to see.
And they’re kind of a fading light,
they’re starting to flicker.
So there is this incredible relationship
between body vitality and brain vitality.
That, of course, is not
an excuse for spending
all day in the gym.
The gym rats, I enjoy working
out so I could imagine
doing that, but that
doesn’t make us smarter,
unfortunately you actually have to do
the cognitive work also,
it’s not just exercise.
So I’d love to hear about some of these
new unpublished data.
– Yeah, okay, so when I
jumped into the exercise work,
everybody was studying people 65 or older
because that’s when
cognitive decline begins.
And if the idea is exercise can help you
with your cognition, then makes sense.
However, I thought, well,
you know that it’s great,
there’s lots of work there.
I wanted to know what happens
in people in their 40s
and their 50s, maybe even
their 30s and their 20s.
Why, because that’s when
we, as humans are able,
ready, willing, and able
to increase our exercise
and gets us set up to build our brains
as we go into our 60s.
And so the first study
that I did looked at
low fit participants from
their 30s to mid 50s,
and we wanted to ask this question,
how much exercise do you really need
to start seeing benefits?
Do you see benefits?
Or maybe you have to wait
until you start seeing
cognitive decline to get benefits.
That was one of the theories out there.
And so that’s what I wanted to do.
And so what we did was three
months of two to three times
a week cardio, it was a spin class,
so spin classes are great for cardio.
And the comparison group was
two to three times a week
of competitive video Scrabble.
So no heart rate change, but
they had to come into my lab
and be in a group just
like they were in a group
for the spin class.
We touched them cognitively
at the beginning
and the end of the session.
What we found was two to
three times a week of cardio
in these people, they are low
fit, which means specifically
that they were exercising
less than 30 minutes a week
for the three months
previous to the experiment.
So they went from that to
two to three times a week
of spin class and what
we found was changes
in baseline rates of their
positive mood states went up
relative to the video Scrabble group.
Their body image got more positive
because they were
exercising, which is great.
And really important, their
motivation to exercise went up
significantly compared to
the video Scrabble group,
which is great.
So the more you exercise,
the more motivated
you are to exercise.
What about cognition?
What changed in the cognitive
circuits of their brain?
Number one, we got improved
performance on the Stroop task,
but we’re headed towards
my favorite structure,
which is the hippocampus.
What we found was improved
performance on both
a recognition memory
task, which was a memory
and coding task, and that
is, can you differentiate
similar items that we’re
asking you to remember,
and a spatial episodic memory task,
where we had them play one
of those Doom like games
when they went into this
spatial maze and they had
to do things in a virtual city.
Their performance there got better,
which is very, very classically dependent
on the hippocampus.
So this, it was so
satisfying to do this study
because I’ve been wanting
to answer this question,
what is a minimum amount or
doable amount of exercise
that will get you these
cognitive benefits?
And now I can say in 30-to-50-year
olds that are low fit,
two to three times a week.
Is that doable, absolutely.
Will it be hard if you’re low fit, yeah,
it’s going to be challenging,
but absolutely doable.
And so it makes sense
with all of the mechanisms
that we are, I didn’t study the
mechanisms just to be clear,
but with all the mechanisms
we are imagining are playing
a role here, that absolutely
makes sense and it is doable.
This is not like you have
to become marathon runner
to get any of these benefits.
This is you have to start moving your body
on a regular basis two
to three times a week.
So I love that for its realness.
– How long are those sessions again?
– 45 Minutes.
– 45 Minutes.
– Yeah, 45 minutes, it’s a
typical spin kind of class.
There’s a warmup for five
minutes and a cool down
for five minutes, so
it’s really 35 minutes
of they’re really pushing you.
– And so they’re
breathing reasonably hard.
Heart rate is up.
– Heart rate is up definitely up, yeah
– I find that all of those
results are really interesting
that the results showing
improvement in motivation
to exercise is interesting,
’cause it gets back
to this issue of kind of
a self-amplifying effect.
And the neuroscientist
in me wants to think
about kind of pre-motor
circuits and the fact that
we have a motor system that
can obviously do things
like lift cups, and walk, and
run if we want to or need to,
but that it’s possible to create
a kind of anticipatory
activity in our nervous system
where our body craves a certain stimulus,
you mentioned the cold and
how you crave the cold.
Now whether or not that’s the adrenaline,
and the dopamine, etc.,
or whether or not somebody
who exercises, going from
zero, less than 30 minutes
per week to two to three
times a week, 45 minutes,
as you described for this study.
I’ve had that experience
before of that the cardio,
that I tend to battle the most,
I love lifting heavy objects,
at least heavy for me.
I’m happy to go to the gym every other day
and just lift heavy objects for an hour.
It just makes me happy,
I like the way it feels,
and I’ve been doing it since I
was in my teens, so 30 years.
Cardio’s a little bit trickier.
I like to run, but if I stop
running for a little while
I find it very hard to get back into.
But if I start running three times a week
for 30 to 45 minutes and I
do this pretty consistently
on the days I don’t weight train,
I find that I start to crave it.
It’s almost as if my body
needs that in order to,
I always say, clear out the cobwebs,
but it’s like my mind
doesn’t function as well,
clearly now I understand
why and why exercise helps,
but also physically I almost
feel like my body needs
to engage in that movement.
Like the pre-motor circuits
are kind of revving,
kind of like revving then engine
on a car while it’s in park.
So the motivation to exercise obviously
could be multifaceted.
It could be purely psychological,
but do you think there’s any
reason to speculate at least
or believe that we can
build an anticipatory,
reverbatory activity
into our nervous system?
– Yeah, yeah,
I agree with that because I
also have those same kinds
of thoughts and I do have
anticipatory exercise
when I can’t do it.
So I just got back from a
week and a half in Paris,
where I got to do a book launch
of my last book, “Good Anxiety.”
And I really walked around a lot,
but I did not do my exercise
for that whole week and a half.
But there was a lot of
stress ’cause I had to do
all these interviews in French.
So I gave myself a break.
– You speak French?
– I speak French.
– I was going to say, otherwise
it would be really stressful.
– That would be really stressful.
– Then I’d be really impressed.
Then I would definitely start exercising.
Actually, I would follow
your morning routine to a T,
but okay, very impressive nonetheless.
– But I got back and coming
back this direction from Paris,
I live in New York, is much easier.
And so I was able to get up
at a normal time the next day.
And that exercise session
that first day is like, okay,
I’m back in my home, I’m
back in my environment.
And it felt so good.
It was like I wanted to come back.
And I know it’s because
I worked up over years,
now I could truthfully
say seven days a week,
but it was first it was four to five,
then it was five to six, and yeah, seven,
but that includes a yoga day,
or sometimes I have to
do it for 10 minutes
instead of 30 because I have to leave.
But that habit of you do
that even for five minutes,
you do either the weight 10-minute thing,
or a five-minute thing, or a
stretch, that is a tiny habit.
Is that somebody at Stanford
that invented this idea
of tiny habits, I thought it was?
– Well, we’ve got a
number of people there.
And I apologize in
advance to all the people
I neglect in this statement, but I’m happy
to put it in the comments, folks.
BJ Fogg is there, has done–
– Yes, that’s who I,
– BJ’s done really great work.
And then James Clear
wrote a book about habits
and has a very popular
newsletter about habits.
We’ve done an episode
about habits that covers
some of their work and some
of the more laboratory-ish,
not ish, laboratory science,
peer-reviewed work on it.
Daily behaviors, also
daily behaviors performed
at roughly the same time of day.
I mean, one thing we know for sure is that
the circadian system is part
of our nervous system’s way
of anticipating when things will happen,
not just what will happen.
I’m telling you things you
obviously know already,
but for the audience.
Performing your exercise at
roughly the same time each day
will make it easier as
opposed to just saying,
I’m going to do it seven
days a week sometime today.
But of course, getting it
done sometime is better
than not getting it done.
– Yes, absolutely, absolutely.
– Well, those are impressive
effects and I love that
you’re starting to look
in populations that are
a bit younger, not because
some of these older populations
aren’t important, but I think
that building good habits in
across one’s entire life
is really what it’s about.
As I always say with
anything related to longevity
or offsetting an age-related
decline, we don’t know,
it’s hard to know if things work
because there’s no within subject control.
But what we also know for
sure is that you don’t want
to be the control experiment.
– Exactly.
– You absolutely don’t
want to be the control experiment,
especially for something
that’s purely behavioral.
I mean, you’re not talking about ingesting
a particular supplement.
You’re not talking about
changing your diet in any way.
But I am curious diet is
a very barbed wire topic
on the internet, which diets
whether or not they work, etc.,
but in general, in any of these studies,
do they evaluate whether
or not people change
their eating habits when
they start to exercise more?
– Yeah, I think I’ve seen
one study that controlled
for that, but I feel for
them because it’s hard enough
to get people to exercise at
the level and at the time,
that you need for your study.
If you also ask them, okay,
fill out this survey to
tell us exactly what you ate
all day, they’re going to say, forget you,
I’m not joining your study.
So it’s a critical question.
And again, there’s only
been one that I’ve seen
and the evidence was that diets got better
when they, you know, less processed foods,
when they did adhere to this exercise.
But lot more information needs
to be gathered in that realm.
The second study that I
wanted to share unpublished,
we’re writing it up right
now, is part two of that study
that I just described, which
was the low fit people.
Next we move to mid fit
people, like what about us,
we’re already exercising,
am I going to benefit from
increasing my exercise?
So here again we collaborated
with a great spin studio
that had a whole bunch of mid fit people
that by our definition were
exercising two to three times
a week on a regular basis.
That’s great, all you people
out there that are doing that,
you should know you’re
already benefiting your brain.
But our question was what if
we invited them to exercise
as much as they wanted at the
spin studio for three months,
from two to three times all the way
up to seven times a week, and
let’s just see what happened.
And the control group, we asked them
not to change their exercise.
And so what we ended up
with was a nice big array
of starting with mid
fit people that exercise
between staying at two
to three times a week,
all the way up to seven times a week.
And the bottom line from that study
is every drop of sweat counted.
That is, the more you change
and you increase your workout
up to seven times a week,
the better your mood was,
you had lower amounts
of depression and anxiety,
higher amounts of good effect,
and the better your hippocampal memory was
with the more you worked out,
again, this was for three months.
So I love that too, because it gives power
to those of us that are regularly
exercising and wondering,
do I really need to?
I mean, is it really going to help me?
And the answer is yes.
I mean, not all of us can exercise,
go to a spin class seven times a week,
but I love the message that
our body is responsive to that.
And you can get better
hippocampal function,
better overall baseline mood affect
with a higher level.
So it works for the
mid fit people as well.
– Fantastic, the more I learn from you,
the more I’m starting to
conceptualize the brain as an organ
that is privileged in so many ways,
has this unique blood-brain barrier,
has this incredible quality of
being able to predict things,
and it’s job mainly is, of
course, to predict things
among other functions, of course,
but that our brain isn’t
necessarily going to stay stable
or get better over time,
that it needs a signal.
It isn’t sufficient to just
say that we can’t take it
for granted, that our
brain is actually an organ
that requires a signal
in order to maintain
its own function and it sounds
like enhanced blood flow
and these pathways that
you described earlier,
these two pathways are at least among
the more critical signals.
I’m tempted now to move my frequency
of cardiovascular exercise from,
I confess it’s about three
days, 35 minutes lately,
and it should be more to daily.
There’s something really, again,
really special about daily
because it’s nonnegotiable,
you just do it.
And it sounds like if one were to do
higher intensity exercise,
you know in a spin class,
I’ve never taken a spin
class, but I’ve seen
there are times when they’re
standing up on the bike
and pedaling very hard.
So that is included in these
kinds of workouts, right?
– Absolutely, yeah.
– Okay.
– I mean, that’s what
the instructor is doing.
I cannot control.
We did monitor heart rate of
all the subjects and it was
clearly, compared to the video Scrabble,
it was highly significant.
– I would hope so.
– Yes.
– I guess it depends on how intense
that game of Scrabble is.
Could we just briefly talk
about mindset and affirmations?
– Yeah, sure.
– You’ve talked
a bit before about affirmations,
and as you mentioned, the
beautiful work of my colleague
at Stanford, Alia Crum,
we can summarize her work pretty simply,
although we won’t do it
complete justice by it,
she’s already been on the podcast,
just to say that one’s
beliefs about a behavior
also impact the outcomes of that behavior.
If you learn a lot of true
facts about stress being good
for you, then you’ll experience
stress as better for you
then if you only focus on or learn about
the negative effects of stress.
If you learn about the
positive effects of exercise,
you actually derive greater
benefit from exercise,
believe it or not.
It’s incredible, incredible effects,
but they make sense when you understand
what the brain is doing,
which is a lot of this
predictive coding and mindsets
don’t seem as mysterious and woo anymore
once you understand what
the brain is really doing.
But what is, if any,
the value of affirmation
of telling yourself
something positive about yourself,
or of exercise, on not
the exercise itself,
but on mood, self image,
memory, and brain function?
– Yeah, so, I looked into
this because I am also
a certified exercise instructor
and the form of exercise
that I teach is called IntenSati.
It’s a form of exercise that was developed
by this amazing instructor,
Patricia Moreno.
And she combined physical
movements from kickbox,
and dance, and yoga, and martial arts
with positive spoken affirmations.
So each move, if you’re
punching back and forth,
as you would do in a kickbox class,
you don’t just punch,
you say something like
I am strong now, which every punch
is associated with a word.
And you know, you can create
your own series of affirmations
with the moves that you put together.
And the first time I did it, I
just wandered into her class,
I didn’t know what it
was and I felt idiotic,
I was like what, I came
into the wrong class,
I don’t want to come into this class.
But then I saw they didn’t
care whether I thought
they looked silly saying these affir-,
not saying, yelling these
affirmations out loud
while doing the choreography
at the same time.
And then I tried it,
okay, I didn’t yell out,
I kind of whispered it at first.
But by the end, I was
really yelling it out.
There’s something about the declaration,
using your own voice of saying things that
you don’t often say to
yourself, like I’m strong,
I’m inspired, I believe I will succeed,
are all the kinds of affirmations you say.
And you walk out of that class,
or I walked out of that class,
thinking, ah, I feel really good now.
Man, I can’t wait to
come back to this class.
Which is why I ultimately
took teacher training
to be able to teach that class.
And so I started to
look into what was known
about affirmations and
they were never combined
with physical activity, but
it was clear that there was
a literature showing that
positive affirmations,
saying them or reading
them could change mood
in the same way as we’re talking about,
you know, Alia Crum’s work.
If you have this, it’s a belief,
once you start saying these things,
these are not difficult things to believe,
but it’s amazing how much you don’t say
these kinds of things to
yourself or with your own voice.
You might say them about somebody else,
oh, you’re strong, you’re so smart.
Do you say that about yourself?
And that’s the thing about
the self affirmations.
It really gets you into a habit
of saying good things about yourself.
And then you start to realize,
oh my God, I’m so mean to myself.
I have lots of negative thoughts going on
about myself in my head, and which is part
of the other reason why I loved this,
this particular form of exercise.
So what you get in
IntenSati is the mood boost
from the positive spoken affirmations
together with all the other
brain and affect boosts
that we’ve been talking
about for this whole podcast,
from the exercise, because
it’s a sweaty workout as well.
– Interesting, there’s a book,
I confess I haven’t read it,
but I have had the pleasure
of having a discussion
with a psychologist from,
I believe he’s at University
of Michigan in Ann Arbor,
Ethan Kross wrote a book called “Chatter,”
which focuses on the fact that so much
of our inner dialogue,
it is indeed negative.
He certainly wasn’t the
first to point that out.
But that explicit statements to counter
that negative chatter, I
believe is one of the hallmarks
of readjusting one’s own, not
just internal reference frame,
but actually self-image generally.
And it’s a fascinating and, I
think, a very important area
of psychology and neuroscience because,
and I acknowledge this,
we’re talking about this,
two laboratory neuroscientists
who record from neurons
and label neurons and look
at stuff down the microscope,
we are now deep in the
territory, in the deep water
of what some of our colleagues
and people who think
about neuroscience would
consider really out there
on the kind of subjective edges.
And yet I think it’s worth pointing out
that the brain does all these things.
It’s responsible for simple
reflexes and motor behaviors,
but also high-level conceptual
ideas about the universe
and what it might look like in 10 years,
or 100 years, or 1,000 years,
but also high-level
conceptual understanding
of who we are and what we are about.
And so even though it
might seem a little bit
out on the fringes, dare I say,
I think that these are
some of the more important
untread landscapes of neuroscience.
And I just want to
acknowledge my appreciation
for the fact that I’m going to
connect the dots here and say,
you went from somebody
who didn’t exercise,
who went on this rafting trip,
That discovered exercise and its benefits
for your grant writing
and then on and on and on,
and then became a certified
– Exercise instructor.
– Instructor.
So you don’t do anything
halfway, either as it’s clear.
I’d like to touch on something
you mentioned earlier,
but we haven’t dove into
it all in any depth,
which is meditation.
You mentioned this tea meditation.
You had a publication recently
on a 10-minute meditation.
– Yes.
– Right?
Maybe you could tell us about
this 10-minute meditation
because it seems like such
at tractable amount of time.
And then if you would
maybe tell us a little bit
about the tea meditation.
But sounds like you’ve
discovered a minimum,
a close to minimum threshold of meditation
that can really benefit us.
So maybe you could tell
us about that study.
– So the study was, as you
very astutely pointed out,
very practical study,
just 10 minutes, not 30
minutes, not an hour meditation,
that’s too hard, 10
minutes guided meditation.
They logged into a site.
So we can tell that they logged
in and they listened to a,
it’s a body scan, very basic,
but easy to follow kind of meditation.
And we asked them to do it, how often?
Daily, seven days a week,
just 10 minutes a day.
And the most shocking thing
about this study is that
we got more adherence to the
10 minute daily meditation
than the 10 minute
daily podcast listening,
which was our control.
So the highest retention
rate I’ve ever gotten in any,
this kind of study that I’ve
done, exercise or meditation,
they wanted to do it 10 minutes a day.
It was great.
– I’m going to just
start leading meditations
for three hours as opposed to
doing a three-hour podcast.
– So we looked at cognitive
effects before and after this,
it was eight weeks of daily,
it was actually 12-minute meditation,
12 minutes of body scan meditation.
And what we found was
significant decreases
in stress response.
So we did the stress test
to see how you responded
to an unexpected, stressful situation.
The meditators did much better.
Their mood was better and
their cognitive performance
was also better.
And this was my first
little foray into meditation
after I had started my
personal tea meditation,
that really shifted my
relationship with meditation.
But it is consistent with
many other studies showing
the beneficial effects of meditation.
But the unique thing was
we tried to make it doable
that many, many people out
there could actually follow
this typical regimen, and
so we’re continuing that.
In fact, my research in my
lab right now is all about
those doable, short things
that NYU college students
will do, not just at the
beginning of the semester,
but at the end of the
semester when the stress
and anxiety levels are now at
record-breaking high levels.
And they need something to
bring that level down so that
they could show their professors
what their brains can actually do.
And so it includes very short meditations,
sound meditations, visual
meditations, walking,
things that any college student,
but we’re obviously focused
on NYU students, will do.
I want to get at graduation rates.
I want to get at class performance
with these kinds of interventions.
But it started with that study
that I just described, meditation.
– If you would, and here’s where we can
highlight this again, as some
highly educated speculation,
if it’s coming from you.
What do you think is going
on during meditation?
I mean, so a body skin involves
a kind of a interoceptive awareness,
like interoception, of
course, being an attention
to what’s going on on the surface of
and within the confines of our skin
as opposed to the outside world.
Drawing our attention to
anything inside us or outside us
involves forebrain function,
prefrontal cortex presumably,
and other things,
typically eyes are closed,
typically it’s relaxing.
So there are a lot of
variables that could be feeding
into a number of different effects.
But as a neuroscientist,
what do you think is going on
that this period of
kind of an self-induced,
somewhat unusual state, what
do you think is going on
in terms of network behavior
and networks within the brain
that it can have these long-term effects?
Because we got to some
of the ones downstream
of exercise and I think
there’s so much evidence,
I know there’s so much evidence
that meditation is beneficial.
How do you think it’s working
or what do you think it’s doing?
– Yeah, I think that one of
the most important things
that gets worked when we
are doing a simple 10 minute
or 12 minute body scan
meditation regularly,
this 10 minutes a day, 12 minutes a day
is the habit building and
the practice of focusing
on the present moment.
I think that is very hard
for us modern humans to do,
because I’m worrying
about the thing that’s due
at the end of the week that I need to do
and how many hours am I going
to have to be able to do that.
Or I’m worried about,
whatever, the email that wasn’t
as polite as it should be that I sent
and what were the repercussions for that
instead of focusing on
this moment, which is fun,
I get to talk to you, it’s
a beautiful day outside,
I’m feeling good right at this moment.
And I think that those,
all of the meditative
practices that I’ve done,
and this one also, whether
you know it or not,
is getting you to focus on this moment.
And I think it’s even more
important in this day and age
where anxiety levels and the
next variant might come out
and what are the repercussions there?
And I have a mother who’s older
and she’s more susceptible
to it, and there’s a war, and
what’s going to happen there?
Those are all future possibilities.
And we should be worried about that.
That is a possibility,
you need to plan for that.
But you also need to focus
on this moment right now.
I’m healthy, I can breathe,
I get to have this
interesting conversation
right in this moment.
If I start thinking about other things,
then it takes away from this moment.
Do I know what circuits are involved?
Not exactly, that is not my area.
I think there are some studies
that have focused on that,
that present moment kind of activity.
But that is what I think is most important
about the practice of meditation
or one of the important
things that calms us down.
Because if you know how to do that,
that gives you this powerful
tool for the rest of your day.
You’re not locked into that
fearful future thinking
that so many of us have,
or that just reliving
of the terrible past, but you could
enjoy the present moment.
– Yeah, that really resonates.
I think that going back
to the earlier part
of our conversation,
the hippocampus has this
incredible storage capacity
and ability to set context
about past, present, and future.
And that’s a beautiful thing
because as much as I like
to think he had some
semblance of a healthy life,
none of us want to HM,
none of us want to be in the
position of not being able
to form new memories and have no context
to the past or the present.
So we’re grateful that,
we should all be grateful
that our hippocampus can draw
from past, present, and future
in various combinations
and we should support it
through the daily
exercise and other habits,
let’s call them habits, so
that people make them habits
now that you’ve highlighted.
But if we are not deliberately
anchoring within past,
present, and future
according to what we need,
and we’re just shuffling between
past, present, and future,
that is not a good way to live.
– No.
– It’s not effective.
– No.
– It sounds like meditation
can really help us go to the right stacks.
I guess people don’t go
to libraries anymore,
but in the old days you would
go to the right location
in the library, you actually
can’t get distracted
by the books that you’re interested in,
if you need to go just reflexively,
if you need to go study
a particular topic.
So that’s kind of how I think about it.
It makes us more linear
perhaps in our way of being.
– I think so, and it actually counteracts,
not that I’m against technology,
but having our phones and being connected
to every good and bad thing
going on in the world today
is incredibly distracting
and takes you away
from the present moment
virtually 24 hours a day.
And so we have to work extra
hard right now compared to
in the ’40s when we didn’t
have all this technology
or at the same level.
So yeah, it becomes even
more important practice,
I think, for everyday life.
– Yeah, or even 10, 15 years ago
it felt like smartphones
weren’t as intrusive.
One final question and maybe a request.
As the new incoming dean of
College of Letters and Sciences,
and I must say I’m delighted,
thrilled actually to hear
that a lot of the practices
that we’ve been discussing today
and that you’ve pioneered
are going to be incorporated
into undergraduate education.
I predict, and I’d be willing
to wager that that will become
a template for how universities
and non-university systems
should function because if
indeed the, and it is true,
that there’s this incredible relationship
between physical movement and
mental deliberate practices
and performance, any
corporation, school, household
would be crazy, would be self-limiting,
and even self-destructive
to not incorporate those.
So I’m so happy that you’re going
to do this and collect data.
Please, we’ll have to touch back with you
and hear what comes to that.
But one of the main things
that I hear so much about today
are issues with attention.
And we haven’t talked about attention,
we’ve mainly been talking
about memory and cognition.
But you know a lot about attention,
and here I’m not being disparaging,
I think people have done
what I’m about to say
as a consequence of need
and lack of other resources.
There’s an immense amount of
Adderall use, Ritalin use,
Modafinil use, and caffeine abuse.
Now, I happen to like caffeine,
I don’t use the other
compounds I described,
but it’s just incredible to
me how the data on this are,
a colleague of mine at
Stanford claims that
something like two-thirds
or more of college students
use these without prescription for ADHD.
What can we expect in terms of the effects
of regular exercise on attention?
And are there any other
things besides exercise
and meditation that you
would like to see people do
in terms of trying to increase
their powers of attention?
Because I think the
ability to focus and attend
is really the distinguishing feature
between those that will
succeed in any endeavor
and those that won’t.
And that’s a scary thing
for a lot of people to hear
because a lot of people
think they have ADHD.
They may, they may not.
But I bet that a number of
students at both Stanford and NYU
feel challenged with
holding their attention
to the thing that they need
to hold their attention to.
– Yeah, so I would say the
top three tools that everybody
right this minute today can
use to up their capacity
to attend where they
want to include exercise
for the reasons we’ve talked about.
It has a direct effect on functioning
of the prefrontal cortex.
Meditation also, clear
clinical studies showing
improved ability to focus
and particularly focus
on the present moment.
And the third has to be sleep.
So sleep is, you can’t,
it’s out of the three,
it is the most physiological.
I mean, I could live my whole life
without meditating one minute.
Could I survive without sleep?
No, none of us could.
So, it’s more basic physiological,
but it is so important for
all core cognitive functions,
including attention, including creativity,
including just good basic brain function.
That is why it’s so critical
to get that information,
that basic neuroscience
information into the heads
of these students that are
trying their best to show us
how their brains work, but being hampered
because they’re not moving
enough, they’re not meditating.
And there’s all these distracting things
that they include in their lives.
Some of which a little bit is good,
but you know, 24 hours a day on your phone
and linked in, not LinkedIn,
but linked to your phone
is damaging to your attention.
So exercise, meditation,
sleep can help you learn,
retain, and perform better
than if you do not have
these three things in your life.
– Wonderful, music to my ears.
And also either very
low cost or zero cost,
considering that the exercise
doesn’t require a class,
one could use the freely
available resource of gravity
to do jumping jacks, or burpees,
or pushups, or whatever,
or sit ups, or all those in combination.
– And don’t forget YouTube,
the freely accessible
millions of YouTube videos.
If you don’t want to do your
jumping jacks by yourself,
I always say this, I talk
about breath meditation
for my book, “Good Anxiety,”
and if you don’t like
the one that I suggest
there’s only about a
million more on YouTube
with ratings from one star to five stars,
so use that resource.
– It is a wonderful resource
and you are an amazing resource.
Wendy, thank you so much
for coming here today
to have this discussion
and share your knowledge
about not just existing data,
but new data coming out soon,
and for your leadership
in the university system,
for your leadership in public education,
for the decades of
important work on memory
and neural circuitry, which we got
to learn about today, as well.
Thank you ever so much.
– Thank you, Andrew, fun conversation.
– Thank you for joining
me today for my discussion
about learning and memory
and how to get better
at learning and remembering
with Dr.
Wendy Suzuki.
If you’d like to learn more
about Dr.
Suzuki’s work,
you can go to WendySuzuki.com.
There you will also find titles and links
to her popular books, as well
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