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Unknown A
There are in fact many roads to Alzheimer's disease and it's things like marijuana, alcohol and clickwalk. And then a study found that people that had a simple carbohydrate based Diet had a 400% increased risk of getting Alzheimer's. But one of the major causes is.
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Unknown B
Gosh. Dr. Daniel Aman is a renowned psychiatrist and brain health expert who has scanned over 260,000 brains, including Justin Bieber, Miley and Kendra Jenner, to determine what need to be for optimum brain health. In 2024. The word of the year was brain rot. Why?
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Unknown A
Because people are worried that their habits are shrinking their brain. Like food, gaming, social media, pornography.
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Unknown B
What about life that drew brain? And then is there anything normal to us that we do to our children's brains? Yes.
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Unknown A
And this is so important because this is one thing a lot of parents do without knowing the consequences for their children. And we'll talk about that.
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Unknown B
What about native thinking?
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Unknown A
Well, we just published this huge study on this and the science is really clear. It decreases activity in your prefrontal cortex, which impacts your motivation, focus and mood. It is detrimental to your brain. So how can you kill the negative thoughts? Well, there's a whole bunch of things. One is Safflon. Head to Head has been shown to be equally. There's antidepressants. And then whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous, what I want you to do is it's so simple.
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Unknown B
I have been forced into a bet with my team. We're about to hit 10 million subscribers on YouTube, which is our biggest milestone ever, thanks to all of you. And we want to have a massive party for people that have worked on this show for years behind the scenes. So they said to me, steve, for every new subscriber we get the next 30 days, can $1 be given to our celebration fund for the entire team? And I've agreed to the bet. So if you want to say thank you to the team behind the scenes that are here, all you gotta do is hit the subscribe button. So actually, this is the first time I'm gonna tell you not to subscribe because it might end up costing me an awful Dr. Daniel Ng if someone's just clicked on this conversation now and they have no idea who you are, which is highly, highly unlikely.
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Unknown B
Can you tell me why listening to you and this conversation and the work that we're about to go through now is so important for everyone, even those who believe that right now they have no issues.
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Unknown A
Everybody has a brain that's listening. It controls everything they do how they think, how they feel, how they act, how they get along with other people. And most people know it, but don't. Your brain is the organ of intelligence, character and every decision you make. And when it works right, you work right. And when it doesn't, you have trouble. And most people have no idea that their bad decisions, their sadness, their anxiety, their insomnia, their poor relationship has to do with the physical functioning of their brain. So if they want to be happier, they need to think about loving and caring for their brain. Optimize your brain, you optimize your mind's ability.
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Unknown B
You mentioned scanning brains there. Remind me again how many people's brains you scanned now?
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Unknown A
So it's now about 260,000.
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Unknown B
260,000 people's brains. And you scan some famous brains?
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Unknown A
Yes, actually people from nine months old to 105, from 155 countries. And it's public knowledge. I've been in Justin Bieber's docu series seasons. I scanned his brain. I've scanned Miley Cyrus's brain. Mel Gibson just went on Joe Rogan and talked about me scanning his brain. Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, Jake Paul, you.
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Unknown B
Also scanned my brain. And you actually taught me a lot from scanning my brain, which I'm.
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Unknown A
Did you think about your brain after we talked about it? Of course.
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Unknown B
I think about it all the time now. It's also interesting that in 2024, the age is gone. The word of the year was the word brain rot. And that's interesting because the subject of the brain, I don't think, has been given the credit and the attention it deserves, really, until recently. And much of your work has played into that. Why do you think, if you had to guess, why do you think Oxford University's word of the year was brain rot?
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Unknown A
Because people are worried that their habits are shrinking their brain, especially social media and digital addictions. I'm so hoping they'll go to brain health, be more aspirational.
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Unknown B
We talked about a lot of things on the show. One of the things that really stuck with me is how the content we consume can have a profound impact on our brains. We often think of the chemicals, the drugs, the alcohol and all those things which I want to talk about. But one such piece of content, which I don't think we have talked about is the impact of pornography on the brain. Is there a link between brain health and pornography consumption?
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Unknown A
You know, it's such an important question. And the first thing that comes to my mind is exposing developing brains to pornography is so dangerous and 8, 9, 10 year old boys are being exposed to the Internet where they can see all sorts of pornography when their brains aren't anywhere near the ability to discern what's good, what's not good, what's healthy, what's not healthy. And it's deadening. And I use that word purposefully. The nucleus accumbens, which is the area of your brain that produces, that responds to dopamine. So dopamine. And I know you've done podcasts on dopamine, it's the neurotransmitter that helps us with motivation, which helps us with focus, which helps us with happiness and mood. And when the nucleus accumbens gets hit repeatedly with pornographic images, it's like dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, it begins to deaden that area and then you need more and more to begin to feel anything at all.
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Unknown A
That's why fame is so hard on the brain. But pornography, especially in the young, is incredibly damaging to the brain.
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Unknown B
So is that applicable to all things that cause like a really sharp burst of dopamine and stimulation? So you said there, fame, pornography, I mean potentially gaming or gambling, those kinds of things. Alcohol's obviously one of those things as well.
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Unknown A
Cocaine.
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Unknown B
Cocaine. Especially for a developing brain.
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Unknown A
Especially for a developing brain. If there's any message, protect your brain until you're 25, and then your brain will protect you. But until then, your prefrontal cortex, that front third of your brain, is not fully developed, which is sort of why God gave you parents. It's like, so you supervise. It's like, oh, my teenagers hate it if I supervise them. And yeah, they hate it more if you don't.
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Unknown B
But what if you get to 25 and you're listening to this now and you go, jesus, does this mean I can do nothing about my brain?
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Unknown A
Of course not. I mean, what I've shown is, let's just take the NFL work. Hot, big damage, right? Let's stop lying about this. Football is a brain damaging sport, and soccer as well is a brain damaging sport. So high levels of damage. 80% of my NFL players got better when we put them on a rehabilitation program. So if you've been bad to your brain, like non stop gaming, lots of pornography, terrible food, and all of a sudden you go, oh, I can have a better brain. Your brain can be better in as little as a couple of months where you just feel better, think better, your mood is better. But it has to start with this concept I think we've talked about, brain envy. It's you have to want to have a better brain.
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Unknown B
When people come to you, what is it they're typically motivated by? Like when they come to you, why do they come to you? Is it because they've heard of your work on the Internet and they, they want to just. They're curious about getting their brain scanned. Or do they usually come with a symptom or some other ailment?
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Unknown A
No, usually they come because they're in pain, that they're anxious, they're depressed, they're marriage is falling apart, or their wife says, come or I'm going to divorce you. It's not an uncommon thing. Or they're struggling in school, they're not living up to their potential in one way or another. Now, about 10% of people come to us go, I'm fine, but I want to see and I want to be better and I don't want Alzheimer's. So a lot of people come because they love a parent or grandparent that has Alzheimer's. They realize there's a genetic component to it and they don't want to have that. But that's really someone who is forward thinking. I think more people come because they're hurting.
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Unknown B
What evidence have we got that alcohol is bad for the brain and bad for the rest of our body, especially in moderation?
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Unknown A
Well, the US Surgeon General just came out wanting to put cancer warning labels on all alcohol. That's sort of big evidence. I mean, three years ago, the American Cancer Society came out against any alcohol because drinking any alcohol increases your risk of seven different cancers. And that's a big deal. And then the evidence I have in my first clinic was outside of the Napa Valley in Northern California. So alcohol was a big thing. And as I was looking at scans, I'm like, your brain's older than you are that alcohol is not a health food. It is detrimental to brain function. And then of course, you know, so I've been a psychiatrist now. I decided to be a psychiatrist 46 years ago. The number one problem I see is someone drinks and they make a bad decision. Someone drinks and they say something to their partner that they just shouldn't have said, or they drink and they go to work, or they drink and they drive, or they drink and it just causes so much trouble.
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Unknown A
And in 1999, I did a show called the Truth about Drinking. And we took a young adult who had trouble with alcohol, got him sober, scanned him, and then on national television we got him drunk. Just like he got drunk and it just crashed his frontal lobes and he just, it's so clear that alcohol takes the break off your brain. And so people use it to calm the brain down. But there's certain parts of your brain you really don't want to go offline. The part that says, don't say that, don't do that.
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Unknown B
Is that just when I've had one drink and then when I sober up, I'm back to normal, or is this chronic?
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Unknown A
Well, it depends. One drink will decrease in a mild way, your decision making. When it becomes chronic, your life begins to get out of control.
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Unknown B
Because I'm wondering, if people drink in moderation, are they going to see long term impacts to their brain? Is there such thing as drinking just a little bit and being fine?
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Unknown A
Well, I think there's always sort of a dose response. There was a study in Spain that looked at people who had mild, moderate and severe drinking, and they compared them to people who didn't drink at all. Even the people who only drank a little had disruptions in the white matter of their brain. Now, most people have heard about gray matter and white matter. Gray matter is nerve cell bodies, white matter is nerve cell tracks. So if you think of gray matter, it's where the computation is happening in the brain. And white matter are like the highways. And so even a little bit of alcohol is creating potholes. It's disrupting the highways in the brain. And if you're drinking a lot, you are prematurely aging your brain.
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Unknown B
You scanned a lot of people who are alcoholics?
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Unknown A
Lots.
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Unknown B
I mean, I've got some scans here, which I'll put on the screen, but can you explain to me exactly what a brain looks like when a person has been drinking heavily for a long period of time?
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Unknown A
So again, we do a study called spect. And SPECT looks at blood flow and activity. It looks at how the brain works. And for people who know the mitochondria, those are the little powerhouse energy plants in your cells. The SPECT tracer, 49% of it is taken up by the mitochondria in the brain. So we're also looking at energy metabolism. And what we see with alcoholic brains is something we call scalloping, which is this global decrease in activity. So a healthy brain, full, even symmetrical activity. It's sort of a big fat and round with alcohol or other drugs too. You see the brain begin to shrivel and you see it gets this wavy appearance. And I'm like, the real reason not to drink is it damages your brain.
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Unknown B
So if you drink, then you have a smaller brain than you would have otherwise.
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Unknown A
Correct.
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Unknown B
That's pretty scary. What does it. Why does brain size matter? You know, people say it's going to shrink your brain. Why does that matter?
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Unknown A
So I often say the only organ where size really does matter is your brain, because you don't want to lose brain tissue. Right. There is a part of your brain called the hippocampus, which is on the inside of your temporal lobes right here. And it's really important. And it makes new stem cells every day, about 700. And if you're drinking, it's not allowing those new stem cells to take hold, to take root. You want to strengthen them so they will continue to support mood, memory, spatial orientation, spatial processing.
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Unknown B
So that's the symptoms. You're naming the universally symptoms of someone who is damaged. The hippocampus. Right. So called memory, probably poor spatial awareness, brain fog and mood and mood issues.
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Unknown A
And judgment and impulse control. But it impacts the brain globally. So the cerebellum. So they're not going to process as quickly. Their decisions are not going to be as good. And I worked with my friend BJ Fogg, who wrote a wonderful book called Tiny Habits. And he's the director of Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab, which is really on how people change. And he and I work together because I'm always interested in how I can help my patients better. And I met him at a conference like 18 months after we worked together. And he said, I just want to thank you. I'm like, why? He said, I wake up 100% every day. I'm like, why? I stopped drinking because people, and they're around me enough, they either drink more, I suspect, or they stop. And isn't that what you want? You wake up 100% every day. Why would you ever do anything that damages stem cell production in your brain?
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Unknown B
One might argue that it's serving me in the short term, of course, but.
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Unknown A
There are lots of things that are like, you see, you know, let's say you're married, but you're at a conference and you see this really cute person and you're like, oh, well, in the short run, that could be awesome. And in the long run, you lose half your net worth and visit your children on the weekends. It's like, that's not a good thing. And, you know, in the short run you feel more relaxed, right? With alcohol you feel more relaxed. And in the long run, it increases your risk of Alzheimer's disease. I'm like, that's not a good trade off.
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Unknown B
On your blog, you published a study from 2019. Sorry, from 2009, it was a study of monkeys that showed a decline in new brain cell development. And in that study, there was a 58% decline in new brain cells and a 63% reduction in the survival rate of new cells from alcohol use. They had monkeys drink alcohol? Yes.
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Unknown A
They had monkeys doing all sorts of things they shouldn't be doing, which is.
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Unknown B
Effectively like premature brain aging.
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Unknown A
Right. And it's worse if you do it before you. Your brain is finished developing. And so if you think of fraternities and sororities, I'm not a fan of sending children away to college. And it's because you have all these underdeveloped brains or not fully developed brains, and you put them all together without appropriate adult supervision, and a lot of bad things happen. Fraternity parties and sorority parties.
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Unknown B
They're drinking less, though, now.
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Unknown A
No, they're still drinking.
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Unknown B
Oh, really? There's one second.
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Unknown A
And now they're adding mushroom parties to it. So it's alcohol and psilocybin and marijuana. Because everybody thinks marijuana is innocuous, which is a lie. And is it not marijuana? It's a lie. Yeah. And I was actually really upset. So President Biden, during the time he was running for president, so this is 2019, he's on debate stage with a lot of other people, and they asked him if he would federally legalize marijuana. And he said, I don't think the science is decided, and, no, I don't think I would. And Cory Booker, the senator from New Jersey, shamed Biden on national television. He said, man, are you high? Which is just horrifying. And I'm watching this going, the science is actually really clear. Marijuana is bad for the brain. I published a study on a thousand marijuana users. Every area of their brain is lower in activity.
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Unknown A
And just today, a study came out in the Journal of the American Medical association on 1021, 1027 marijuana users. It decreased activity in the hippocampus that affected their memory centers. If you're a teenager and you use marijuana in your 20s, you have a higher incidence of anxiety, depression, and suicide. This is not innocuous. And we've been advertised this load of crap, which is, oh, it's just good medicine. Yeah, for some people, it is helpful, but let's not say it's innocuous, because that's a lie. And we are now. So many states have legalized marijuana for recreational use, including here in California. And the mental health crisis is not better. If anything, it's dramatically worse. Worse.
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Unknown B
There's two issues here. Isn't There, there's the impact cannabis has on the brain and then there's the whole issue of legalization. And as you were speaking, I was just looking at some of the research and it says exactly what you said. It says that there was a study published in JAMA Network which examined over a thousand year animals brains and almost 70% of heavy users exhibited reduced brain activity during working memory tasks. The decline was associated with poor performance in retaining using information. Long term cannabis use has been linked to smaller hippocampus volume which again impacts memory and learning. So I mean the science is clear of what it's doing, but the question of legalization is a whole nother issue.
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Unknown A
But please don't put people use marijuana in jail. Like that's just a bad use of money. That's not smart. But the problem becomes we're not educating kids on the potential damage to brain development, which nobody really argues about. Nobody's really. Nobody reputable I know of is going, yeah, give it to teenagers and let them smoke all they want. No, it's just dumb. So it's a bigger question and I think the answer I have a high school course in, it's called brain thrive by 25 and we actually studied it in 16 schools. Decreases drug, alcohol and tobacco use. Decreases depression and improve self esteem. Why? We teach kids to love and care for their brain. You got your brain scan and now you love your brain more. You, you want it to be better. That's the answer. It's not scanning everybody, it's educating everybody. Your brain controls everything you do.
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Unknown A
And when it works right, you work right, when it doesn't, you don't. So let's love it and let's learn together how to optimize it. But the big innovation, Stephen, for 2025 in psychiatry are marijuana, psilocybin and ketamine. The street drugs of the 60s are coming back and I'm like, I feel like I'm living in this insane world where we're not talking about, you should eat better and exercise and learn not to believe every stupid thing you think. And meditation could calm your mind probably more effectively than alcohol or marijuana. It's not hard to learn what's wrong with psilocybin.
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Unknown B
Magic mushrooms.
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Unknown A
Yeah. Everybody's so excited about microdosing and it's a treatment for depression. And I think I've seen this story before. So in the early 80s, benzos, you know, like Xanax and Klonopin and Ativan, they were mommy's little helper. And this will really help Your anxiety. The problem is they make your brain look older than you are and they're addictive as hell. Then there was alcohol is a health food, marijuana is innocuous. Pain is the fifth vital sign which led to the opiate epidemic and now we're into mushrooms. Psilocybin associated psychosis has gone up 300% in the last couple of years. That not for everybody, but for some vulnerable people and we don't know who they are, it can flip them into a psychotic episode. I'm like, we need to be careful, we need to be thoughtful.
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Unknown B
So psilocybin hasn't yet been legalised in the us In Oregon. Oh, it has been in Oregon. Is it being delivered yet in Oregon?
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Unknown A
I think just now. So there was a two year waiting period and they were training people to do psilocybin assisted psychotherapy.
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Unknown B
But there isn't a psilocybin compound that's been approved yet by the fda. So there's still, I think it's stage three clinical trials from what I understand. I was quite involved in that world as an investor once upon a time. So I understand the rigor to get these compounds clinically approved. And you're right. So in the early clinical trials, there's groups of like 20 people in some of the early clinical trials. And as they're progressing now, I think getting to stage three, they need to have bigger sample sizes and make sure that these compounds are safe. And from what I've seen, a lot of people are trying to get approved in a clinical setting for cases of treatment resistant depression, where you do see, even the studies that I've read, you see some people have adverse responses. So some people get worse. And there's, you know, if you take someone who's treatment resistant depression, potentially suicidal, and you give them quite a strong compound like psilocybin, some people can get worse, but for the ones that get better, it's pretty remarkable.
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Unknown B
It's like I've been, I remember the first study that I read, I think coming out of one of the London universities that's really leading on this, maybe Imperial College London or something. And it said something like 30% of people that did one dose of psilocybin went into clinical remission after 12 weeks after one dose. And there's really like nothing else that I can think of that can deliver that kind of response in that period of time.
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Unknown A
Ketamine, ketamine, MDMA's, I think ketamine can do it. But then ketamine can also be addictive and can be problematic. So I'm like, well, why wouldn't we scan them first and then try to figure out why you're depressed? Because if you think about it, depression is like chest pain. And nobody gets a diagnosis of chest pain. Why? It doesn't tell you what's causing it and it doesn't tell you what to do for it. All sorts of things can cause chest pain, right? From a heart attack, a heart arrhythmia, a heart infection, gas, an ulcer, grief. All of those can cause chest pain. Well, there's a whole bunch of things that can cause depression, like loss, negative thinking, low thyroid, having a head injury, being exposed to mold or mercury bladder. It's like if you don't look, if you just give everybody you're depressed based on these nine symptoms.
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Unknown A
And now we go give everybody an ssri, which is ludicrous because that's assuming everybody with. It's sort of like giving everybody with chest pain nitroglycerin, which is stupid. Right? You would never give everybody who has chest pain one treatment. You'd go, I have to target the treatment to the cause. But if you never look, you have no idea. So, for example, I was on the Kardashians, and so it's public that I saw Kendall and I saw her for post Covid anxiety. Her brain was on fire from COVID And a lot of people don't understand that Covid and other infections can cause inflammation in the brain. Well, that's not a psilocybin thing. That's an anti inflammatory cocktail to help post Covid anxiety or post Covid depression. If you don't look, you don't know, you end up flying blind. And that's what I've been fighting with my colleagues for the last 33 years.
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Unknown A
It's. How do you know unless you look? And what other medical specialists never look at the organ they treat. So we could talk about. I've seen these amazing results and I think we should see. Well, what's this scan pattern that you're going to respond to? Psilocybin or Lexapro or ketamine or lamictal. Right. I mean, it's great we have all these treatments, but let's not fly blind when we don't have to.
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Unknown B
There's this graph I saw the other day circulating around the Internet, which I'm going to show you. I'll put it on the screen for anybody that can't see it, but it shows globally which countries distribute most antidepressant pills, SSRIs and the United States leads the way by a long margin. I mean, I think in looking at that graph, it's almost 10 times more antidepressant pills per person are handed out in the United States than other parts of the world. And I wondered why, why does the USA hand out antidepressant pills like their water or something?
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Unknown A
It's such an interesting graph because here in America we want the fast answer. I don't feel well. Fix me. And what doctors have. Do you know 85% of psychiatric drugs in America are prescribed by non psychiatric physicians in 7 minute office visits that do standard of care 12% of the time and that they do what most doctors would consider good medicine 12% of the time. So you go to your family doctor, your nurse practitioner and you go, I'm sad, I'm anxious, I'm not sleeping. You might. And we hear this all the time in Amen clinics. I have 11 clinics around the United States. We hear it all the time that I went to my doctor and he gave me a prescription for Lexapro, Xanax and Ambien. And it just blows my mind that they would put you on something that changes your brain to need them in order for you to feel normal.
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Unknown A
See, people don't understand. And I am not opposed to medication. I use it when I think I need to. But let's be clear, they do not heal, fix anything. What they do is they suppress symptoms. But then once they've suppressed the symptoms, they've changed your brain so you need them in order to feel okay. I don't like that. Like, what can I do naturally? Head to head against antidepressants. Saffron has been shown to be equally effective. The spice saffron. Head to head against antidepressants. Walking like you're late, 45 minutes, four times a week. Equally effective. Head to head against antidepressants taking omega 3 fatty acids. Equally effective. In a study from Australia. Head to head against antidepressants. Learning how to not believe every stupid thing you think has been shown to be equally effective. So why not? If you are depressed and you can't get scanned, start walking, take omega 3 fatty acids and saffron and learn how to kill the ants.
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Unknown A
Ants. Ants are automatic negative thoughts and thoughts that come into your mind automatically and ruin your day. And we grow up, I don't know if the same thing is in England. There's no training on how to manage your mind right. I was 28 years old in my psychiatric residency when one of my professors said you have to teach Your patients not to believe every stupid thing they think. And I'm 28 and I'm in my residency, which means I finished college, I finished medical school, and I believe every stupid thing. I think that no one had ever taught me how to manage my own thoughts.
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Unknown B
I can't believe that thing you just said about Saffron. I was reading about it here. It says, research indicates that Saffron may be as effective as SSRIs in treating mild and moderate depression. And a meta analysis of eight studies found no difference between saffron and SSRIs in reducing depressive symptoms. But in fact, the side effect profile is probably better for Saffron.
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Unknown A
So I got interested in saffron about 25 years ago because I saw a study. So There are now 25 randomized controlled trials showing that Saffron is as effective as SSRIs and other antidepressants. But the thing that caught my interest, somebody speak more about me, is they didn't decrease sexual function. In fact, they enhanced it. And so I've been a psychiatrist a long time, and SSRIs for the right brain, they work, but they make it harder to have an orgasm. They decrease your libido, and I don't like that. I don't want to separate. If you're depressed, you already separated from your partner. If you're depressed and you can't have an orgasm or you're not interested, that's damaging not only to you, but it damages your partner. And so when I thought saffron can enhance sexual function, and I'm like, okay, I'm paying attention. And so I have collected every study ever published on Saffron and brain and mental health.
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Unknown A
There's actually five studies showing enhances memory, that it was as good as Aricept in people. Aricept, a medicine we use in Alzheimer's disease. And it's as good as Aricept. So it helps memory, it helps mood, it helps sexual function. I'm like, mood, memory, and sex. I'm going to take it. Mood, memory, and sex. So, yeah, I love Saffron. So why wouldn't we start with that and exercise and learn to manage your mind rather than start with Lexapro or even psilocybin or ketamine.
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Unknown B
One of the things when people are talking about psychedelics that they're trying to treat is trauma, right? Early childhood trauma. Is that something that you can see? If you looked at my brain, could you see trauma on my brain?
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Unknown A
Yes. And have you noticed there's a diamond pattern that I've written about. I published in. Actually, Discover magazine in 2016, listed my study. So I published a study on 21,000 people showing we could separate post traumatic stress disorder from traumatic brain injury with high levels of accuracy. And then we repeated the study on soldiers and showed the same thing. And this year, I just published the world's largest study on childhood trauma. So do you know the ACE score? Yes.
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Unknown B
Which is a measure of childhood trauma.
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Unknown A
Childhood trauma, adverse childhood experiences. So it's on a scale of 0 to 10, how many bad things happened to you as a child? Physical, emotional, sexual abuse, neglect. Being raised with a parent that has mental illness, that's incarcerated addiction, watching your mother be abused. So domestic violence. So zero to 10. I'm a one. My wife's an eight. We adopted our two nieces, who are both nines. And so I'm very interested in childhood trauma.
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Unknown B
So a nine is good or bad.
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Unknown A
Nine is terrible.
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Unknown B
Okay.
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Unknown A
So higher than zero always means you have none of those.
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Unknown B
Okay, eight.
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Unknown A
You have a lot. And if you have four or more, you have an increased risk of seven of the top 10 leading causes of death. If you have six or more. So my wife's in eight. My nieces are nines. You die 20 years earlier than the general population. And in our study, what we showed, the more aces you had, the more activation of your limbic structures, especially a very interesting area called the anterior cingulate gyrus. I think of this as the brain's gear shifter. Lets you go from thought to thought, move from idea to idea, be flexible, go with the flow. And when this is overactive, people worry. They hold on to things. It's like the trauma is always in front of them. And I often do timeline. I ask people, do you see your life going from left to right or from front to back?
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Unknown A
And I see the past behind me. My wife sees the past in front of her. And that's often what you see with trauma. And their brain becomes overactive in their emotional brain, which makes them at higher risk for pain syndromes, higher risk for anxiety, higher risk for depression, higher risk for insomnia, that they're sort of always looking for bad things to happen.
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Unknown B
Is there anything someone can do at home? Because, you know, not everybody can afford to go to a therapist. It's hard to get access to these kind of treatments. If I have some kind of trapped trauma or traumatic experience, PTSD that I've been through, and I don't have any money at all, what would you recommend for me?
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Unknown A
Well, I mean, the first thing I want everyone to do is love their brain. Right? The healthier your brain. And before we started, we talked about this idea. It's the brain you bring into trauma that often determines how you deal with it. And to get well, you have to get your brain healthy. So that's the first thing that means.
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Unknown B
Getting the alcohol, exercise, eat well, certain simple supplements.
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Unknown A
Yes. And then multiple vitamin for basic nutrition, know your vitamin D level and optimize it. And most people need to supplement vitamin D. And if you have darker skin, you need five times the level of sun as someone from northern Europe to get a healthy vitamin D level. So you should know your vitamin D level and optimize it. Like I always say, can't change what you don't measure. And vitamin D is a very important number to know. So multiple vitamin, vitamin D, omega 3 fatty acid. I did a study. 50 consecutive patients came in clinics who are not taking vitamin D. We measured their omega 3 index, 49 were suboptimal. And so I think most people would benefit from vitamin D, an omega 3 fatty acid supplement. And then it sort of depends if you have issues with your mood. Saffron would be great. If you tend to be anxious, don't go for the benzo theanine, ashwagandha, magnesium gaba, diaphragmatic breathing, hypnosis.
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Unknown A
So many things to help anxiety before you ever go to something that's addictive, that makes your brain look older than you are, that increases your risk of dementia.
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Unknown B
One of the really interesting things that you mentioned, which I had never heard of or thought of before, is the impact of negative thinking on your brain.
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Unknown A
We just published this huge study on negativity bias, and it's not good for your frontal lobes. And so I love doing positivity bias training like I train all of my patients. Start every day. Today is going to be a great day. I mean, somebody asked me today if I believe in manifestation, sort of. I think you have to tell your brain what you want and then your brain will figure out how to get it. And so if you go, today is going to be a great day, your brain starts looking like, why is today going to be a great day? And when you go to bed at night, what went well today that's so helpful to just start programming your brain to look for what's right, not just for what's wrong. Virtually every depressed patient, I said, have a high negativity bias. And so training them to be more positive now, not irrationally positive, because you need some anxiety.
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Unknown A
People who have low Levels of anxiety die early from accidents and preventable illnesses.
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Unknown B
People who have low levels of anxiety.
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Unknown A
Low levels of anxiety. So I always, I have an older brother who I love, but he's one of the don't worry, be happy people. And I sort of always wanted to be like him because I'm much more serious, much more driven and I'm like, no, I wanted to be like him until I read the research. The people who live the longest. So there's a study from Stanford, they started in 1921 and they looked at 15, 48, 10 year old children and they were looking for what goes with success, health and longevity. And what they found was shocking that don't worry, be happy people died the earliest from accidents and preventable illnesses. The people who live the longest, the one theme was they were conscientious. If they said they were going to show up and they showed up reliably, consistently. They live longer than everyone else and that just shows they had good frontal lobe function.
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Unknown A
It's like if I say I'm going to do something, I commit to it, I do it. You live longer.
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Unknown B
Could that be also linked to like discipline? Those people are more likely to be disciplined with other areas of their life. Habits, Eating, gym.
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Unknown A
Yes. Which means they had better frontal lobe function. So why would we ever take these guys frontal lobes offline? No. Love your frontal lobes. This is why, when you have children, don't let them hit soccer balls with their forehead. It's just not a smart thing to do.
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Unknown B
I think that's probably a big thing. People thinking about this time of the year. So recording now in January 2025.
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Unknown A
Wow.
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Unknown B
And everybody's thinking about new year, new me. They're thinking about the New Year's resolution, becoming a new person. Habits, motivation, discipline. These are like the trifecta of what I see people talking about the most this time of year. With everything you understand about the brain, how do I become a more disciplined, motivated person who has better habits?
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Unknown A
So one, you take care of your brain. And two, you know when relapse happens? Relapse happens when you don't sleep okay. When you've gone too long without eating, when blood sugar levels go low, relapse happens. You start making bad decisions. When, if you're a female, when you're in the last week of your cycle because blood flow to your frontal lobe drops for many women. So I have five sisters and five daughters. I completely believe in PMS and I've scanned people. Best time of their cycle, worst time. It's like they are Two different people, sort of like they have multiple personality disorder. Because your brain is just so different now, obviously not with all women, but for certain ones it's a big issue. And if the ants are taken over, so if the automatic negative thoughts, which also tend to go up, if you haven't slept, if you've gone too long without eating, if you're at that time of your cycle or you're under chronic stress, or you're drinking or using other drugs, so you might suppress them, but then they come back and they attack you, so then you have to suppress them again.
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Unknown A
And this is how addiction starts.
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Unknown B
So is it fair to say that if you're trying to change who you are, you're trying to establish a new habit or crack motivation, then the goal shouldn't be necessarily to get a six pack. It should probably be something further upstream, like sleep well or better frontal lobes.
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Unknown A
And so how do I get better frontal lobes? And three strategies. Frontal lobe envy. Right. Brain envy. Gotta care about it. Avoid things that hurt, damaging my frontal lobes, and do things that strengthen my frontal lobes.
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Unknown B
We talked about two of these points earlier, but we talked about alcohol, but in the context of sleep, I've heard of people on your podcast. Change your brain. After two drinks, your REM sleep drops to roughly an hour. After four drinks, REM sleep drops to 30 minutes. And after six drinks, your REM sleep drops to less than two minutes. For many people, obviously these aren't specific numbers because everybody's brain is different, but it just goes to show, I guess, the relative drop in REM sleep, which is your restorative sleep based on alcohol consumption. Hence, if I drink, I'm not going to sleep. While I'm not going to get restorative sleep, I wake up the next day, I'm going to struggle more with motivation and keeping any habit I have and anxiety.
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Unknown A
And then you're going to be more ants and then you're going to drink more to shut up the ants, and then when they come back, they come back stronger.
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Unknown B
And by ants you mean the automatic.
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Unknown A
Negative thoughts, the chatter that hurts you. And we talked about how to kill them. So whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous or out of control, what I want you to do is just write it down and then ask yourself a series of questions. And I have, I have this cute diagram of the different types of ants and I always ask my patients, so which, which are your ants? Are they like all or nothing ants? Where you think in words like always, never, everyone, every time, are they less than ants? Given to us by social media where we compare ourselves to others in a negative way. Guilt beating ants, mind reading ants, fortune telling ants, blame ants. So identify the type. Do you have an example of a bad thought that just sort of runs around your head?
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Unknown B
Oh, gosh. I think I live in a permanent state of assuming I'm gonna get bad news and it doesn't haunt me. I think I'm generally quite a calm person and quite focused and peaceful in my brain. But I think because I've ran companies for the last 10 years or longer, you're always just about to get bad news. So I think that can be playing on the radio in the background somewhere, like I'm gonna open an email and it's gonna be bad news. There's so many opportunities for bad news in my world. So yeah, yeah.
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Unknown A
So I think you write it down. This is gonna be bad. And then my friend Byron, Katie has this process that I've refined to be. So that's a fortune telling ant.
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Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown A
And so this is going to be bad news or I always get bad news, fortune telling and all or nothing. And so the first question is, is it true?
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Unknown B
No.
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Unknown A
The second question, is it absolutely true with 100 certainty? And if one is no, two is automatically no. The third question is how does that thought make me feel?
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Unknown B
On edge.
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Unknown A
On edge. How does the thought make me act? So the third question has three parts. How does the thought make me feel? Tens. On edge? How does it make me act?
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Unknown B
Removed. What's that one? Is it apathetic?
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Unknown A
Reticent.
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Unknown B
Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown A
And the third part of that, what's the outcome of believing it's always going to be bad news?
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Unknown B
I mean there's no good outcome, really.
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Unknown A
Suffering.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
Suffering. Yeah. The fourth question is, how would you feel if you didn't have that thought? Free. And how would you act?
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Unknown B
Happier and more present.
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Unknown A
And the outcome of not having that thought? Better relationships, better life because you're more present. Yeah, yeah. And then the fifth question. So the first one is, is it true? The second one, is it absolutely true. The third one, how would I, how do I feel? Act. And what's the outcome of having this thought? Fourth question is, how would I feel? Act and what's the outcome? Not having the thought? The fifth question is my favorite. Take the thought and turn it to the opposite and then ask yourself, is that true? So it's gonna be good news or it's gonna be innocuous news and then go, yeah, 99 times out of 100 that's true. And then I would because I'm also a CEO. I'm like, well, how many of these things can't I handle? Virtually none of them. I can handle all of them. Right. So I'll be okay.
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Unknown A
And then I meditate on the opposite of the thought that's bothering me. And so I take these thoughts captive. I like that. And people who are depressed are infested with negativity that you can train that your brain is healthy, it's easier to do, you can train that. But you imagine there's no second grade class in the world where teachers teach children not to believe every stupid thing they think. In fact, I was watching one of the confirmation hearings today and the senators were filled with ants. Oh yeah. They were distorting things, they were angry, they were making things more negative than they needed to be. We are modeled bad thinking. And the news does it purposefully because they know if they piss you off, if they scare you, you're going to tune in so they can sell you more copper underwear. So we're in a society that breeds these ants attacks.
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Unknown A
So you have to be careful. People who watch the news in the morning are 27 less happy in the afternoon. And so you have to guard what goes in. So every day you are programming happiness or sadness. And I believe Dennis Prager has this great five minute video called why be happy? And I love it so much. I wrote a book called you happier? And I start with his idea that happiness is a moral obligation. And unlike. So I grew up not too far from here. I went to Catholic school. My mom was very serious about being Catholic and growing up. The idea happiness is a moral obligation was nowhere in my childhood. And I had a good childhood. Why is it a moral obligation? Because of how you impact other people. If you were raised by an unhappy parent, or married to an unhappy spouse, or raising an unhappy child, and you ask those people, is happiness an ethical issue?
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Unknown A
They would all say yes. So is it wrong to program your mind to look for what's right?
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Unknown B
It's hard for some people.
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Unknown A
It's just a pattern, right? It's like getting biceps are hard, but it's not right. It's just repeatedly doing the same thing that gives you the desire you want.
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Unknown B
Have you seen someone shift from being a stereotypically negative person, down and out, negative, depressed, to the opposite?
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Unknown A
Yes, truly opposite a lot. But you got to do the process. You've got to do the work. When you love yourself, you do the work. Like I come from a family of fat people, but I'm not why Because I know it's a risk for me. And so every day of my life, I'm on an obesity prevention plan. And I wish I didn't have to be right. I wish I could just eat anything I want and it would be okay. But it's not the reality of my life.
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Unknown B
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Unknown B
Head to LinkedIn.com diary to claim yours now. That's LinkedIn.com diary and of course, terms and conditions apply and only available on LinkedIn ads. Now for people that don't know who Elizabeth Smart is, who is she and what did you learn from scanning her brain?
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Unknown A
So Elizabeth is someone who made really international news many years ago. She was kidnapped when she was a teenager and virtually raped every day for nine months. And then she was found that she was actually very smart and she manipulated her kidnappers to bring her back to Utah, Salt Lake City, where they kidnapped her from. And she was found by the police. And one would think she would have severe lasting Post Traumatic stress disorder. And I was very interested to scan her and be helpful to her. She, in fact, did not have Post Traumatic stress disorder. She had post traumatic growth. She took her trauma and made something special out of it where she actually runs an organization for women who have been abused. And I just remember sitting there and her brain was actually quite healthy. I think she helped me more than I helped her.
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Unknown A
Just so fascinated by how she could take something that's truly horrifying and come out of it and be quite okay.
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Unknown B
And she's how old now?
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Unknown A
She's in her 30s and she's in a relationship, she's married, she has children, she's running an organization, she speaks around the country.
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Unknown B
I think when people hear that, they might begin to question how they think about trauma. Because we think of trauma as a very deterministic thing, I. E. If that happens to you, I can predict that you're going to be X. You're going to be, you know, maybe depressed. You're not going to be socially functioning. You're probably not going to have functional, good relationships. That's the kind of thing we think when we hear about such a horrific event, we kind of see as deterministic of who you then become. But she's proving that that's not the case now.
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Unknown A
In fact, of people who go through something really terrible, about 10% of people will develop PTSD, and about 10% of people will develop post traumatic growth. And most people sort of land in the middle. I wrote an article 1982, when I was a resident at Walter Reed, called post Vietnam stress disorder, a metaphor for current and past life events. And it was when I was resident, I got the idea. It's the brain you bring into Vietnam that often determines the brain that comes out of Vietnam. That if you grew up in an alcoholic home or you grew up with a lot of stress, you are much more likely to become a heroin addict and much more likely to come home and struggle. Obviously not always, but we should. There's a concept since I started imaging that I just dearly love so much called brain reserve.
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Unknown A
So brain reserve is the extra tissue you have to deal with whatever stress comes your way. And brain reserve actually starts before you were conceived. So if you get your brain wrapped around that a little bit, it's the idea of epigenetics, that if your parents grew up in trauma and abuse, it changed their genes to make you more vulnerable. And if so, your genetic history matters. The health of your mom while she's carrying you, your brain starts to develop three weeks after she gets pregnant. Three weeks, like about day 21. And so her stress level, her infectious disease level, burden, her nutrition, her sleep, all of these things matter. When my patient's wife is pregnant, I'm like, you need to be nice to her. You need to, like, lower her stress. Because your child that this has generational consequences. And then when you're born, how did the birth go?
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Unknown A
And then as a child, what was your nutrition like? What were your stress levels like? Did you play football? Did you fall off the swing? All of those things are either building your brain reserve or stealing your brain reserve. So when you get kidnapped, or let's just take two soldiers in war, they're in the same tank, they Go over an ied. So they're both. The tank is blown up, one walks away unharmed, the other one's permanently disabled. Why? It's their brain reserve. The brain they brought into the explosion often determines how they are. So I argue we should always be building reserve. And I turned 70 this year, and I know 50% of people 85 and older have Alzheimer's disease. One in two horrifying statistics. And so I know that. So between now and 15 years from now, what are the things I can do to build my reserve so the gravity of age has less impact on me?
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Unknown B
Because your brain is going to shrink with aging, regardless of any it's going to show.
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Unknown A
Although I have a whole group of super brains, people that are 80, 90, 105, like stunningly beautiful brains, but they're people that had stunningly beautiful brain reserve habits that they didn't smoke, they weren't drinkers, they ate well, they were not overweight.
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Unknown B
So on the subject of Alzheimer's, it's increasing globally. Reading something I think from like the Alzheimer's association that said, they're predicting by 2050 that there's going to be 150 or 160 million people globally that have Alzheimer's disease. There's still a lot of question marks around what causes it, what increases its probability, et cetera. But what do you think the cause of Alzheimer's is?
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Unknown A
I think there are many causes of it. And the going wisdom until recently was excessive beta amyloid plaque formation caused Alzheimer's. And there's a lot of questions around that theory. I think I have a mnemonic I like called bright minds. You want to keep your brain healthy or bright rescue it. You have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors. So I think there are in fact many roads to Alzheimer's disease. And people go, what's the difference between Alzheimer's and dementia? Dementia is the umbrella category. You start losing your faculties. Alzheimer's is one of the types. But the more you get into it, you realize it's a pretty mixed bag. And so bright minds, blood flow, retirement and aging, inflammation, genetics, head trauma, toxins, mental health. You know, if a woman is depressed, it doubles her risk of Alzheimer's disease. If a man is depressed, it quadruples his risk of Alzheimer's.
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Unknown A
And then the sleeper in all of these is infections, immunity and infections. Many of us think it's a major one of the major causes of Alzheimer's disease. In fact, there's a new study out on Covid. People who had Covid have significantly Increased risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. And then neurohormones. And we have this epidemic of low testosterone in young males now, diabesity and sleep, diabetes. You either have high blood sugar and, or you're overweight. And that one risk factor, if you have that one risk factor now, all of a sudden you have 10 of the 11 risk factors.
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Unknown B
Because if you have diabetes, if you're.
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Unknown A
Overweight or you have high blood sugar, it lowers blood flow to your brain, it prematurely ages your brain, it increases inflammation. Fat cells produce something called adipokines, which is inflammatory molecules. It changes your genetics, fat stores toxins. You're more likely to be depressed, it damages your immunity, takes healthy testosterone, turns it into unhealthy cancer promoting forms of estrogen and impairs your sleep. And then people go, oh, but you're fetching. And it's like, no. I published a study on 33,000 people. As your weight goes up, the size and function of the brain goes down. Somebody's got to like say the truth. The truth is being at an unhealthy weight is unhealthy for your brain and body.
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Unknown B
I was reading some studies earlier on when I spoke to a insulin resistance expert. One of the things he said to me was that they now almost describe Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes. That's a phrase that's often used. And when they look at brains that are insulin resistant, the person between 40 or 80% of the time, depending on which it is you look at, has insulin resistance, I. E. They've had elevated blood sugar levels which have cause an insulin resistance or something else, it could be stress that causes insulin resistance or many other things. But it's interesting to think of, to think of as you said that, that one thing which is the high blood sugar levels, insulin resistance can have such a profound impact on the brain. And if I've ever had a case for being a bit more careful about sugar and other things that will spike my blood sugar levels and chronically, I think that's probably it, you know, because your brain, as you said at the start, this conversation, drives everything in your life.
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Unknown B
And to think that sugar, an overconsumption of sugar, should I say has such a profound impact on the brain is pause for me because I don't like sugar that much.
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Unknown A
You don't like it as much as you like your brain?
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Unknown B
Yeah, in my life.
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Unknown A
So there's a study from the Mayo Clinic where they looked at people who had primarily a fat based diet. So fish, healthy oils, avocados, nuts, and seeds. They had 42% less risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. And then they looked at people who had primarily a protein based diet diet. So think of a caveman diet. 21% less risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. And then they looked at people that had a standard American diet, simple carbohydrate based diet. Bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, fruit juice, sugar. A 400% increased risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. It's the sugar and the foods that quickly turn to sugar, which goes with the insulin diabetes type 3 hypothesis. You have to manage it. And the reason this is so important to me is having high blood sugar makes your blood vessels brittle and more likely to break, which means it takes longer for things to heal and you're more likely to have a stroke.
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Unknown A
And having a stroke increases your risk of Alzheimer's tenfold.
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Unknown B
So you've found a keto diet for some people.
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Unknown A
I find that it doesn't have enough plants in it, which means it's probably not going to be awesome for your microbiome. So I'm more a fan of a paleo diet that has healthy fat, healthy protein and lots of plants.
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Unknown B
We covered so much. The one thing we talked, we started talking about briefly, I think before we started recording was the subject of hope and grief. I've never heard someone talk about the impact that grief has on the brain when we lose someone, when we're going through prolonged pain because of a loss.
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Unknown A
Oh, I know more about this than I want. It activates the limbic or emotional circuits in the brain. And so when you lose someone important to you, or even a pet like I had made me cry. A white shepherd and so beautiful and so sweet. And he got cancer and when he died, he still lives in my head. And I lost someone important to me about 20 years ago. And for like a year, I was just not okay. And so I scanned myself and my emotional brain was so busy. And it's like when you have someone, they actually become ingrained in every fun place in your brain. So they get stored in multiple places in your brain. And when they're not there anymore, your brain still looks for them. And figuring out ways to sort of calm down your emotional brain can be so, so helpful.
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Unknown B
What part of the brain is that? Is that the amygdala?
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Unknown A
No, it's more the insular cortex and the thalamus. And that's what we found with depression. I published a study with scientists from USC and Los Angeles Children's Hospital on depression. And what we found, those were the structures that were dramatically overactive compared to people who were not depressed.
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Unknown B
So in grief, the prefrontal cortex, I'm assuming, because that's the more rational part of the brain that's probably gonna be quieter.
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Unknown A
Right. And so it's the prefrontal cortex you bring in to the loss that often determines how you deal with it.
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Unknown B
Okay.
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Unknown A
And so your emotional brain fires up. If you're drinking and taking the prefrontal cortex offline, it can't manage it. So one thing people don't understand is the fibers from the prefrontal cortex to the rest of the brain are inhibitory, which means they calm things down. So if this isn't working right, the emotional part can sort of override it, and it becomes problematic. And so protecting this is so important to managing so much of your life. I mean, it's really the human, most human, thoughtful part of us. And what we found within hope was that insular cortex was low. It's really interesting to us. And hope is tomorrow can be better, and I have a part in it. When you're hopeless, you don't believe you have agency to make tomorrow better. And so often they're hope training courses that can be good. And I, with all of my patients, I do this exercise called the one page miracle I referred to earlier.
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Unknown A
It's like, write down, what do you want? Relationships, work, money, physical, emotional, spiritual health. All these things. Write it down. And so we talked earlier about recording this in January. I have all my patients here when I first see them. And then every January, for sure. And then you just ask yourself, does my behavior get me what I want? But. But it starts with, what do you want? You have to write it down. Like with my wife, I'm very clear. I want a kind, caring, loving, supportive, passionate relationship. Always want that. Don't always feel like that at these rude thoughts that show up or conflicting ideas that'll just show up in my head. And I'm like, oh, no, don't say that. No, don't do that. Because it doesn't fit. And it's been the best relationship of my life because both of us have the same goals, and we're pretty good at matching our behavior to the goal.
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Unknown A
And as a CEO, right, what do you do with companies? You have a business plan, and then you have regular meetings and key performance indicators to like, oh, how are we doing? And if we're not doing great, we change. But it always starts with plan. And most individuals never have a plan.
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Unknown B
So they're kind of just being dragged around by whatever I mean, and now.
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Unknown A
In social media, it's very dangerous because you might want what the Kardashians have. And it's like, wait a minute. Relationships, work, money, physical, emotional, spiritual health. And then if I had tattoos, I don't yet. My wife got one and freaked me out. It's my daughter's birthday. But the tattoo would be, does it fit? Know what you want. And then ask yourself, every day, my behavior, get me what I want. And some people go, well, isn't that selfish? It's like, absolutely not. Because if I'm good, I'm good for everyone around me.
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Unknown B
Your goal could be to be a great father.
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Unknown A
It absolutely should be your great father. It's to be a loving husband. Kind, caring, loving, supportive, passionate. It's. Oh, by the way, when people do our program, their erections are better. Just saying. Because blood flow is better. When brain health is better, because your brain uses 20% of the blood flow in your body. And so if you're working to have a healthy brain, everything works better.
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Unknown B
Jesse, why did that come to mind when I asked about your goals?
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Unknown A
Well, because I went passionate. And I'm like, okay, you have to be clear and. Or even think about work. You know, what's the goal with work? It's to do meaningful work. It's to make a difference.
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Unknown B
I am. You're a father. I'm not a father yet, but I hope to be. I've got three little nieces. My brother's had two little nieces and one nephew. My brother's a year older than me, and he's had three kids already, so I've got some catching up to do. But as I'm progressing towards this season of life, one of the things I think about having met you is how to raise healthy brains. Like, what parenting style is going to make sure that my kids have very healthy brains. There's so much conversation about parenting styles. Some people say, just let them do whatever they want to do. Some people say, be an authoritarian and put rules in place. I'm wondering, from the perspective of someone who scanned 260,000 brains, how do you raise a perfect brain?
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Unknown A
Well, one, you get rid of the idea that you're going to raise a perfect brain because there's a little OCD in there. The first thing you do is you have goals for yourself. What kind of parent do you want to be, and what kind of child do you want to raise? And for me, I want to be present, kind and effective. And for my kids, I want them to be mentally strong and resilient And I want them to feel good about themselves. And then you bond with them. You want to be a good dad. Bonding requires two things. Time, actual physical time, and listening. So time. I have an exercise I love so much called special time. 20 minutes a day, do something with your child that your child wants to do. And during that time, no commands, no questions, no directions, just time to bond.
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Unknown A
The most important thing to children is time with their parents. And people are busy. Doesn't have to be a lot, but if you do that 20 minutes a day, it's money in the relational bank. So my first literary agent, I think he was 42 when he had his first child. And he's like, my daughter, she's two. Laura never wants to be with me. I come home, she completely ignores me. She just wants her mother. She wants nothing to do with me. That's because she's a girl, right? I'm like, absolutely not, girl. You're ignoring her. What do you mean, I'm ignoring her? I said, you're ignoring her? Do this. And I told him about special time. And he's like, that won't work. I'm like, negativity bars. I'm like, oh, great. You represent an idiot. You represent me. And you're telling me it won't work? I said, do this.
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Unknown A
It works. And I'm gonna call you in three weeks. So I wrote him in my appointment book. We had appointment books on. And three weeks later, I called him. Carl, It's Daniel. Daniel. She won't leave me alone. All she wants to do is be with me. As soon as I get home, she grabs my leg and wants her time. I'm like, I told you, it works. It works. Time. Actual physical time. And then shut up. Listen, this is so important. Parents are awful at listening. You've heard of active listening?
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
So active. Listen. It's like, so simple. Child says something before you give your two cents, just repeat it back and sort of listen to the feelings behind the words. I want to have blue hair. I know what my dad would have said. I want to have blue hair. No way in hell. As long as you live in my house, you can have blue hair. What does that do? It just shuts down the conversation or starts a fight. Like hell you want to have blue hair. And then just be quiet. And then the child might say, everyone's doing that. My dad would say, I don't care what anyone else is doing. As long as you live in this house, you're not going to have blue hair. If they're going to jump off a cliff, are you going to go with them? Not helpful. Sounds like you want to be like the other kids.
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Unknown A
And then he might say sometimes I feel like I don't fit in. Which is really the conversation you want to have. And my mother would have said of course you fit in, you're a good boy, you're a good looking boy. And that's not helpful either. It's just helpful to listen. If you have time and you have listening, you bond. And then the kids tend to pick your values because they're bonded and then when they make a mistake, don't rescue them. Today parents do way too much for their children and they steal their self esteem. I often say if you do too much for your kids, you build your self esteem by stealing theirs. And you are going to be tempted because you're going to have such love for them. You don't want them to hurt and that's a mistake. Because character is built through struggle.
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Unknown A
Character and self esteem are built by feeling competent. You can solve problems. So when a child says I'm bored rather than well, we could do this or we could do that or we could do this, no, I wonder what you're going to do about it in.
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Unknown B
Terms of their diets and lifestyle. Am I right in thinking it's pretty obvious here? Sugar, chemicals, toxins, these kinds of things are really, really bad for child's but is there anything non obvious that we do to our children's brains?
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Unknown A
Well, I think the most important thing is you model the message and there's a reason that all of the sugar poison cereals are on the bottom two aisles or the bottom two rows because that's where children can see them and they're like mommy, I want this and I always want you to remember this rule and I want you to consider sharing it with your children. If you have a tantrum to get your way, the answer is no. It's always going to be no. Go for it. I'm dead serious. We teach people how to treat us by what we tolerate. We train children to be bad by what we pay attention to to. So I think that's always been a very effective rule for me. If you have a fit, the answer is no. It's always going to be no. And I'm not going to be phased if you do.
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Unknown A
But what if they do it in a store? It's like you want long term pain or short term pain. Short term pain is not giving into the tantrum and there'll probably be a consequence when you come home for acting like that.
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Unknown B
So are you saying to ignore the tension?
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Unknown A
It's like, I'm not giving in. Like, have fun with it. I am not getting in. We're at a friend's house and you have a fit. Well, one, there's going to be a consequence when you come home. I don't know what it is, but I'm going to think about it. It's such a great line that in my book, raising mentally strong kids, we have lots of great lines for parents. And it's, I don't know what the consequences, but I'm going to think about it just to increase their anxiety about it because we want them thinking about their behavior and like in life, their consequences to that behavior. We want them to think about what.
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Unknown B
That might be, might that stray into neglect when they get. They express their emotions. So, for example, my kid is in a supermarket and screaming and crying, my daddy give me this. And I just always ignore them. Are they going to be raised to be like neglected children or something?
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Unknown A
Well, if you do it in the context of special time and active listening. And I think rules are important, like, tell the truth, put away things that you take out. We treat each other with respect, do what I ask the first time. It's one of my favorite rules. It prevents the kids from, like, going on and on about being oppositional. There's no way they're going to feel like you're not listening and you're ignoring them. But if they're acting inappropriately, you want to one not get into it and to have a significant conversation and consequence for it.
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Unknown B
I've invested more than a million pounds into this company, Perfect Ted, and they're also a sponsor of this podcast. I switched over to using Matcha as my dominant energy source, and that's where Perfect Ted comes in. They have the Matcha powders, they have the Matcha drinks, they have the pods. And all of this keeps me focused throughout a very, very long recording day, no matter what's going on. And their team is obsessed with quality, which is why they source their ceremonial grade Matcha from Japan. So when people say to me that they don't like the taste of matcha, I'm guessing that they haven't tried Perfect ted. Unlike low quality Matcha that has a bitter, grassy taste, Perfect Head is smooth and naturally sweet. And without knowing it, you're probably a Perfect Ted customer already. If you're getting your matcha at places like Blank street or Joan the Juice, but now you can make it yourself at home.
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Unknown B
So give it a try and we'll see if you still don't like Matcha. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you 40% off our matcha if you try it today. Head to perfect head.com and use code STEPHEN40. Or if you're in a supermarket, you can get it at Tesco's or Holland and Barrett or in the Netherlands at Albert Hein. And those of you in the us, you can get it on Amazon. One of the big themes I wanted to ask you about, so last thing I really wanted to focus on today, is there's been such a huge rise in the conversation on neurodivergence, which we talked about in part last time. You looked at my brain, you looked at my brain and we did some tests and such, and you spoke to some of my colleagues and people that know me.
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Unknown B
I think they did some surveys about me as well. And you concluded that I had adhd. So many people are being diagnosed with adhd, it seems when we look at some of the numbers around the increase in diagnosis, it's quite alarming. I wonder why that is. Are people being born with more ADHD or is it an increase in the diagnosis? Is there a pop culture element to it where it's become quite popular to say that you have adhd? If you like, forget your keys or something? What is it, in your view?
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Unknown A
So ADHD is real. There's a significant genetic component to it, but we're also living in a society that promotes its expression. So the more sugary cereals with red dyed number 40 increases hyperactivity, the more gadgets you give them so they can't pay attention, the less they're outside in the sun, the more they're playing video games. All of those things increase the expression of adhd. Again, something I know more about than I want to. I have a book called Healing Add and I write about my own personal experience being married to someone who has ADHD and having several of my kids who have it, that it's real and left untreated, there are all sorts of consequences. So people always ask if you think of medicine like Ritalin or Adderall, people go, what are the side effects? And it has side effects. Sometimes it can increase ticks, sometimes it'll cause sleep problems, sometimes you'll lose some weight or decrease your appetite.
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Unknown A
But they don't ask me. The other question, and I always want to make sure they do, is what are the side effects of not treating adhd? And they're things like school failure, incarceration, bankruptcy, divorce. It's serious now for someone like you who's really driven and very bright for you, the consequences. And this is going to sound crazy, but it's underachievement or it takes more for you to be at your best than if you had it treated. But I have this, an example of a 14 year old who was literally failing in school and conflict driven with everyone around him. So people didn't really want to be near him. And I diagnosed him, started with natural things and they help, but not enough. Put him on Concerta, a form of methylphenidate or Ritalin, and he went from failing to all A's and B's. And he got into the high school he wanted to get into, which was very competitive and he's easy to be around.
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Unknown A
That's a win because it's going to change the trajectory of his life. And I like that.
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Unknown B
I remember you talking last time about your daughter. We have the clip. Don't we have a doctor? I'm talking about daughter. We can just insert it here.
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Unknown A
I have a daughter. And the truth is, and this is going to sound awful, I never thought she was very smart and I'm ashamed of myself for thinking that. And she's staying up every night till 1 or 2 o'clock in the morning to get her homework done. And one night she came just crying to me and she said, dad, I don't think I can ever be as smart as my friends. And it just broke my heart. And I scanned her the next day and I'd actually scanned her originally, but I had no experience in scans, so it was like 1991. I'm like child psychiatrist and an expert in ADD and I didn't see it in my own child. And the next day I put her on a tiny dose of Ritalin, scanned her again in her brain, normalized, normalized. A week later I had dinner with her and I'm like, do you notice any difference?
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Unknown A
And she said, oh my God. She said a class seemed like it always took eight hours to just do that one class. And I was always lost. And I'm very religious. I was praying to God that the teacher wouldn't call on me because I was lost. She said, now that same class goes by in about 20 minutes. And my hands up because I track what's going on. And that child, who had always gotten Bs and Cs but with great effort. Her first report card was straight A's. The next 10 years, straight A's she actually got into the University of University of Edinburgh's veterinarian school, one of the best vet schools in the world, where they cloned Dolly the sheep. And if I wouldn't have figured that out, she would have been condemned to a lifetime of mediocrity, hating herself, working so hard to get a mediocre result.
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Unknown A
Optimizing your brain and medicine's never the first thing I think about, but it's one of the things I think about because I just want to use all the tools in my toolbox to optimize your brain, because if I optimize your brain, I optimize your life.
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Unknown B
It was really powerful and something that I then spoke to lots of my friends about and such. One of the things I've always struggled with with ADHD in terms of my understanding is some people that I know have adhd. They just. They're so remarkably different to me, and they're so remarkably different from each other. Something about one of my friends that has it very, very different in terms of productivity, symptomology versus someone like me, who, for example, in my case, I'm very focused. I think I can be very focused. Not always, but when I'm into something, I can focus on it for a long period of time. In fact, people don't know this, but it's worth me saying. My last book, I went to Bali for, I think it was either 11 or 14 days. And I came out of the jungle with the book.
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Unknown B
So I went into the jungle with basically 33 sentences, individual sentences. I knew what the chapter titles were. Came out of the jungle. I handed my publisher, Penguin, a manuscript after that, that Prudent Jungle, which basically meant that for those 11 or 14 days, I can't remember the exact number. I sat there for about 10 hours a day and did. I was obviously getting distracted once in a while, but I wrote the whole book in about 14 days. Decent book, so dollars. But for me, it's an example of that. When I think of adhd, I think of, like, attention deficit. And again, I don't know much about adhd, so I'm very naive. I represent emotional population probably in that regard, but I don't think I have an attention deficit necessarily.
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Unknown A
Well, for things that are new, novel, highly interesting, stimulating, or frightening, yeah, people with ADD can pay attention just fine. That's why a lot of people who have it go, I don't have it. Like, if I love my history teacher, I'm, like, focused. But then when I go to geometry, I can't do it. At all.
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Unknown B
Yeah, that's the story of mean school.
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Unknown A
It's. It should be. It's like love is a drug. If you love something, well, you can do it. But the problem is, most of life, you don't love, and so you end up with this really sort of erratic attention disorder. And they tend to gravitate toward things, you know, I see. Hear the story a lot, unfortunately, is they. They experiment in college, and they take a little bit of methamphetamine, and it helps them, and they're more focused and. But then they don't know how to manage it, and they end up taking more and more, and they end up getting addicted, and it steals their soul.
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Unknown B
Love. Can you see love on the brain?
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Unknown A
Helen Fisher, who's a neuroscientist in New Jersey, has actually studied love. And new love shows up as increased activity in the dopamine centers of the brain. And it makes you just a bit obsessive. I think of new love as dopamine, but lasting love more like opiates. So new love, when you break up, is sort of like getting off cocaine hard, but not that bad. Lasting love, if it goes away. And we talked about grief earlier. It's like it's ripping your skin off. It's really hard. Sort of like getting off of heroin.
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Unknown B
Do people come to you that are heartbroken a lot? What do they say?
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Unknown A
I can't stop. Think that their brain gets into anxiety, sadness, and that person just lives in every fun place in their brain, and they can't get over it. And it can be quite messy for them.
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Unknown B
What is the change that you would like to see in the world?
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Unknown A
Well, I'm actually working on it. I want everybody to just ask this one question. And we mentioned my work with DJ Fogl and how people change, and he talks about tiny habits. What's the smallest thing I can do that will make the biggest difference? And if I could impact the world, it would be through one question. Whatever I'm doing right now, is it good for my brain or bad for it? I want to teach people to love their brains and to just make better decisions for the health of their brain. Because then everything follows that. Is it good for my brain or bad for it? I'm 15. I have a developing brain. My brain is myelinating itself, which means it's wrapping all my nerves, all my brain cells with a white, fatty substance called myelin. And my frontal lobes are not done until I'm 25.
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Unknown A
Oh, I'm gonna love my brain. So I'm not Pouring crap in my body with what I eat or what I drink because it's bad for my brain. When I'm 60 and I'm stressed because my football team's not winning, I'm not going for an extra beer because I love my brain, and I'm going to get to a healthy weight because I love my brain. That's a change. That's why I think God put me on the earth.
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Unknown B
I wanted to do something. Just thinking about it, as you're speaking on about the one simple thing that I can do to help my brain and to love my brain. When you think about behaviors and habits that are popular and trendy at the moment, are there any that stand out to you as being particularly good for the brain or particularly bad for the brain? Because I had a couple come to mind that I wanted to throw at you. I mean, one of them that's exploding in the UK at the moment is paddle, which is kind of, I think you call it pickleball here. Good for my brain, bad for my brain.
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Unknown A
Good for your brain. Really good. Do you know what?
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Unknown B
When you scanned my brain, you told me that you said, for next six months, Steve, I need you to take some Omega 3. Do this, do this, do this. And I'd like you to play more racket sports. I built a paddle court in my garden. So I have a paddle court in my garden in Cape Town. And I love playing it now, and I play it all the time. I said, Dr. Damon said it's good for my brain, but it's exploding. It's exploding across Europe, really, but really across much of the world.
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Unknown A
Now I'm here in the US Too. And it's so good for your brain because it's working your cerebellum. And I told you that because yours was sleepy. And as you activate this and you do that with coordination exercises, it then activates your frontal lobes.
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Unknown B
Does that mean that people that are uncoordinated have a cerebellum issue?
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown B
Oh, really?
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Unknown A
And the more you do it, the better coordination you develop. And that's why coordination exercises for kids, so we talked about kids, is you want to do that with them early, play sports, but not sports where they're going to get a head injury, right? I mean, we have to be smarter than we are. But when I was young, my mother, who's now 93, was the ping pong champion in the neighborhood. And she was really good, and she never let us beat her until we could. But she was always encouraging.
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Unknown B
I've got. I was Looking then as you're speaking about different trends at the moment that really go bad for the brain. And one big trend at the moment is neuroplasticity training. Lots of people are doing games and using other things to. Like, there's apps you can get that are neuroplasticity training apps. Does any of that stuff work?
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Unknown A
Some of it.
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Unknown B
Some of it works.
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Unknown A
And if you're. So, for example, if you're doing memorization games, do them while you're on the bike. Now, not in the street, but if you're on a stationary bike and you're doing those games. It's been found that exercise increases blood flow to the hippocampus, meaning you're more likely to remember it and you're strengthening your brain in the process. So exercise with new learning. Stunning.
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Unknown B
So if I want to learn something, I should do it while walking or moving in motion.
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Unknown A
Right. So if you're listening to a language app, for example, do it while you're walking.
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Unknown B
Mindfulness and meditation, good or bad for the brain.
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Unknown A
Great. I published three studies on a Kundalini yoga form of meditation called Kirtan kriya. It's a 12 minute meditation. I always say it's a perfect ADD meditation because it's only 12 minutes. And for 12 minutes you do this. It's two minutes out loud, two minutes whispering. Four minutes silently to yourself. Two minutes whispering two minutes out loud. You're done. Satana ma. Birth, life. Death reborn. Birth, life. But the one we studied is SATA na ma. And so if they look it up, Kirtan Kriya activates your cerebellum, activates your frontal lobes, calms down your emotional brain. People who did that for 12 minutes, for eight weeks, their resting frontal lobe function was stronger. So simple.
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Unknown B
What the hell is going on there?
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Unknown A
I think it's the focused attention. Plus you're doing a coordination meditation.
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Unknown B
Cold therapy, cold exposure therapy, ice bath, those kinds of things go back to the brain.
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Unknown A
I think you have to be careful with it because it can trigger atrial fibrillation. I think taking a cold shower is probably good for your brain because it's going to short term increase dopamine and sort of give you a jolt.
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Unknown B
Loving your job?
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Unknown A
Absolutely. Great for your brain if you're learning new things. People who are in a job that does not require new learning have a higher incidence of Alzheimer's disease.
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Unknown B
So if you're stagnant in your work, you have a higher risk of Alzheimer's.
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Unknown A
And if I just read brain scans all day, well, I know how to do it. I'm not learning anything new, so I do that. But I also am writing about something I don't know about or I'm learning something new.
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Unknown B
What if you're working with assholes? I'm sorry, I love the job, but I'm working with assholes.
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Unknown A
Bad for your brain. Chronic stress increases cortisol and I think everybody should sort of know their baseline cortisol level. And cortisol shrinks the hippocampus and puts fat on your belly. So that's two very bad things for your brain.
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Unknown B
Breath work. That's a big trick.
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Unknown A
Excellent, Excellent. You want to break a panic attack. The 15 second breath. Four seconds in, hold it for a second and a half. Eight seconds out, hold it for a second and a half. You just do that four or five times, your whole nervous system will calm down. And the research shows take twice as long to breathe out as you breathe in. That's why four seconds in, eight seconds out.
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Unknown B
It shifts your nervous system, doesn't it?
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Unknown A
Yes, it increases something called vagal tone.
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Unknown B
Okay, some bad things then. Social media usage. Chronic social media usage. Good. The brain. Bad for the brain.
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Unknown A
Because you're constantly comparing yourself to people who aren't real.
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Unknown B
What about workaholism and hustle culture?
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Unknown A
So I love my work. Am I addicted to it? I don't know. But I love it when they say people are workaholics and it's bad for the brain. It's. They're working with assholes or doing something they don't like or doing it for the money but without other purpose.
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Unknown B
Microplastics must have been true.
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Unknown A
Awful for the brain. One of the major causes of hormone disruption and cancer and other environments. Thank you for not giving me a plastic word.
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Unknown B
Yeah, it's okay. Imagine if we did that. We spent a lot of time these days talking about the microplastics and other environmental toxins that I think people are more aware of now, which is good. Noise pollution.
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Unknown A
Bad for the brain. And if it hurts your hearing. Hearing loss is actually one of the risk factors for Alzheimer's.
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Unknown B
Why is that?
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Unknown A
Because you're not getting input.
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Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown A
And if you're not getting appropriate input, your brain starts to atrophy. And if you don't hear what other people are saying and you have a lot of ants, you have a high negativity bias, is you can actually begin to get a bit paranoid and fill in the empty spaces with negativity.
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Unknown B
I just bought some new Apple AirPods and when I connected them to My phone, it said, do I do a hearing test? So I did a hearing test. And then I asked my girlfriend, I said, you should do this hearing test as well. Because I needed something to compare it to. And I was a little bit shocked. It said I hadn't lost any hearing yet, but my hearing was significantly not as good as hers. And I remember thinking, gosh, you know, I didn't have any idea that was linked to Alzheimer's at all. So now I've turned down the volume for the first time in my life because I think you're hearing declines regardless of really what you do with age anyway. But as you said earlier, like, starting from a better baseline when you're talking about the brain reserves is really the game, I think with aging.
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Unknown B
My last point is a. My last question is a bit of a. Seems to be uncorrelated, but the world is heading towards a world that's driven by artificial intelligence. It's like all the rage at the moment. If you log on the Internet, people talking about they're going to lose their jobs, all of these new tools that allow us to optimize our lives in a variety of different ways. When you think about the world of AI that we're heading into, there's so many ways that I imagine it's going to make your job easier as someone who's doing scans of brains and so on. But do you think artificial intelligence is going to be good or bad for our brains?
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Unknown A
I think in the short run it's going to be bad because your brain is going to do less and that's bad for the brain. I think it's fascinating to watch what's going to happen and ultimately, in the words of my friend Byron Katie, argue with reality. Welcome to hell. We need to figure out how to use it to enhance our lives rather than to steal brain development. And so much of technology we haven't talked about this has stolen brain development. When video games came into my house was actually 1987, I remember my son was 11. He was a straight A student, and then he wasn't. And then we started fighting about. It's like, you can play for half an hour and then like I took it out of the house because I saw it as an agent of thrilling his brain to death, deadening the dopamine structures.
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Unknown A
And then I've watched this whole group of kids grow up with very cool video games that are, I think, damaging their brain. So unleash technology without any neuroscience study on the impact of brain development, it's.
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Unknown B
A bad Idea are brains getting bigger or smaller? Does anybody know?
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Unknown A
I don't know.
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Unknown B
Interesting question.
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Unknown A
Yeah. Because we could ask ChatGPT.
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Unknown B
Oh, gosh. Yeah. It's things for you. This is the thing.
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Unknown A
Although one caution with ChatGPT, it sucks if you ask it for medical advice, it often will make mistakes. And so there are other sites I like better that I trust more.
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Unknown B
Social connection is obviously another point on that because there's now articles where men are getting into relationships with an AI character of a woman they like. And, you know, social connection is so good for the brain. So I wonder if artificial social connection.
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Unknown A
It'S probably not great for the brain because your brain doesn't have to work as hard with an artificial, especially one you created, Right? Your brain is. When you're with, like, another real person, your brain has to do a lot more calculations to make that work than with someone you can just ration anymore.
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Unknown B
Or you program it for dopamine, wouldn't you? If you're making a friend or partner yourself, what's the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about? Dr.
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Unknown A
I think purpose. And what is purpose matter? Connection to a higher power. I always think when I assess patients of them in four big circles, it's like, what's the biology? We talked a lot about the brain. What's the psychology? So we talked about development a little bit and trauma and ants. What's the social circle like, what's going on in your life now and who are connected with. And we talked about love, but we didn't really talk about the spiritual circle, which is. So what's the point? Why am I here? Am I here because of random chance, because of an explosion that happened billions of years ago? Or do I believe in creative design, where I'm really created for a purpose that is to make the world a better place? And I find people who live without purpose have a higher incidence of depression, have a higher incidence of loneliness, have a higher incidence of dementia.
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Unknown A
And so I encourage all of my patients to seek and live with purpose. It's one of the reasons the onepage miracle is so important to me. What do I want? Relationships, work, money, physical, emotional, spiritual health. Which is really the why question. And a lot of my colleagues go, well, how can you believe in God if you're a scientist? And I'm like, do you know anything about physics? That the second law of physics is entropy? Things go from order to disorder. I'm like, I think there's an order to this and that. I'm Here talking to you. And there's a purpose behind it that's greater than me.
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Unknown B
Studies suggest that religious belief can be associated with differences in brain structure and function. While there is no single religious brain, certain patterns have been observed in neuroscience research. The prefrontal cortex evolved in decision making, mortality and self regulation, tends to be more active in religious individuals.
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Unknown A
And their right temporal lobe tends to be bigger. There's another study with that. And if there is a God and we communicate with God, there's got to be a neuroscience mechanism for that. And Michael Persinger is a researcher out of the University of Laurentian University in Canada. He would put helmets on people and give them low volt electrical activity. And whenever he would stimulate the right temporal lobe, people would get a sensed presence. They would actually feel the presence of God in the room. I just think that's so interesting. And does that mean that the brain makes up God or that the brain has pathways to experience God? I think it's an interesting question. I actually did a study on prayer. We have a foundation called the Change youe Brain foundation, and we raise money for research, education, service. And I did a prayer study of conversational prayer.
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Unknown A
I pray for you, and speaking in tongues, which is channeling the Holy Spirit in Christian tradition. And it was so interesting. And there's actually been other studies. Andrew Newberg, who studied channelers in Brazil, they would channel the dead. And the idea is if you're going to channel an outside spirit, you have to turn down the noise in your brain so that you can sort of hear the other frequencies. And that was our hypothesis. And 60% of our subjects dropped their brain activity when they were speaking in tongues, which sounds so interesting. One completely activated the dopamine centers. And so I'm looking at him like, I bet you do this a lot.
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Unknown B
Prayer.
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Unknown A
Prayer can change the brain. I mean, we talked about meditation changing the brain. And Dr. Newberg again studied Tibetan monks while they meditated and Franciscan nuns while they prayed, and they found very similar changes.
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Unknown B
Strengthens the prefrontal cortex, reduces stress, anxiety, increases dopamine, changes brain connectivity, thickens the cortex, promotes neuroplasticity. If you pray now, what if you're not religious? Because I. I don't think I believe in any particular God, but I would like some of these benefits. So I guess I could achieve them by meditation and those kinds of things. I could still pray. I've got no issue with praying. I don't know what it would be.
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Unknown A
Praying. And you could be curious.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I've got no issue Praying. I don't know what to be praying too. I'm praying to the universe. I guess spirituality is another big trend. I wonder if that's good for the brain.
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Unknown A
I think it depends on is it a healthy tradition or is it an unhealthy tradition? And I've seen both. I've seen some religions being very rigid and shaming. I've seen others, you know, be more open and seeking.
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Unknown B
You've scanned 260,000 brains. Roughly how has that, if at all, changed your belief in a God?
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Unknown A
You know, I believed in God since I was, since I can remember. And there's not been one thing in my life that's caused me to not believe. So I always thought, going back to the second law of physics, that if it's random chance, it just doesn't make sense that randomly we would get a brain cell that has DNA and a mitochondria. It's like it's, it's statistically impossible. And I'm just like, we are so beautifully made. I just don't get the whole thing. So one thing we haven't talked about is the LA fires and the impact of disaster on the brain. And I grew up in Los Angeles and I'm just horrified by what happened. And like we talked that my foundation is actually going to give away 100 evaluations for firefighters. And I almost feel bad. I did the big NFL study and it was really cool and it was a lot of fun for me.
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Unknown A
But NFL players aren't heroes. They're entertainers. Firefighters are heroes, first responders are heroes. And what I've seen with firefighters, this makes me so sad because they have damaged brains often because of the toxins that they're exposed to, the emotional trauma that goes with that job and the head trauma that also goes with this, with things falling on them. And they have a higher suicide rate than the general population. Significantly higher. I think it's like 25% higher. And shouldn't we be teaching them about brain health and go, hey, look, this is a brain damaging job, but we need you to do it. So all the way along, let's see and repair your brain. Let's make sure your reserve is something special. Rather than, we had a really bad day at work, let's go get drunk together. Let's elevate brain health to the people who save us.
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Unknown B
Why is that emotion so raw for you?
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Unknown A
Well, just thinking of what happened. One of my close friends lost his home and then he went to work and did a consult for me. I'm just Blown away by him. But, you know, we're so close to the sadness of what happened. And I have a clinic that we had to evacuate, and I have doctors that they had to evacuate. The group trauma is so high, and yet the people who care for us, we're not doing a good job of caring for them. And I think I have part of the answer and I just wish I could do more.
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Unknown B
Incredibly kind of you to offer to scan 105 fighters brains.
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Unknown A
Yeah. And hopefully it's our foundation, you know, can raise money. We can do thousands of them.
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Unknown B
How does one go about supporting your foundation? Where do we go to support it?
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Unknown A
So changeyourbrain.org yeah, we have a closing.
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Unknown B
Tradition, as you know, where the last guest leads a question to the next. And the question left for you is, what advice would you give a couple who want to start a family?
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Unknown A
I love that question so much, is if you want to start a family, you have to get your bodies ready. So she was born with all the eggs she'll ever have, and you want to give them time, like a year or more of good nutrition. And the child? No, no, the mom. Okay.
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Unknown B
So my pond, I'm. Someone wants to start family.
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Unknown A
So you want to go, what I'm eating, what I'm thinking, the stress I'm under is going to impact the next generation. What are the right brain and body habits that we both can do to get our bodies in the best shape? Is this good for my brain and body or is it bad for it and really focus on good. You know, a lot of people who are drinking, they actually stop drinking when they find out they're pregnant. Remember, the brain develops at day 21. You may not even know you're pregnant at day 21. Just let that roll around your head a little bit. So I love this question is, oh, I can start to get my brain and my ovaries and my sperm ready to connect, to be healthy. So I think that's the advice I would give them.
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Unknown B
Dr. Daniel, thank you so much once again for your time. And thank you for the wisdom and value you've given to my audience over the years. Like, as I was saying before we start filming, I get stopped all the time. Everywhere I go, people telling me about you. I told you I was stopped yesterday. Well, I was having a spa treatment. Oh, it's what it is because people will roast me. But I was having a first of a kind for me spa treatment. And then the lady turned to me 20 minutes in and was like, by.
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Unknown A
The way, thank you so much for.
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Unknown B
Having Danny, Dr. Taylor Lehmann, because he helped me understand my ADHD, et cetera, et cetera. So, and I see that absolute love admiration for you in the comments section every time where people recount stories from decades ago where their kid came to see you and how you transformed their life. I think the top comment on our last episode was someone who, I think they came to see you 15 years ago and they said that you changed their son's life. And that was just over and over and over and over again, the comments. So the life you've lived is such an important one and it's added so much value and hope and so many turned on the lights for so many people in so many ways. So on behalf of all those people, on behalf of the tens of millions of people who tuned in for conversations, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
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Unknown A
Steven. Thank you. The last time I was on, we got calls from all over the world. I mean, obviously you're doing amazing, purposeful work. Thank you.
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Unknown B
Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know I asked the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO. And what we've done is we turned every single question written in a Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home. So you've got every guest we've ever had their question, and on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question. We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question. The brand new version 2 updated conversation cards are out right now at theconversationcards.com, they sold out twice instantaneously. So if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly. This has always blow my mind a little bit.
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Unknown B
53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, free, simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, and I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guest that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.