Afford Anything - Why Your Brain Rewards You for Avoiding Your Boss, with Dr. Joel Salinas

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

#592: Ever wonder what's happening in your brain right before you knock on your boss's door to ask for a raise? Dr. Joel Salinas, neurologist and brain health expert, joins us to explain the neurology of negotiation. When you avoid difficult conversations, your brain actually rewards you with a small dopamine hit. That temporary relief feels good, reinforcing the avoidance behavior. But Dr. Salinas explains this creates a problematic loop: the more you avoid conflict, the more uncomfortable it becomes when you face it. Breaking this cycle starts with a simple but powerful step: taking a breath. A long, slow exhale activates the more deliberative parts of your brain, helping you move beyond knee-jerk reactions. Dr. Salinas suggests focusing on what he calls the "Bigger Better Offer" — the meaningful reward that comes from pushing through discomfort. Thinking about what happens if you don't ask for that raise (struggling to pay bills, missing career advancement) can motivate you to overcome avoidance tendencies. Beyond workplace conflicts, we explore fascinating brain facts: Your brain constructs reality like "one great big hallucination" Neural pathways that fire together wire together Conflict isn't a sign of failure — it's actually necessary for authentic connection Want to boost your brain health? Dr. Salinas recommends regular exercise, brain-healthy foods like leafy greens and berries, quality sleep, supportive social connections, and challenging yourself with new skills. The conversation meanders through various aspects of brain function — from why humans are visual creatures to how trauma impacts neural pathways — all explained in accessible, engaging terms. Whether you're looking to have difficult conversations more effectively or simply curious about the remarkable three-pound organ controlling your reality, this episode offers practical insights into the science of your mind. Timestamps: Note: Timestamps will vary on individual listening devices based on dynamic advertising run times. The provided timestamps are approximate and may be several minutes off due to changing ad lengths. (0:00) Intro (3:00) What happens in your brain when asking for a raise (6:30) How negativity bias shapes interactions with authority figures (10:41) The "Bigger Better Offer" technique for breaking behavioral loops (19:22) Why avoiding conflict creates reward pathways in the brain (29:12) Training your brain to tolerate disagreement (34:52) How salience and valence affect what we perceive as conflict (40:42) The role of internal conflict in decision-making (55:08) Understanding the structure and functions of different brain regions (1:00:53) Why imagination of possibility matters for breaking rumination cycles (1:06:45) How challenging our brain creates new neural pathways (1:11:42) Five key behaviors that improve long-term brain health (1:17:03) Brain plasticity and how it changes throughout our lifetime (1:22:51) Resources for learning more about conflict resilience For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode592 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In today's episode, we're diving into the fascinating world of neuroscience with Dr. Joel Salinas, a neurologist who's passionate about the intersection between your brain and asking for a raise. So if you've ever felt your heart racing when you go in for a salary negotiation, or if you've ever avoided difficult conversations and just accepted less than you probably could have gotten, or if you've ever wondered why certain situations just trigger these really intense emotional responses. This conversation will illuminate what's actually happening inside your brain during those moments. Welcome to the Afford Anything Podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything but not everything. On this show, we cover five pillars.

Financial Psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate and entrepreneurship. It's double eye fire. Today's conversation focuses on the first two letters, the F for financial psychology, although in this case it's really more accurately financial neurology, and the I for increasing your income, because that's what we're trying to achieve with these in-depth interviews. Dr. Joel Salinas is a clinical associate professor in the Department of Neurology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. His training includes a fellowship in behavioral neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a residency in neurology at that same location, as well as at Brigham and a women's hospital.

He holds an MD and an MBA from the University of Miami. In today's episode, Dr. Salinas breaks down the neurological basis of conflict avoidance and why our brains are wired to predict threats. He talks about how to interrupt unhelpful neural pathways that keep us stuck in these avoidance patterns, and he talks about practical strategies to build conflict resilience so that we can have difficult conversations so that we can ask for that raise so that we can deal with that annoying co-worker

so that we can haggle for that used car for an extra $5,000 off. I, as an interviewer, will be the first to admit that neurology is completely outside of my field of even basic awareness. And so my questions are intentionally basic, the kind that a curious child might ask about how our brains work. But I believe these fundamental questions are exactly what most of us want to know, but are perhaps too embarrassed to ask.

Whether you are navigating workplace dynamics, whether you're planning out how to ask for arrays, or whether you're simply curious about the three-pound universe inside of your skull, this conversation offers accessible, insights that just might change how you approach those tough conversations in life. Enjoy. Dr. Salinas, welcome. Thank you. Excited to be here. Imagine. I've been working at my company for a year, a year and a half. I've done great work. I believe that I deserve a raise. So I go to my boss's office. I knock on the door. I ask if they have a moment to talk. At the neurological level,

What is happening in that moment? A lot is happening at that moment. A lot of it depends on the context of the situation as well, because each person is very different. Our brains are 100 billion cells with hundreds of trillions of connections. And that's all representative of our history of experiences, not just our genetics, but who we've encountered, what bad and great experiences we've had in the past that all creates the pathways that form who we are long term and in the moment as well. When you are coming to speak with your boss, if you are conflict avoidant like myself, you might be really nerve-wracked. And what that really

represents is that these areas of your brain that are really attuned for helping to detect threats or danger are much more active at the time. And that includes areas like the amygdala. It can include areas like the anterior. Seeing you that these are, are all kind of areas that relate to these limbic or paralympic systems, and we can go into more detail on that. But these are areas that we typically associate with emotions, but really they're there to monitor our physical state and also detect what's important around us in our environment, as well as how positive or negative they can be.

So as an example, just before you speak to your boss, you might be playing out all the potential scenarios that can happen. And that's useful, just evolutionarily. because our brains evolved to become a fortune teller for us. That's really what drives the evolution of the brain, which is taking past experiences and the ability to predict what may happen or the likelihoods of those things happening.

And then if something happens that is contrary to what you expect, revising that internal model. And so if you're thinking about what might happen when you talk to your boss, if you already have had bad experiences with engaging with authority figures, or have seen other people who've had bad experiences, all the scenarios that are vividly playing out in your head,

almost as if it were actually happening in the moment, maybe all negative or catastrophic experiences, like your boss yelling at you, telling you that you're worthless, or telling you that you don't have value, or laughing in your face. I mean, all these many things that can potentially happen are playing out in your head

whether you're fully conscious of it or not. And that, in turn, your brain is registering and having a response in relation to that. So if you're feeling that there's a threat happening, if you're running these threats in your mind, it's very likely that your brain will start to do the things that it does in the setting of a stress, what we talk about kind of like fight or flight or what we call the five Fs, the default reactions, like the fight, flight, freeze, fawn, fester.

Really, it's just one of the typical behaviors that you take on in response to these threatening or potentially threatening situations. and the goal per your brain is to decrease how bad or how negative the situation is. And for some of us, that means avoiding it altogether. Right before I knock on the door, my deepest instinct that's going on my brain would be, actually, maybe this is not the best time for it. Let me come back tomorrow. And as I walk away, that negative feeling will start to go down a little bit.

And my brain starts to register, oh, that was a good behavior. There's a little bit of a reward tied to it. So it is a swirl of things that are going on, and it can be very challenging in those situations to be able to sort through what is Justin LeBrain and what is likely to happen, which is very realistic. And a lot of the time, we don't know what will happen. I think that's an important thing for people to appreciate when you are feeling some anxiety around engaging in a difficult conversation or potential disagreement is that you

may be telling yourself that the outcome is going to be bad, but in actuality, we don't know. We don't really know. We don't have the full information there to know for certain because you may walk into that room and it may be a very easy conversation. They might say, absolutely. Yeah, you really earned it. I'm so glad you've been so tied up the last couple of months and I haven't been able to think about that.

I'm so glad you made the time for us to talk about it. But we're not really fully thinking about all those things because our brain is so much more tuned on the potential threat. Now, one of the things that you said is that if we engage in that avoidant behavior, there's actually a reward system that then kicks in. Can you dive into that? What precisely happens in our brain in that moment? Yeah.

As we are doing a behavior that can decrease the negative experience, we use the term valence, there's positive and negative valence. This is a lot of formed by the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett, who's really phenomenal, neuroscientists you wrote this book on how emotions are made. But if you think about levels of alertness and attention, that's one element that factors into an emotion, but then there's also the positive and negative valence. And that positive negative valence is important because the less negative or the more positive, the experience, the more likely you are to get a release of dopamine or serotonin, which then activates these reward and reinforcement pathways. These are really

there to help us learn. And in that learning process, what's really really being registered is not only what was the thing that I did that made me feel a little bit better, but also how big that reward was. And there's a part of a brand called the orbital frontal cortex, which is kind of just sitting there pricing out all the different behaviors that we do. And the bigger the reward, the bigger the relief, the more likely it's going to get ingrained in these behavioral pathways. And the next thing you encounter that kind of a situation, that behavior that had the bigger reward is going to be way. more heavier as the thing that you're going to be more tempted to do. One of the things that we

recommend is how to break that behavioral loop, one thing that can be helpful is take a breath. I mean, we all need to take a breath in some of these situations. But in particular, because our brains, these areas that are very focused on threat detecting are activating our heart rate, are increasing our blood pressure, causing our muscles to contract. And it can kind of give us a sense of tunnel vision almost. And by taking a pause and taking a breath, especially a long, slow exhale, which may have a stronger impact on lowering that heart rate and slowing that respiratory rate so we can take fuller breaths. It can also allow us to bring on these more deliberative parts of our brain, more of these frontal and parietal networks, basically networks to help

with judgment planning organization to sort through the situation. That's the first thing. But another really important piece is what this one psychiatrist, Judge Brewer, has talked about called the BBO, the bigger, better offer. So to my viewer, maybe familiar with this, but this BBO, the idea here is if you're able to be aware of the situation, pause, and then reflect on what is the reward that will come to you from taking on that big scary action or that thing that you're not usually inclined to do, that is bigger than doing the counter to it. The more likely it is that your brain's reward and reinforcement pathways are going to start to align with what you want to happen or what is in your best interests. So an example of that could look like as you're

really working up the courage to knock on that door and speak to your boss, think about what would happen if I don't ask for this raise? What are the consequences of not asking for that raise? And some of those are really negative situations. Maybe you are having a hard time kind of paying rent or you have some big expenses coming up or things have been really tight for you and asking for this race can be really helpful financially or the promotion of itself can really help to give you better sense of recognition of value in the workplace can give you a better sense of control can help your career development can open more doors for you can increase a better sense of happiness and that process of in itself already starts to kind of get these systems almost aligned with you

to say okay it might be scary but it's still worth doing the thing and it becomes just a little bit easier to do, but it's going to take some practice. Just even just generally with conflict, it's a process of doing a lot of unlearning, a lot of these behavioral loops and kind of circuits that you've probably learned from a very young age. And starting small with maybe people talk about like with performance anxiety, right, talking to like a stuff animal or yourself in the mirror or giving your speech to your dog or your cat is a part of helping with that practice. And so one thing that I would encourage is to practice sitting in the discomfort of disagreement, starting with those that are a little bit

easier for you to handle, and slowly with practice work your way up towards the more challenging disagreements and the more uncomfortable conflicts. And asking for ways, for some people, it's a very easy one, but for a lot of us, it's not. And I think this goes to this point around conflict tolerance, which is this combination of conflict recognition and conflict holding. I can go into the breakdown of that. Absolutely. One thing that I want to pause and draw out this distinction here is we're talking about asking for a raise, which is a request, but it processes in our brain as conflict. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah. What we perceive as conflict or can tag as conflict can be all sorts of things and it's very different for

each person. This is kind of the element of conflict recognition. Conflict recognition. Exactly. So that can be informed based off of your past experience, it's like your child. Like if you grew up in a home where really lively debates was a very normal thing and it actually was a sign of family cohesion, a debate with somebody else on a very kind of hot button kind of political issue may actually be a sign of connection. Whereas if you're someone like myself, situations like that, you're just like, oh, no, this is big. And you're much more likely to avoid it. You're much more likely to register that as a really big conflict. And so that is an important piece of awareness that starts more internally first is recognizing for yourself, what are the situations that you're

recognizing as a big disagreement or a big conflict or a little disagreement? That's one piece. but then also acknowledging that the person who you're engaging with on the other side of this dialogue may have a very different measure of conflict recognition. To them, disagreement over kind of the ethics of whether you're not, you think gun control or gun safety is something that is important to address may be fun, but you might register it as highly uncomfortable, but they don't know that. And the flip side to that is what we call this conflict holding, which is how, what's your capacity for sitting in that discomfort related to disagreement or a conflict? And in that similar situation, everybody has different barometers and different tolerances to it. For some of us, a little bit of a, even a really big disagreement, you just kind of take it as this is just the course of life and I just move on. Whereas for some of us, it can feel really catastrophic.

And so in our brains, what's going on is this, there's a combination of that valence that I mentioned, but also salience. So salience are these, it relates to networks in the brain that focus on what's going to pull our attention. It's how our brain registers, this is the potential threat focus on this. So this is really important for survival or reward, really focus on that. And so for those of us that see conflict as any kind of conflict as really hot, it's going to pull out our attention pretty dramatically. And for some of us, that can look like developing a lot of rumination, even obsessive thoughts, or around the potential conflict to the point where it's just so much easier to avoid the conflict altogether, or the hard

conversation. I mean, we see this playing out in the workplace for sure, right? Not asking for a raise, not asking for promotion, because you're really unsure about what the reaction will be, be, and you're just roominating a lot about the negative things that will happen so much that it's just easier to avoid or do something else altogether. But we also see it in personal relationships. How often is it that we hear people say that they should have broken up years ago in a relationship? And it's this kind of predicting what might happen is one piece of it. It's recognizing how big of a disagreement or conflict it is. And then there's also how much you can really stand the heat of that conflict. And I think one of the things that we're really

trying to introduce here with this conflict resilience concept altogether is that there may be lots of strategies and techniques and tactics out there. We do introduce some of those in the book, but this is almost prerequisite to any of those strategies or tactics, because just using the analogy of learning how to prepare a meal, if you can't stand the heat of the kitchen, how do you expect to ever learn how to use a recipe or use any kitchen utensil, really? So it's just really important to really gain a sense of a better ability to stand some of that heat. You mentioned salience, which is the amount of attention that something is drawing, and then valence, which is essentially positive or negative affinity for the outcome. How does sensitization play a role in all of that?

Sensitization fits a little bit closer on the salience piece. Another way to think about it is the flip, which would be kind of adaptation. The idea here is think of the boiling frog. kind of story. The frog that's in the water that's slowly boiling is less than notice that the water is scalding hot. And so if the flip of that is becoming more attuned or more alert to it, it means that these salience networks just become that much more active, even the lowest threat situations. And we do see that with these avoidance type of behaviors when it comes to conflict, which is that the more you avoid the discomfort, the

stronger that discomfort can be, the more uncomfortable that discomfort can be, the less your tolerance to it can be. And so you're becoming more and more sensitized to it to the point where it's actually going to work against your favor because if every conflict is uncomfortable, you're not going to want to engage with essentially other human beings, which is hard because there's a lot of human beings in the world. Or there might be a very specific topic area that you avoid to an extreme degree. Absolutely. I can give a personal example when I knew that I had to come out to my parents. That was really hard. I'm Hispanic. My family is very traditional. And I knew that coming out as not being this idea of the typical machisto heterosexual male was going to be

really distressing for them. It was going to be a disappointment. But in my head, the distress of that was so great, just I just didn't want to disappoint them that I kept on avoiding the conversation from when I knew that about myself and I had kind of was able to accept it. It took years to build up to that. And there was kind of years of buildup of what I would call like inauthentic interactions with my parents, right? It just wasn't being totally honest with them about my life where I was hiding parts about my life. And that was beginning to take a toll on the relationship. And I think that's a really important piece to think about, which is that conflict oftentimes gets thought of as a source of failure or weakness or pain or a sign that things aren't working. But actually, conflict is a sign of connection.

You cannot have connection without conflict. It's how people can be most authentic with themselves and live the lives that they really want to live. The more I avoided the conversation with my parents, the more painful that distress was in my head. And so it became harder and harder until eventually I had to create a situation where I couldn't avoid it, where I'm already in it and I can't backpedal anymore. So I had to kind of force myself into it. But after I actually did it, yes, it was very uncomfortable. Yes, there was a lot of distress. But the amount of distress that was on both sides was not as great as what I was experiencing leading up into it.

And this is a common thing that we see is that oftentimes people will say, yes, engaging in that really hard dialogue or engaging in that conflict finally was hard. But it wasn't as painful as all of the anxiety and distress I was having about engaging in it until I was actually in it. At the neurological level, the anxiety and the distress about anticipating it, is that the mind playing through all of the what if scenarios over and over? It's generating these predictions, and you're generating these predictions, regardless of how likely they are to happen, there is some kind of weight of positive negative to each of those possible scenarios. And there's also a weight on how much you should be paying attention to how serious those different potential scenarios are. And I think the less we actually engage in the thing, the more you are prone to just sitting in an endless cycle of lots and lots of

predictions, especially if there's one that really captures your attention because it feels very, very serious, you might just end up looping in that thought. You may end up what we call it ruminating or having this obsessive thoughts about it. And it can become intrusive. It starts to get in the way every day where you can't really focus at work anymore because you keep on thinking about that conversation that you've been avoiding, which is why it is, I think, really important to develop this conflict resilience skill set. And mind. mindset because it helps to address situations up front before they snowball into much bigger challenges that you really don't need in your day-to-day.

Right. Can you explain what rumination is at the brain level? Yeah. Yeah. So this process of rumination, there are brain networks that are responsible for repetitive movements and thoughts as well. These are kind of these deeper areas like the basal ganglia. They're involved in helping us move throughout the day.

But sometimes they can run amok a little bit in that they can catch on to one of these thought processes. And it just kind of keeps them running it through a relay in your head. And the more you think about a particular scenario or situation, the type of what you can call them, brumidative thoughts or obsessive thoughts, the deeper the pathway is, imagine. you're hiking a trail, if you keep on walking in the same circle over and over again, eventually that trail is going to get deeper and deeper and deeper, and so it's very well will traverse. So it's hard to actually not fall into that path.

What helps to really break that loop is to find a new path or find some new way forward, and that includes a little bit of unlearning and also being really aware when things don't play out the way that you were ruminating, that they were going to play out. So, for example, if I keep on thinking about the potential that my boss is going to laugh at my face when I ask for this raise and say absolutely not. But then when I actually do have the conversation with my boss, or if I've had a conversation with somebody else where I ask something challenging and it actually ended up working out pretty well or okay near the end, it's often a little too easy to forget that you had a positive outcome and focus more on the potential negative outcome. And so if you're not doing the deliberate process of being aware and telling yourself, oh, actually, I don't have the information to really fully know because this may actually work out in my favor as well, you can develop a skewed sense of reality. Fifth Third Bank's commercial payments are fast and efficient, but they're not just fast and efficient. They're also powered by the latest in payments technology built to evolve with your business.

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When you talk about how to break out of that well-trod pathway, that neural pathway that has ingrained itself because you've already been obsessively ruminating about something for so long, you mentioned that focusing on something else, that novelty would be a method to get out of that. But oftentimes you might turn to something novel, play a video game or watch a movie. and yet in the action of doing that novel thing, you're still thinking about whatever it is that you're ruminating about. It could be a fight that you had with a boss or a fight that you had with a client. But whatever it is, you're still ruminating even in the process of doing this very novel thing.

Do you just keep doing it? Yeah. I think one of the core messages of this process of becoming more resilient that we share is how it is very tempting when you're in a conflict situation. to really focus on how it's the other person that's the issue in the situation. Like they're unreasonable. They're just not being logical. But a lot of the time, actually, you want to be able to start with something you have control over, which is ourselves. And that's why we really focus on this internal work up front.

And when it comes to kind of these intrusive thoughts or these ruminative thoughts about all the negative things that might happen with the conflict, we want to make sure that it's clear that this is going to be. going to not be easy. This is going to take some work and it's going to take a lot of repetitions and it's going to be a lot like learning to play tennis or learning a new language or I sometimes think about kind of the idea of like training a dog. I'm training the dog in my head to do something that I'm asking it to do and it can be really challenging because it can get distracted by like a squirrel or the treat over in the corner of the room and having that bit of sense of compassion and that it's going to be a process, then it'll take a little bit of time,

is important so that way you don't start to develop distress around the act itself. But being able to just work on becoming more aware of it is pretty huge. It seems small, but it's actually the biggest thing. I think awareness is more than half the battle here, which is just becoming more aware of what's going on internally in terms of when I have this challenging conflict that I'm avoiding or that I have kind of looming as something potential, how negative is it? Like, what are the thoughts that I'm having in my head?

How difficult is it for me? Because then that allows you the space to be in to plan it out or think about really interesting what it is that's driving. Because there can be a lot there. One of the things that we describe is this thing kind of like mirror work, chairwork, and tablework. But I think at its core, kind of at a neurological level, a lot of what that is is trying to gain an awareness of.

these different loops that exist in the brain. There's a part of me that wants to be really authentic and wants to live life the way that I want to. There's also a side of me that wants to be a good son and wants to be doing things that are in favor with the family. That's its own conflict that I need to mediate, but it's helpful to at least give voice to both those things. In the job-raised situation,

one voice could be like, I want to be somebody who is a really great worker and is considered a team player. And I also have this other voice in me that wants to self-advocate and wants to say that I need a raise. And actually, just giving voice in the dialogue to those voices can be really helpful because it helps to start to attenuate the intensity of the emotional experience with it. So that can look like engaging a conversation just like this is saying these types of conversations are just to give a heads up. are really awkward for me and very uncomfortable. And there's a part of me that wants to be a good team player and preserve the budget of the business.

And there's a part of me that knows that I've been putting in a lot of work. I have big projects over the next year. And I feel like I may be overdue for a raise and I want to advocate for myself. And so I just wanted to start the conversation by letting you know that I might need a little bit of time in restoring through this because it is so uncomfortable for me. You mentioned that when you were avoiding the conversation about coming out, you eventually created a situation in which you could not avoid it anymore. Is that something at an unconscious level? Is that something that you recognized would be an effective way to go about doing this?

At an unconscious level, was there some part of you that recognized, let's create a forcing function? It can be helpful. The challenge there is that if you... aren't ready to have that conversation, if you haven't done a lot of the work in it, you're just more prone to do things that are, we would call it, unskilled or less skilled, which is that you may respond with yelling or a lot of anger. You might not be able to manage whatever emotions that come up, or you may not know exactly kind of what messaging you have. For example, for myself in situations where I've done the forcing function, I don't necessarily trigger a forcing function. until I know what's at the core of what's important to me in that conversation. And that oftentimes can be your values. In the thorniest situations, I find it really helpful to just go back to what are my values here and why that's so important because no matter how uncomfortable the situation is,

I can always go back to this core, the centered piece of just saying being authentic and being honest to you is really important to me. And this is why I'm having this really hard conversation. And you have every right to be upset and disappointed. But I also have a right to live authentically and honest with myself and be honest with you. And that kind of messaging or these types of things don't really come up unless you have that grounding around like a central value. And this is why when we talk about how to prepare for these conversations, you want to make sure that you've got the right environment for. it, that the timing is right, like you don't want to engage in a conversation that's really

challenging when you're tired, you're overworked, you're stressed, you're hungry, you're sick, or the other person is distracted, in that you've had an opportunity to really articulate for yourself what it is that's important for this. And so we talk about this thing about understanding what the purposes of the dialogue or the situation are. The more clear you are on the purposes, the more clear your BBO, your bigger, better offer is, and that can help to make the situation just a little bit easier to navigate, especially when inevitably a curveball will come, that you're like, oh, like I really feel the discomfort rising in me right now. You can come back to that kind of central value or messaging or set of voices that you have for

yourself. You talked earlier about training the dog inside your head. Yeah. And what I like about that analogy is that when you're training a dog, you can observe the dog's behavior and you can see how reward mechanisms play. a role in shaping a dog's behavior, at the risk of asking a very large question. What is the difference between a dog's brain and a human's brain? Does a dog have a prefrontal cortex? Yeah, so I think there's differences in size. There is a difference in the kind of surface area of the

cortex itself. So I think the neocortex is one of these areas of the human brain that is most unique to us. The number of involutions that we have and the types of networks that we have already kind of programmed in are part of the complexity of what it is to be human. Very social animals tend to get closer and closer towards that human brain. In addition to this fortune telling process, the brain is really helpful for us in terms of forming groups and socializing, and various social animals tend to have more, I don't say develop, but brains that resemble a human brain a little bit more. And I think that that's also saying, again, primary brains is the more complex the social relationships, the more complex the social relationships I have to keep track of,

and the more like theory of mind type of things that they have to do, like thinking what the other person's thinking and how that person's thinking about how I'm thinking may require more of that additional processing power, and it leads to presumably leads to some of that evolution within the brain. But I think there's a lot of things that are quite similar with the dog brain as well. We talked about kind of the limbic system, and some people refer to these systems that's kind of like the lizard part of the brain. I think what's core to understanding these deeper parts of the brain is less that they are, maybe reptilian, but more that they are areas of the brain that are tied to very core reflexes in networks that are just like reactions or reflexes that came from evolution and survival as the outer more kind of part of the brain that neocortex degenerates in disease that's like Alzheimer's disease, which is a little bit more. work that I do a lot in, more of these deeper reflexes start to come up until we started to have

essentially an emergence of these primitive or we call kind of like, almost like neonatal reflexes. The reflexes you have as a baby, like sucking reflex or rooting reflex on the touch as you like moved your head towards it. Or there's this more real reflex where they, with a certain kind of a movement or touch, you're going to spread your arms out. These are all deeply ingrained, almost very evolutionary systems that protect us when we're very, very, very young, like babies, just newborns. You imagine being in a tree you fall. It's helpful to spread your arms out and your legs out to protect yourself. It can be really helpful to have a reflex to find your mother so that way you can nourish yourself. And these deeper parts of the brain are always there. They're always

active. They're involved in all these processes. I don't want to say that there's this kind of tug-of-war between these higher order processes and these deeper parts of the brain. I think they work together, but it's really about how much you're able to allow these higher order areas of the brain to become more online. And that's where things like taking a pause, that very thoughtful breathing, this is where kind of like mindfulness meditation is really helpful. Their metacognition can be really helpful.

It's basically giving an opportunity for other parts of their brain to sort through the situation, which creates space in your mental headspace, to be able to make a better call about what to do as opposed to act on an impulse. Can we map the brain a little bit just so we know where everything is that we're talking about? So what is the neocortex? Yeah. And where is it? And what are the attributes of the neocortex that differentiate it from other areas of the brain?

Yeah, I love this. So if we think about the brain, I can just give you like a model here of the brain. let's say this is the right side of my brain. This is the left side of my brain. So let's just focus on one hemisphere here. So this outer portion here, that is that neocortex. So we often just call it kind of the cortical areas of the brain, cortical regions. They are essentially networks of lots of neurons that have different configurations in terms of how the axons and the gender rights connect to each other. But there's layers of connectivity within that that allow for greater processing within those areas. There's areas that are called unimodal and multimodal because of

how much information or the types of information they're processing. So like if we go back to the occipital lobe, which is important for vision, so this is the front of the face, this is the back of the head. So this is this part of the head here. Excipital lobe is really important for vision. Yeah. For those of you who are listening via audio, I encourage you to come check this out on YouTube so that you can see the visual. Yeah. So the occipital lobe, which is for vision, that you're very unimodal, that's processing light that's being filtered through the eyes, through the optic nerves, that goes to the back there. And then it's being filtered to progressively more and more complex filters that then allow us to recognize not just light versus dark, but also shape of lines

to getting more complex shape of a number or a letter, like a grapheme, the shape of a face, what a face looks like. And that, as it moves more forward, starts to get into areas of the brain, like the temporal lobes and the parietal lobes, which are becoming more multimodal, more different senses involved, that are helping us to understand what is that thing that I'm seeing. And so there's the kind of memories and labeling. And the labeling also involves some degree of language, like ideas that we put onto the thing that we're seeing. So, for example, what a chair is, where the chair is in relation to my body, where my body is in space, when we're kind of parietal, visual, spatial. And then the further we go, the more we get into the frontal lobe, which is we often call kind of like the captain of the ship or this part of the brain that is very deliberative, is really focused on judgment planning, self-regulation.

That one of the thing that we've learned in the last couple of decades is that it doesn't act kind of on its own. It works a lot with a parietal lobe, so it's actually more accurate to call it frontal parietal networks. That helps to coordinate all all this sensory information together. And it's not as simplistic as things kind of like moving through a flow of processes because we have networks that are in parallel and in connection with each other. So actually we're almost experiencing everything about the thing all all at once. So like a chair, I see the chair, but also in my head, parts of my brain are feeling what I think that chair feels like. And hearing what that kind of chair could sound like if I were to sit in it. but it's just below the conscious level.

And then this is kind of what brings the brain stem, and these what we often call kind of these more primitive parts of the brain or the lizard brain, but this is the brain stem and these limbic and paralympic systems, which are really there to help to detect new things, like new information. And it's not necessarily driving emotion. They are a part of what we ultimately label as an emotion, but they're really there for the salience, the valence, and getting these reflexive behaviors to act in the case of something really dangerous.

And then we've got one other area that doesn't get enough attention, which is the cerebellum, which is important for coordination of movements and error correction, but it's not just movements, but it's thought and feelings as well. Where is that part? So here's the brain. The brain stem. Maybe I'll do this here, so it's a little bit clearer. Right.

And then it sits right here behind. Oh, that was not where I guessed it would be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's that little kind of like bundle that if you see like a brain. model that's there coordinating things. And it's not in isolation because if we're thinking about what constitutes the motherboard of reality, we're missing out the whole nervous system that is in your whole body. So your body is in constant conversation with your brain. If you are feeling sick,

like if you have the flu or you're feeling hungry, that is sending a signal to your brain, which is then coloring all the information that you're processing. So you may be more likely to have a conversation with somebody, but if you're like hungry and kind of irritable where you're having that conversation, you may actually register that that person is being irritating or upsetting to you, but really you just need to eat something. And it might change the whole emotional color of that conversation. So don't ask your boss for a raise right before lunch. Yeah, exactly.

There's actually been some study looking at judges granting parole. You might have heard of this. Yeah. Yeah, that they're more likely to grant parole after. after lunch. Yeah. Although the study also showed if it's too late in the day, they get tired. Yeah.

It's energy waning as it gets towards the afternoon. So early in the morning, they're fresh. Yeah. Energy is high, and so they actually tend to be more generous. Yeah, there we go. Yeah. That's just really just how the body is informing how you're perceiving the world around you. Right.

So is the amygdala part of the limbic system? and the amygdala as part of the limbic system, it's kind of in that center part of the brain, so it's behind the thinking and the decision-making arena. It's kind of enveloped by that blanket of the cortex. It's sitting in there kind of connecting to different regions, but in particular to temporal lobe, the area is coordinating between there,

as well as these reflective body areas, like the brainstem. Because these limbic systems, it's important for them to also have, some degree of what we call interoception, which is kind of feeling yourself, feeling what's going on inside your body. That specific area is called the insula, which has close ties to the amygdala, which is people often think of the amygdala as like the seat of fear or this area of fear, but actually a more nuanced way of thinking about it is it is there to detect new information, especially potentially threatening information, but it's there for things that are new

and different and unexpected, which is helping your brain to become better at fortune-telling. Oh, would it then be accurate to say that if you go on vacation, the amygdala is firing? Yeah, I mean, the amygdala could be firing the more you're engaging in things that are unexpected. Yeah, I meant go on vacation to a brand new and novel place. Like, you're in a foreign country, you're encountering language and culture and even the shape of a toilet, right? Yeah, yeah. Maybe you're encountering a squat toilet for the first time. Yeah, yeah.

And in that situation, it might be more a sense of comfort that it's actually linking to. just the physical feelings that are linked to it. And if your brain is registering those situations as something of security or safety, less threat, then it's all going to be more in that positive valence side. You might even be a little bit calmer in that level of arousal, like high arousal versus low arousal. Whereas if new environments or change can feel really threatening to you, being in that new environment, it's going to have the,

yes, it's going to still have the amygdala firing, but it's also going to be firing in tandem with these other areas that link to more these negative feelings. And some of that relates to the interior singulate part of the brain, but that in and of itself is more linked to areas of the brain that become active with just physical pain. I think that's one of the things that's really enlightening and also really humbling about the brain is that things that are abstract or perceptual, like a disagreement, can activate parts of the brain that are the same, the exact same parts of the brain that are involved in perceiving physical pain. Oh, and which parts of the brain are those? So there's the physical feeling parts of their brain. Those are the somatosensory strips that are a little bit going back to the brain.

It's like right around this area here between the parietal lobe and the frontal lobe. It's very much focused on sensory and the anterior cingulate and the insula that relates to the body, you're feeling yourself. Plus these anterior cingulate is kind of a way that processes or relays information that can often be associated with, like negative valence. I'm just going to keep asking a bunch of, I'm sure, are probably some beginner questions. I love these questions. What is the difference between the limbic and the paralympic system?

Limbic system is this collection of several areas that are in that kind of deeper part that include the amygdala, includes the hippocampus as well, but paralytic is just the areas that are just tied to it, just outside of it. In addition to the hippocampus, there's also things like the mammillary bodies, there's these pap circuit. There's like these lots of other kind of cortical areas that all relate to these salience and valence areas of the brain. And of where you draw the line between limbic and paralymbic ends up being more of a neuroanatomical question. But at the end of the day, these are all kind of areas that are tied to these feeling novelty detection, threat detection

areas. Why is the cerebellum so far away from all of this? It seems far away from it, but it's actually in a pretty great, realistic. area. It's pretty central because it has connections to the brain stem and a lot of information across the whole brain itself is coming into the cerebellum and back out to the body and information from the body is coming up through the cerebellum and back out to the rest of the brain. So is the cerebellum the messenger to the body? It's helping with like error detection and kind of coordination and it's really good at being able to sort through what's coming from the high up in the brain and what's coming from like the low down kind of processes of the body itself.

There is a hub element to it, but more than anything, it's just coordinating all these different messages, which is why if you have an injury to the cerebellum, it can be really hard to put my finger on my nose and then kind of touch this flower here exactly on the tip. People that don't have a working cerebellum or have an injury to cerebellum, it will look more like this as a trying to reach it. And there's been work done by this one neurologist named Dr. Jeremy Schmohmann, who has found that there's this thing called a cerebellar cognitive affective syndrome, but basically it's going beyond thinking of the cerebellum just for these motor movements, which is easy to appreciate, but also how it coordinates thoughts and feelings as well

in kind of bizarre ways that you wouldn't anticipate because it's more this error correction part of the brain that is out of whack. Zooming out, one thing that I've learned from the last 20 minutes of conversation is, is I had always, I guess erroneously assumed that a lot of our thoughts and feelings, and particularly our fortune-telling, our assessment of decision-making, really lived in that front part of the brain, you know, the frontal cortex. Yeah. But it seems as though it's a whole brain activity.

It is a whole brain activity. Yeah. There's this term called degeneracy, which is kind of an unfortunate term. But it relates to different parts of the brain being used for multiple things or multiple functions. I think it's easier to just think that you have lots of networks and systems and loops, and they're all working in concert with each other. Or maybe it's a little bit more like an orchestra, like a really huge, like orchestra with like billions of people where they're all coordinating with each other in some way,

as opposed to just thinking it's just the woodwinds or just the percussionists. It's how they all come together that leads to the whole piece that we call like consciousness or like the symphony. At the risk of asking, I won't even disclaim this question. Go for it. What is the area of the brain that gives us the capacity to wonder? Some people might say that this mind wandering is this ability to wonder, part of wonder. I mean, there are people that actually dedicate their whole careers to just like the experience of wonder.

Some of it is this mind wandering, which relates to what's called the default mode network, which is different areas of the brain that typically come online when we're just at rest. But there is, for like true wonder, this feeling of awe or being a part of something bigger or feeling very small in a positive way can involve more of these emotional-related systems to create this kind of positive valence with a bit of a sense of calm, maybe a little bit of arousal in it. If we look at the example of people who have temporal lobe seizures, the temporal lobe, this part here of the brain, if you go more inside of the temporal lobe, you get into the hippocampus and the medial temporal lobe in there, the medial temporal lobe in there, the media temporal region. But the areas that are very active there, people who have these profound temporal lobe seizures can have profound religious experiences too. Some people can think about it as like a moment of ecstasy or can have these big religious experiences.

And I think there's some activity going on in these deeper parts of the temporal lobe, which are very closely linked to these limbic systems. And so it's a combination of kind of the positive feeling that comes from it, but also a, there's like probably a deeper breakdown of the different types of wonder. But what I would say is there's this sense of diffusing your sense of self, we'll call like the ego. And that also relates to less attention to kind of your boundaries within space and more into kind of a connection with things around you. Wow. One of the things I've come to appreciate from being a neurologist and just really falling in love with the brain is how much of our existence is just one great big hallucination. Yeah. I have a sense of what you're saying, but can you elaborate on that?

Yeah. It's so much of what we experience and register and recall and. kind of predict what's going to happen, it's all being conjured in our brain. There's just expressions like, all we will ever know is our nervous system. All we will ever know is kind of what this nervous system that we have is registering around us and how it's perceiving and constructing and predicting the world in front of us. I mean, even now as we're having this conversation, our field of attention is really focused on this area right here in front of us. But there's this whole other world that our brain is filling in the gaps with whatever it decides to fill in the gaps with.

It's usually a pretty good estimate based off of kind of what light has entered the brain and like what it's registered as colors, but it's not necessarily 100% accurate if it was really out there. So it is kind of like a hallucination. It's conjured out of all these cells kind of sitting in our skull. Wow. You've mentioned now, because you just mentioned light and color, and I noticed this is the second time in this conversation that you've mentioned something of the visual field.

Earlier you also mentioned that the optical area of our back of our brain, it strikes me that humans are particularly visual animals, whereas back to, you talked about the dog, like training your inner dog, dogs really navigate the world through smell. And a lot of other animals navigate the world through smell. why is it that we experience the world so visually while not every animal shares that experience? That might have to do with just the process of evolution and of itself and how much of our brain was dedicated to that particular sense in terms of how it led us to be more likely to survive. So with dogs, for example, so much of their brain is dedicated to these olfactory bulbs, a olfaction. connections and things. I mean, that's not to say that humans also aren't involving some of that.

It's just so much of our brain's been dedicated to vision. I mean, we evolved to have two eyes that are kind of centered in front to give us more binocular vision, so we have better depth perception. And it might have been really advantageous to us, let's say, out on an open savannah to be able to detect threats that were very, very far away, as opposed to having to be close to be able to smell the potential threat. It's more a factor of far evolution than anything, but even in people who are born blind, that area of the brain gets used for all sorts of other things. It's not like their occipital lobe isn't active. It's just other activities of brain functioning kind of begin to flow over and relate with that part of the

brain as well. I realize we've wandered far from how do you ask your boss for a raise, but this is, It's fascinating. The reason why I think it's so important to bring the brain into the conversation is because how could you not have a conversation about who we are and all these things that are important without bringing in the motherboard of reality, the brain? It's just core to the I and I am and the you and you are. And we have to appreciate the complexity of all that is and all of the wonderful ways that it helps us out. and how it evolved to protect us, but also all the tricky ways that the brain can fool us and hijack situations against what we really want, and how all those same things that are going on in your brain are also going on in the brain in front of you, as well as all the brains that

person is interacting with as well. It's the more aware we are of how our brain plays a role in everything that we do, the more empowered we are to make decisions that fulfill who we want to be. You said something just now that you mentioned your brain might hijack you from the thing that we really want, right? Your brain might hijack you from the thing you really want. So what you really want is to get a raise, but you know that the moment that you walk into your boss's office, you're either going to clam up and not ask for it, or you're going to fly off the handle and behave inappropriately and probably. get yourself fired, right? So there's the part of you that wants a thing, and then there's the part of you that has behaviors, and both of these parts live in the same brain. We've talked a bit

by now about the thoughts and feelings and behaviors live, but where does the wanting live? Like the desire, the motivation toward the thing. Yeah, the direction towards wanting to take on an action, some of that really is more frontal, kind of that orbital frontal cortex that I mentioned, kind of where those rewards are, where the weight of the reward is. But it's also the reward and reinforcement pathways, which are deeper, and in the brain, which have learned to do X thing because it makes us feel more positive or less negative and helps us to potentially survive or hopefully survive. But these areas of the brain, they may not necessarily have the full context of a situation.

So, for example, there is a situation. a thing as too many French fries. Right. But our brain, that part of our brain, can say, feels really good to have two, three, four, five, twenty French fries. And so there is this negotiation that you have to do internally between these different voices of kind of your brain in terms of where the desire comes in and what and how that relates to the desire helping your future self.

this is why those exercises around how to best manage expenses and saving for yourself for the future can be helpful when you visualize that future version of yourself because you have this short term. There's a lot of work about fast and slow thinking. And I think that kind of relates a bit to that as well, which is you're having to negotiate between parts of you that want that quick reward and the parts of you that want the longer term reward. The parts of you that want that longer-term reward is long-term live in the same areas as motivation? I guess where I'm going with this is you're planning out 20 years into the future. You want to set yourself up for the long-term. Yet the day-to-day motivation of what it takes to achieve that can sometimes not be, again, what you want it to be. It's even hard to structure the questions because it seems as though.

there are multiple U's in here? Yeah, it can be helpful to think about it. There being multiple use. I can go a real deep on that specific thing, but I'll get to it. But I would say, just thinking of the future self, that might not be as vivid as the physical feeling that you have right now sitting in this chair and the positive feeling of having kind of that bit of chocolate or making that, like, really luxurious purchase or deciding not to talk to your boss about something difficult. And so it can be helpful, again, going back to this BBO, this bigger, better offer, do whatever you can to articulate and crystallize that as much as possible for yourself.

And really engage your sense. Some people are very sensory. So thinking about, like, visually, what will your life look like better by engaging in this? What are the smells? How would it feel to be in a new office? How will it, like, what are the things that people will say to you when you've had that raised that promotion. And that helps to then shift the conversation going on in your brain to begin to move away

from that behavioral loop that's really well ingrained of just avoiding or any of the behaviors, like fawning or resenting the festering, to doing the really brave thing of taking our risk and having that conversation that's uncomfortable. Now, to the point about kind of like who we are in the multiple selves, So one of the things that really interested me in the brain earlier on when I was in medical school was the work of Stephen Savage around something called the single neuron theory of consciousness. And when I first heard it, I couldn't quite grasp it. But when I did, I was just really like humbled, just like, if this is really true, what is reality? And the idea there is if you think about this split brain experience and happen, I want to say back in the 60s, where people had been.

really bad epilepsy one part of the brain, they would have a surgery, would split the corpus callosum, which is if we can go back to the brain, it's the part that connects the two hemispheres together. When they split that apart, people who had that surgery done would have, there would be things that they could perceive, but not articulate, and things that only one hemisphere could really recognize, but not the other. And it kind of begs this question, are there, by doing that surgery, are there two consciousnesses? are there two people now living in that same body? And if you take that idea even further to think about what brain networks are,

it's one brain cell kind of activating or inhibiting other brain cells. In that kind of flurry of activity within the brain, there's even of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second, there might be a moment where there's just one neuron that's really dictating most of the activity that's going on for all the other neurons, the other brain cells. Could that single cell be what represents you in that moment, in that split moment? So is that like the queen B of neurons? Well, I wouldn't call it the queen B of neurons.

I would call it more a transient kind of position where the who you are can, the consciousness of who you are can be very, very fleeting where you are within that fraction of a fraction of a second, the who you are because it being dictated by the activity is that one neuron very briefly is kind of coming into existence and coming out of existence, just in less time than it takes the blink. So there are constantly existing and unexisting. And so we're kind of painting this kind of story or telling ourselves this narrative about who we are when who we are is this very fleeting, this fleeting moment over time.

Why is the neuron transient? And what? Just the activity within that cell comes through it and then it becomes less active. So it's just whatever we call it like potentiation of the electrochemical signal. So it's just like when it comes on and then it comes off. Oh, I see. It's not fully off. That's a simplification of it.

But the idea there is that active kind of neuron that's very brief and potentially could be at the crux of who you are within like a very fraction of a second. Oh, I see. So it's almost as though it's flowing through. Yeah, it's a very transient moment where so much of who you are is represented by a cell. And it's a wild idea, but I always find it really humbling and also helped me to appreciate just how important it is to understand the brain not just as islands that kind of coordinate. That's actually it's this like really complex network or symphony, which is like a big system that's in constant conversation with itself and the world around you. it strikes me that the brain can study itself and that the brain is in awe of itself and also that the brain still has so many questions about itself the brain and one of the low-affairs

that I've had with the brain is just thinking about how the brain can improve that which does the improving that's partly what led me to be so passionate about brain health and led me into the field of neurology and to be really focused on helping to diagnose, treat, and manage conditions like Alzheimer's disease, because the better we are at helping to preserve our brain functioning for as long as possible, the better we are at being able to improve our own situation, but also as a whole, collectively, as a society. It's been an ongoing passion of mind. One of the ways I really want to have an impact on the world is just helping to improve the health of all of our brains. On that topic, what are the things that we should be doing for improved

brain health, assuming the average listener who's relatively healthy adult? Yeah. There's a lot of behaviors that we can do day to day that can help to improve our brain health. And one core one, that the minute I say it, everyone's going to roll their eyes, which is exercise. So exercise, very physical experience, but it does so much for our circulatory system, for our stress levels, for the different types of molecules that exist in our brain and in our body. I would say if you can increase your level of physical activity and keep up that level of physical activity over the long term, that it will be huge already. Another one is engaging in a brain healthy diet.

So there's something, I mean, I would say something close to the Mediterranean diet is pretty good. There's a specific diet called the Mind Diet, which is a combination of a, of the Mediterranean plush dietary approaches for helping to manage high blood pressure, this thing called the dash diet. But essentially, it's kind of eating meats that are lean, green leafy vegetables, olive oils, nuts that are high in omega-3 fatty acids like walnuts, and then dark fruits like blackberries, blueberries, strawberries. And then there's a lot of research coming out around ultra-process foods and kind of

what world they play. But I always like to focus on what to eat as opposed to the nuts. what not to eat. Then sleep is another big one. Just making sure that you're getting enough sleep. And for every person, that amount of sleep is different from person to person. Just making sure that you're treating any sleep disorders. Like, for example, like sleep apnea, if you snore a lot, making sure you're getting that checked out because it's treatable.

And it can help to kind of improve that brain health. Social connections, I've done a lot of research on social connections and its impact on brain health. And I think the key thing there is making sure that you're really sustaining supportive social connections. that you're not just the one providing the support. The support is coming back to you, especially if that support is in the form of emotional support or even just having somebody available to listen to you. And then another one is just constantly engaging in new

and challenging mentally stimulating activities and very deliberate in terms of the words that I use there because it's new topics, new skills are really helpful, and they would ideally be challenging so that it requires effort to do it, which is more likely to form new brains, self-connection, so that way, even if you develop injury down the road, you have a lot of spare pathways for information to get to where it needs to get to. Speaking of pathways, because I often hear the analogy of pathways forming in the brain,

is there a maximum number of pathways that can form? Like, I'm envisioning it as undeveloped real estate and then you can build some roads on it, but it can either be sparsely populated or densely populated. Is that the right analogy? I don't know that there's like, mathematically, there is a limit to what can happen within a bit of mass or matter. But I think the thing that we know about the brain is this kind of expression that really summarizes it nicely is that neurons that fire together, wire together. So this kind of kind of kind of kind of kind of kind of kind of kingling effect that happens with neurons, the more these brain cells are in contact with each other, that they connect with each other, they're in similar pathways. the more likely the art to grow those connections and form stronger connections with each other

and then become part of essentially an interlocking network on itself. We can develop new pathways whenever we learn something new. It's one of the beautiful things about the brain. We call it plastic. It changes based off of the environment they're in. Even in this conversation we're having right now, we're shaping each other's brain because we won't be who we were at the beginning of this conversation as who we are at the of it. The transient ewe. Yeah, exactly. Is it true that we lose that plasticity with age? So there is a

critical window at a very young age where our brain is highly plastic, where it's just very prone to making those connections. And this is kind of in the early months of life, that window starts to close as a couple of years go by. So we've seen that with studied looking at kids around like 10 to 12 months old, where they start to form, they begin to lose the ability to detect differences in speech. Specific accents start to form in language as well. So, like, the difference between the bu and the V sound in, like, Spanish culture can get lost after that.

Or, like, in Japanese cultures, the difference between the la and la-da sound can get lost during that time. That's why it's also really, kids are really amazing at learning, kind of, like, languages and skills and that's, like, the environment around them. But as we get older, things do get harder to create, but it's not impossible. So there are things that we can do to help to increase some of that plasticity. And some of that is doing things that are keeping that plasticity active, kind of keeping the molecular kind of environment, like very prone to performing connections. There's a thing called brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF.

But some people call like miracle growth for the brain. But that increases with physical activity and also like learning and social engagement. we tend to see more of that molecule around, so you're more prone to make those connections. There are also some research around certain medications, making people more prone to open up that window. But I think in general, it's about the physical activity

and engaging in the new and challenging, mentally stimulating activities. As we get older, we do lose some of our cognitive functions, but the typical situation is not a sharp decline where we lose our ability to function. It's really just a slight decline. I mean, some things like working memory,

some of these kind of trickier brain functions actually peak in our early 20s and then start to go down very slowly. But there are some areas of brain function that continue to improve over time, vocabulary. Some people will call it like theory of mind or perspective taking or like wisdom. Like these things continue to get better over time. But even then once we get into our 90s, some of those functions also will begin to decline as well.

But they can improve even in our 70s or 80s? Yeah, as long as you're able to learn, you can reopen that window of plasticity. I mean, it's constantly happening. It's just part of our brain. It's just the propensity for which it happens is not as great compared to how immense that capacity is when we're toddlers. Right. But at least as adults, it's heartening to know that those things can improve even in our 70s and 80s. Yeah.

I mean, it may take a little bit more effort sometimes. I think going back to conflict resilience, like unlearning, some past behaviors can take a little bit more effort because those pathways are just so ingrained. But it is something that can happen. I mean, another big process that happens in the brain is what we call myelination. It's like white matter kind of tracks that basically are creating efficiencies in the brain. So we prune some of our connections to increase efficiency. So it's like getting rid of a lot of side rows to make room for highways. And that is another part of this process of learning and really forming those really strong connections that happen over time.

And that's something that can definitely happen as we get much older. I've heard the theory that we have fluid intelligence when we're in our 20s and 30s, that high compute power that allows us to do very, very difficult mathematical equations when we're 30. That's harder to focus on at the age of 50. And that as we get into our 50s and 60s, we have crystallized intelligence. wisdom across multiple domains. Is there actually a neurological basis for that? The concepts of fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence is one way that we can think about intelligence that gained a lot of attention in the last several decades. Essentially, when we think about fluid intelligence, more of that problem solving, kind of novelty thinking,

double thinking, and then the crystallized images of knowledge, facts, procedures, processes that are well-worn. None of those really go away. You may live. leaning on more of one than the other, but it's still there to some degree. And the brain areas that are involved in each of those, there's a lot of overlap between them as well. But if you're much older and you're not really focused on trying to challenge yourself and learn something new or learn a new experience or something, you may just be relying on facts and kind of past experiences and say, like, in this situation, I just do this no matter what, regardless of what the outcome is. But someone who's a little bit more fluid might think, I can, I.

can try this and if that's not the right way to do it, the way that I want it to end up, I can make an adjustment. What is the impact of trauma on the brain? Trauma is really complicated and it involves these past experiences of actual or perceived threat of violence or potential loss of life that becomes very deeply ingrained in our memory, so much so that we're not that we can be prone to developing post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, where we have intrusive thoughts of the past or being in situations where we are reminded, our brain is reminded of that past threat will set off all sorts of warning bells and alarms, and it derails your ability to function in a lot of places. When we are thinking about conflict resilience, we are definitely

making sure that we are making a distinction that we don't want people to tolerate a very traumatic situation where you are at risk of being harmed or somebody else being harmed. We want people to know that this is really meant to help us with more of the discomfort of disagreements and conflict across things like lines of difference or difference of opinion or difference of decisions about how you want to do things. But if you're in a situation that is actively going to harm you or is a threat of harming you that a big decision has to happen at that point for yourself, whether the two stay or to go. And that's something that we talk at length.

And we try to navigate kind of the complexities of that by sharing a little bit of research around kind of this trigger warnings and how trigger warnings may actually not be as helpful as we think that they can be because a trigger warning may actually increase a person's when it can sensitize them more. They can also increase your own self, how you identify. with the trauma, it can actually increase the amount of distress around the situations. So there's a little bit of a navigating that has to happen about how much and when do you expose yourself to some of that discomfort. Some people can use a system of just giving yourself

or waiting of how distressing something is from like a zero to 10, 10 being the most distressed, zero being no distress at all to gauge for yourself at what level of distress is the situation. putting me in, if you are at a 10, maybe pause, step away, or ask yourself, is this the right time or the engagement for me? And then maybe you want to practice with things that are more on the one to two range. Usually, just like lifting weights, right? You want to work with weights that you can lift and keep your form before you start to increase the weight because it's all the things that you learned with good form that allow you to actually lift those heavier weights without hurting yourself. Right. And so finding situations or your distress level is more in that like,

one to two, three range, and then really bringing in these different skills can be really, really helpful so that way eventually you can work your way up to what would have been in the past the four or five. But certainly jumping to a nine or ten is actually just going to be potentially traumatizing and kind of reinforce this idea that conflict is bad. Just with the idea of conflict and of itself, one of the things we want to make sure that comes across is that conflict is something that we should expect and expect. accept. And the more we see it as a sign of opportunity, creativity, innovation, connection, vibrancy, the more likely it is that we will want to engage in some of these more

uncomfortable conflict situations if we know that there's that BBO at the end of the discomfort. The bigger, better offer, the raise that you get when you finally go into your boss's office and ask for one. What would you do if, let's say that there was some, something you talked about the distress rankings. Let's say that there was something that in the past created a level 10 distress. And now there are things that are objectively benign, but that remind you of it. Let's just say the color yellow, right? The color yellow is objectively benign, but it reminds you of something from your past that had a level 10 distress. How do you How to manage that?

Yeah. How do you manage that? I mean, one thing that we also try to highlight is there are some situations where it would be helpful to work with a therapist, to work with a trained mental health professional who can help you navigate these really tricky experiences. Because if the distress is very high, it would be helpful to have an external person kind of coaching you through it and walking you through kind of how to navigate those feelings that are coming up and not just avoiding them all together. there's one type of therapy that's often used in situations. It sounds like a specific phobia, and specific phobia is oftentimes the treatment that's used is something called exposure response therapy. But essentially, it's gradually introducing that thing that is really scary in those

lighter levels and then helping you bring in strategies and tool so that way you're able to manage that distress that comes up, whether it's through breathing, through it, through kind of reminding yourself through this thing called the response prevention messaging. So it's like kind of things that you can tell yourself that can help to ease the discomfort.

So for example, if the yellow reminds you of a situation like, let's say a yellow school bus hit you. And ever since then, that yellow above the school bus just drives you in a panic,

working with other shades of yellow and starting with that, even if it gives you like that one or two level, so finding that thing that leads back to that one to two to three, so you can navigate it. And then reminding yourself, using that response for prevention messaging around this color yellow

reminds me of something that happened, but this yellow here isn't going to harm me right now. And we might never know whether, you know, this yellow is a sign of something really bad because it could be something good, it could be something bad. It could be something, it could be nothing. It's less about kind of downplaying things

and more about giving you a fuller picture of what's possible, as opposed to being very certain that something bad's going to happen from it, opening up with that kind of new layer of imagination around that also nothing might happen or something really positive might happen too. And we don't know. Right. We don't have the information. Right.

And that's where the imagination of possibility comes in. Exactly. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. where can people find you if they would like to learn more? Yeah, if people would like to learn more about the book, Conflict Resilience, they can go to Conflict Resiliencebook.com. And if they want to learn more about myself, you can go to joelselenasmd.com.

And all social media platforms, I'm Joelle Salinas MD. Thank you to Dr. Joel Salinas. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one, your brain's avoidance loop makes asking for raises, harder. Your brain actually rewards you for avoiding difficult conversations, which creates a cycle that makes future conversations even more uncomfortable. Breaking this pattern requires deliberately practicing discomfort, and it requires focusing on the long-term benefits rather than the short-term

relief, which is easier said than done. As we are doing a behavior, that can decrease the negative experience. We use the term valence. If there's positive and negative valence, the less negative or the more positive, the experience, the more likely you are to get a release of dopamine or serotonin, which then activates these reward and reinforcement pathways. These are really there to help us learn.

And in that learning process, what's really being registered is not only what was the thing that I did that made me feel a little bit better, but also how big that reward was. and the bigger the reward, the bigger the relief, the more likely it's going to get ingrained in these behavioral pathways. Your brain's avoidance loop reinforces itself, continually making, asking for raises or doing anything else that's uncomfortable harder.

That's the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two, the bigger, better offer technique can help you ask for that raise. When you're preparing to request a promotion or a raise, first identify the compelling long-term rewards that outweigh the temporary discomfort. And that should be a duh. What's the long-term reward of making an extra $10,000 a year to do exactly the same thing that you're doing right now?

The long-term reward speaks for itself, but you can actually take it a step further and get visual with it. All right, what would you do with that extra $10,000? Would that put you on a shorter timeline towards financial independence, which means that you would then be able to move into your true calling? Would that allow you to pay off your student loans and feel the relief of being debt-free? Would it allow you to move into a larger apartment as your family grows? I mean, identifying those long-term rewards and being as specific and as visual as you can be,

that will help shift your brain's reward system towards supporting your career advancement goals. This BBO, the idea here is if you're able to be aware of the situation, pause, and then reflect on what is the reward that will come to you from taking on that big scary action or that thing that you're not usually inclined to do, that is bigger than doing the counter to it, the more likely it is that your brain's reward and reinforcement,

are going to start to align with what you want to happen or what is in your best interest. So that is the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three. Conflict is actually a sign of connection, not failure. Reframing how you view workplace disagreements can transform your ability to have those hard but productive conversations about compensation, about advancement, about benefits, about having a better working environment, all of those tough but necessary conversations that force growth. Conflict isn't something to fear, but rather a really necessary part of having authentic, long-lasting

professional relationships. Conflict oftentimes gets thought of as a source of failure or weakness or pain or a sign that things aren't working, but actually conflict is a sign of connection. You cannot have connection with that conflict. It's how people can be most authentic with themselves and live the lives that they really want to live. The more I avoided the conversation with my parents, the more painful that distress was in my head. And so it became harder and harder until eventually I had to create a situation where I couldn't avoid it. Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Dr. Joelle Salinas. He is the co-author of the book, Conflict Reservoir.

along with Bob Bordone, who you heard from earlier this week, which covers negotiation and conflict both from a tactical perspective as well as from the neurological perspective. Thank you for tuning in. I am so grateful that you are part of the Afforder community. This is the Afford Anything podcast. I'm Paula Pant, and I'll meet you in the next episode.