Dhru Purohit Show - Your Brain Doesn’t Want You to Slow Down: The Real Keys to Lifelong Cognitive Strength with Dr. Tommy Wood

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, BiOptimizers,  Maui Nui, and One Skin.  We’ve been told that cognitive decline is just a normal part of aging. But what if the real story has less to do with age and more to do with how we’re living? Your brain is constantly adapting to the signals you give it, and those signals may matter far more than you think. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with neuroscientist and performance expert Dr. Tommy Wood to challenge the idea that cognitive decline is inevitable and reveal how our modern lifestyle may be quietly reshaping our brain health. Dr. Wood explains why dementia risk is often a mismatch problem, breaks down the Movement Funnel and the three types of exercise that stimulate different brain networks, and shares his “3 S’s” framework for building long-term resilience. He also unpacks the science behind high-intensity training, purpose and social connection, brain training, stress, creatine, and what truly separates superagers from everyone else. Dr. Tommy Wood is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience at the University of Washington, where his research focuses on brain health across the lifespan, from newborn brain injury to adult traumatic brain injury and long-term cognitive decline. He earned an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge, a medical degree from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Physiology and Neuroscience from the University of Oslo. He has consulted with elite athletes, including multiple Formula 1 drivers, and serves as Director and Treasurer of the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine and as Head of Research for the dementia-prevention charity Food for the Brain. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Wood dive into: (0:00) Intro (2:03) Cognitive decline isn’t a brain issue; it’s a lifestyle mismatch (10:18) The overlooked force that could matter more than any supplement. (15:00) How modern life quietly reshaped our thinking about aging and mortality (18:37) The evolutionary truth your body and brain still expect from you (30:29) The landmark study that changed how scientists view dementia risk (41:06) Why pushing your limits might sharpen your mind faster (44:00) The framework that explains why your workouts may not be enough (50:57) What early childhood movement reveals about lifelong brain resilience (57:30) The three simple levers that could shift your brain’s trajectory (1:18:06) Why brain games are not the full answer to cognitive longevity (1:28:22) How purpose-driven communities seem to outperform biology (1:35:57) The counterintuitive way to think about stress and long-term health (1:41:28) The surprising compound that fuels both muscle and mind (1:46:50) What truly separates superagers from everyone else (1:53:03) The mindset shift that ties everything together Also mentioned in this episode: The Stimulated Mind Brain HQ Creative Experiences and Brain Clocks Study For more on Dr. Wood, follow him on X/Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Apple Podcasts, or visit his Website. This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, BiOptimizers, Maui Nui, and One Skin.  Right now, get 20% off your Cozy Earth sheets and sleepwear. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Upgrade your digestion with enzymes! Go to bioptimizers.com/dhru now and enter promo code DHRU to get 15% off any MassZymes order and all BiOptimizers products. Right now, Maui Nui Venison is offering my listeners a limited collection of my favorite cuts and products and a FREE 12-pack of venison jerky sticks with your first order of $79 or more! Just go to mauinuivenison.com/dhru to secure your access now, but hurry, supply is limited! Right now, One Skin is offering my community 15% off; just go to oneskin.co and use the coupon code DHRU to save 15% and give your skin the scientifically proven, gentle care it deserves. Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Tommy Wood. You know, most people think that cognitive decline is inevitable. They think it's genetic. I'm sure you've heard that before. They think it starts late, but it's destiny. Yeah. And they think that once it begins, you're essentially on the path to a planned destination, a destiny that was already going to happen.

There's nothing you can do about it. it. And you're here to make the case that actually there's a lot that we can do about it. But there are surprising things that significantly move the needle forward. And there's other surprising things that may not actually make a difference. And that's what today's podcast is with you. And your core message that you're bringing here today, your brain is plastic far longer than you think. And the inputs you give it on a daily basis matter more than any. scan that you're being marketed, any supplement that you're being marketed as well. And the good news about that is today our audience is going to leave with a ton of things they can do immediately

to help them tackle this thing, which is one of the scariest topics for a lot of people. I know my audience, especially women, they feel that cognitive decline, one of the scariest topics out there. So welcome to the podcast. I'm excited to get into subject with you. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to talk about all of that and hopefully bust some myths. As I mentioned, if someone listening today has a fear of literally losing your mind, and that's one of your top fears, we have seven big ideas that we've taken from your new book, which is fantastic, by the way, the stimulated mind. We have the link in the show notes.

And we're going to break those down here. And let's jump into the first one that we have. The first big idea that we're taking from your book, cognitive decline is. It isn't a brain problem. It's a lifestyle mismatch. Help us understand what you mean by that. When I think about a wide range of areas and periods of brain development, brain function, many of which that I work in, and some context is probably useful here.

I run a basic neuroscience lab. I look for ways or my team and I try and develop ways to treat the injured new warm brain to treat and prevent traumatic brain injury to then ideally prevent cognitive decline and dementia and then I also do some work in elite sports performance so I help oversee performance programs for several Formula One drivers and traditionally you think that's a very random collection of things that one person might do and it's amazing that I get to do all of those things but when you look across all those different areas, the same things pop up as being important for both development of brain

function and maintaining and supporting brain health and then having that last for decades into the future as well as contributing to the top level, you know, cognitive performance, you know, at the, sharp end of elite sports. And where we see these mismatches and is, really the biggest driver of, I think, the majority of cognitive decline. So when you think about biology more broadly, there are these critical inputs that our bodies require in order to maintain function. They are inputs that say, hey, this tissue is useful. I need it to do something.

I need it to improve its function so that I can hunt, run, jump, teach, learn, right? survive, most of it's driven by sort of our core need for survival. And these are things that have been, these inputs have been increasingly engineered out of our environment. So they could be inputs like a core need for physical movement, right? That is what drives maintenance and repair and anti-aging processes in the body. A core need for nutrients that run the whole system. And a core need for stimulus, pretty much for. any tissue to function at its best. And that's the same for the brain.

It's the same for our muscles. It's the same for our liver and our immune system. There are these stimuli that essentially drive that whole process. And we've removed or our removing nutrients from the diet. We're removing physical activity from the environment. We're removing social interaction, true real social interaction from our daily lives. We're removing significant cognitive stimulus and replacing it with multitasking and scrolling. And it's these core mismatches that I think are driving a lot of cognitive decline,

gogative decline, brain fog, you know, what a lot of people are experiencing. And sort of like a real typical example of that that I talk about a lot is retirement, which I think is the ultimate mismatch for the brain. Because we see cognitive decline accelerate in several large studies at the time of retirement. And that's because I think the, our work is where we get most of our stimulus. We get social interaction. Maybe it's a complex job where we have to learn new skills or do problem solving.

And we remove that stimulus, then function declines as a result. So kind of the core idea of the book is that there are these things that our bodies need just to function and develop and maintain, you know, all these core. are we in functions including cognitive function and slowly those have been removed from the environment so that we don't need to provide those inputs anymore but if we bring them back there's a huge amount of evidence that we can prevent cognitive decline improve cognitive function at any age and it's not necessarily that hard to do we just need to know what those stimuli and what those dispatches needs they look like and how we can overcome them. Yeah, for anybody reading your book, it's a huge distinction you walk away right from the opening.

The brain doesn't fail randomly, which is what a lot of people think. It just randomly failed because of genetics or bad luck. So the brain doesn't fail randomly. It declines when the environment stops asking anything of it. It's powerful because I think the other thing about retirement, which is very relatable for a lot of our audience. Some of our audiences in retirement, a lot of our audiences thinking about retirement one day and what does that mean? Think about also work is where a lot of people get value, that they feel like they are contributing, that people are relying on them. And that isn't what we want all of our value to come from.

But the flip side is, especially here in America, is you lose some of that. And then you have older individuals that don't have really strong community ties. And now you are more isolated, you're more alone, you're not contributing, and your mind is sort of spiraling like, what is my purpose? Do you hear that from folks sometimes? So my friends and family often ask me, if I eat clean and organic, should my digestion just work? Well, not necessarily. As we age, we can naturally produce fewer digestive enzymes, especially protease, which helps break down protein. And that can mean bloating, heaviness, sluggishness, even after a healthy meal. Digestive enzymes can help and often,

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And I think this is a, this is a core part of the problem that people are experiencing. The first is that, yes, there's the, this overall idea that purpose and meaning are critical, right? They are like, you need to have some kind of reason to exist for one of a better word. If we think about core physiological requirements or sorry, psychological requirements, or sorry, psychological requirements, requirements. Some people think about self-determination theory. You need autonomy, relatedness, and competency. So you need to feel like you have control over your life and that you're connected to others and that you're good and useful at things. These are sort of like core physiological,

psychological things that we need. Those are increasingly being lost as we become socially disconnected as we feel like we're you know we don't necessarily know what it is that we're we're here to do and this is important because if you're trying to build a framework so that you maintain function and health for as long as possible you need to engage in those activities that help to drive function, some of which I've sort of already touched on, like physical activity and cognitive stimulus and social connection. As we get older, there's this idea that older individuals are no longer useful. And I think this has been kind of baked into society for more than a century. And I have one person that I largely blame for it is a guy called Sir William Osler.

Wow. This is... If you've trained in medicine, you'll have heard of... of Osler, he's like his methods of examination, like still taught in medical schools more than 100 years after he died. He was also a professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, which is where I went to medical school. So everything that I did in medical school was Osler themed.

We have an Osler House, which is where medical students could study. We competed for Osler House Sports Club. So I was the head coach of Osler House Boat Club, the rowing club. all the way back, right at the beginning of the 20th century, Osler gave a speech at Johns Hopkins University where he said that at the age of 60, adults had to be put out to pasture

because they essentially had become useless. And this was one of the ways that retirement became more popular. Because actually, up until that point, retirement wasn't necessarily a thing. People didn't have the ability or the kind of the infrastructure to allow them to retire. But he kind of is credited with popularizing retirement to a large degree. But that idea that at 60, all of a sudden, you're no longer useful.

This has kind of been absorbed into society in a way that people like still believe that. And that's part of this idea that cognitive decline is inevitable. I think they like intricately linked because you're like, well, I'm going to get old and I'm going to lose function. Right. And then because you expect to lose function, you don't do the things. things that help you to maintain function. And then that is sort of, you know, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's worth, you know, acknowledging that in the beginning of the 20th century, the average

life expects in the US was 50 years old. So like 60, like people who were 60 were probably not in great physical health. But that's completely changed now, right? It's just not even a thing anymore when people can live easily into their 70s, 80s and 90s in great overall health. Question on the lifespan. was a lot of that because of infant mortality. So, you know, we had lower lifespans from the outside

because we're dealing with the average of infant mortality. But, you know, if you look at like a lot of the founding fathers here in America and other individuals, that generally if you made it to, you know, the ages of 60 years old, many of these people would live into their 80s. Obviously, in highly industrialized zones and areas, like I can even remember as cities we're getting more,

hearing from different experts on this podcast as things were getting more polluted. That's when you started to have even the emergence of things like Parkinson's disease, right, in cities because of air pollution, environmental toxins, etc. But generally speaking, if you made it to 60, you were going to live a pretty good life after that. That was my understanding. Do I have that incorrect? So I think it's a bit of both. Yeah. And this is actually sort of looking at population averages is also important as it relates to how we think about cognitive decline as we age. So we'll come back to that because the way you calculate an average is actually really critical to this idea of how we think about our brains over time. But you're right.

So if you have a lot of infant mortality, then you have a lot of kids dying at one years, two years, three years, four years, right? And you calculate a mean average, right? You add up all the years or the ages at which people died, divided by those number of people that gives you the average more like average life expectancy, right? You're right. If you have a lot of infant mortality, you drag the average down. But equally, think you know in certain parts of you know industrial America and other westernized societies it's going to have been very common that you know there was a lot of air pollution in cities at that time and you know a lot of cardiovascular disease smoking nutrient deficiencies right so I so I think it's still quite likely that the average

60 year old back then was a lot less healthy than the average 60 year old could be today but you can you in many places in my book I compare sort of of physical activity and physical function in, say, US or European populations today to still modern-day hunter-gatherer societies. And it's very common for individuals in the societies to live into their 70s or 80s and be very physically active while they do it. Of course, another thing I didn't mention back then, you know, infections, antibiotics weren't really a thing. You know, a lot of hygiene is improved now. So I think it's probably a bit of a bit of both in terms of what you're thinking about.

Yeah. And the thing that I took away from some of the things you shared inside your book and why I think this topic is important is that society for a long time had to live in a particular way that life demanded of it. You had to move. You had to eat a diverse group of different foods because you ate seasonally. There was no other choice. You needed to rely on your community because those who lived on their own would surely die between all the different threats between other villages, tribes, and also just the toughness of living in the world, fetching food, water, et cetera. And these things were needed. The stress was needed by the body because that's the environment that it adapted to survive in. Nobody was going to the gym.

You just had to move because life demanded it from you. And when we took these things out to make our life more convenient, to try to improve things for society, to manage growing civilization, we had all these unintended consequences. And now we're waking up and we're saying, Dr. Tommy, help us figure out what the hell is going on. And you have some important things here to remind us

that this was always part of how we were designed to be human being. but because we took it out, we're suffering. And I think the biggest one, you've already talked about this, so I'm gonna jump ahead to the next big idea that we have, and it's around movement. So let's flush it out a little bit because it's literally one of the most important things as is related to our modern day society

that's being sucked out of every single corner. So the big idea from the book is exercise doesn't just protect the brain. It actively builds it. Let's do a deep dive on, movement. As a kind of starting point, I think it's important to reiterate what you just said, which is that physical activity has been such a critical component of human evolution that it is a fundamental requirement of our biology, essentially. There's a nice quote from Enigo San Milan, who's a very well-known exercise physiologist. And he basically says that in order for our bodies to function normally, they require frequent movement and physical activity so much so that we've had to like invent exercise as a thing because we've now engineered movement out of the environment.

And when you look across all of the different biochemical processes that we measure in terms of aging, there are these hallmarks of aging that that you can sort of. of you mainly have to measure them in like animal models because it's not all things that you can like measure in a human but they relate to mitochondrial function and genetic stability and metabolic function and inflammation and all these other kinds of things things like autophagy to kind of break down and renew the machinery of the cells as they get kind of junky over time and all of those different hallmarks are in some way reversed or slowed by physical activity and exercise is the only thing that essentially hits all of them. The way that I think about this is not that exercises anti-aging, it's that not exercising is pro-aging, right? So we can then look specifically when it comes to the brain. And you're right that physical activity and how we use our bodies directly stimulates both the development of the brain and then the maintenance of the brain over time. It really nice studies in kids where you can give them different types of exercise

and then look at their cognitive function. And this kind of tells us about the types of exercise that are most critical to the brain. And there are each, you know, if we break exercise down to three kind of broad types, they each have different effects on the brain such that we probably have to do a little bit of all of them. So there's like erobic type activities. And so this is everything from just walking through to, you know, much more intense stuff, high intensity interval training. And there is an intensity component. So intense exercise also has a very specific benefit for the brain.

Then you have resistance type training or strength training. And then you have coordinative or sort of like complex movement type exercise. So that could be something that involves playing a team sport. or a ball sport, something that requires you to sort of like respond to the environment and maybe strategize like when you're playing tennis. You're like trying to manipulate your opponents so that you can get the ball, you know, get the ball past them. Those kinds of activities also have a specific benefit for the brain. But I think about one of these studies in kids, if you have kids and you randomize the three groups,

this is one study they did. And they just had a control group that didn't really do anything. Then they had, and these kids are about sort of nine or ten years old. Then they had an aerobic training group. Basically, these kids just ran laps around the track. And then they had a group that did ball sports and skipping and speed ladders and all these other kinds of things that were just like, well, first of all, they're more fun, but then also they require a lot more sort of complex skills.

And you see that, yes, the running group had improvements in cognitive function over the control group in a short period of time. But there were greater benefits in this like sort of complex, in the complex, so like fun skills group. And we see this actually across studies of adults as well. So we can maybe start with coordinates of exercise because I think it's something that we don't give enough credit to. Everybody's thinking about when we think about exercise, think about I'll go for a jog and I'll go lift some weights. But when you look at studies in older adults as well, if you have them do some kind of what we would call unimodal or you know, you sort of like,

simple aerobic type exercise, cycling or running. And then you compare that to an open skill or, you know, co-ordinative type exercise that has the same amount of physical strain on the body, right? So it could be badminton. They've done studies with dancing. They've done studies where they compare running around the track to running around the track when they add obstacles. So it's like it comes an obstacle course.

Yes, the aerobic training group, like the simple training group, the running, the cycling is absolutely beneficial for the brain. But if you add complex motor skills on top, you see even greater benefits. And that's in terms of the cognitive functions that you can measure, but also in terms of you can measure changes on MRI scan. Or you can measure some of these hormones that get released during exercise. We call them exa-kines that can have direct benefits for the brain. So one thing that I think we don't get enough of when it comes to exercise is those kind of

complex movements. And it could be right, you join a soccer team. Dancing has some of the best evidence of any type of exercise when it comes to the brain, both for treating mood disorders, but also for improving cognitive function. So you don't have to go to a gym. If you don't want, you can actually get a huge amount of benefit by doing these other these other types of sports. And it's probably partly because of the movement. It's partly because they require complex skills. Partly because it challenges the brain in a way that we don't often challenge it where we have to process information very quickly, which is not something most of us have to do on a day-to-day basis. You try to react to the ball being hit at you or something like that. Well, one thing I was going to say about that is you obviously saw how something like pickleball, which took off and in Europe, Paddle, paddle, whatever you call it.

Didn't take off in the U.S. There's a couple places around here in L.A. that have it. But in Europe, it's huge. You can see how so many people, especially those that are in the 50 plus crowd, 60 plus crowd, they would gravitate towards it. You had the community element of it. You had this quick reaction time. You got to develop a new skill.

It wasn't so tough on the body from a starting place, like maybe tennis, where you kind of need a little bit more stamina that was there. And pickleball got, you know, a lot of hate for a bunch of different reasons and especially more people that are like professional amateurs like they take tennis really seriously or other stuff they're like it's not a sport it's like dude look at what this is bringing to the lives of so many people this is amazing i'm so glad that so many people are playing pickleball uh funny enough there's been a little bit of a backlash because of the noise of it but i think the industry is responding by creating quieter paddles you know people who have nice homes are like living next to pickleball

courts and they're like i'm going nuts you guys are pushing me into cognitive decline with all your sound of the paddle going off. But that's a great example of why this sport took off and especially that community element of it. You have to like think about it together. You get to be outside in the sun, which has so many different benefits that are there. You know, coming back to some of the data and you mentioned these coordinated sports and how dancing has a lot of data, zooming out into the bigger concept of movement and how crucial it is, there's also other data that's out there that's you talk about inside of the book and how powerful it is, one of the trials that you highlight was the finger trial, right?

Did I get that right, the finger trial? Yeah. And Howard talked about structured, aerobic and strength training, you know, moving now from coordinated activities into a new category, improved executive function and processing speed regardless. And this is the key. At the beginning of the episode, we talked about how so many people think, okay, it's genetics.

And they export their 23 and me data. And they're like, okay, I got an APOE4, I have a double allele, I have a single, I have this, I have that. My destiny is cognitive decline. My parent had it. My uncle had it. My grandparent had it. So it's only a matter of time and I can, you know, before it happens to me.

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Now, multiple trials that show that you can improve cognitive function, even very late in life, and even in individuals who are at a high risk of cognitive decline. So the finger trial was done in Finland. And it was in individuals who they expected to have a high risk of cognitive decline and dementia. Exercise wasn't the only thing that they did. But they had four main interventions. So they had the exercise of resistance and aerobic training. They had dietary counseling. They did some cognitive training like brain training. And they did tracking and treatment of cardiovascular risk factors.

And cardiovascular risk actually tracks very closely with dementia risk. And they saw significant improvements in multiple cognitive functions compared to a control group over a couple of years. This has now been repeated using largely the same structure but in the US population as the pointer trial that came out last year, showed essentially the same thing. And again, that it was beneficial regardless of ApoE genotype. With respect to the ApoE4 in particular, I think that one of the things that we can say we are most confident, about it in terms of increasing risk of dementia, which it does is associated with a significant increase in the risk of dementia, Alzheimer's disease, is that it mainly acts like a risk

amplifier. So we know what the majority of risk factors for dementia are. We think that the majority of dementias are probably preventable. Would we be able to eliminate all those risk factors related to physical health and physical activity? And some of them are. sort of social level things that we would need to change like education because education is a critical risk sort of predictor of dementia risk when you think about individual risk factors and they've looked in multiple studies like physical activity alcohol intake smoking those who have one or two copies of appoE4 see a greater risk associated with that risk factor but then in many studies you also see a greater benefit if you then improve it so there are some studies that suggest

that if you have an api for genotype, you get more benefit from exercise than somebody who doesn't in relation to your cognitive function of dementia risk. Everybody benefits, but because it acts as a multiplier, that means that, yes, you have a greater risk if you have a sedentary lifestyle, but you also get more benefit if you do exercise. So what that, I think that's quite empowering

because it tells us that actually you can get significant benefit from doing these things. And it will offset a lot of the increased risk that you have because of your genetics. Another thing that you often see is even if somebody doesn't have APOE4, we still see that dementia risk tracks in families. So if you have a family member who had dementia, you're more likely to get it yourself. But what also tracks across family history is risk factors for dementia. So if your family don't, you know, regularly move or participate in exercise, you're less likely to. And if, you know, they are more likely to eat a certain way, then you're lucky to eat that way.

And if that doesn't have the nutrients, you know, the things that the brain needs, right, that's going to be associated with an increase in risk. So often what we think is genetic is actually shared lifestyle amongst family members that seems to be driving some of that risk. So again, that's something that we individually can take some control over. thinking now back to exercise, yes, like traditional aerobic and strength training have been shown in individual trials, because finger and pointer did multiple things at the same time, which is probably going to be better, you know, hit multiple sort of risk factors at once. But thinking about aerobic exercise, one of the first studies that was done that showed that there were that you could increase the size of. of certain parts of the brain in older adults used walking as an intervention. 40 minutes of brisk walking three times a week for a year and they saw significant improvements in the size of the hippocampus, so a part of the brain that's really

important for memory and is affected particularly later on in Alzheimer's disease. And those who gained the most fitness tended to have greater improvements in hippocampal structure and then also function. So they did the some cobbotted tests. And so then if you're if you're starting from a very low level of activity, then just walking a few times a week has been shown to significantly improve. Brisk walking. Brisk walking.

So what they did and this is important because you're right, the intensity has an effect. They started out just having them do like 10 minutes at a time and they slowly built up over several weeks. And then once they got to 40 minutes, they slowly increased the intensity. So it doesn't mean you have to go like straight in, right? Some people might just might just need to take 10 minutes a day, just go walk for 10 minutes a day and then slowly build up from there. There are also lots of studies looking at just the number of steps that people take per day. And there's a linear benefit, basically more is better starting somewhere around 1 to 2,000 steps a day, which is sort of even somebody who doesn't really move very much usually takes somewhere around that number of steps.

the more steps you take from there the better up to around sort of eight nine thousand where things start to level off so even without thinking about how brisk the walking is just walking more and moving more can be really important and i talk about in the book i talk about exercise snacks just getting up and moving around has a significant effect on cognitive function because sitting still changes how blood flow goes to the brain and that can actually sort of in a very short period of time a couple of hours change how we feel and change our aspects of cognitive function. So even just like getting up and moving around can have an effect. But then as you sort of build up, more intensity can be better. So there was another study recently, probably one of the most impressive exercise trials that's ever been done where they took again older individuals and they split them into three groups. They had like a low intensity training group.

They had a moderate intensity training group. which was like, so the low intensity group was like walking. Moderate intensity was jogging for 40 minutes. And then they had a high intensity interval training group who did something called the Norwegian four by four protocol. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a pretty intense protocol.

It's an intense protocol. But for three times a week, they did this protocol, which is four minutes, at 85 to 95% of maximum heart rate with a three minute break. And you do that four times over. And they did that three times a week for six months. And they saw significant improvements in, again, hippocampal structure on an MRI scan and significant improvements in function using a test of a memory test called the PAD Associates Learning Test in the high intensity group compared to the other groups.

And that benefit was maintained for five years after the end of the trial. So a six-month training intervention. And they went back to their normal exercise afterwards. Like all the groups were the same afterwards, but five years later. they saw retained benefits in terms of brain structure and function, which is amazing. And they, I don't know if they were measuring people's V02 Max, but their V02 Max probably improved in that time period there from that burst of this intense period of time of working out, which has all sorts of other longevity benefits.

Yeah, so they did look at V02 Max and it actually improved quite similarly in the jogging group and the Norwegian four by four group. So some of the benefit probably comes from improvements of V02 Max. And that brisk walking study also saw that those who gained the most fitness, so greater improvements of V02 Max, saw greater benefits in terms of brain function. Beyond the training effect on V02 Max, there's something special about very high intensity exercise. And of course, for the brain. Yeah.

And of course, like, you should work up to it. Do it in a way that's low risk to you. So it could be a rowing machine. It could be cycling. It could be running. Right. Each of us like, you know, all of those would be the, would be the same.

I really like an assault bike in the gym, right? It's really hard to, it was really easy to work hard for short periods of time. But I think the main effect is probably driven by lactate. So, you know, lactate is this thing that, you know, is often kind of derided as this stuff that accumulates. It causes the burn. And we work really hard. Like, you know, lactate's a bad thing. Yeah.

But what's interesting is that lactate goes into the brain and it switches on the production of something called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is like miracle grow for neurons. So BDNF is really useful for supporting the function of areas or networks or neurons in the brain that were recently activated or stimulated. So it helps to kind of support neuroplasticity. We make BD and F when we exercise, but our muscles make it. But the BDNF we make when we in our muscles doesn't get into the brain very well. There isn't like a transporter for BDNF.

But there are transporters for lactate. And the more lactate you have on your blood, the more gets into the brain. And lactate then switches on that BDNF switch. So I think, yes, there's the training effects, which is important. Yes, the improvement in fitness is important. But there's something about just the intense exercise

that releases things like lactate, to then have special benefits for the brain. It almost switches this idea that when you're doing intense exercise, which again, for those that are listening, it's all relative, right? You can find a level of intensity that's there for you to match where you are in life. And I'm going to ask you about that. We'll put out some protocols for the audience. But when you're doing something intense and you feel a little bit of that burned, right,

that feeling of like, man, I'm getting either windy or like my body's aching a little bit there's this. It's a mental switch now that you understand the importance of lactate. It's like, wow, this is actually fueling my brain. I'm getting that BDNF as a Trojan horse that's latching onto the lactate going right up into the brain to turn everything on and make it grow. For some people, maybe this is a useful thing to think about because we don't, like not everybody really enjoys very intense exercise, right?

Some people do, some people don't. But just thinking about like a little bit of that burn, right? Maybe that's where you're starting to see some additional benefits from the brain. And it could just be short periods, right? You go for a brisk walk and then maybe you just like do a little sprint the last little bit, getting back to the house. This is something that you can build up over time. When we talk about individual studies, which I do a lot, right?

I talk about the four by four protocol. And there are some people who are like, well, that means I have to do the four by four protocol. But actually, so many studies use very short periods of sprints, like all out for 30 seconds or all out for six seconds, an all out six second sprint, acutely, like immediately afterwards, improved cognitive function. And so it doesn't have to be that much. And you can really work up to it over time. And so I would worry much less about, like, the exact protocol and more about, you know, two or three times a week, just like push yourself just a little bit and kind of slowly build that up over time.

So if we're going to recommend protocols, not in the sense of, hey, follow this exact thing that this study showed, but rather people who are listening think of themselves as either very sedentary, like, hey, I'm in a life stage right now, where I'm not moving that much. And it's also not just based on age. You know, I was chatting with you a little bit beforehand,

and I've shared with my podcast audience. My wife gave birth last year to a beautiful baby boy, who's now part of our life. I'm fully in dad mode. My wife is finding herself naturally that her activity level has gone down a little bit, right? Actually, pretty significantly, which is expected. She literally just 3D printed a human being.

That's, you know, first of all, miracle. Second of all, you know, it's a lot of demand from the body that's there. And she's slowly wanting to get back up. And there's been days where, and my wife was very active. She's, you know, very fit when I, you know, met her and loves boxing and loves this. and even a part of her that's saying like, man, I just don't feel like I have that same level of energy, stamina, how am I going to do it? And the reminder for her of, hey, let's even start small.

Let's get on a walk. Let's get sunshine. Let's have a break for you so that you can actually take care of yourself because you're taking care of our baby and breastfeeding and pumping and doing all these different things that are there. So it's not just that people become sedentary when they're older and they, you know, use it or lose it type situation, you could have had an injury. You could have had this. You could have given birth. So for somebody that finds himself at a place in life right now where they're like, hey, I am way sedentary. I'm sitting a ton for all sorts of different reasons.

Would you start off with, hey, just try to take a brisk walk every day? This idea that I think is really important. And it relates to exercise in particular, but also relates to most other areas in terms of how we, we can support the brain. And it's that everything counts, right? So often we think about exercise in terms of like the idealized exercise, you know, training for a 5K or running a marathon or, you know, signing up for a triathlon or, you know, you talk about lifting weights in the gym and you're imagining you have to like go in and like do several hours,

several times a week so that you could be massively muscle bound. And none of that is true. If you enjoy doing that, please keep doing it. It's great. I love all of that stuff. But there's this very clear dose response in terms of exercise and the brain in that anything is good. And anything more than you can do more than what you're doing right now is going to be better. So in the book, I have this framework I call the movement funnel where you can kind of build through it as you sort of build up your.

your your like movement schedule and the first thing I start is with is with snacks right so if if you're not exercise exercise snacks no Oreos not not not chips in the squat rack unfortunately it's just like get up during the day go for a walk to and I mean just like five minutes go walk up a flight of stairs go you know there are lots of interesting studies where they do like 15 squats an hour or you know jumping jacks or pushups and not everybody wants to do that but equally just like any time you get up and move around that's that's great and then you can start to build up from there so like one of those snacks you could turn into a walk right you could do several flights of stairs um you you can then um do that more times

throughout the week and then once you're you're actually outside and you're doing a walk for 10 10 and 20 minutes. And I actually have the level that comes below snack in the funnel I call propel. And the reason why I say that is because not everybody has an environment that they want to walk in or can walk, right? But you could propel a wheelchair. You could sit on a bike. You're right. Anything that involves that similar kind of movement is going to have that kind of benefit. And then as you sort of build that up, right, make it a little brisker for a short period of time. Once you've done that, maybe you add a short little sprint at the end. And I think once you're doing that, you know, you're getting 20 to 30 minutes on average a day,

you know, including all your movement snacks and all your sort of like periods of walking, then you might think about, you know, how do I add some resistance training or something on top of that. That's where I'd usually go next. because resistance training in particular, I know you just had my very good friend, Gabriel Lyon, on the show, who's been a real proponent of this. And we actually wrote a paper together

on resistance training and the brain came out a couple of years ago. And what you see is that whereas aerobic training has benefits for the gray matter in the brain and including the hippocampus, which I mentioned earlier, But to kind of, if anybody imagines a human brain, it's kind of this wrinkly, sludgy pinkish thing. And on the outside, you have the cortex and the gray, and that's the gray matter.

And there's some gray matter like deep inside as well. But then underneath those wrinkles is something we call the white matter, which is where the branches of the neurons are tightly sheathed in fat. essentially, called myelin, which makes them connect and transmit information much faster. And one of the reasons why humans have the brains that we do is we have more white matter than any other species. More than 60% of our brain is white matter. And this is the white matter, its structure and its function tracks more closely with cognitive decline and dementia risk than other things like amyloid. Interestingly, the white matter is super critical to how our brains

function as we age. And resistance training in particular supports and benefits the white matter. So there was randomized controlled trials that show that if you if you take an individual and you put them on a resistance training program like two or a few times a week, six to eight exercises, you know, machines in the gym doing, you know, just covering the whole body, three sets of eight to 12 reps, like a very, very basic resistance training program that anybody can do with almost any equipment that significantly improves things like executive function and decision making, which the white matter is really important for, and the structure of the white matter. And the reason for that, where I mentioned exocines earlier like lactate, is the resistance

training is really good at driving the production of something called IGF1, insulin like growth factor 1. And IGF1 is critical for white matter development and then to maintain. dysfunction. So one of the other areas that we kind of briefly touched upon that I work in is in preterm babies. Babies who are born preterm have an increased risk of something that we call white matter injury. Their white matter doesn't develop fully and that's associated with increased risk of things like cerebral palsy. And one of the reasons why they have that increased risk is because the placenta makes all the IGF1 that the developing brain needs. But if you're born preterm, you don't

get that IGF1 and then your white matter doesn't develop. And we see that same thing in older adults, right? As we get, as we get older, we lose IGF1 production. We're not doing things like resistance training that helps support that. And as a result, white matter structure changes. So throughout the entire lifespan, we kind of see this critical piece from IGF1. And resistance training is the best way that we can leverage that as adults. And for babies, you know, being a new dad and also I mentioned to you,

our baby came a little bit early is one of the best ways, you know, you hear, and he has an incredible team of an integrative neonatologist, he's got his occupational therapy people, you know, we have a really incredible group of people surrounding him. And we just keep on hearing time and time again, hey, getting that tummy time, that play time, getting all of that, getting him to move everything is so crucial. Now that's for all babies, but in particular for preterm babies asking because I'm interested in this, what are the top? or two, three things that you can get and do for your baby to help that white matter explode. One of the things that I've found most interesting and humbling by working in this arena, right?

My main day job is having a lab trying to develop therapies for babies with brain injury, including babies born preterm. All my colleagues and the anitologist who are doing this on a day-to-day basis, looking after preterm babies as an example. And what you see, see, including from papers that I did, big machine learning models that I developed using data from babies like this, is that even the most vulnerable babies or babies who have brain injury in the hospital, one of the most important, if not the most important predictor of how well they then function later in life, how their cognitive function and other things develops,

is the home that they go home to. So they can have a really bad time in hospital, right? There are lots of injuries they can experience. They might have to get a ton of antibiotics, opioids, benzodiazepines. They have to undergo lots of painful procedures as they take blood tests and things like this. But the home that the kid goes home to is more important than all of those things. And that's because the home will then provide the opportunity for that brain to really engage with the environment. and develop regardless of what happened previously.

So that is any kind of cognitive stimulus that you can think about. So reading, playing, obviously sports once your kid is old enough, all these sort of like complex skills that the kid can be exposed to. Do you even see like early on how much autonomy your kid develops in terms of feeding themselves, right? That becomes an important stimulus for the. the brain. So like letting the kid explore, learn new things, make mistakes, right? All of this is important because that's what really drives brain development. And then, you know, two other things that are going to be critical as they are for anybody of any age is going to be, you know, a nutrient-dense

diet as much as possible. If possible, obviously like mother's own milk is an incredible source of nutrients early in life. Formula has gotten a lot better over the past few years than it was made than it was previously. So if you can't breastfeed then you know formula can be great too. But then you transitioning to a nutrient dense diet is going to be critical. And then the you sort of you have your stimulus, you have your nutrients and and so everything you can do is sort of like support rest and sleep when needed is going to be important as well. But it's just creating that stimulating, supporting, loving environment, that's going to have the biggest effect, regardless of anything that may have happened previously.

Yeah. And you know, you said at the beginning of the podcast, you're connecting these dots with high performers, seniors, babies, right? You're at this intersection of seeing all of that. That essentially what we do, take the high performers out because they're doing everything that you want them to do correctly. If they're working with you. Not always. Or they're doing more things hopefully but looking at super young human beings babies looking at seniors that are there you see that the trend in society to remove stimulus has even gone an extreme within those groups you know for example with babies one of the things that our team for our baby boy has been saying is that do do not always have his hands covered up

Right? A couple times he had scratched his face. It's normal. Baby scratched their face. Their nails grow like crazy. And one of the people that was helping us was kind of covering his hands a lot, covering his hands a lot because they were trying to look out for him and make sure. And his team is occupational therapist was saying, baby's brains learn by grabbing and understanding. And that's part of it. And they need to have that movement. And another example for like older kids is, people putting shoes on their kids too early and not letting their feet develop and connect to the ground and really understand and get their environment and have that benefit, especially if they're being outside

and grounding and all the beautiful things that come with just exploring the world through your feet. We saw years of that. People were so afraid of babies picking something up, a toy that fell on the ground outside

and putting in their mouth, which babies do all the time, kids do all the time. Well, there's the idea that we were too clean with babies for a long time And maybe that, you know, worsened off their microbiome, comparatively speaking. And then to connect it to, you know, older individuals and seniors is that society has really

sort of reinforced this idea again, thanks to this American who moved to England and was teaching everybody, sir, what's his name? Osler. Osler. That, oh, you're older. You have to be out to pasture. Don't, don't, don't take it, take it easy. Don't do too many things.

Don't do hectic things, you know, and amongst all the other societal issues that are there of not valuing people that are in their wise years. You've ended up sort of trying to put both groups in a little bit of a bubble. Yeah. And being bubbled and being insulated from the natural things that have our body and brain grow has all these downstream effects, right? So we're trying to unwind that. We're trying to, you know, take my son and make sure. like he struggles and holding himself up and trying to do his tummy time and make sure that he's lifting his head up and it looks uncomfortable for the outside and yet it's the best thing that he

could be doing on a regular basis you know this really is a great opportunity to you know we've incorporated a lot of these ideas that are there but you've created this framework that really makes it easy for people and I'd love to take a pause on some of the big ideas and go to this framework, right? The three S's, right? The three S's framework. This will help people really connect the dots of a lot of what we've been speaking about, some of what we haven't gotten into, and think about it in their own life and do an audit to see how do they stand when it comes to these three S's. So can you break this down, give any backstory that you need to, and then talk about the protocol and how we can be using in our own lives. Something that I learned to do when I was in medical school and not three,

through medical school, but it was actually through a family project. My stepbrother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And we, my stepfather at the time as a chemical engineer and as an expert in doing something called systems analysis, which is basically figuring out all the different parts of the system and seeing how they interact to sort of look for commonalities or things that you can improve. And so we essentially applied this framework to multiple sclerosis, like read thousands of papers on all the different things that might increase the risk of somebody getting multiple sclerosis and may make the symptoms worse, may change the trajectory. And built these huge like models where you sort of like draw the arrows between all these different things like different dietary components.

And for some individuals, there might be things with genetics or nutrient status or there's a thing called molecular mimicry where certain infections can like trigger. an autoimmune process. What you then do with this massive map, you try and figure out, well, what are the common pathways that are happening here? And I'm not going to pretend that we solve multiple sclerosis by any stretch,

but it sort of gave me this idea of and trained me to sort of like look at how all these different things interact. And so I have thought about similar ideas when it comes to brain development and maintaining cognitive function and preventing cognitive decline. And when you build up a very sort of

big complex network of things, you can then ideally distill it down into some core concepts that are easier to handle and maybe easier to intervene. So that whole process is kind of how the 3S model came about. And I think this is important for a few reasons. The first being that when we think about all the things that we should be doing to improve the health of our brains, right? At the end of this podcast, we might have talked about 20 or 30 things. It's very easy for somebody to go away and be like, well, what am I going to do?

I have 30 things I have to do and I have like time for none of them. So the common response when people see these long list of things they're supposed to do and that like you can go on social media and you'll see a very evidence-based list of 50 things that you can do for your brain health. Most people when they see a list of 50 things, they do zero things, right? It's too overwhelming. So if we can think about the fact that lots of different things actually act through a similar mechanism, that can then help us like refine down to like maybe one or two things that are most important to us. But it's also important to remember that these things aren't a list, right? All of this stuff interacts, right?

The brain is an incredibly complex structure that I don't think we will ever fully understand. But we know that everything sort of interacts in different ways. So that's important as well because you can intervene in one area and there's knock on effects in multiple other areas as well, which means that when you change one thing, you might change 15 things, which again gives us much more agency and power to sort of make small changes that have big, big impact. So after all of that, we come to the three S's. So the 3S is our stimulus, supply, and support. And we've kind of talked about stimulus already. But across the entire lifespan, how we use our brains is the primary determinant of how they function. That's a fancy way of saying if you think about your brain as a muscle, which I do because I like lifting weights.

So like I think about things in terms of lifting weights. If you want your muscle to get bigger or stronger, the most important thing is to apply a stimulus, right? You want bigger biceps, you have to do bicep curls. That's just a fact. You can get a better response from your training by attending to nutrition and recovery. We know that you don't get stronger in the gym. You get stronger when you're recovering afterwards, right?

But you can have as many protein shakes and naps as you like. Your biceps won't get bigger unless you're, you do bicep cows. And the brain is essentially the same. Nutrition is critical and we'll come to that. That's one of the other Ss in one of the other S's. But the primary determinant of how our brains function is the stimulus that we apply to them. The complex skills we learn.

The people we interact with, you know, the social connections that we have. The education and the learning and those other things that we get from the environment and from the world. that's what drives the processes of neuroplasticity and your developing function in the first place. You know, if we stimulate an area of the brain, some neurons, a network associated with focus or a motor skill or vision or something like that, when that area of the brain becomes activated,

then there's this thing called neurovascular coupling. So the neurons and the astrocytes and other cells in that area, they become active. And what they do is they tell the blood vessels nearby, hey, we need more blood, right? We're active now, right? So we need more energy. We need more oxygen. This is going to come from blood flow. Your blood vessels therefore need to be healthy and responsive. But this is why I mentioned earlier that heart disease risk factors track very closely with dementia risk factors. And most cases of dementia have some evidence of cardiovascular disease or vascular

disease in the brain. So this is where maintaining heart health, maintaining fitness is really critical because that's what keeps your blood vessels flowing. So this, this is the S of supply. So you need a healthy blood supply. You also need a supply of energy, which means you need good metabolic health, right, because that's going to regulate glucose or your other source of energy for the brain like ketones or even lactate if you're exercising. And then the final part is a supply of nutrients. So we know there are several critical nutrients that are associated with an increased risk of dementia if we don't have enough. And the ones that are better. understood are omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D, the B vitamins, particularly those that affect

homocysteine. So if you're insufficient in one or more of those B vitamins, that's B2 or riboflavin, B-9 or folate, B-12 and B-6, your homocysteine goes up and that's a risk factor in its own right, but it's also telling you that you don't have enough of certain B-vitamins. Sometimes zinc can be important there as well. So then iron status is really important as well. And this is often very common in women as they enter perimenopause and the menopausal transition, often they have low iron. And that contributes to some of the cognitive symptoms that they experience. At the other end, you might have sort of iron overload. You might see something called polycythemia or high hemoglobin.

This is very common in people who have obstructive sleep apnea. So sort of looking at things like your hemoglobin level can be important kind of tell where you are on that spectrum. And that can help you determine iron status as well, as well as some other things you might measure. those have the best evidence behind them, but there are other things that we know are important, like antioxidant polyphenols, things that you get from like berries and coffee, or the more like colorful ones that you get from peppers and carrots, things like lutein, zesanthin, that's what's pink and salmon. All of those have been associated with improvements in cognitive function.

And if you look at the brains of people without simas, they tend to have lower levels of those polyphenols in their brains, interestingly. So there are these critical nutrients that we know are important. I haven't meant like magnesium sinks and other things as well. So that's kind of the supply bucket, right? You've activated a certain part of the brain that provides that sort of like starts the whole process of, you know, improving the function of that area. Then you need a supply of the things that kind of allow that function to happen. Then the last S is support.

So like I mentioned with the weightlifting, right, you get stronger after you've done. your workout so the brain gets stronger and it adapts during sleep so sleep is a critical aspect of support so rest and recovery is is really important support can also be helped by trophic factors so we mentioned bdnf earlier right that's one hormone status can certainly have a role there as well and then we want to avoid things that inhibit that support process so air pollution other sources of chronic inflammation like dental disease is really common as a risk factor for cognitive decline dementia, smoking, alcohol, and then something

like chronic stress, which is kind of like the off switch never goes, never gets flipped. That's one of the main reasons why chronic stress can negatively impact the brain. I kind of said, oh, hey, we shouldn't think about this long list of risk factors, and then I gave you a long list of list of risk. Hey, I was going to say it.

I was waiting for you to say it. So then how I think we can use this. framework is that because these things are kind of lumped together in common mechanisms we can identify within one or more buckets where's the thing that's most likely to have an impact for me and also acknowledge that they have knock on effects right so if you're not sleeping very well and you manage to address your sleep all of a sudden your blood pressure improves your blood sugar improves right so then you've started to improve your cardiovascular health and your

cardiovascular risk you're you become more sociable the next day so you're you're more likely to maintain social contacts you're more likely to engage in cognitively challenging tasks right so you're more likely to get more stimulus just by changing sleep same thing if you if you start to move if you've been sedentary previously we know that sleep improves we know that often um you're improving things like cardiovascular fitness but at the same time you could be providing some kind of stimulus to the brain right because if you're doing it through pickleball right you've got your friends you've got your complex coordinates of movement, you're outside.

And so again, multiple things change at the same time. If you stop smoking, information improves. Blood pressure improves, right? You're more likely to then change other things like start an exercise routine. So because all those different buckets interact, you can just change one area and the whole thing kind of shifts in your favor. So that's why I like, so even though, yes, there are a lot of things that you could change within that by thinking about like which bucket maybe feels like the most important bucket to me.

And within that bucket, which area feels like the thing that I'm most likely to be able to make a change on or where I can get the biggest bang for my buck. And like I said earlier, everything counts. Right. That then could be the domino where everything sort of like falls afterwards. So we don't have to think about a long list. We can sort of like drill in and then the whole kind of network shifts in your favor. Yeah.

That's a good reminder. is sort of use that framework to audit your life, see which one has the biggest opportunity to move the needle for you. And I would probably say, knowing my audience, I think for a lot of individuals who feel like, hey, like, I'm not eating twinkies and Doritos all day and my diet, you know, is pretty good,

comparatively speaking. And, you know, I have community and I have family. Sure, do I want to dial it in a little bit better for sure. you know, I have stimulus that's there. I would imagine that for a lot of my audience, you know, using this first part of the podcast to talk about how movement is so key, I think that a lot of them would benefit

from listening to your work, reading your work, is that if they were able to get more appropriate movement for their life, contextual for them, I think that that's where they would see the biggest benefits for their brain health, for their body health, their metabolic health, all these things obviously being tied. getting movement routine that's personalized for you,

for where you're at, but also shooting to get to a place where your body's strong enough that you can do the occasional sprinting, occasional, right? That you can do resistance training, that you can do some of these things, not that you are trying to have muscles as big as Dr. Tommy Wood. You can Google him and you can see his muscles. Make sure you look for the right Tommy Wood.

I'm just going to say that. But that movement and resistance training and having that regularly, I just see it time and time again, even with my own family, even my mom who's 70 years old. Turning 71 this year, she never was regular about her movement when she was younger and lived in, we grew up in Kenya. And before we moved to the United States, she definitely grew up in Kenya. And she was on her badminton team.

And she loved, you know, the playful things that like kids do, young girls. She was playing badminton, a little bit of, like, cricket here and there. and then kind of just like lost movement besides, you know, walking and other things like that. And now seeing her, we did a whole newsletter and podcast episode of things that we're doing to help my parents who are 70 and 75 age well and, you know, live well and live strong, seeing her add in movement into her life and how that's increased her confidence around so many aspects by now having a trainer and getting into resistance training and she's literally starting on the basics, it's been the biggest thing that has significantly moved the needle forward

from looking from the outside that's had all sorts of implications. It's improved her sleep. It's made her feel more excited about, you know, going for a, like, dialing in her diet, which for her was making sure eating enough protein, you know, variety was always there, fiber was always there. You know, she doesn't really eat ultra-processed foods, but it was really like growing up, you know, Indian vegetarian diet, it tends to be very carb-heavy and very low protein. So making sure she's eating enough protein.

It helps with her stress that's there because, it gives her perspective. It helps with her social life that even though she has a ton of friends where she lives in San Diego, she's now seeing a trainer. And she's challenging her brain by doing these new activities. So it feels for me and knowing that a lot of my audience would probably relate to my mom's story, even if their circumstances are different, that really dialing in that movement piece is probably one of the lowest hanging fruits for that audience that's not binge drinking and smoking and

doing other things that are super damaging and toxic. What are your thoughts on that? I think it's really nice because you mentioned that resistance training was the starting point, but then all those other dominoes fell into your place for your mum, right? So like exactly showing why just focusing on one thing like that can have such big impact elsewhere. And I think that you're right. Probably two things that are consistently missing from most people who have the, the time and the opportunity and the resources

to take good care of their health, right? Two things that are often missing are some kind of resistance training, right? Applying load to the body in some way. We know that's important for bones, important for muscle, right? Then there's knock on effects on the brain like we've already talked about.

Plus then you're decreasing your risk of falls and falls and significant hospitalizations are another time when we see significant drops in cognitive decline because you're laying in a bed, not stimulating anything, right? And function drops. And there are several studies that show that as well. So minimizing the likelihood that you're going to have some major injury or

something like that as you get older is critically important. And resistance training plays a role there. So I think that finding a way to build, build that in. And it can be done at home with bands, minimal equipment. You can get an adjust, you know, adjustable dumbbells that will, so you don't need to have a whole rack if you don't want. But again, like going to the gym is great using machines there. There's a social component. You can even do it with very minimal equipment with things like Buffalo restriction training,

which has been used in individuals who are frail and sarcopenic so that they can apply some load to the body very safely and get some of that stimulus, you know, until they can build up greater capacity. So there's so many ways to do it. And I think that building that in is going to be critically important. And so that's one thing that I routinely see. And then the other one is, you know, we talk about stimulus and social connection, but I think it's actually quite rare for the modern adults to really challenge themselves cognitively. And one of the reasons for that is because just like your son trying to learn how to walk, trying to learn how to stand, he's going to fall on his butt a lot, right? but adults don't like falling on there but either metaphorically or literally and so then we don't put ourselves in situations where we can truly challenge ourselves and learn new skills and

that could be languages it could be music it could be new new sports right because we hate people seeing us be bad at something and so like it's great that your mom has gone out there and started this new skill at the of looking like she doesn't know what she's doing, right, because she's never done it before. But one reason why I think it's important to think about this is because we may not engage with these other things that are important like resistance training. Because we're worried. I don't know how to do it. I don't like, what if I look stupid?

And so that's actually really important. Like that failure is one of the greatest triggers for neuroplasticity and for learning. And so we have to be willing to lean into the discomfort of not knowing how to do something so that we can get those benefits. So I think both of those kind of come together in the story of your mom, but they're also going to be very relevant to anybody who might be thinking about trying to implement these things in their lives. Totally. My mom had all those thoughts and all those feelings. What if I look stupid? What if I, you know, what if it doesn't work? What if I can't do it? What if I want to do it and I can't keep it up? We know this. She's had all those thoughts. And shout out to my my sister, Herschel, and, my brother-in-law, Dr. Neil Patel, who have been such encouragement for her, and also finding the right trainer for her that has worked with both women and seniors.

This trainer is so gray. I don't remember her name offhand, but she understands that so many older individuals have been brainwashed to thinking that they can't do things. Yeah. and to make sure she listens to my mom and hears, you know, any kind of complaints. Are you achy, other stuff? And then also, what is remnants of that brainwash? That needs a little bit of a push the same way that we would, you know, encourage a child

who just fell down like, you got it. No, no, you're okay. You're okay. We might comfort them a little bit because they're crying. And then they give another shot at it. You know, we need that as human beings too. as adults and seniors need it as well to have that sense of, hey, look, it was tough.

I get it. Don't worry. You're out of breath a little bit. But let's give it one more shot. We'll go a little low on the weight. I think you got it. And seeing my mom or hearing stories for my sister, my brother-in-law of my mom going through that,

it builds up the confidence because you tried something hard. And now you have a receipt to show that, hey, I can do tough things and still be okay. We need that reminder, which is obviously the core premise of your book. You talked about making sure that we challenge the brain. And I think this is an important thing because anybody who's been paying attention

to sort of the trends around brain health and, oh, do this for your brain, do that for your brain, has heard about the crossword phenomenon, the Sudoku phenomenon, which was there before. And, you know, you have an important message inside of the book. It says your brain adapts to meaningful challenges which is all the things we've been talking about,

these are groups sports potentially, trying resistance training, social environments that might be putting you in a different position in place, learning a language, not artificial puzzles. It's funny because the standard trope is, I'm going to retire, but people know this idea of like use it or lose it, right? So I'm going to retire, but don't worry, I'm going to do Sudoku and that's going to keep my brain sharp.

And unfortunately, like, Like, Sudoku is great. I enjoy a good Sudoku. But it's not the kind of challenge or stimulus that really drives brain function. Yeah, it doesn't translate to other things. I've heard different brain experts say, great, you're getting better at Sudoku. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And that's not translating to other stuff.

Yeah. In this area of cognitive neuroscience, there's this idea of something called transfer. So that's exactly what you said. Does the thing that I'm doing make me better at other things that I really care about, right? Do you want to just get better at Sudoku? Or are you doing Sudoku because you're hoping that it's going to help you maintain your memory and you keep you cognitively sharp and slow cognitive decline and dementia, right? Because if you just want to get better at Sudoku, do more Sudoku and you'll get better at it, of course.

If you want some kind of activity that's going to try, that's going to maintain cognitive function or you'll maybe even improve it, Sudoku is not going to be that thing because there's no transfer to other areas. There are some brain training games that do have some evidence of transfer, like into the real world. But they probably require much more concentration focused effort and like your improvement over time as part of like almost like a training program. And so and most of them don't work on. Most of them probably aren't the ones that you can do on your phone. Right. If we think about the kind of stimuli that drive cognitive function and brain development in the first place, but also maintaining cognitive function later in life, think about how similar is this to the kinds of things that are sort of fundamental drivers of brain function? So like your son, learning how to walk, learning how to talk, these incredibly complex, multisensory challenges that he engages with on a data.

day basis, right? Sudoku on a phone is, is not that. So like, how are you challenging multiple senses? How are you challenging your, your brain's ability to your process complex information, maybe at speed, those are the things that are going to be particularly beneficial. So you can do that through sort of very human tasks and skills, right? Languages, music, dancing. But you can get an element of that from some other areas.

So we've seen some benefits from complex like 3D world video games, right? That's multi-sensory, requires problem solving, requires fast processing speed, depending on the type of game that you're playing. Often you're exploring a large world. You're going to have to... You're talking about like a VR type game? It doesn't have to be VR. So I think VR is going to improve that even further, right?

Because it's truly immersive. You're going to have visual inputs, audio inputs. You can layer physical activity on top. And so I do work with some kind of... companies that do some of this stuff in VR as a like for cognitive training. But the the video game has the best evidence for it in terms of improving cognitive function in older adults, but also younger adults. And Super Mario 3D world, which you might play on like the Nintendo. And they've used this in multiple trials that comparing to other games like Solitaire or Angry Birds.

It was one one one one study did. And because it's, whereas in 3D, you have to explore a complex world, you're having to respond, problem solve. Actually, some of these complex video games can be an interesting cognitive training, type of cognitive training in their own right, because they are, you know, multi-sensory and, you know, require you to learn new skills in that way. It doesn't mean you have to play video games, but it's an option and it's an interesting option. In terms of formal brain training, the one that has the best. best evidence for it is something called Brain HQ. It was developed by a guy called Mike Mersenich, who's one of the original neuroscientists who's sort of like looking at neuroplasticity and learning.

And one of the programs in Brain HQ was used in what is still the best trial of cognitive training that was done in the 90s. It was called the active study. And what they did is they took individuals. in their sort of 60s, 70s and 80s. They randomized them into four groups. It was nearly 3,000 people. So it was a massive study.

And they had like a control group. And then they had a processing speed training group. They had a reasoning training group and then a memory training group. And the processing speed training group in particular. And they were using a computer set up. And this is in the 90s. So it was probably relatively basic. And you had to like do this task kind of centrally.

on the screen, but at the same time, you had to like recognize when things appeared on the periphery and kind of process that information, they sort of flashed up. So you had to like notice it quickly and remember where it was while you were doing something else. They did this for the training for 10 weeks. And then they had refresher training at one year and three years. Those who were in the processing speed training group had significant maintenance of activities of daily living several years later, were more likely to stay driving.

compared to the other group and we're less likely to be involved in car accidents whilst driving. That's the ultimate example of transfer like you're talking about, right? You do a computer training thing and you can keep driving for another like a few years at least, right? That's true transfer. It's changing something that actually means something to you rather than just like playing a game. So again, you don't have to do, I don't think you have to do cognitive training, right? is just one option that is open to people if that's something that they want to do. And I think the real critical difference compared to the other groups in that same study

is this training of having to process information quickly, particularly visual information, as, you know, especially if it then relates to something like driving. So this is where it could be pickleball, right? Somebody hitting that ball at you on the pickleball court, you're having. to respond and react quickly, just like you're having to respond and react quickly and process information quickly in that particular brain, like cognitive training game. So it's having the opportunity to do these things that require you to use your brain really quickly and really quickly react to the environment and process information in that way.

Because as we get older, we just don't have to do that very frequently, right? Most things can happen at quite a sedate pace. And as a result, the brain's functioning becomes more sedate because of the brain's functioning becomes more to date because of how we're using it. So there are lots of different opportunities for us to train these different components of our cognitive function. And I like that because it means you can kind of do it the way that you want to do it. And the final example that I'll give was a very nice paper that was published recently called

Creative Experiences and Brain Clocks. And what they did is they looked across multiple different studies at what they called creative experiences and is essentially complex skill learning of one type or another. And they found that even though the skills themselves are quite different, they had very similar effects in terms of improving the structure and the function of networks in the brain that are susceptible to the processes of aging, like the front of parietal networks is really important for like focus and attention. And they saw this across tango dancers, artists, and they also looked at video games.

gamers. And so across languages, music, dance, you know, even some things like video games, these complex skills that you learn in sometimes in creative ways seem to have these, this sort of like very similar effect in terms of the benefit for the brain. Again saying that, right, some people like video games. Some people might want to go and learn the tango, right? You will get similar benefits from developing expertise in those things, which again just give us like a nice sort of smorgas boards of things to choose from. A lot of options on the menu of things that people can do. Yeah.

Just make sure you're looking at stuff that actually has a track record of being transferable. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And don't forget about the tried and true basics, you know, these societies out there in the world that have had very healthy aging, brain aging, and have high concentrations of centenarians, different groups in, you know, Japan, Italy, whether you're looking at like blue zones or some independently studied places, you know, they don't really even, they're not even on their computer, they're not on their phone, they're walking, they're gardening, they're spending time with friends, they're physically active, they're, you know, just to just to live their life. Yeah. Right? They live their life to walk to the market. In those societies, they never retire. They never retire isn't a thing. And do you

often you might switch from being the person doing the thing to the person teaching the thing. But that kind of switch over from like the, you're a major producer to then a font of knowledge and wisdom that then teaches the next generation. That is continued stimulus through the complex process required to sort of teach and share that that knowledge. So all of that becomes important. And so your role and the exact things you do might change as you get older. but that sort of core requirement of continuing to stimulate and connect with others is going to be the thing that sort of like draws a thread throughout all the bit.

One of the coolest examples that I saw of that, my wife and I were in Japan earlier last year. And we were in just a random neighborhood in Kyoto that a guide was showing us around. Like, we love to explore this like regular like neighborhoods. It's like, how do people live? Like what grocery store they go to? What coffee shop? And he was giving us more the, hey, if you lived here, this is the places you'd be checking out. So he took us to this cool coffee shop.

And we were just sitting there, enjoying, talking with him. And then we saw a group of people that were all gathered in this park. There was a little bit of atrium. And there was a group of people that were gathered. But it was like a unique blend of people. There was a bunch of seniors. And then there was a bunch of like young adults. that, because it was like still in the middle of the school day,

so there wasn't a bunch of kids. So there was like some young adults, and there were some couples that were there. And they were doing something. And we were like, what's going on over there? He kind of like took a look, and I think he was talking to somebody. He's like, oh, well, this is basically the seniors in this group have essentially like a version of like a homeowners association.

And they have these regular trainings where they take everybody, everybody in the community. And it's sometimes annoying for the young people who are like, oh my gosh, we have to go to this thing. So you have a lot of people that either work from home or are young couples that just got married that moved to this area. And they're teaching them fire safety and how to use a fire extinguisher.

And they had a member of the fire department that was there. And the seniors are actually the ones that are talking about the importance and leading them through. I think there was one lady that was kind of the main lady that was there. And I was like, dude, how cool is this? Obviously, that's us as a Westerner romanticizing it from the outside, but, you know, I'm sure it was probably a little bit annoying. But the fact that this thing happens and that, you know, it's a blending of different age groups of people. It's the seniors inside of that group feeling like value and contributing.

And then it's the young people getting a chance to learn and, you know, hopefully maybe contribute some of their ideas too. it was just a really great example of like, wow, that's amazing. Another example that my dad is actually a part of is my dad, even though he, quote-unquote, retired years ago, he's more active than ever and loves to be involved in different things. And one of the things he's involved in, he had heard from a friend in his walking group. There's a group of people that they walk and they do two walks a day. They do one at like 5.30 a.m. And then later on, they'll do one at like nine, which my mom would join in because she doesn't

like to wake up super early. And they'll walk with some of other seniors inside of the group. And they'll just talk about what's going on in their life. They get outside, vitamin D. They're in Southern California. And one of the members of the group was saying, oh, you know, this is a cool thing that I'm part of. I'm part of this voluntary sheriff, like a deputy sheriff.

And I work with the police department. And I'm a volunteer. And we have this thing, this program called, you are not alone, where we drive in patrol. and we go and we check in on a lot of seniors who live by themselves and maybe don't have community and don't have family. So now you have seniors themselves, and they literally have them wearing like, you know, police uniforms,

but it says, you know, voluntary sheriff, like they haven't, they're not police officers. And they feel contribution that they get to be part of it. They have assignment, okay, you check on on these persons, you look at this. And if you see anything, you're not obviously, you're just kind of calling into the station to deal with it. But you do it in tandem with somebody else.

take two seniors together and they'll be on patrol. My dad freaking loves this. He gets to meet people. He gets to be out in the world. He's seen situations that had needing addressing, you know, like vandalism or maybe a potential sort of break in that they'll call into the police department. And then obviously 99% of the work is just checking in on people and see how they're doing. They get to have conversations.

It gives them purpose. I was like, that's an incredible program. Yeah. You know, this is part of like San Diego Police. police department. I was like, I don't know if this exists in other police departments around the country, but this is an amazing thing that should definitely be scaling. So I was just sharing two examples that I've seen in my own life that I thought were just

like a fantastic blending of exactly what you were talking about. There's actually really good evidence for that having massive impact across a community. So one of the first ways that this was done, was actually run by a friend of mine, Dr. Julian Abel, who's a retired palliative care physician. And he built something called compassionate communities in the UK. And they started this in a town called Frum in the southwest of England. And what they did was they built essentially what they called a compassionate community. It was basically a connection across the entire community.

So they hired people to become community connectors, right? So every time anybody went to their primary care physician, they would get a conversation about, hey, who are you? What do you want? What do you need? What are you interested in doing? Who do you want to be connected to? And so then they either found them groups to be a part of.

They created new groups depending on what needed to be created, so that everybody within the community was in some way supporting one. another. And one of my favorite parts of the story was there was a guy, an unhoused guy who lived in like a park in the center of town. And they realized that he knew everybody and everything that was going on in the town, right? Because he's like there all day, every day. So he became one of the people they hired to be a community connected. So like build these, build these networks out. It was really cool. What they found was that emergency room admissions in that area decreased over the time that they started this while everywhere around it they were significantly increasing and they found

similar things so now this has been doing being done in columbia like the the country like several areas of columbia have started to institute this and this finding has been repeated in in several other places now that if you connect people and you build a community that support each other right you can not only improve the health care of the health of the individual but you're also like dramatically decreasing the burden on the healthcare system and all these other knock on effects just by, you know, having people supporting one other, checking on another, like being there for one another. No, that's awesome. There was two big ideas we talked about, but we didn't go in depth on.

And I just want to acknowledge them because I did say seven and my audience will call me out if I don't say it. These two things are connected. You talked about it, but just want to see if there's anything additionally that you want to say. So the idea that your brain needs stress, not just chronic, meaningless stress. So the big idea there is the brain strengthens through challenge. not comfort. You know, you talked about this through different

level layers of an example of my child, learning how to like have tummy time and keep his neck up. It's a struggle. He cries sometimes, but he does it. And then the other idea is a brain that's overly protected becomes fragile. Again, that's been a theme throughout the things that we've been talking about here and that you've been presenting to our audience that are inside of your book. But anything that you didn't get a chance to mention about those two, either one of those? When I open up a conversation about stress in the book,

I acknowledge the fact that when we think about stress, we immediately think of it as a bad thing, right? That's how we've kind of internalized stress as a society now, that we want to avoid it as much as possible. But what's interesting is that anytime you challenge the body, you activate stress responses, exercise, learning, right? That frustration of failure is that same stress response that you get from anything stressful,

That's what directs the body to say, oh, I need to improve my function. I need to get better at this, right? So stress is just a way to direct resources to respond to a stimulus. I think this is important to acknowledge because otherwise we get to the point where we avoid things that feel inherently stressful. When actually in short bursts and doses with recovery afterwards, that's what drives improvements in physical and cognitive function. So we don't want to avoid stress.

We just want to try and have our stresses be ones that generate adaptation. And then an important part of that is getting some, some opportunity to recover from that and getting to sleep properly in particular. So one way that you might say that a stress has become chronic is if it's negatively affecting your sleep, for example. But just remembering that stress responses are there to have your body adapt. and become stronger in the first place is really important. And I think changing the way we think about stress is critical as well, because we know that if we think that something is stressful and that stress is bad for us,

we're more likely to see negative effects of that. We're more likely to see our function decline in the face of stress like cognitive function. They've done studies where individuals are stressed acutely, then there are ways to do this, like something called the Trier Social Stress Test, which is you get put in front of a panel of impassive people.

So like, there's a room full of people and they stare at you and you have to give a talk of like a five minute talk on something you haven't prepared while these people give you no feedback. Which that's one of the ways that we sort of experimentally,

people induce stress, because that's very stressful. Very stressful. That's incredibly stressful. But what you see is that if people change the way they think about stress, there's this idea that you say stress is enhancing.

This comes from audio crumbs worker. Stanford. And if people go in with a stress is enhancing mindset, you know, thinking about the fact that, you know what, when humans are stressed, they can do incredible things. And stress is actually me directing my attention to something that's important. Then when you're put under stressful situations, you're more likely to maintain good decision making and cognitive function. So just thinking, like changing how you think about stress can be really important. Because often we're stressed because we get to do something cool or important that means something to us. So just remember that stress is actually usually because we're getting to do something good or obviously there

are other stresses we're exposed to that we have less control over you know societal and socioeconomic stresses that are separate but in terms of some of these stresses we have to we have to kind of change how we think about them so that's that's also directly ties into the last piece that you said right if we if the brain is overly protected or the bodies are overly protected, we lose function because we're not stressing them. We're not challenging them, which is what drives the body to improve function. And so like one example that was going to be relevant for you at some point is there are studies showing that in kids, risky play improves emotional regulation and decision making. And so historically, there's been, you know, in

recent history, there's been this, you know, the idea of the helicopter parent and this idea of safetyism, like we can't let our kids do anything dangerous because, you know, we're so worried about them. There are studies that suggest that if we don't give kids the opportunity to make mistakes, take risks, you know, they might fall over. They might injure themselves. They might get lost. If they don't have exposure to those experiences, they're less good at knowing when something is really dangerous or knowing when they're really at risk or being able to regulate their emotions when they're stressed. So risky is not dangerous, right? But kids should be allowed to do things that have some inherent risk because that teaches them how to how to deal with risk.

Otherwise, you might end up with issues with emotional regulation and some other things. So all of this just to say that challenge, some stress, some risk, some failure, right? These are things that are really critical to driving brain function no matter who you are. The last big idea is there's no supplement, no protocol or no scan that outperforms a fully stimulated life. the essence of what we've been talking about here in this conversation. And I know that's a great place to wind down this incredible conversation.

And thank you for coming on. And you talked a little bit about supplements. So I have a list of some questions that are there for you because our audience is curious about it. So you mentioned a couple that have some evidence that are there and I have some questions, some follow-ups for you on that. But one that you didn't talk about,

that is all the rage right now, is creatine and co- negative decline. Is there any there? What are your thoughts? In my book, outside of supplementing with like critical vitamins and nutrients that we know are important, if you're not getting enough of them from the diet, you can supplement with them. We mentioned some of them earlier, vitamin D, B vitamins, omega-3s, that kind of stuff. The only other supplement that I talked about in the book that I talked about in the book is creatine. I think there's both like promise and hyperbole when it comes when it comes to creatine, right, as there is with, everything. Like a lot of things. Yeah. And so creatine is really important for yourselves to be able to

distribute energy and do work. Right. Originally, creatine has been very popular in strength training or bodybuilding communities, right? Because it helps you get an extra rep in the gym. It can help you slowly build strength over time. And you see it looks like you get similar benefits. for the brain because the brain is very energetically demanding, right? And we know that creatine is a critical component of distributing energy throughout the cell. So there are studies that show that creatine may help with treatment of depression in symptom resistant or in a treatment resistant depression. Or if you start some kind of antidepressant doesn't have enough of a benefit. Some studies have added creatine and seen some benefit there.

There are studies that show that creatine helps you. maintain function after a night of poor sleep, again, by helping to maintain energetics in the brain. There are studies that creatine can help treat concussion or a traumatic brain injury, again, probably because it's helping some of the energetic side. And there was a small recent study in individuals with Alzheimer's disease where they gave creatine and saw some improvements in cognitive function. The problem is that study didn't have a placebo or control group. So we don't really know how much of a benefit creatine was directly having there. But there are meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials that suggest, particularly in older adults,

creatine may have benefit for cognitive function, especially for memory as a cognitive function. So I think that creatine is super interesting. It's incredibly low risk. It's the best studied supplement of all supplements. they've used very high doses in older frail populations for several years at a time and seen no side effects or no side effects compared to like a placebo group. So a lot of promise, very low risk, but equally, you know, it's not going to be a magic bullet. Creating helps you do, you know, helps you do work.

So the stimulus, just like the stimulus is going to be the most important thing. how you're using the brain, your brain is the most important thing. Maybe creating gives you a little bit of a boost there. Just like it helps, you know, how you move your body is going to be the thing that determines how strong you can get. But maybe creatine helps a little bit there. So that's kind of how I think about it. Yeah, like a protein shake can be great.

But if you're not lifting weights, it's not going to really do much for you. Well, actually, I think that there's probably some debate about that because it depends on how much protein you're taking. Absolutely. But you're not going to get muscles from just eating protein. protein alone, especially for the population that is not in its prime of growth. You know, if you're above the age of 40, 50, 60, 70, et cetera, where you don't have those naturally flowing human growth hormones that are going inside of the body that we do when

we're younger, just eating protein alone is not going to give you those results that you're looking for. It will just while we're on that, there are some trials in older adults at risk of sarcopenia, So it's significant muscle loss or they have some kind of metabolic disease which increases the risk of muscle loss and strength loss. And in those trials, if you just increasing protein intake is enough to slow the rate of muscle loss. So yes, stimulus is critical, but in some scenarios, more protein will actually help help with muscle gain. So basically ignore the analogy that I just gave and actually have your protein and probably have your creatine too. There's not a lot of downsides to it.

Yeah. Of including that on a regular basis. I'm a fan. I'm giving it to my parents. You know, we've written about it in our newsletter a lot. The only thing I'll mention is that make sure it's a high-quality source. So creatine monohydrate. Crea-pure is the most common.

Crea-pure, Crea-vitalis, same company. Yeah. Go for one of the highly high-quality ones. The Germans know how to make creatine without contamination. So, you know, get one of those. Final thoughts here as we're winding down and the message that you want to leave with our audience, especially around this idea of, you know, not falling victim to marketing, trends, et cetera, and really putting together a personalized plan for you of things that have deep evidence around

them, but especially a plan that hits on these multiple domains, multiple inputs to actually help your brain be anti-fragile. I mentioned a while back that I was going to talk a little bit about changes in cognitive function over time, how we think about cognitive functions change with age and why the sort of like looking at that at a population level can trick us, right? This was the averages we talked about. And I think this is important here because often we think about cognitive decline as this inevitable thing, right? You sort of your cognition sort of peaks maybe in your 20s and 30s, and then after that, it's just like an unstoppable decline after that.

When you look at data across a big population, that is true as age increases, on average cognitive function declines. And there are lots of different cognitive functions. We haven't really sort of like broken them out, but just like thinking about cognition broadly. For many of those, the line trends down because some people are losing function and they're driving down the average, right? But there was a really fascinating study done in Seattle, the Seattle Longitudinal Study, started back in the 50s where they looked at the same individuals every seven years for several decades, right?

And it's two very different things to think about what's the average effect of age on cognitive function versus what's the effect of age on my cognitive function, right? There's are two very different things. And so what they found in this study was that most adults in the study who went into their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, maintained cognitive function. across that entire span. The majority, so more than 50%, right? Yes, the average decreased because there were some people are losing function, but the norm, most people maintained function for like several decades

from 50s into their 80s. And these data were actually used to raise the retirement age in the US because they showed after Osler's, you know, first proclamation, they showed that actually, do you know what, people into their 50s, 60s, 70s, they can maintain good function. This is really important because nowadays, what do we call somebody who maintains cognitive function from their 50s into their 80s? We call them a superager, right?

That's the formal scientific term. You'll read papers about it. And we think about super ages as if they're this like magical unicorn of people who've somehow managed to not lose significant cognitive function by the time they're 80. When you look at studies of super ages and you just compare a superager to. the average population. What do you see? You see people who remain physically active, remain socially active,

avoid metabolic disease. That and you and have some kind of good sleep hygiene. That's basically it, right? There's no magic. Super ages are maintaining cognitive function because they maintain stimulus. They maintain good metabolic, cardiovascular health and nutrient status.

and they have social connection and sleep and avoid some of those things that we know a damage. You mentioned alcohol and smoking, right, which are two big ones. So super ages aren't super. They're just doing all the basics that we know are really critical for a long-term cognitive function. So the way that this all comes back is just knowing two things. One, depending on how you calculate the average, the average person is actually, You should be somebody who maintains cognitive function into their 80s. And the way that people are doing that is by attending to all those basics.

Nothing's like super heroic about it. They're just making sure they keep ticking all those boxes over several decades. Yeah, it's a great reminder for what's possible. And then for even the audience that's interested in what's optimal, it's like, amazing. How many of those individuals are probably resistance training with all the new knowledge that we have around it? how many of those people are having appropriate levels of protein, creatine, some of the other things we talked about. So have this foundation of the basics,

many of the ones that you talked about here, many more that you talk about inside of the book, the stimulated mind, have that foundational, double down on the basics. And then, great, sprinkle on a couple of these things additionally that we know that most people are not doing, not that you have to do it, but probably if you want to be in that category of optimal

within the sort of day and age that we live in of all the different stressors that we're all being, you know, encountering. You add in some of these additional aspects that are here. You very easily have a shot to be in this optimal category from what we know is possible out there. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, I think that's absolutely fair. The only thing that we just have to acknowledge is that all of this is about stacking, the deck in your favor, right? You can never guarantee a certain outcome. Never guarantee, something can happen. So much data show that if we sort of, yeah, start with these foundations and then build upon them, right, with the sprint training, with resistance training, with your new skill learning, then I think it's you've dramatically decreased your risk of cognitive decline in dementia and really, you know, sort of pushed everything in your favor as much as possible. Yeah. And even if you end up, God forbid, getting some sort of chronic disease,

forget even about Alzheimer's, cognitive decline, et cetera, you end up with cancer. Well, if you have all those lifestyle aspects that are there, your chances, especially if you catch it early, are so much better. If you're exercising on a regular basis, that's like one of the best things you could do for pretty much every type of cancer. that's out there from at least the literature that I've seen out there and that people have presented. So life happens, it happens, a fall can happen, a car accident can happen, a crazy diagnosis can happen,

but you doubling down on the basics and having some of these additional things sprinkled in is just gonna make us so much more resilient to those aspects if they, God forbid, end up happening to us. Absolutely. Dr. Tommy Wood, this has been fantastic. You're on a mission to write the wrongs of the past people saying, you know, especially those in their prime time of life who were previously told,

you get sent to pasture, you need to be treated with white gloves, don't do anything too intense. There's even wellness influencers that are out there that are saying, don't do anything crazy to spike your cortisol. Maybe that information is wrong, and there's so much more that we know about the brain and what it needs to thrive. And that core idea is that we have to use it. We have to stimulate it. We have to stress it out in a healthy way.

We have to challenge it. And we have to give it the love that it needs of being around other people as well, too. I want to thank you for reminding us those things on today's podcast. It's been a fantastic opportunity to both meet you. Thank you to our friend Rungen for the connection. And to be reminded of the importance of doubling down on the basics. Thanks so much for having me. This has been fantastic.

Like you said, very nice to, we have many good friends in common. Very nice to meet you in person finally. I do hope that people take away that one main thing. Actually, you have huge agency over your destiny. And it really just requires, you know,

leaning into a little bit of discomfort or something new, a little challenge, something maybe something that spikes your cortisol, which can absolutely be beneficial. And then, you know, finding ways to make it fun and social because that's really what's going to, you know, make it, have you continue to do it for decades, decades to come. Yeah. If it always feels like work, if it always feels like discipline, you're not going to keep it up. So it's got to be fun.

Important reminders, Dr. Tommy Wood. Thank you for being on the podcast. Thanks much for me. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast. step. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number

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