Good Life Project - Are We Related? | How Exercise Boosts Memory.

Episode Date: November 23, 2017

Good Life Riff: Ahhhhh, family! With many people heading into that time of year when gathering with family becomes a "thing," we figured it was a great time to invite our old friend, everyone's cousin and New York Times bestselling author, A.J. Jacobs, to share a very special guest riff about what family really is...and isn't. He's spent the last few years deep-diving into the topic and has come up with some fascinating and fun discoveries, which he shares in his new book, It's All Relative.Good Life Science: Ever notice that the older we get, the more we tend to forget stuff? Turns out, the hippocampus - a part of our brain heavily involved in memory - starts to shrink in our middle years, taking memories with it. In our Good Life Science segment today, we're diving into some fascinating new research on how one very specific type of exercise affects can not only stop the shrinkage, but even reverse this process. And, as always, for those want to go to the source, here's a link to the full study.+--------------------------+Our Podcast Partners: ZipRecruiter: Post jobs for FREE, go to ZipRecruiter.com/good.Thrive Market: $60 of FREE organic groceries, free shipping and 30-day trial at thrivemarket.com/goodlife.Freshbooks: Cloud accounting, 1-month free trial, no credit card required, at FreshBooks.com/goodlife.ShipStation: Manage and ship your orders. FREE for 30 days, plus a bonus. Visit ShipStation.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in GOODLIFE.Casper: Get $50 toward any mattress purchase at casper.com/GOODLIFE and enter GOODLIFE at checkout. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, hello, and today's Good Life Update, we've got a couple of fun segments for you. Starting off, kicking off with a special guest riff from my friend and cousin and neighbor, New York Times bestselling author of many books. His latest is called It's All Relative, which is a pretty cool exploration of family and what that really means and how we define it. AJ Jacobs is in the house, and I asked him to really share some thoughts on this idea of family, how we define it, how the way we define it can profoundly connect us to people around the world or even isolate us from people either next door or on the other side

of the planet and offer some ideas that might help us kind of live more comfortably and see the humanity in others. So I'm going to turn it over to AJ in just a few short seconds for a fun and informative guest riff and our science update. Also some breaking research. You guys know that I geek out on research and especially on the way that sort of vitality practices can affect us. We've got some really cool new research on how exercise affects one particular part of the brain as we age. So make sure you stay tuned for that as well. And really excited to share this. As always, I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what's the difference between me and you? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. Hello, I'm A.J. Jacobs. I'm a writer. I just wrote a book about family called It's All Relative, and that's what I wanted to riff on today is a little bit about family. And it started about four years ago. I got a very strange email that radically changed the way I thought about

family and had a big impact on me in general. And the email said, you don't know me, but I'm your eighth cousin. So immediately I'm suspicious. I figure he's going to ask me to wire $10,000 to his Nigerian bank. But it turns out that this guy was legitimate. And he is part of this group of people who are building the biggest family tree in history, with literally millions of people from dozens of countries, hundreds of ethnic groups, all connected together on this one family tree. And I love, this blew me away. And I said, this has to be my next project and the topic of my next book. Because these are, it's such an epic undertaking. The biggest family tree is now 270 million people, all connected by blood and marriage. And in about 10 years,

we're probably going to have a true world family tree that connects every single person on earth. And it's made possible because of breakthroughs in DNA testing. Five million Americans have had these DNA tests. And it's also technology. The internet has allowed us to collaborate. So there are thousands of people working on this one jigsaw puzzle at the same time. And what I love about it is that it's proving that very simple but profound idea that we've known all our lives. We humans are one big family.

And, you know, it's almost a cliche, but now it's concrete. Now we can see it. And scientists say the farthest cousin you have on Earth is probably about a 70th cousin. But that's just by blood. Then there's also by marriage. And this is where I find it fun. You can figure out how you're connected to almost anyone on earth using these vast trees. So for instance, Barack Obama is my fifth great aunt's husband's brother's wife's seventh great

nephew. That's literally how we're connected. So I love, you know, we're practically brothers. I'm not sure why he's not hanging out with me more now that he's out of office, but it's the ultimate social network. It's like six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but everyone's Kevin Bacon. And what I love about this is it made me feel like I was part of something larger. And I think one of the biggest, and Jonathan has talked about this, one of the biggest problems we face as humans is tribalism. We are obsessed with our differences instead of focusing on the 99.9% of DNA we share. We are obsessed with us versus them thinking, in-group, out-group, black versus white, rural versus city, country versus country. And this tribalism, it's making us unhappy and it's preventing us from working on the really huge crises that need worldwide cooperation, like the climate crisis or poverty or pandemic diseases. we need to reconceive of us as the human family. It's not going to solve all our problems, but I think it will really push us in the right direction. And there is empirical evidence of this. There's a great study by Harvard social scientists last year, where they took Palestinians and Israelis

and showed them how closely they were related. And the control group, the people who were told they were really closely related and showed how, they treated each other with more kindness. They were more open to negotiation. So it was a really remarkable result. And Jonathan actually talks about cognitive biases a lot, which I am obsessed with as well. And it turns out family is a bit of a cognitive bias. There's a great writer named Cass Sunstein. He co-wrote the book Nudge.

And he's a behavioral economist. He's a law professor. He talks about how this project, the global family, is exploiting, this is his words, exploiting the family heuristic. So the family heuristic is that you treat your cousins, your brother, your sister better than strangers. You give them the benefit of the doubt. You're just more open to them. So you exploit the family heuristic by triggering

the positive emotions of close family and apply it to the big world of distant strangers. So whenever you're irritated by a stranger on the subway or enraged by someone of a different point of view, you should consider that they are your cousins. You share probably a 10th great-grandfather, maybe a 12th great-grandfather. If you have kids, your kids are going to be related. I've seen this in action many times. I'll give you one very trivial example, but it's, I think, instructive. You know, Judge Judy, the TV personality. I always found her incredibly abrasive, just obnoxious nails on the chalkboard. Well, it turned out, I figured out she's my ninth cousin. And it totally changed my perspective. I'm like, you know what? She's just

being Judge Judy. She's just doing a shtick. She's probably a sweetheart underneath. And it made me more, oh, it opened my mind. It opened my heart. And I hope that this broadening of this feeling can be applied to everyone, not just Judge Judy. And I think a related idea about family that I found when researching this book is we should not just broaden our notion of the global family, we have to broaden our notion of what family is, and that family can come in all shapes and sizes. And we've seen an explosion of this recently with gay marriage and open adoption, sperm donors, where the kids have like 42 steps, half siblings or dibblings, they call them donor

siblings. And I love this, actually. As my ninth cousin, three times removed, Hillary Clinton says, it takes a village. So to me, the more people who are in your family, the better. One of my favorite stories in the book is twins, these twins born in Korea, separated at birth, both raised by white families in America. And they found each other in their late 20s on Facebook. They had a mutual friend who said, you guys look eerily similar. What's going on here? And they met up and did a test. And indeed, they are identical twins. Now, what's interesting is they tried to contact their biological mother in Korea, but she was not interested for whatever reason. But they said, I loved this quote, they said, that's okay, we have at least five other

mothers. We've got the mother who raised me, my identical twin's mother, one of them is an actress who has a manager she calls a momager. And I love this idea that the family can be expansive. It doesn't even have to be biological. The writer Armistead Maupin talked about logical families versus biological families. And the logical family can be anyone. It can be your work family. It can be someone you share an interest with. And this notion of two opposite gender parents with two and a half kids, there's nothing natural about it. There's nothing set about it. So this book, this project has made me open my eyes to the definition of family. It's made me

less tribal. And as part of the project, I actually threw what I call the global family reunion, where I got 10,000 people from around the world at 40 different events, all simultaneously singing We Are Family by Sister Sledge. I sang it very softly because no one needs to hear my singing voice. But even though I was singing softly, I believe it deeply. And it made my life better, and I hope it makes yours better too. Thanks, cousin. And that was today's Super Duper Guest R riff from my friend, my neighbor, my cousin, because we're all cousins, A.J. Jacobs, author of It's All Relative, sharing ideas around family. Excited to segue into our science update where we're going to be talking about how one particular type of exercise affects one particular part of the brain. swimming or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot?

Flight risk. And welcome back to today's Good Life Science Update. If you're new here, these are short little bursts where I share my complete geekiness around science, keeping up on research, especially any research that touches on how we live a good life, sometimes connected to vitality, sometimes connection, sometimes contribution, our three good life buckets. Today, we are diving into some research that is around the vitality bucket more specifically, kind of an interesting connection between a specific type of research and a specific

function in the brain. So we've known for a long time that exercise can be good for our bodies. We've known for a long time that exercise can be good for our brains. It can also be good cosmetically or for other reasons, if you want. It can feel amazing if you're doing something that makes you feel awesome, that you really love to do. It can add something nourishing and passion-filling to your life if you choose to actually set it up that way. This particular research focuses on one very specific type of exercise and the way that it affects the brain in a very specific way. This was done by researchers at Australia's National Institute of Complementary Medicine at Western Sydney University, the Division of Psych and Mental Health at the University of Manchester in the UK. So jointly, they were looking at how aerobic exercise, so our running, our cycling, our swimming,

stuff like that, quote, cardio, what they were looking at was how that type of movement affects a very particular part of the brain, and that part of the brain is known as the hippocampus. Now, why do you care about your hippocampus? Aside from the fact that it conjures up images of a large animal that lives in the deep recesses of your brain, the hippocampus is actually one of the areas of your brain that is really important in memory. And similar to other parts of your brain, what we know is that once you hit the middle years of life,

generally somewhere right around 40 or so, not exactly, but right around there for most people, there is a natural process of your brain actually shrinking. Yes, it's true. And in fact, for every 10 years or so, the research shows us that the brain can shrink around 5%. So if that starts happening around 40, then when you're around 50, you're 5% smaller. When you're around 60, you're potentially 12% smaller than the original. Why 12 and not 10? Because it's 5% off of the originally, already 5% smaller brain. So, you know, plot this out to 60, 70, 80, and you realize that your brain starts to shrivel

into something smaller. And as it does so, it very often loses function. And one of the critical functions that it loses is memory. And part of that, it's hypothesized at least, is that it goes along with a shrinking, a decrease in the functionality and the size of this thing called the hippocampus. So the question these researchers were looking at were in different types of people, would aerobic exercise in any way affect what happens with the hippocampus? Would it stop it from shrinking? Would it maintain it where it is? Would it potentially even grow it bigger? Because we've actually seen now that certain types of exercise can actually

help to release a chemical in the brain called, shorthanded as BDNF, which is short for brain derived neurotropic factor. That's why we shorthand it as BDNF, which has been described as a miracle growth for the brain. It's something that actually can not only slow brain deterioration, but also let the brain grow new neurons, new brain cells. So here's what the actual researchers did. They got together about 740 people and they scanned their brains both before they were doing the exercise, and these were aerobic exercise programs, and after because they wanted to see what was happening with them, there was three different groups of people. There were people who were just kind of like your average middle-aged adults. There were folks who had diagnoses, actual clinical diagnosis of various mental illness and conditions.

And there were folks with what they would call mild cognitive impairment, including folks with Alzheimer's. And these people ranged from about 25 to 75 years of age. The average skewed towards the older side of that, so mid-60s. And the amount of time was pretty wide ranging. So this is more of a correlational study. And what they looked at was people generally exercise, they did their aerobic exercise anywhere from two to five times a week. And from anywhere from about a quarter or a season or, you know, like about three months to up to two years, the exercise varied from the stuff that I mentioned before, treadmill running, running, cycling, walking, stuff like that, anything that would sort of qualify as aerobic

exercise. So what happened? What happened? Well, the results were kind of fascinating in this particular study. Turns out that exercise actually did in, increase the size of a part of the hippocampus in these folks, the left side, the left region of the hippocampus. And what that shows us is that exercise may be really important in preventing the shrinkage of the sort of natural shedding of brain tissue that tends to happen over time as we age. One of the researchers, actually a lead researcher, Joseph Firth, quoted as saying, when you exercise, you produce a chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which may help prevent age-related decline by reducing the deterioration of the brain. Our data showed that

rather than actually increasing the size of the hippocampus per se, the main brain benefits are due to aerobic exercise slowing down the deterioration in brain size. In other words, exercise can be seen as a maintenance program for the brain. So pretty interesting, right? We don't like to accept the fact that there are certain sort of, there are certain processes that get sort of set in motion in the human body through simply the process of living, not even just, you know, abusing our bodies, not eating poorly or doing, you know, this is through the process of living. Living takes a toll on us. One of the reasons that we die, even if we live well, is that the process of living is also the process of dying. There are certain things that happen in our body

that lead to states of decline. Now we've researched, and there's a ton of research going on to try and figure out how to slow this or change it and maybe one day even reverse it. Although the questions revolved around that, the ethical questions and whether you would actually want that to happen are myriad and we won't dive into them. But one of the things that we've come to accept is that there are certain processes, long-term processes of decline that tend to get

set in motion in the middle years of the average human being's life. And one of the really cool things that we're discovering is that there may be very simple, natural, completely free, readily available solutions like simple aerobic exercise on a regular basis that have the effect of potentially slowing or even stopping this process of decline and maybe even to a certain extent reversing it. And what we're seeing here is in one particular part of the brain that is heavily responsible for memory, aerobic exercise is critically important. So start to do it not just because you want to feel better and feel strong and be able-bodied, but because you want your brain to function well and to remember all the stuff you really want to remember. As always, something to think about.

And as always, we will include a direct link to the full study in our show notes so that fellow science geeks like me can actually take a look through the detailed protocol and the detailed analysis of the research done. I hope you find this interesting. Thanks so much for hanging out and joining us for today's guest riff from A.G. Jacobs and today's science update. I'm Jonathan

Fields. I'll talk to you next week. Hey, thanks so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we've included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode and then share the Good Life Project love with friends. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.