Good Life Project - Brain Hacking: The Truth About How to Change Your Brain

Episode Date: May 25, 2015

You can lose almost any part of your body, except one, and still be you.What is that one exception? Your brain.Because...The brain is the seat of your memory and your identity.Which is why brain injuries can be so devastating. And taking care of your brain is so incredibly important to a life well-lived.Question is, how do you do that?Turns out, there's a lot of "neuro-myths" floating around today. We love to spout all sorts of supposed facts about the brain. Things like, "the average person only uses 10% of their brain." Or, "you can completely rewire your brain through meditation." And, "exercise is like Miracle Grow for the brain."To find out what's fact and what is fantasy, I sat down with today's guest, Dr. Wendy Suzuki.Wendy is an award-winning neuroscientist and NYU professor. She runs an acclaimed research lab, teaches classes, and is the author of the new book, Happy Brain Happy Life. She is obsessed with how our brains either fuel or hold back our best lives.But as she explains in our conversation, her dogged quest to become a leading researcher and professor came with a cost. She gave up nearly every other part of her life. A few years back, she awakened to her reality and set in motion a series of radical changes in a renewed quest to reclaim her life.In this week's conversation, we explore her personal journey, do a bunch of myth-busting and discover how best to optimize our brains for life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot if we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. You know, who are we if we aren't a compilation of all the memories we have and all the experiences that we have?

And the only way we hold on to those experiences, our own personal experiences that are unique to us and only us, is through our memory. This week's episode is sponsored by Camp GLP. That's short for Good Life Project. And I'm really excited to share also, we have been featured in USA Today, which is pretty awesome. So what is it? It is a pretty amazing three and a half day adult summer camp for entrepreneurs, makers, and world shakers. A place where you can come, let your hair down, drop the facade, just be you. Have an incredible time.

Meet people who see the world, you see the world, and simultaneously learn a ton about building cool things, about entrepreneurship, about making, and leave absolutely lit up. If this sounds cool to you, then check out more information at goodlifeproject.com slash camp, or just check the link in the show notes. Thanks so much. On to our show. Imagine waking up one day and realizing that every professional dream that you had ever had, you'd achieved. But along the way, you'd essentially given up your entire life to get there. Well, that's the reality that today's guest, Wendy Suzuki, faced when she woke up one day

in the middle of her life, realizing that she was an acclaimed, award-winning neuroscientist, ran her own lab at NYU, but at the same time, everything else in her life had literally ceased to exist. She decided to make a profound change in the way that she leaned into life and the way that she explored everything outside of the laboratory. In the process, not only did she change her life, but that informed a radical shift in the nature of the research. In the process, not only did she change her life, but that informed a radical shift in the nature of the research she was doing in her laboratory, the way that we've come to understand the brain and how it interacts with things like exercise and movement. That's the conversation we're exploring in today's episode. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project.

So hanging out here with you today, we're in New York City, and you run a neuroscience lab, teach at NYU, acclaimed labs, all sorts of awards, new book out. I'm always fascinated when I have a chance to sort of find somebody who's really devoted so much of their life to this thing and really risen up and become somebody who's accomplishing incredible things in a field. What was the genesis of this for you? If you track it back, I mean, were you the kid with the science book when you were five years old? Or was this – how did this unfold in the early days? So there was a somewhat circuitous route. So when I was really little, I wanted to be a Broadway star. And I wanted to sing and dance and be on the stage. But I was

also very shy. So it was kind of a secret Broadway dream for a long time. But then I realized that, you know, I come from a pretty serious family. And so math and science and being a doctor or a lawyer was very big in the family. So I decided that I liked science and I was good at science. And so I headed towards college to look at to to study some some kind of science. I didn't know what kind. And there was a specific day that I knew that I was going to become a neuroscientist. And it was the very first day of my very first semester at UC Berkeley,

which is my family's alma mater. So I got in there, really proud to be there. And I took this freshman seminar class called The Brain and Its Potential with an amazing professor, Marion Diamond. And she was so kind of larger than life to me. She really, to this day, my memory of her is like a science rock star because she was very tall, very beautiful, and she always had perfect hair and really nice clothes, always with a crisp white lab coat over it. And that very first day, she had – she not only looked very striking, but she had a hat box on the table in front of her.

And what she did was she opened up that hat box and she pulled out the very first real preserved human brain that I ever saw. And that just blew me away. And a lot of people go, ooh. Right. I'm sure a lot of class and like freaking out a little bit like, ah. It was so fascinating to think that that thing was in my head. And the other thing, memory that I have is the reverence with which she held that brain. I mean, and she said, you know, this was somebody's personality before. And so it demands respect. And you can tell by the way that

she was touching it, that she had so much respect for this structure. But the thing that really got me was when she started talking about her kind of big finding in the field, which is that she was interested in how much the brain can change in response to the environment. Is the brain just fixed? Are we just destined to be our, you know, just whatever it is? These were probably the days where the concept of neuroplasticity and that being possible was really a fringe idea or sort of like completely outlawed. Less than a fringe. It was no idea at all. Everybody believed.

You get what you get by the time you're an adult and that's it. Exactly. Exactly. And she tells a story that – so they did these experiments and all they did was – well, all they did, fantastic idea. They raised rats in these enriched environments, which is kind of like a Disney world of environments with lots of toys and lots of games and – not games, lots of toys and lots of other rats to play with. Big environment. I'm just thinking of like, you know, like PhD candidates walking around Disney taking notes on what to do with the rats. That's right. That's right.

I mean, we should. I think it has implications for what experiments we can do today. And she compared those brains of rats that were raised in Disney World, you know, theoretical Disney World, with rats that were raised in an impoverished environment with no toys and just another rat or two. And what she found that was so striking was that the outer covering of the brain, the cortex, actually got thicker in the rats that were raised in these enriched environments compared to the impoverished rats. So these were adult rats. So that meant that the enriched environment actually changed the physical structure of the brain. And she tells a story of the first meeting she went to where she presented these results. And she was the only woman at the meeting. This was in the late 1950s, early 1960s. And she said, some guy in the back raised his hand and said, young lady, that brain cannot change. But she was right, and he was wrong. And that kind of ushered in this

whole field of neuroplasticity with that experiment. That's amazing. So you really had the opportunity to study with a woman who sounds like she was very much a pioneer and a visionary in this space. Absolutely. And where did you go from there? Because I know you ended up working with her eventually. Well, I did my undergraduate thesis with her. So I got to work in her lab.

She was also the best teacher that I ever experienced in my whole career. So break that down a little bit for me because what made that so? So what made her such a good teacher was her intense curiosity. So she was a specialist in anatomy, gross human anatomy, and neuroanatomy, brain anatomy, brain parts. And, you know, some anatomy classes that you could take, I don't know if you ever took any anatomy classes. I have. And I'm ever took any anatomy classes. I have. Yeah.

And I'm a geek with this stuff. Yeah. But still, very often it's taught as sort of like mass rote memorization. It could be as exciting as reading, you know, last year's tax class. But when Marion taught it, it really came to life because she put it in the context of this is you. This is really a study, a class about you understanding yourself. Don't you want to do that? And everybody was like, yeah, I really want to do that.

And not only that, but by this time, she'd been teaching these classes for decades. And yet every single class, she remained curious about either aspects. I remember one day she said, we could teach a whole class on the psychology of hair and what's behind the psychology of hair. Just things that come to mind as we're talking about different anatomical parts. And I don't know if she thought about that before,

but just sharing that with people. It was always curiosity and questioning. And, you know, I grew up in science with this idea that that curiosity was the cornerstone of what it really meant to be a scientist. And that was such a gift. I only realize and appreciate now, but that's where it came from. So as long as I have you here and you are a expert on the brain, talk to me a little bit about curiosity and where is that in the brain? Is it something that, is it part nurture? Is it part nature? Is it just there?

Is it not there? Is it trainable? Is it not trainable? Because it's a fascination of mine because what I've experienced, and I'm sure you have also, is that curiosity becomes such an exquisite driver for a life well lived. You know, if you have that seed, even if stuff is bad in your life, you've got the seed of curiosity, somehow you find your way through and you start to elevate again. Yeah.

Have you done any work sort of like looking into where that originates? Or is there a where even? You know, I think there could be a way to study curiosity. And I have not done it. I think people are starting to get interested in creativity, imagination, curiosity, and we're still at the fledgling area. But I love that you asked me this question because the book that I'm reading right now, it's on my phone, is by Brian Glazer. Yeah, curious question. Yeah, yeah. Awesome, right?

And so I love that. And he tells about his lifetime of these curiosity conversations. And that has just inspired me so much. I had had a version of that within my colleagues in science, which is a whole world. Even my department, you know, grows from molecular kinds of studies all the way up to modeling and things like that. But what he's talking about is going out and, you know, interviewing President Putin on one hand. And, you know, the woman who I love that story about the woman who survived the torture in Peru, on the other hand, and the way that that has infused his work. But I love the story because he's a producer, a movie producer, and you might think that's helpful. But it would help me as a neuroscientist and you as a podcast guru, an entrepreneurial guru. And I just love that

idea. And I wish I knew how to study curiosity. What I can tell you and what I talk about in the book is the observation that I had in myself that when I started exercising more and really doing it at a pretty good level, really regularly, I saw a lot of changes in my brain, including, I noticed a lot of changes in my own brain, including better memory, better attention, better mood. But the other thing that I noticed is that I got more creative and imaginative and possibly more curious, but it came out in the realm of creativity. I started trying new things that I had never tried before. And I thought, that's interesting. But it turns out that there is some really hardcore neuroscience evidence that suggests why that may be. So exercise enhances the birth of new brain cells

in a structure that is really important for long-term memory. It's called the hippocampus. And I've studied that structure for about 20 years now. And so everybody thought they knew what the hippocampus does. It does long-term memory, right? Well, people started testing subjects with damage to their hippocampus. Of course, they had a bad memory, but they started to notice that they also had a very difficult time imagining situations that they had never experienced before. So with age and education matching, you could ask two sets of people, one with hippocampal damage and one without, who had never been to a tropical beach before, either one of them, describe for me a tropical beach. You know, you've never been to a tropical beach before, either one of them. Describe for me a tropical beach.

You know, you've never been there, but what does it look like? And, you know, most people would tell you stories about, you know, fruity drinks with umbrellas in it and the color of the sand and the color of the ocean. And these patients with hippocampal damage could barely say there's sand, there's water, and that's about it. And even when encouraged. And we thought, well, I don't know what that is. But multiple people had shown this.

And not only that, when you brain image people imagining certain things, what do you get? You get activation of your hippocampus. And so the idea is that exercise is not only potentially enhancing my memory because I'm getting more hippocampal cells, but it might have been enhancing my ability to imagine possibilities in the future, which could be the core of curiosity and creativity. Yeah, that's fascinating. And then you brought up a whole bunch of things that I want to follow up on, especially exercise and all the different ways that it changes your of things that I want to follow up on. Especially exercise and all the different ways that it changes your brain. And I want to actually kind of go step by step through

a couple of big things there because you write so beautifully about it. But I want to fill in a little bit of the story before we get there. So you go from doing your PhD work and then from there, where do you go? Yeah. So I do my PhD work. I do a postdoctoral fellowship at NIH for four and a half years in a great lab. So I learned yet another way to study memory function. My whole focus was on parts of the brain important for memory, including the hippocampus. And then what is it about memory at that time that's drawing you in? I mean, what's the fascination for you around the brain and memory? Yeah, it was, you know, it was the

idea that memory is really what makes us who we are. It, I mean, you know, who are we if we aren't a compilation of all the memories we have and all the experiences that we have? And the only way we hold on to those experiences, our own personal experiences that are unique to us and only us, is through our memory. So out of all the cognitive functions, it seemed to me at the time to be the most fascinating and also understandable. So how, that was also very naive. It's still very difficult. But I thought, what more fascinating thing to do than to look at, and again, I was coming from Marion Diamond's work, all about brain plasticity. Well, this was a everyday form of brain plasticity that we did sometimes multiple times a day, well, certainly multiple times a day, multiple times an hour,

multiple times a minute. And what if I can figure out what those kind of dynamic changes in the brain look like when they were happening. That fascinated me. Yeah. I mean, to a certain extent, I guess you could say that memory is the seed of identity. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that. And I've known people, I'm sure people listening to this will have known people, and they may have endured some level of brain trauma in their lives. And I think one of the biggest challenges, not only for the person who's been through it, but for the people all around them is that they may look exactly the same on the outside.

Yeah. But the trauma, the change in the brain, the traumatic brain injury, they're quite literally a different person. But they look. They look the same. From all intents and purposes to be the same person. So it's like, it's such a profound struggle, I think, for so many people because of this cognitive dissonance.

Yeah, yeah, it is. Exactly. It's the same thing. I always remember something that Marian Diamond said when I was taking the classes, her classes, which is people that suffer from deafness have the most difficult time because nobody can tell that you're deaf.

And so it's hard to get over that. You look completely normal. Why are you having problems? And they have this extra hurdle. When you're blind, everybody can see that you're using a cane. But deafness has an extra difficulty. That's interesting. I didn't even think of it.

So there's this whole social dynamic overlay that really changes it. So you go deep into memory and especially how memory works in the brain. Let me throw out one other myth because there's, and what's fun is that you do a lot of myth busting. So I love talking to people who are actually in the lab doing the research to find out what the legit thing is. There's this thing that the self-help world loves to throw around. You've seen written in books and all over the internet that at any given moment in time, we only use like 5% or 10% of our brain. Talk to me about this. So that is so untrue. And it's so untrue because, for example, about 70% of your whole brain is devoted to processing visual information. Just think about how much of the day are you processing some kind of visual information? And that activates that

whole 70 percent of the brain. So even just right there, you're using so much of your brain. And so I have wondered and I've read theories about how come this myth has been... Right. Where's it come from? And why does it still propagate like that? I think one idea is that it's kind of built on this idea of hopefulness, that if you're only using 10%, then we all have 90% to go. And isn't that great? And that's not to say that that totally isn't true. The work on brain plasticity that I and many others have done has shown that despite the fact you're using so much of your brain, there's other avenues to change and grow and improve through many, many different forms of brain plasticity. So you still have lots and lots of potential.

It's just not like a black hole of 90% of the brain that's not being used, which is not true at all. Yeah. I mean, you see the dystopian future movies where somebody figures like a pill where all of a sudden you can go from 10% to 100%. Yeah. All of a sudden you're walking through walls and morphing energy and all sorts of madness like that.

But I do like, I think it's interesting how you brought up like the connection. Yeah, all of a sudden you're walking through walls and morphing energy and all sorts of madness like that. But I do like – I think it's interesting how you brought up like the connection. Maybe what it really is is it's just sort of a pop psychology way certain amount of shifting and rewiring and growth that can still happen. So you go deep into the memory rabbit hole, and you start to build a career and become a very well-established researcher and running your own lab and tenure professor at NYU. And you are like the, you know, the dream scientist. You've got, it sounds like from the outside looking in, you've got like the life that every scientist dreams of living. But you hit a point where you're kind of like, wait a minute. Yeah. Is that all that there is? Tell me about this awakening. Yeah. So, you know, ever since I first realized I wanted to become a neuroscientist when I was in college, my dream was to have my own lab and to have tenure. And so I worked really,

really hard. And I had this question that I loved, fascinated, still fascinated with the hippocampus and memory and had a vibrant lab. And they were and they are fantastic. And I got tenure. And so it's like, yeah, I'm in. And then it's like, OK, what else is there? Because how I like to describe it is that my lab life and my scientific interaction life was like that dinner party that you never want to leave. There's always somebody interesting on the other side of the table to talk to, lots of interesting conversations. And if this conversation ends, you go to the next person and there's also a fascinating conversation. And it was great. And I had great working relationships, but I had very few close personal relationships. So

in contrast to the dinner party, my social life was more like one of those Clint Eastwood movies with the deserted ghost town and tumbleweeds, you know, rolling around the dirt roads. And it really did feel like that. And it's like, hmm, something's a little out of balance here. And the other thing that was completely out of balance is I spent so much time in the lab and focusing on work that I was always in my head, using my brain to think about other people's brains, and never in my body. And I had gained 25 pounds. And I grew up in California, quite active. But I was so determined to do this, to get tenure, that I neglected all of that. And I knew something had to change. So that was a huge turning point for me. Yeah. It's interesting, too, because I've spoken with so many people, and this has happened in my

own life also, actually a number of times probably, where there's some sort of big shaking event that kind of makes you zoom the metal lens back a little bit and look down into your life and kind of ask the question, is this what I signed up for? And do I want to shift gears and potentially even endure disruption in the name of doing that moving forward. What's interesting is, sadly, what I've seen is that for so many people, it's a traumatic and harmful event. Very often some sort of health incident or the loss of somebody close to them that kind of makes them go through this. So it's kind of interesting for me and you is you achieve this thing you've been working for essentially your whole career. It's sort of like the thing that everyone works towards.

So it wasn't this big negative thing. It was sort of like every bit of energy that you had for years and years and years was going to achieve this one thing. And granted, you had deep questions and you were researching, but the pinnacle career thing was this. And then you get there and it's kind of like,

you know, this moment where you're like, okay, almost like, well. That's it. Right. Is this it? Or more like, is that it? Right. And I've gotten it. But what have I, like, what's the price that I've paid to get this one thing? And do I want to keep paying it? Because now I have it. So it's like zoom the lens back again. So that starts you looking at the broader scope of your life. Right. And your health as well. What's interesting about the book you've written is it's this really fascinating narrative of your fitness life, your social life, your foodie life, and your research life. You know, like woven in there is this really fascinating neuroscientist stuff that's being done by the actual researcher, which is what I love.

And it's so compelling to see how that became this tremendous turning point. And you started to weave them all together. Yeah. And then it all kind of fed your research life in a profoundly different way. It did. It ended up – I mean, I feel like the whole book boils down to how neuroscience has affected and informed my life, but then how my life then informed my own neuroscience research. And, you know, it took me like the two and a half years that I wrote the book to realize that that was the core. But there's this profound interaction that I used what I got good at at neuroscience, and I kind of turned it on myself.

And it helped me actually shift out of a situation that wasn't so good. I don't feel that it's good to be that unbalanced and not have a good social life to match your, you know, really thriving career life. And, and so I changed it, but it took many years. I mean, I don't want people to think that suddenly I made that realization and change. And before we go into the changes, I want to dive into it, because it's fascinating. I gotta ask you what I would sort of called the whiplash question. I don't know if you've seen the movie whiplash. No, I almost watched it the other night. It's essentially, you know, a maniacal, you could easily argue, sadistic jazz band teacher

who basically teaches people at the most elite music school in the world that you essentially have to have somebody driving you until you either become the best in the world or die. Right. It's been my, I've had some exposure to the world of academic science. And tell me if I'm off in sort of like my observation from the outside looking in, is that in some labs and in some

spheres of academia, especially science, especially research labs, that there's a similar ethic. And that there is sort of like a community of people who literally are willing to go to that place in the name of being at the absolute top. Right. I think you're absolutely right. I was definitely in that camp for many, many years. It's like this is so hard. You have to devote every single fiber of your being to it. And I loved it.

Well, that purpose, it was easy because there was only one thing to focus on. And in fact, then I always get the question saying, well, Wendy, you know, you made this change. You're already a tenured professor. So, you know, it's like it doesn't count. You wouldn't have been able, you wouldn't have gotten to this place had you done that earlier on when you were doing that. And of course, I don't have the data, but my strong feeling is that I am more productive now, irrespective of whether I have tenure or not.

I'm more productive. I'm more creative. I'm a better scientist now that I have a balanced time frame, and I don't spend every single waking moment thinking about or preparing for science. And I let these other things, these other forms of creativity and life kind of infuse. And that's what made that's what has made my science so much more creative in the last five years. I so agree with you. And I think it's counterintuitive when you're in, counterintuitive when you're in the bubble looking out.

You can't imagine any way of getting to that place you want to get to without spending every waking hour of your life doing this thing, this one thing and nothing but. But when you're outside looking in, you actually start to taste life again. And then you start to actually see that, no, it's the experience that I just had, like savoring this moment that now informs a new question that I'm going to bring to my laboratory, or maybe lets me see how two disparate pieces of data come together to form a third and pattern recognize because you have data points that exist outside of the laboratory now fold into them. And it's just, you know, it's been my, I mean, I'm not a researcher, but I spend a lot of time asking questions. It's been my same experience. Like there have been times where I'm deep down a rabbit hole trying to build something, you know, in the business world maybe.

And I find that, you know, sometimes things blow up or I'll blow up. And I'm forced to pull back and reclaim the parts of my life. And you start to realize, oh, well, actually everything works better. The business moves faster. You come up with better ideas and solutions. And then what I love is that you took this then and didn't just start to change the way that you were living, but you changed your research. And you started really exploring, okay, how do these things affect the brain? Like, why is this making me feel better?

What's this actually doing? Let's talk a bit about how you brought exercise into the laboratory. Yeah. So, you know, I went to the gym and I got fit and I noticed all these brain changes. And it was a legitimate scientific curiosity. It's like, this is a big effect. I am writing better because I, at this point when I'm exercising more and I want to emphasize that you can't do experiments through introspection. This was this was a self observation that I used as as the basis of a hypothesis that I then tested. This was like your end of one. Exactly. Exactly.

But but, you know, it's I'm not you can use it. It's just not I'm not going to conclude anything just based on me. But it does work for me. And that's valuable as well. So the first thing that I decided to do is use a trick that professors know all too well, which is whenever you want to learn something new, teach a new class on it. So I decided to teach a new class about the effects of exercise on brain function. I was going to go over all of the previous research from the animal and the human studies.

And then I thought, well, I don't want to just teach the students about exercise. that rush and that adrenaline and endorphin rush that I have felt and enjoyed and kind of got addicted to as I've made this journey. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to have them exercise. But NYU doesn't pay for exercise instructors to come in because they pay me to teach all the classes. And so I said, well, I'll go and get certified as a group fitness instructor and teach this class that I'm going to, whatever, five times a week. Did you tell any of your colleagues that you were going to do this? Did they think you were nuts? I didn't go around advertising that I was doing, but I had to tell somebody because I had to propose it to the education committee. And I was at the meeting where they were considering my proposal. And,

you know, they trusted me enough to know that there's serious science underneath it. But they were very curious to know whether the classroom that I was going to share with everybody else was going to be really smelly and sweaty after my class. And I said, don't worry, I'll bring fans in and we'll air it out. And that was the main thing they were concerned about. So I went and, you know, to NYU's credit, they paid for my teacher training because the only reason I was doing this was to teach this class. And actually, I've also taught for the last six years, a free weekly exercise class to the NYU community. So I do that as well. But for this class, I taught the students an hour of aerobic exercise. And then we'd follow that up with an hour and a

half lecture discussion about what exercise was doing to their brains from all these different kind of points of view. And that sounds all well and good, but it was totally transformative to actually bring exercise into the classroom and actually have the professor teach the students exercise because it brought in a whole different dynamic. On that very first day of class, I'll never forget, I walked in, I was clad head to toe in spandex. Best workout gear. It's like, yes, I'm your new neuroscience professor. And, you know, they knew that it was an exercise class. They all signed up. They were all excited because nobody had taught a class like this.

And I told them they had to wear workout clothes. But they were really scared. They didn't know what to expect. I bet. And so, and I was a little bit scared too, because I had never, you know, I was in this classroom that I had been lecturing in for the last 15 years or so. And here I was going to stand up and teach this exercise class. And so after some, you know, very nervous laughter, we got into it.

And they were just great. They loved the workout. They were very interactive. It's a workout called Intensati, and it combines physical movements from kickboxing and dancing yoga with positive spoken affirmation. So it's very, very interactive. Okay. So let's talk about this too, because I know Intensati. Yeah. And it's the type of exercise class where if you've never done it before, and you belong to a health club, and you walk by the room, and you look in and you see the people doing it, a lot of people look in there and say to them, oh, I'm never going in there. Not because it's not physical, it doesn't look like a great workout, but the whole time you're

yelling these affirmations. And once you do it and you get into it, you know, everyone just kind of rolls with it. Exactly. But from the outside looking in, you're not only asking your students, you know, come do an aerobic exercise class. You picked a class which brings in like sort of like shouting out affirmations too. It just has got to ramp the anxiety level through the roof. Well, it would have, but I didn't tell them what the workout was. I just said, come for the workout. I get to choose the workout because I'm teaching the class.

So they have no choice in that. So sneakiness is part of the whole teaching methodology. And once I got them indoctrinated, they thought it was great fun. And it's funny. People have pointed out because everybody knows that I love Broadway. And it's like, this was really a way to bring a little bit of Broadway into my classroom. Right. I'm thinking like that kid that we started out talking about.

Yeah. That's coming full circle. Exactly. Exactly. So you do this. And I guess this has also got to have just a profound effect on the classroom dynamic. Absolutely. In terms of the students becoming more open.

Yeah. Just like raising the level of energy and thought process within the conversation. It so did. And, you know, I challenged them explicitly. I said, you guys are so interactive with me during the class. We're yelling. I'm going around.

I'm having them, you know, punch my hands. And I said, I want you to be just as interactive when we get to the lecture part. I don't want you to just sit there again. This is completely interactive from the beginning of the class to the very end of the class. And they totally took me up on that challenge. And it was easier to to yell and not yell, but but but raise your hand and ask questions and get a real conversation going when you have just sweated with your professor compared to when it's, you know, this professor at the front of the room and it's hard to ask questions. So I think I definitely got, I know I got this great rapport going with the students

because I brought the exercise in. Yeah, no, I love that. Now, did you do any benchmarking with the students beginning and after to see how this experience had changed them on an individual level? Yeah. So I did it in two different ways. I realized pretty early on that so this was going to be fun. It was going to be a way to bring exercise in the classroom. But I realized that they would be my perfect research subjects. And I actually made them the research subjects in my very first exercise study that I did by testing all the students at the beginning of the semester and at the end of the semester on a variety of different tasks, focused on a task that we know is supposed to be very sensitive to hippocampal function, a memory task. And I also talked to them about it. I mean, especially at the end, we had a wonderful conversation both semesters that I did it

about what did you think about this class? How did this class change? And all of them said, I kept thinking about those affirmations. The affirmations kept running through my mind all week long. And that wasn't surprising to me because that's exactly what happened to me when I was a student. And even more when I had to develop and write the affirmations and teach them to the students. And so there was an interesting shift there was the exercise but there was this kind of mindset shift because i am now having them run through their mind saying i'm strong i believe i will succeed and you know this whole range of positive affirmations that we said so i i guess

that also brings in it's almost like sort of um on the one hand it's really cool on the other hand there's a set of almost like confounding variables there it's like is it the exercise is it the enhanced social dynamic is it the effect of the intentional language you know the affirmations right and i guess it's probably kind of hard to tease apart what any of the relative effects are absolutely you cannot tease it apart all you can say is you can ask i asked the question what is the question, what are the effects of once a week in Tensati for a semester in healthy college students? So that was the specific question, not about exercise, not about the combination or not the combination. And so we can ask, you know, what is the effect? Remember, it was only once a week they were doing this. These

were healthy, you know, bright NYU students. And what we got was a small but significant effect. They got actually significantly faster. There was better reaction times in my students at the end of the semester relative to a set of control students that didn't take any exercise in their elective class. And you might think, oh, that's a subtle effect. But to me, it was so exciting because I expected nothing. These are healthy young students. And what we found with just once a week, you can see an effect. What would happen if we actually did three times a week and really started to have a

significant effect on the cardiorespiratory output? That's a major question that I'm going for right now. Yeah. And I guess the other question for me is, what's actually happening in the brain? What's changing through this process that's causing these effects? Yeah. So I can tell you about what we know that's changing. So one thing that's clear is that increased exercise in people will improve your attention functions. There are good studies, strong studies that have shown that in a variety of different ways. The other thing that's changing is your brain milieu, because we are increasing and changing and shifting levels of a variety of different neurotransmitters.

Mood neurotransmitters, this is why we feel so good after we work out. Serotonin, noradrenaline, dopamine are all increasing with exercise, as well as endorphins. And all of these are causing positive, positive reward, positive mood. The other thing that's happening, as I mentioned, is exercise is enhancing a growth factor called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF, and that is enhancing the survival and stimulating the birth of those new brain cells in the hippocampus. And so what are those cells doing? We think they're doing at least three different things. One, these cells are contributing to memory, long-term memory processes. So in rodents, if you just give them access to exercise, they will perform better on long-term memory tasks.

Second, the hippocampus is also important for anxiety, that is controlling mood and anxiety. And better performing hippocampi, you have better control of your mood. So it's probably contributing to mood in the same way, in a similar way as increases of serotonin levels in the brain. And the third is what we talked about earlier, which is the hippocampus is now being implicated in imagination. And so at the same time that you're improving long-term memory, which is making associations with things that happened in the past, you're probably improving your ability to make new associations with things that might happen in the future, which is imagination.

Yeah. No, I love that. It's interesting. My first exposure to what this chemical you talked about, BDNF, was through I think it was John Rady's book, Spark, where he called BDNF miracle grow for the brain. Yes, yeah. And I always, it made me wonder, is it changing the way that the brain is wiring or is it literally growing?

Is it somehow growing new cells, new neurons? So maybe this gets to another interesting question and maybe some myth busting here. So when we talk about neuroplasticity, when we talk about people are like, well, we used to think that the brain couldn't change and it couldn't grow, but now we know that it can change and it can grow. Can you actually grow new brain cells or are we just taking what's there and sort of creating a denser net? And what's actually happening? Yeah. So there are only two locations in the human brain where, as adults, you could actually grow brand new brain cells. And this has been clearly demonstrated in lots

of different experiments, strongly replicated. The first area is the one we just talked about, the hippocampus, important for long-term memory. And the second first area is the one we just talked about, the hippocampus, important for long-term memory. And the second brain area is the olfactory bulb, a structure critical for ability to smell. And that doesn't increase with exercise. If you exercise, you're only going to stimulate the birth of new brain cells in the hippocampus. What stimulates the new brain cell growth in the olfactory bulb, you know, it'll continue, but how you can kind of beef it up even more is by enhancing your olfactory environment. So rats given access to lots of different smells during the day, they will have a bigger olfactory bulb than rats that don't get any more smell.

So that literally will grow new olfactory brain cells. Yes. Oh, that's fascinating get any more smell. So that literally will grow new olfactory brain cells. Yes. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, yeah. So if you have, because it's funny, because then if you have, I mean, there are professions in the world where their job is to delineate smells and aromas, you know, like coffee. Yes. People who are, you know, like, and sommeliers, and, you know, like people who are in the

perfume and the essence. So what you're saying is it's not entirely outlandish to say that because that's what they do all day, every day, if you actually took a look at their brains, there's a reasonable chance that that area of the brain would literally have grown new brain cells through the process of their work. Exactly, exactly. In fact, I think I...

That's cool. Do I say that? That's one thing I thought about in the book. That might be suggested in the book about, you know, maybe sommeliers have bigger olfactory bulb. Those people tend to be the people that are really good at it, so it doesn't seem to disrupt their brain. But you never know until you really go and study it. And to my knowledge, nobody has studied the neurobiology of olfactory systems

and plasticity in professions like sommeliers. And I think that would be really fascinating. It would, right? But then I guess you would always have to, I guess then the question would be, even if you took a look, you know, you have to do it over a period of probably months or years. And then you couldn't just look at a whole bunch of people and say, well, it's bigger than other people, because you don't know if that actually is what brought them to it, because genetically they just kind of landed with larger or whether it's developed through behavior.

So the way to do it is the way that they did it when they studied London taxi cab drivers. So there's an experiment that I discuss in the book that's a very famous one done by a friend and colleague of mine, Eleanor McGuire at University College London, where the hippocampus is, as we've been saying, is important for long-term memory, but also very involved in spatial long-term memory.

And one of her first studies showed that London taxicab drivers that have to pass this crazy test of the thousands and thousands of streets in London, they have larger posterior hippocampi than normal people. But you thought, well, maybe they're good at spatial stuff anyway. So they started out with a bigger hippocampus. And so in the next series of experiments, she took a whole bunch of London taxi cab driver wannabes and followed them all through their training and then compared the ones that passed and the ones that didn't pass. So they got all the same experience and they measured their hippocampi at the beginning of the training and at the end of the training. The ones that passed had significant enlargement of their hippocampus from the beginning to the end.

The ones that did not pass did not have any significant change in their hippocampus. So it was likely actually trainable. It was trainable. It was trainable. Yeah. Yeah. I read a study. Yeah, I'm the complete was trainable. Yeah. Yeah. I read a study. Yeah, I'm the complete pop neuroscience geek.

Yeah. Just like is constantly reading research and trying to figure out what the words mean. There was a study that I read some five or six years ago that my recollection is it came out of University of Portland or University of Oregon, Eugene. Yeah. And they did a very short, intense measure of meditation, which I want to talk to you more about in just a moment. But the research showed, if I'm remembering correctly, that in a really short window of time, under MRI, they were able to see an increase in what they call the gray matter in the brain, sort of the front part of

the brain. But what you're saying is that's not that they're – like meditation didn't grow new brain cells. So when they say something like that, what's actually happening? Is it a thickening of existing things? So there's lots of things that could change the thickness of this outer cortex, the outer covering, which they refer to as gray matter. For example, glia cells, which are the support cells, do divide and grow in the brain, just not the neurons, the brain cells. And so, for example, Einstein, one of the big differences in his brain is he didn't have more neurons, he had more glia cells, suggesting that he had more support for his neurons. So what does that allow you to do that you couldn't do with fewer glia cells?

That's a good question. We're just starting to understand all the different roles of glia cells. And earlier, we thought that they were just, you know, they helped clean things up and they kept, you know, all the neurotransmitters at precise levels. But now we're learning that they could also contribute even sometimes to cognitive function. So even though we ignored them for 100 years, but they can be doing the new skinny on the street is that they're doing much more than we think that they're doing. And so those are the things that can grow and make the

outer cortex bigger. The other thing that could happen is the synapses could increase. So you have more connections and those connections mean that your dendrites have to grow and they have to make connections with axons and that takes up more space. So there's a number of things that could happen that would make the cortex grow that is not necessarily more brain cells. So it's a complex ecosystem. Yes, it is. Meditation. I know that you started to explore this also. Yes. Tell me, what's the latest thought on meditation and how it relates with your brain? Yeah. Well, I think there's more and more interest in really understanding the neurobiology of meditation,

what it's doing to your brain. And I think one of the biggest proponents of that movement is the Dalai Lama himself, who is a huge fan of science. I had the privilege of listening to him when he came to address the Society for Neuroscience, which is the largest society of neuroscientists in the world. And I'll never forget, he was just so cute. He's just so funny, so charming. But one of the things that he said that was so, so interesting is that Buddhism and science have a lot more in common than you might think,

because Buddhism is the quest of, or it's based on asking questions and introspection and trying to understand ourselves. And that's exactly what science is doing. And he was a big supporter of neuroscience and has supported a lot of the key findings in studying the effects of meditation on the brain in his Tibetan Buddhist monks. And those are profound differences. Their brains are profoundly different. In one particular waveform, which is the gamma wave, is significantly enhanced, and especially when they meditate. So they were measured with EEG, so the electrical encephalogram, which is just measured from the outside of the brain. And they would ask the monks, start to meditate. They were using a loving kindness meditation. And then stop, start, stop.

And they compared it to a group of people with the same age that were given one week of meditation training. And the monks, when they meditated, their gamma waves went off the charts. And it got much lower when they stopped. And that's after, what, 50,000 hours of meditation. Right. But what is it having more gamma waves? How does that help me? What does it allow me to experience that I wouldn't? Yeah. Well, that's the big question. I think those are the kinds of experiments going on right now. So what we can surmise is this could be part of the difference that is underlying the monk's ability to do all these things that you and I want to be present, to feel a sense of oneness, to all of these things that, you know, 10 or 5 years ago, it was like impossible to figure out what's going on there.

But now that result that I just said is a clue to link that between the modern mind, which is going all the time in ADD and so many different things, and the meditative mind that many of us, including certainly me, and I'm sure you want to try and get to. So what is it doing? I think that is the instantiation of that state that you get in when you meditate. Yeah. And I'm a meditator. So I roll out of bed every day. And at 5.30 I sit. And everything after that is different.

Yeah. And it's just my ritual. Like that is how my day starts every day. It's been that way for a number of years now. And what's interesting about my experience with it is that I came to it kind of on my knees to try and just help move through something that was really challenging in my life. But what I didn't expect was how slowly over time it not only brought me from minus 100 to zero, but from zero to really the ability to drop into the present moment. And I feel like it allows me to see things

that other people don't see, not because of some sort of hyper consciousness, but just because you, you, you see more clearly, I think what's actually happening rather than the illusion or the overlay of what you, you know, some sort of illusory thing of, you know, what could be happening in a room. I know it also, my practice is mindfulness. So part of that practice is it's a practice of dropping. So you're constantly let it go, let it go, let it go. And I find that that follows me through the day where if there's a challenging scenario,

instead of being immediately reactive, I'm much more likely to just kind of say, you know, let me take a breath. Yeah, let me kind of zoom the lens out again. So what's really happening here? And what would be the deliberate way to respond to this in a more measured way to really create the outcome that's most beneficial for all of us. And it's given me the ability to do that on a consistent daily basis on a level that I wasn't able to tap into before. But I'm still so fascinated. I'm like, but what's it actually doing to my brain? I guess you're saying the work, that's where we are, where the work needs to be done now. And we're still at a very elementary level.

And there have been a lot of studies. But it's frustrating because everybody uses a different form of meditation. And so it's so frustrating. Why don't you just all use the same kind so we can compare across studies? It's like turf wars. Exactly. Everybody uses their favorite kind because that's the best kind, right? That's the kind I do.

But I've actually experienced the same kind of effect with meditation, which is an enhanced detachment from and I don't, I have a hard time thinking about, there is a focus on the present moment. But the thing, as you were just saying that it helps, it helps me so much is this ability to detach. It's not about my ego. It's not about what you're doing to me. It's just what's happening. And I am able to step back more. And it has changed the way that I'm able to interact in my life and with my friends and colleagues. Yeah, I think probably the easiest way for me to explain this, I think meditation gives me much more ready access to the witness state than I've ever had before. Not that I want

to live in that state, but that allows me to pull back and experience the benefits of it and then step back in from a different place and with a different lens. Yeah. And that's fascinating and complicated. And we just need a whole bunch of people that can do that. Okay, do it now, right? Detach now. And so we can study it. It's a hard question. Yeah. I want to ask you about one other thing. And I know this isn't in your book, but I'm just I have you here and I'm curious about it. And that is consciousness in the brain. Yeah. Have you explored the idea or so I had a conversation with somebody last year, neuroscientist, also a deep, long student of all sorts of mind altering processes and of

exploring consciousness. And it's relational, like, can you actually, what is it? And does it exist in some identifiable place in the brain? Yeah. Or is it just something out there? I know putting you on that sort of like on that. Yeah. I mean, that's a really fascinating, really difficult question. And I think there are really bright people trying to get at it.

And it's never satisfying because to get at it scientifically, you have to whittle it down to this one little paradigm that nobody thinks it's consciousness, but it's the first little baby step towards something that might be considered consciousness. And kind of that's where we are. So I, you know, I have not spent a lot of time delving into that, into that literature. I think it's, I think there's some great minds already working on it. But it's, it's, it's something that I keep in the in the periphery. It's like, tell me when you have something interesting in the middle. So actually, I'm going to sneak in one other question before we wrap it up then, because we're kind of going in that direction. You spent your entire life science-based. Yeah.

As you move further into your life, and you've essentially lived a paradigm which says prove it to be true. Mm-hmm. Is there any shift? I'm just curious in just your lens on the world. Yeah. As you sort of experience more things in life, because I'll tell you where this is coming from. I'm very much a wonk hole, so I was always like,

I want to see the signs. Show me why before I'll believe that it's true. And the further I get into life, the more I find myself being open to the validation of phenomenon that I absolutely cannot explain through any scientific methodology, through any evidential process. And I don't believe I'll ever be able to explain as much as I consider myself science oriented. Do you find that at all yeah just on a personal level very very much and um i mean at the end of the book i try and and describe that a little bit um and this is you know i talk about my own

spirituality and and um that started with meditation that started out very scientifically meditation is good for your attention so i'm going to just exercise my attention by practicing meditation. Well, you start it and then it's like, well, it's obviously so much deeper than just an exercise in attention. And it opens up these questions of, you know, is there a larger force out there? And, you know, nobody believes you can, there's any proof of that. Yet, the deeper I go into this meditation and spiritual practice, the more I not only believe it because of just personal experience, but the more, just like you, I am able to accept it without being able to prove it scientifically. And how do I think about that?

I have thought about that. I believe that there's not, unlike what I used to think, there are some questions that are not amenable to the scientific method that is in existence right now. And it might be a little bit naive to think that everything in the whole universe has to be able to conform to what we believe is a scientific method right now. And so my feeling is that I can perfectly well follow the scientific method for my science,

which I do, and I have a lot of experience in that. But I am much more open now to these other experiences that are not amenable to science. And that doesn't make them any less interesting or any less worthy. And I've spent a little bit of time thinking, well, how would that be? How would that be? And it's like, no, I can't. I can't figure it out. There's other things I can figure out better. There's a big, dark, deep rabbit hole right there. Because it pops into my mind every once in a while when you read about, you know, extraordinary

women and men of science who are also deeply faith-based. Right. And you're kind of like, how do you hold that seeming duality? And yet they do. And that fascinates me. And not that I'm looking for any specific answer. I don't know if there ever will be one. But it just fascinates me to be so devoutly evidence-based in one part of life and so devoutly accepting on an almost blind faith level of the existence of something that you will never be able to prove evidentiary, you know, through any evidentiary process and another part of life.

But they have that second form of belief because of their own personal experience. Yeah, exactly. It's not no experience. Right, so it's the end of one again. Yeah, they trust in what they are experiencing in this. And that happens to be something that it's hard to quantify. We can't both have the same. I don't even know whether my spirituality, my spiritual experience is the same as your

spiritual experience. So, but I do know that if I give a rat a food pellet, that's probably the same kind of experience I can give, you know, 500 different rats a food pellet and I can study that. And if you give a rat like an LSD pellet or an ayahuasca pellet, a whole different set of experiences are going to unfold there. So last question, and this is I offer out to everybody I have the opportunity to have a conversation with, which is the name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer that term out to you, to live a good life, what comes up? What does it mean for you? Yeah, to live a good life is to fully appreciate

and to enjoy every moment. And for me, that really starts with kind of a base of self-love and self-appreciation and self-awareness that I could then bring out and share with everybody else.

And that, to me, is a good life. Thank you. Thank you. As always, I hope you enjoyed the show this week. I'm always so excited to share these wonderful conversations and interesting people with you. Today's show, as I mentioned earlier, is sponsored by Camp GLP. It is our once-a-year amazing gathering where we take over a sleepaway camp, literally a beautiful sleepaway camp that's normally used for kids,

and turn it into an adult summer camp for entrepreneurs, makers, and world shakers. It's this incredible place to come, to gather, to find people just like you, to learn, to just have a ton of fun, to make new friends, and have a complete mind-body-business reset. If that sounds like something that you need, that you want, check out the details at goodlifeproject.com slash camp, or just check out the link in the show notes. Thanks so much for tuning in. always signing off for good life project. This is Jonathan Fields. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

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