Good Life Project - Unlocking Your Brain's Potential | Dr. Ryan D'Arcy

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

For generations, when it came to your brain, we pretty much assumed that once you reach adulthood, it pretty much is what it is. That meant you couldn’t get smarter or faster or wittier or optimize it to perform at a higher level and, on the other side, if you suffered an injury, there was very little you could do to help your brain recover or even rewire itself to function at a higher level again. Turns out, much of that was wrong, and my guest today, Dr. Ryan D’Arcy, is an acclaimed neuroscientist and entrepreneur who is at the leading edge of this awakening. The co-founder, President, and Chief Scientific Officer of HealthTech Connex a brain health technology company, he also holds Professorship appointments at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia, where he serves as a BC Leadership Chair in neuroimaging and neurotechnology. He has published more than 260 academic works, and led major scientific advances include the discovery of white matter activation in functional MRI, the world's first VR simulator for neurosurgical training and planning, the development and deployment of the world's first brain vital sign framework, and the utilization of neuroplasticity in brain injury to drive recovery well beyond conventional limits.Today, we’re talking about some of the incredible innovations in brain science across the four domains of performance optimization, mental health, neurological diseases, and brain injury recovery and you are going to be amazed at the work he and others are doing and where things are heading.You can find Dr. Ryan D'Arcy at:Website: https://healthtechconnex.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neurocatch/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So for generations, when it came to your brain, we pretty much assumed that once you reach adulthood, it pretty much is what it is. That meant you couldn't get smarter or faster or wittier or optimize it to perform at a higher level. And on the other side, if you suffered any kind of injury or neurological illness, there was very little that you could do to help your brain recover or even rewire itself to function at a higher level again. Well, it turns out much of that was wrong.

And my guest today, Ryan Darcy, is an acclaimed neuroscientist and entrepreneur who is at the leading edge of this awakening. The co-founder, president, and chief scientific officer of Health Tech Connects, a brain health technology company. He also holds professorship appointments at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia, where he serves as a BC leadership chair in neuroimaging and neurotechnology. He's published more than 260 academic works, led major scientific advances, including the discovery of white matter activation in functional MRI, the world's first VR simulator for neurological training and planning, the development and deployment of the world's first

brain vital sign framework. This is really cool. We talk about this a bunch. And the utilization of neuroplasticity in brain injury to drive recovery well beyond conventional limits. So today we are talking about some of the incredible innovations in brain science across the four domains of performance optimization, mental health, neurological diseases, and brain injury recovery, you are going to be kind of blown away at some of the things that are happening right now. I was amazed and inspired and hopeful at so much of the work that Ryan and a lot of his colleagues are doing. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

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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. 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 8 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. As we have this conversation, I'm hanging out in Boulder, Colorado. You are in Vancouver. And you grew up in British Columbia. It sounds like in a small town. I did.

Which is known, tell me if I have this right, as the second largest stampede in Canada behind Calgary. Is that right? Oh my God, you got that right. Yes. Yes. I've lived my entire life telling people that factoid. And for those non-Canadian listeners, the stampede is sort of like the biggest rodeo on the planet in Canada, right? You bet. You bet. Yeah. I grew up surrounded by cowboys and gold rush prospectors. Right. Williams Lake. The town itself is a pretty small town though, isn't it? Yeah, it is. Between 15,000 and 25,000, depending on over the course of years. It's pretty small. It's largely in the interior of BC. It's a lot of mountains nearby and a lot of outdoors and that sort of thing. Yeah. The caribous, right? That's right. Yeah. It's in the caribou. Yeah.

So were you ever a participant in the rodeo side of things? Actually, my father was the head of the rodeo one year, but I was really small. I was never a participant. We had sort of friends that had ranches. And for a while, we had cattle and horses. Horses scared me in the sense that they had their own minds. And I wasn't entirely sure. When I was on a dirt bike, I knew how to control that. But horses were, you had to actually be a lot smarter than I was to know how to get on with horses.

So my sister rode a lot. Got it. That's kind of really interesting foreshadowing in a weird way, though, right? Because you sort of like, as a kid, you see these animals and realize that they have their own mind and their own will, and you're not entirely sure how it works or how to relate to them or how to sort of like interact in a way where you develop a mutual understanding. And then you look like pretty far, not that far forward, actually like a couple of years down the road. And your life has kind of been devoted to a similar process, but with human beings. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's really

interesting too, because you see it come full circle and not for me personally, but now equine therapy. I mean, you have these people that are really being able to understand the phenomenon of the brain is the brain is the brain, right? So it's fascinating to see it across not just humans, but across all animals. Yeah, I'm actually curious. So you do all this work on measuring what happens in the brain and detecting what happens in the brain and then translating that. Because I've also seen sort of this really fascinating emergence of equine therapy and known people who both lead the therapy and have been through it, been clients slash patients,

and shared how they feel like horses are these sort of deeply wise animals who are fiercely intuitive and can sense everything about you. So that there is this sort of connection, really unusual connection that tends to happen with human beings. As a neuroscientist, does that land true to you? Yes, it does. It's actually where I'm right now, I'm really interested to back up a bit. When IBM first built Watson and challenged Jeopardy champions, I got called in as a neuroscientist to compete, sort of debate with computer scientists about the brain and AI and all that stuff. And I got fixated on this interesting thing I stumbled across in my research where somebody proposed that there could be more functional connections in the human brain than there were atoms in the observable universe. And over the years, I've really found that interesting because I've tried to work the

numbers and that sort of thing. And what I realized is, you know, actually, if you reduce that down to a simple circuit of neurons, it is possible that that circuit can have more connections than it actually has atoms that compose it. And when I really realized it was kind of cool is when, if you think, well, wait a minute, neurons are not just within our own skulls. Our neurons interact with each other all the time, right? So my neurons right now are changing your functional connections and yours are changing mine. So I thought, wow, isn't that cool? Because that's like a really heady kind of insight into ways we could tap brain potential, brain power to do good things in life. And so, yeah, I'm always

thinking about those things. Yeah. And it's really interesting too, right? Because the fundamental assumption there is that the things that go on in our brain can, in a very real way, affect what's happening in the brain of a being, whether human or animal, in proximity to us in some way, shape, or form. Yeah. Yeah. We just had one of our cyber neurofactoid. And one of the facts that was really interesting is when musicians are playing music, their brainwaves synchronize. And we're doing all these things now. I don't personally do it, but in the field, there's all these meta scanning where they can show the neural relationship between mom and baby and different people far away.

And it's just fascinating. Yeah, that's amazing. Because then if you can show that the brainwaves sync, then if that then has almost like this trickle-down effect on the physiology and the rest of the nervous system, then maybe that also is part of the basis for people who were, you know, you have these phenomenon where it seems like physiological cycles start to sink between people. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think it's interesting because the more that we become mindful of that, the more we can actually use it for positive impacts. Right. And I think in the world today, you can maybe start to ask the question if some of that is there and is just out of control. And so how could we actually harness that? I think, you know, that's

just such interesting ways to think about how you, you know, we never really think about our brains, right? It's just what moves our body and our personality and all that. But if you can actually think about it in different ways, I've, I've always loved the creativity in that. Yeah, no, that makes so much sense to me. And I love, I think it's fascinating, the work that you're doing is on so many levels, and we're going to dive into a bunch of it. But the notion that also, you know, we are sort of evolving and increasingly able to actually measure these unseeable phenomenon in ways that I feel like also have strong overlays to ancient traditional practices and the claims that sometimes would go along with them. And a lot of

people raise their eyebrows and like Western society, like this is ridiculous. And yet you have thousands of years of outcomes. And to actually start to be able to track in the body and in the brain what's happening and maybe find overlays, you start to be able to map in a more sort of rational, scientific, provable way what may be actually going on. Yeah. I think one of the things that's interesting is that the technologies we use are allowing us to peer in and track the brain like never before. When somebody asked me at a cocktail party, like,

what do you do? I just say, I watch the brain in action and I've got lots of tools to watch it in action. But even over the course of just like a decade, the rate of the power that we can watch the things we could never watch before. And then to your point, that those start circling back and actually reinforcing wisdom that we've had in front of us the whole time. I think it's really humbling to be quite honest, right? And I think it's also got a lot of, for me, a lot of optimism because I remember once a colleague said that space is the final frontier, but your brain is the ultimate frontier. And I believe that's really true in many ways. Yeah. I mean, and that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious. I want to dive into sort of some of the specific applications and some really powerful stories around the work that you're doing. Coming up in this small town in the mountains in the Carbohus, in the second largest

stampede in Canada, what makes that kid, what makes Ryan start to say, there's something about the brain that I just can't not dive into? Well, it's interesting because I think my father was worried I would deliver pizzas. So what I'm doing today is a long way from that. Although sometimes I'd be really excited to deliver pizzas, to be quite honest. You get to meet so many interesting people. But I know that one of the things growing up in that small town is that I, of course, like many people, I had a hardship when I was young and I wasn't really focused too much on school.

And the teachers would always come back and say, hey, listen, he's clearly capable of doing this, but he's choosing not to. I remember my dad giving me lectures about, hey, there's a common theme here. Finally, I think he got me to see the light and agreed to go down to a boarding school, a private school down in Vancouver. That was really where I activated an awareness of thinking and how fun it was to think about things. And in particular, I loved thinking about both biology and physics. And that's my earliest memory of when I started to really sort of go on a path that led me to be a neuroscientist, is in high school biology and high school physics classes. Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating too, because so you start down that track,

you end up devoting your education to it, PhD, and then move out into the field. It occurs to me that you were moving into this field at a probably really interesting and transitional window in our understanding of the brain and what it can and can't do. Because wouldn't that have been sort of like right around the precipice of when the notion of neuroplasticity went from being, well, that's impossible. It can't happen to, no, actually we may be missing a lot here. Yeah, you're exactly correct in the timing. In fact, it was two things were happening. As I was starting to train, we were opening up our technology to non-invasively watch your function

in your brain and even your chemistry and really just high power brain imaging. But at the same time, the fundamental science on neuroplasticity was happening. And I remember training in terms of some of my clinical training in a stroke rehab ward, and you wouldn't use that word. It was a dirty word. You wouldn't want to give patients false hope back in that day. And now it's probably one of the most empowering words we can use when it comes to recovery from brain injury or brain disease. Yeah. So actually, why don't we deconstruct that? What are we talking about when we talk about neuroplasticity? Yeah, I love that because it's interesting. Some people really love the

term neuroplasticity and the others, their eyes glaze over. The simplest way to think about it is your brain has the innate ability to rewire new circuits. So it has the ability to learn and it rewires new circuits. So that's neuroplasticity. So if you can learn something, you have neuroplasticity. But it also, if you've had a brain injury or some sort of condition that's impacted your ability to move or talk or your mental abilities, we actually know now that we can

harness neuroplasticity as a way to regain and improve your function. And in many cases, we can harness it to improve your function above what you're currently doing. So we sort of get to think into the limitless realm as well. Yeah. It is amazing to think that really not too far back in our history, nobody believed that. You kind of believe that you're born, you reach maturity, you get what you get and you don't get upset. It just is what it is. And then which also the assumption there is that then if something happens to you and you lose some function, it can't be recovered. And also just on a day-to-day basis, there's really not a whole lot that you can do to improve. And I mean, I'm kind of fascinated

at how much that thought process has changed, but also why it stayed that way for so long. Yeah. Yeah. I think the latter part of it being stuck is probably simple in the sense that we didn't understand necessarily so much in what you're doing. A lot of times the answers are right in front of you and you're looking past them. And I think we didn't really understand how to harness it. And if you don't understand something, you don't understand how to harness it, then you generally don't necessarily,

in medicine in particular, it has to come from a very risk averse place. And you have to give therapies and treatments that you know, rather than something that's experimental in that way. So I think that that probably caused it to not get to us as quickly as possible. But equally, there's a huge renaissance in how we care for our brain health now. And I would say without exception, in my world, neuroplasticity is at the absolute center because there are so many interesting ways to harness that. So that as you're quite correct, when I was taught as a neuroscientist, we were taught that at a certain period, your brain was pretty much hardwired and locked. And we now know that that is absolutely not the case. Yeah, it's amazing and super hopeful to have that. It's interesting too,

though, that you use this phrase false hope when you're talking to, or maybe early patients of a traumatic brain injury and what the expectation was around recovery. On the one hand, you want to engender enough hope so that it motivates effort and work to create as much change as possible. But at the same time, there's this notion of false hope in that, how far do you go in promising that change can happen when you're working with somebody, whether it's to rehabilitate an injury or to really optimize the way you function, increase performance? I'm curious about that phrase, false hope, and just the notion behind it. Yeah, I think it was a responsible management strategy clinically, particularly when somebody's got a severe brain injury and they don't have

insights into the severity of the injury. A lot of people who first come, they might be thinking, oh, so that's like a charley horse, right? So I just a couple weeks and it recovers and it's not that way. So I think from a clinical management standpoint, it's really important to orient somebody to the nature of the injury or the disease that they're going through. But what I find is really interesting in everyone that I've ever had the privilege to work with and partner with and collaborate with, they very much have an understanding of that. And they have moved on and past that. And what they want now is a mission. And often what I find is really a great conversation to have is, OK, so in many times, just as

an aside, a lot of the people are really elite athletes or elite performers and that sort of thing. And it's like, oh, so you used to be an elite athlete in this. Now you're your elite focus is recovery from this brain injury. And as it turns out, you can not have a brain injury and that can become your elite focus too, right? So I think you can put it in a positive context where you can acknowledge the concept of, listen, we don't want to get your hopes up. This is a long, hard battle. This is not going to happen overnight. But equally, we're not going to say don't try.

Because if you work hard and you keep at it, you can rewire brain circuits. Yeah, it's got to be such a kind of a fascinating, but also really delicate balance. You know, when you're working with somebody or in a team in search of growth, in search of progress to sort of like, you know, just constantly walking along that line. 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 going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. 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. I want to talk about some of the applications because some of the work you're doing is so fascinating and it's relevant to every single person listening to this, no matter who you are, what you've been through, and who you know. And I think really in the domain of traumatic brain injury, on the one hand, dementia or neurodisease, PTSD and mental health. And then I think the final bucket is performance optimization. How do we really just function at a higher level, especially with so many people walking around with variations of what they're terming brain fog these days, or just inability to focus, which I think this year has compounded. But I think before we dive into those four buckets, it sounds like one of the big innovations

that you have been fiercely involved in that allows so much of this is what you were hinting at earlier, which is a revolution not just in the way that we intervene, but in what we're capable of seeing and how, in really being able to see the brain and watch it in a different way. Tell me more about sort of like this evolution a little bit. Yeah. When I was looking at the problem and many people who are very focused on translating, we, the real problem in our brain health, and I'd like to often compare it to what we

can do for your heart health was that actually, if you look at how much research and science is published, there are more publications year over year now than there ever have been. So we're learning more about the brain every year. But yet, what we weren't doing is we weren't solving the gap of how that was translating for somebody who wanted to manage their brain health. And so when we looked at the gap, it actually came down to the fact that there was a measurement problem. And it actually dawned on me one day that the measurement problem was as basic and simple as the fact that there wasn't a vital sign. So while I could go check my blood

pressure and find out about my cardiovascular health, I could not quickly walk into any doctor's office or any clinic and find out how's my brain health today. And so we decided to try and have a crack at that. And we developed a vital sign framework for your brain that is focused on objectively measuring how your cognitive function is. And that actually ultimately became a technology called NeuroCatch because our goal was to make sure that we could deploy this worldwide so that in a rapid, accessible, and easy to use way, you could find out how your brain health is. I've often joked, and I really do think of it as basically an objective measuring stick for how your brain's doing today. And what's been really great is to see how important it was that

we have that measuring stick. We've been able to evaluate treatments and find ones that work that people would have dismissed. We've been able to be sensitive to things that would have otherwise gone undetected and provide people with treatment. And we've been able to, in elite performers, actually become not just physically agile, but cognitively agile and start to think about thinking faster. So it's opened up this incredible world that I'm just so privileged to be a part of because you can start to really think about tangibly, I can help. And at the bottom line for me, that's what it's all about. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. So neurocatch is a technology. It's a methodology that allows you to measure these brain vital signs. It's also a device. And I've seen pictures of it. One day,

I will come to Vancouver and we'll strap it on me and see what happens. But it also seems like part of what's going on is, to a certain extent, you have created the ability to not have to be inside of a massive lab with millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars of huge equipment where you have to be slid into it. That part of what the idea here is, is to not only establish these benchmarks to be able to figure out objectively, okay, so this is the measure of what's happening, but it feels like there's an accessibility element to what you're doing as well. I'm wondering if that was one of the driving forces. Yeah, absolutely. The vision at the highest level is to unleash our global brainpower.

I look around at all these amazing innovators that I admire tackling problems that, quite frankly, are wicked problems that I'm scared of. And I think, OK, if we can help unleash more global brainpower, then that's our contribution, right? That's the way that we can have more amazing innovations come forward, tackle these scary problems we face. And so let's focus there. And in order to do that,

it has to be accessible. I have all my career worked in these multi-million dollar, high-tech, inaccessible because they're buried in the hospital labs. They're really important. They're how we power up to watch your brain in action. But what we thought was, wait a minute, this can come out of the lab. This can become something as simple and fast and rapid as getting your blood pressure taken. And it turns out now we're pushing it even farther. And we're going into with new tech, trying to really push the limits so that at any given time, you might be able to biomonitor and go, oh, there's something I need to pay attention to. So we're really, really on that technology focus to really give everyone the power to know how your brain is doing from moment to moment in terms of our most precious cognitive and mental processing.

So do you conceive of a day then where there's some variation of neurocatch device that is almost like just an everyday wearable? Absolutely. I have plans to put it in low profile so you might not even know somebody has it on. Wow. That's pretty amazing. That would be super cool. I mean, I wear and have worn different devices over the years. As I speak with you, I'm wearing my Oura ring because I'm fascinated at the ability to track certain markers that give me a sense somehow of what's going on inside of me before I actually

am aware of it. I can look at the data and be like, oh, well, that kind of explains it and allows me to respond to it. The notion of having something so powerful as an everyday wearable is pretty cool. Let's dive into these four buckets. And I think it makes sense to start out with the brain injury bucket because that is where you see the most profound and devastating effects of things that can happen to the brain across society. And it's also where you have been involved in this pretty stunning project for, I guess, about a decade now, the Project Iron Soldier. Talk to me about this bucket and also that project, which I think is fascinating. Yeah. So the very early versions of where we started to get hints that we could help were in major brain injury. And that's actually the root of where NeuroCatch traces back to. And when we were both through Canada's deployment, the United States and other countries around the world, we're in Afghanistan, one of our soldiers was there, his name is Captain Trevor Green. And he was there to basically provide support. So his job was to sit down

with village elders in Afghanistan, and ask how to help, how to build schools, provide water and that sort of thing. And on one mission in March 4th in 2006, he was with his platoon, was seated and was just about to begin a discussion. And a young 16-year-old insurgent came up behind and slipped an axe out of his robe. And as Trevor was about to start talking, with two hands drove the axe into the top of Trevor's brain with all his might. As Trevor describes today, as though he was splitting a log. So this was a absolutely dark, dark event. It was a very, very well-known casualty coming back from Canada. But ultimately, what is amazing about this story is how such a violent and dark act has led to creating such an inspirational and positive outcome. And what happened was Trevor is just, he and his wife, Debbie, are amazing people.

They are lifelong friends, and I'm so inspired by them. As they went through nearly dying on the battlefield, to going into emergency neurosurgery in a U.S. hospital in Germany, to being shipped and flown back to Vancouver, where Debbie was told that the likely outcome was that Trevor would have to live out the rest of his days in a home. And Debbie said, you don't know Trevor. And she was right. Trevor went through some intensive rehabilitation. He went through not just the

physical impacts of what is most certainly the largest traumatic brain injury I've ever seen, but he also has, of course, understandably struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder, the likes of which I can't even conceive. And through that journey, we partnered together because he decided to use neuroplasticity to push the limits of recovery. He decided not to accept his lot in life. And he decided to say, I'm going to rewire my brain. I'm going to regain my ability to move and to walk and that sort of thing. And from that, it's just been an incredible array of positive impacts at a global level that have come from the inspiration of that story. And we had the privilege to be the neuroscience team alongside helping him to maximize neuroplasticity. Yeah. When you first became aware of his story,

when he first landed back in Canada, how did you feel? And then you learned, okay, so you're going to be involved in this. We talked about false hope, right? When you look at him and the level of brain trauma that he had, and then you think, okay, so I'm part of the team that is charged with rehabilitation and getting him back as good as we can get him. What goes through your head? Well, we talked about the fact that I was born and raised in Williams Lake. And so I think my inner innovator is somewhat associated with being a cowboy. I saw this amazing documentary where it was really profiling, not just his recovery story

with Debbie, but it was, as the documentary maker pointed out, it was really profiling not just his recovery story with Debbie, but it was, as the documentary maker pointed out, it was actually about their romance and how in love they were with each other. And at one point he meets with a orthopedic surgeon because he had some spasticity. His feet were not pointing. They were pointing basically because of the muscle tone. And he wanted to walk again. That was his goal. And at the moment where the specialist said, you won't walk again, which was managing false hope, I yelled at the TV. I like yelled. I was yelling. I was freaking out.

I was not at one of my greatest moments ever. And then I realized I should grow up. And so I grabbed my computer and I looked up this documentary producer, Sue Rideout, amazing person. And I sent her an email and I said, I think I can help. And she connected myself to Trevor and to Debbie. And we got started with a research that has continued to this day. And we all agreed at

the beginning, the point of this is to prove to countless, countless people that you can rewire your brain and recover even from the most devastating of injuries. And so that's been our mission. That is Project Iron Soldier. Yeah, that's amazing. So you came into the conversation and the entire project, really, not right in the beginning. Because from what I understand also, he had been in various types of rehabilitation, I think a couple of years in or so, and kind of started to plateau. And then people around him were saying, well, this is where it ends. Was that sort of the window where you stepped in and said, maybe not? Yes, it was. And it's, it's really interesting. We've learned a lot of things from this that help, I think, inspire many people. One of the things we

learned in, and I remember early on Debbie remarking that actually it wasn't until two years after the injury that Trevor started making his gains. So often we think, okay, we need to have these gains right away. But your brain is basically got 100 billion neurons in it. It is very complex. If it takes an insult, it takes time just to settle and sort of relearn what the new normal is. And so we learned that actually intensive rehab efforts should start certainly right away, but they shouldn't stop. And in fact, we don't know at this point if we

found a limit. We've just recently broken the recent limit. And so the answer is probably all your life. You should be working to improve your brain function, whether or not you're any one of us. And Trevor provides that lesson for us for sure. Yeah. So now that you say you just recently broken what you thought were the limits, now I need to know what that is. Well, one of the great things that came from this is that Trevor is an elite athlete. And we know from science that when you are an elite athlete and you visualize your task, you actually activate the same areas of your brain that when you do it. And it turns out, lo and behold, he was giving our

health system a little tip the whole time because every morning he would visualize the movements he wanted to make. And when we would put him in our MRIs and we would take pictures of his brain, we would see he was activating the very same areas he was rewiring. And of course, that cost nothing. And it took no professionals and he could do it all he wants every day. So he was really he's very, very focused. It's hard work, right? If you're going to catch the tail of neuroplasticity, you got to be prepared to work hard, you've got to be prepared to be tenacious, you got to be prepared to do it and stick with it. And he does all that. And every week he works and he does mental imagery and he looks at all innovative options. And we actually did hit a plateau. So a couple of years ago, no matter how hard we worked with the most

intensive rehabilitation possible, we couldn't move the needle. And that's when we started to look into the world of neurotechnology. And through our neurocatch, we've been able to identify this neuromodulation technology called the PONS. So it's actually a stimulator. It stimulates your tongue, and it goes into a hidden sort of backdoor into your brain, into this core of your brain, we're still trying to understand exactly how it works. But what we know is it works. It actually facilitates neuroplasticity recovery. So when we pair that with rehabilitation, we can crush the limits. And I won't forget anytime soon, watching as we couldn't move the needle. We couldn't move the needle. And then one of the things we were trying was a 20 minute independent stand test. Trevor's

six foot four. He's a big guy. He could not stand for more than two to three minutes. We started with this neuromodulation with this Pons device. And in weeks, he was crushing the upper limits of that stand test. And I remember going into the clinic and watching him do it. And in weeks, he was crushing the upper limits of that stand test. And I remember going into the clinic and watching him do it. And it's just something that you will never forget. Because not only are you seeing the impacts on an individual, but you're realizing you're opening up the world of science for benefit for as many people as you possibly can in that moment. It was really great. Yeah, that's amazing. I was wondering, because I've seen video of him in rehabilitation fairly

recently over the last couple of years. And I saw that he was placing this device in his mouth, and then he would go and work out, and he would go do the rehabilitation exercises. So that was the neuromodulator that you're talking about. And somehow there's a connection between your tongue and your brain. Yeah. Well, it turns out it's not that crazy. So the model that we've discovered to try and explain how it works is actually exercise. So what we know is exercise is a neuromodulatory. It's good for your brain, right? Exercise brings oxygen. It brings all these great what we call trophic factors that help neurons in terms of sprouting and growing. And it's very, very good. And it turns out that this stimulation through your tongue, which goes into the core nerves of your brain, likely we're thinking operates in very similar ways. And so what we're learning is that now the world of, okay, you got something wrong with your brain. Okay. Take a pill, you know, here's a drug or, okay, it's really wrong. You better go see a surgeon. There's an entire world in between those where we can just utilize the pathways nature wired

and come up with ways to stimulate your brain to effectively find ways to heal itself. Which if you think about it, I'm always going to give way to mother nature on this one. I'm sure that there are better ways than I have. Yeah. But they keep unfolding, right? Yeah. Yeah.

So we've kind of been focused on this one bucket. I mean, but I think a lot of what we're talking about is relevant to those out of the three buckets that we talked about. So why don't we touch on them? The second being neurodisease or neurodegenerative disease. And I guess there's a full spectrum of that from dementia to MS or a whole other range of neurodegenerative diseases. Is there application of this work in those domains as well?

Absolutely. We in our clinic are seeing people with neurodegenerative diseases, Parkinson's and other multiple sclerosis is another one, which is not neurodegenerative, it's autoimmune. But we are able to, by measuring and finding these technologies like this PONS device that work, we can then actually validate them in a full-fledged clinical trial. And then we can roll them in for early access for people to have the benefits of it rather than just reading about it in a journal article. And we're finding now that it's not just stimulating the tongue. You can stimulate your vestibular nerves. You can actually use light to fire up your mitochondria. There are all these interesting technology ways that

are coming down. Like this is a really good age to be living, right? Because technology is finding ways to interact with the brain in incredibly powerful ways that are resulting now in hope if you should have a neurologic disease. And it comes not just from sort of discovery of something in a lab, in an animal model, but actually from measuring our brains and finding out what is actually making a difference in terms of these technologies or even drugs. Like if you look at Alzheimer's, of course, many people are aware that the drug trials for Alzheimer's have not been as successful anywhere near as we wanted. And a large part of that,

we have to improve the sensitivity of our objective measurements of whether or not they're helping our very, very subtle cognitive functions. And so we're hoping to really make an impact on those things. Yeah, I mean, to be able to do that is, and just, you know, the fundamental change of being able to see in a more nuanced way, what's actually happening while you're sort of, you know, biohacking in a clinical setting, you know, you can just keep running all of these experiments and iterations and measure in a much more nuanced way, in a more accessible way, what's happening. And I guess the accessibility part of it also is that the more accessible it is, the more

people you can bring in to the experimentation and the more data you get and the faster you can iterate and figure out what actually is moving the needle and what isn't. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I'm really interested in and we're launching early in this new year is actually around brain fog. You mentioned it earlier. It's really interesting because, of course, with COVID-19, we've written up a paper

and we're analyzing the neurologic impacts of COVID-19. And certainly brain fog is top of my interest list. We see brain fog not just with COVID-19. You get it with post-concussive as well and chemotherapy and other things. And I think to your point, because our globe has just gone, undergone such a massive, basically impact of the pandemic, we have also the opportunity to really use these technologies to better understand how to optimize brain processing and our brain function, and really detect these subtle things that can have devastating impacts on life, right? As we all know, if your brain is not firing at peak performance on a given day, that changes the outcome of that day, right? It's not the same day for you as it would have been otherwise.

And so I think the ability to really get in there and provide things that people can do from a biohacking or from a medical health point of view is one of the most promising areas to keep an eye on for sure. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting with the notion of brain fog and also just, I feel like there's that old phrase, now I'm blanking on the old phrase, brain fog. But it's basically, if you don't have your health and you don't have anything, but when most people say that, I think what most people are talking about is they think about the physical body. They think about disease.

They think about pain. They think about chronic stuff. They aren't thinking about the fact that if you don't have your brain the way that you want it to be, it makes everything else harder. In fact, somebody, a friend once told me who had been involved in the world of traumatic brain injury and rehabilitation a chunk of years back, this horrifying phrase, which was you're one traumatic brain injury away from literally being a different person. You can be in the identical body and every part of the body is as functional as it was before, but if the brain is injured, literally, you can have a different identity almost. It can

be an identity level change. So when we're talking about even much more mild things like brain fog, that changes the way that you navigate the world, but also it changes the way that you feel about yourself because you're generally aware of when that's happening or what is happening, it's like it becomes this amplifier for not just the effects of the fog, but then frustration and futility built on top of that, which I imagine just deepens you into a spiral. Yeah. And what I think is fully understandable for us all is how scary that is. It's scary when we think about Alzheimer's. And I think most of us have no stories or people who have encountered where that's absolutely changed the person that they knew. But the other part is that, well, we think, okay, well, that might just be that particular condition. The reality is pretty much any negative impact to your brain alters things in some scary way, right? Mental

health, for sure, can cause an impact where you're not at your perfect state, you're not feeling happy, you're not feeling you're living your best life. And then that can spiral and create something concussion, another perfect example where the real epidemic and concussion, I think was driven largely by starting to understand that that could predispose you to a particular type of dementia and or some extreme mental health challenges that could result in addictions and suicides. So clearly, you want to know that that's something you can have control over. I think that's why the ability to be able to measure and know what's going on, but also the concept that there's hope in the concept of neuroplasticity, it makes me feel a lot more empowered. It makes me feel like this is something the whole world needs, right? We need to promote this amongst ourselves because this is going to activate us. And then back to my point,

when we're all activated in our awesome kick-ass states, then we solve the really, really scary problems that are out there. Yeah. Then that makes so much sense. 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 are 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 going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. And you brought up mental health also, which I think is this third bucket, which is probably the most pervasive things that people deal with, certainly in the United States and a lot of the Western world. The rates of mental illness are like we've never seen in generations. And part of that, yes, is very likely that it's being diagnosed much more effectively and earlier.

But part of it also is that there is a lot more of it when you look across the spectrum of humanity. I'm curious what the application is in the domain of something like depression, which affects so many tens of millions of people, whether it's a sort of a persistent melancholy or a clinically really severe depression, if it doesn't affect you now, most people are going to be touched by it in some way, shape, or form, either personally or by friends and family. When we're talking about the things, the conversation around neuroplasticity and devices like the POMS or other research or technologies, where are we with that? Are there ways for us to look into the brain, understand what's happened when somebody is living with mental illness and then intervene in a way where it's not medication-based and

it's not talk therapy or cognitive therapy-based? Not that I have any problem with either of those, but is there this other world for that domain of things that we live with as well? Yeah. What's interesting that seems to be emerging in the field are there's some central truths that we're starting to zero in on. And one of them is when you can combine different types of therapies, you can have an augment of effect. So for example, in cognitive behavioral therapy around mental health and depression and anxiety, we're about to do a study. It's actually with our legions veterans village and our legions and our first responders and all the people that are on the front line around the concept of you combining neuromodulation with that therapeutic treatment

to get an a bigger effect on a more long-term carryover effect um so these are these are very safe treatments they're not they're not necessarily concerned with uh you know you don't have to concern yourself with uh medications and medications in many cases are really effective and important, but they're, they're novel ways of basically putting things together so that you can have a bigger neuromodulatory effect on your brain. And what I think is so beautiful about this is a lot of these are basically using the channels into your brain that have been in front of us for the whole time. Um, so whether or not you are neuromodulating with the pons, or you're doing exercises we talked about, or many places are looking at this thing called transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is TMS. These are ways that we can start to modulate the brain to get it into a more resilient state. We talk about in today's day and age, all of our

nervous systems are overstressed nervous systems. I think that's a safe bet. And so we really have to focus on being more sensitive to what's happening in our overstressed nervous systems and how do we boost resilience? And then how do we guide you back if you get into a danger zone? And what's really, I think, pretty impressively exciting is at a global level, just like we see in terms of open sourcing vaccines, the world is coming with the mental health crisis, the research world is coming with these solutions, with our brain neurology, the same sort of thing. So it's a very optimistic time in terms of brain health. Yeah. I mean, it's the notion of combining different things,

you know, having sort of a one modality and then adding in some form of neuromodulation, whether it's a pause or exercise or whatever else it may be, that makes sense to me. What's kind of fascinating too, is we're not talking about replacing what's out there. We're talking about adding things to those processes to make them maybe more effective or work or accelerate the speed at which they actually can make a difference. Or bust through when you've hit a wall. Right, right. Here's the strange thing that just popped into my head when you were sort of listing these different neuromodulatory technologies. The transcranial magnetic stimulation device,

I've been hearing about from various people in the biohacking community too, and it sounds like there's some pretty fascinating stuff going on there. But the other thing that popped into my head is psychedelics. They have been verbatim for a long time, and now we're seeing real clinical trials going on at top institutions and looking at how even single doses of certain psychedelic substances seem to be having some pretty stunning effects on brain states. And I'm wondering, I'm curious just what your take is on that. And also, do you consider that a form of neuromodulation? It's a great question. As you were mentioning it,

I was thinking about it in terms of a form of neuromodulation. We are getting set to do a number of trials on psychedelics because, of course, many of the hopes here is to boost your creativity, enhance your cognitive processing, your information processing rates. And I'm a strong believer that that's when you've got to measure that with a physiological objective measure. So we're very much focused on that. The concept of microdosing, I think, is a lot of psychedelics. As we know, it's a gift neuroscience gave to the world in the sort of 60s, 70s, and 80s. And many professors to date can thank their career choices based on that.

But we might have in the 60s, 70s, and 80s just overshot the mark a bit. And so the microdosing concept, I think, has a lot of biological merit. And I think that being a little more selective with the use of this and then being pretty systematic and rigorous in how you would apply it and then measure it to make sure it's actually doing something that's productive. So I think just like with neuroplasticity, right, you can have maladaptive neuroplasticity. People can actually start to develop a neuroplastic response to pain where if they imagine pain, they feel pain, and they've rewired a circuit. So that's maladaptive. But I think with psychedelics, or any drug, or anything you're going to try to use to interact with your brain,

improve its performance, it's always going to be about being evidence-based and being very thoughtful around what is it that you're trying to achieve? Are you trying to improve your creativity, your cognitive function, your, you know, regain motor function in Trevor's case? These are the key things. I think as long as we're kind of goal oriented towards it, then I think it's really going to be a vertically oriented growth area. And I love it because I personally, when I watch Brains in Action, it brings up flow and the whole concept of flow for me. And I think that this is all bringing in the concepts related to flow and how our brains can be peak performing in what they need to do.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. You brought up this other term, maladaptive or maladaptive neuroplasticity, which is kind of scary at the same time. When I think about cases where an individual is injured, they have an actual physical injury that triggers pain. That pain is there for a while, but then the injury heals. From a clinical standpoint, the injury is completely healed. There's nothing physically wrong anymore. And yet the person still experiences pain, often chronic pain. And that is something that is not an uncommon story. Would that be an example or potentially where we're talking about maladaptive neuroplasticity where the pain isn't actually being generated from the original site of injury anymore, but it's neurally wired in a way that is not helping. Yeah, I absolutely

owe my education to this to one of our lead clinicians in our neuroplasticity clinic. She's been amazing to be able to guide me in thinking about this, but you're exactly correct. And in fact, chronic pain would be one example. I think when we start to open the curtains up on this, we are going to discover that neuroplasticity has been sitting as a biological capability we had the whole time. We just hadn't ever harnessed it for positive good. So when we didn't harness it, what happened is we started to basically, if you think of, you know, the metaphor has been used about neuroplasticity of blazing a trail. So if you blaze a trail in a path that's not in your best interest for either how your response to pain or anxiety or depression or these sorts of things, you will keep going down that path.

And so the trick clinically is to help people rewire new paths that are actually adaptive and for your positive benefit. And I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I don't think that happens easily. I mean, I don't think that it happens easily to be cardiac to stay heart healthy and keep fit and that sort of thing. I have to work at it. But I think if I need to rewire my new neurons for something that is important to me in a positive way, I'm. I have to work at it. But I think if I need to rewire my new neurons for something that is important to me in a positive way, I'm going to have to work for that too. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. This final bucket, you touched on it just a little bit in creativity, but it's really, it's the performance bucket, right? It's the like,

you know, things are pretty good, but I just know that there is more in me, you know, that there is I'm capable of higher levels of cognitive function, of problem solving, of creativity. And certainly people have been experimenting with some of the things that we've been talking about at home. Sounds like neuroplasticity and neuromodulation are really going to be central in the notion of unlocking potential. So we're not really fixing a problem here, but we're saying, let's see how much we can really make available of what you have, or maybe grow your capabilities in a meaningful way where you have plateaued. You can't figure out how to get further. Tell me more about this bucket. Yeah, it's one where we're, we're super interested. We're starting at the sort of the simplest level, I think, which is, um, thinking faster. And so that, that definitely drew us into the, uh, myself personally into the whole concept of flow. And I'm a big, uh, I love to get on a set of skis and mountain bikes and, um, dart through trees and get myself lost in mountains. So, so I've always been a flow of skis and mountain bikes and dart through trees and get myself lost

in mountains. So, so I've always been a flow junkie, but I really think that what fascinates me from a neuroscience standpoint is you basically disengage all the kind of cortical thinky parts and you just use your subcortical reaction times, which is why you can respond faster than you can think. And so I think we're really going to have, we're having a lot of fun looking at the application of watching that in the brain by using your brainwaves and getting down to the millisecond resolution, like, okay, so you thought you thought faster, we'll tell you, right? And so, so I think those applications were, we're excited to work with the Canadian forces and, and look at our special force operators for those things,

elite athletes, our hockey teams, and we've worked with basketball teams and others. So I think that's going to be a really driving area. Adventure sports is another one. But where I'm really interested to see all things come together isn't just necessarily in the rate of how fast you can think, but also towards what you were mentioning with creativity. So can we start to see things in new ways, start to see patterns that we didn't previously see that become a solution to our problem? And in today's day and age, my favorite example of that would be, we never saw a pattern of electric cars taking out internal combustion engines. And now we can't, right? That pattern is very known to us.

And I think that that's where the creativity is going to make the difference in this world, right, is coming up and seeing a new angle. And truthfully, that's what got me into science. When I was a young kid and I was ski racing, I'd see the path everyone took and I'd be like, why would you take that path? And I would take some other path that no one had ever taken. And most of the time that was a good idea, sometimes not so much. But I think that humanity has to find new paths. And that's where the creativity and the brain performance.

And that's where we're going to learn a lot in terms of watching your brain in action and then modulating it and making it do that even more. Yeah. It feels like this is such an exciting time in this work. I kind of want to just, you know, can we fast forward 10 years and see where all this work is taking us? Because it feels very much like we're on the precipice. You know, there's just the rate of discoveries and insights and breakthroughs is accelerating. And it feels like, you know, the rate of measurement, the rate of figuring out how to intervene and neuromodulate is moving more and more quickly also. And I'm excited, you know, a decade from now, where is this all going to lead? And the notion that on the most fundamental level, like you said, zoom the lens out and your big mission is to effectively unlock brains globally so that we can figure out these wicked problems that are dominating the current existence. That is huge. And then the ability to dip into all four of those buckets that we explored and make a meaningful

difference. This is work that is transformative and has the potential to make a huge difference globally, which feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. Hanging out here in this container, a good life project. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? For me, it is and always will be, Our mandate is to positively impact a billion brains. If I can say at the end of my life that I've gotten close to that number, then I will have been able to pose something that scares the crap out of me and actually get towards that.

And I was saying to my son, because I was excited to do this today, and I'm driving him to school, and we were talking about it. And I said, I think that also means, and it'll sound a little simple, but showing up, right? But showing up isn't just something that you, you know, okay, well, that's great, good advice. But I think you have to show up every day. Every day, you can't just say, oh, this happened to me. So woe is me. Or, you know, every day, day over day, this happened to me, so woe is me. Every day, day over day, I want to be able to say I showed up and did the best I could to make it a better world.

And hopefully by the end of that, a lot of brains across this planet are positively impacted. And there will be some unleashing of brain potential that solves problems that I want to see go away. And I know we all do. Thank you. Thank you 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 have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app.

So you never miss an episode and then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. The Apple Watch Series X 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 8 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 tennis 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 walberg you know what the difference between me and you you're gonna die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk