Habits and Hustle - Episode 579: Dr. Masud Husain: Motivation, Memory, and the Truth About Aging Brains

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

Is a lack of motivation a personality flaw, or a signal from your brain that something needs attention? We tend to think brain decline begins with memory loss, but changes in motivation, behavior, attention, and decision-making can show up much earlier. Apathy can look like laziness. Poor sleep can feel like memory loss. Doom scrolling gets blamed on dopamine, even though the science does not support many of the claims people repeat online. And the habits we rely on for brain health are often based more on trends than evidence. This matters because your brain is constantly deciding whether a reward is worth the effort. When that calculation becomes harder, doing even simple things can feel overwhelming. Understanding how motivation works can help you reduce friction, take action before you feel ready, build routines that support your brain, and pay closer attention to changes in yourself or someone you love. Purpose matters. Curiosity matters. Relationships matter. And movement may be one of the most effective tools we have for protecting cognitive health. Dr. Masud Husain is one of the world's leading neurologists studying memory, motivation, attention, and cognitive decline. He is a professor of neurology at Oxford University, co-leads Dementia Research at Oxford University, and serves as editor-in-chief of Brain, one of the most respected journals in neurology. He is also the author of Our Brains, Ourselves, which explores how the brain shapes our behavior, identity, relationships, and sense of self. What's Discussed: (06:01) Why losing motivation can appear before memory problems and signal early cognitive decline. (08:07) How apathy differs from depression, even when the behavior looks almost identical. (12:14) What two tiny strokes revealed about the brain circuit responsible for motivation. (20:55) How purpose, curiosity, and strong relationships help protect the aging brain. (22:23) Why unmotivated people may use more brain energy deciding whether something is worth the effort. (24:54) What dopamine actually does and why it is not the brain's pleasure chemical. (26:31) Why the idea that social media gives you constant dopamine hits is not supported by evidence. (34:50) Whether Alzheimer's can be reversed and what current treatments can realistically accomplish. (45:17) How breaking tasks into smaller steps, starting before you feel ready, and building routines can create motivation. (57:12) Whether relying on AI is making our brains lazier and changing how we think. (01:01:36) How loneliness and isolation affect cognitive performance and long-term brain health. (01:07:22) How poor sleep, anxiety, and low mood can create memory problems that feel like dementia.   Thank You to Our Sponsors! Magic Mind: Head over to magicmind.com/jen and use code JEN at checkout. Momentous: Ready to try supplements that actually do what they claim? Head to livemomentous.com and use code JEN for 35% off your first subscription.  Therasage: Visit therasage.com and use code JEN to get 15% off your order. Your skin Prolon: Prolon is offering listeners 30% off sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their 5-Day Program! Just visit prolonlife.com/JENNIFERCOHEN and use code JENNIFERCOHEN to claim your discount and your bonus gift. Kion: Visit getkion.com/habits for 20% off. Tru Niagen®: For supplements that are rigorously tested, third-party verified, and actually deliver what's on the label, head to truniagen.com Find more from Jen Cohen: Website: jennifercohen.com Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements   Find more from Dr. Masud Husain:  Website: masudhusain.org X: @MasudHusain Instagram: @masudhusainoxford Book: Our Brains, Our Selves LinkedIn: Masud Husain  

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it. Thanks, Tony. I'll take it from here. I'm Jennifer Cohen, your host, and I'm here to help you build the confidence, discipline, and resilience to create a bigger, bolder, and more successful life. Every week, I sit down with leading experts, entrepreneurs, athletes, and high performers to uncover the habits, strategies, and mindset shifts that lead to real results. This is Habits and Hustle. Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Habits and Hustle, where today I'm joined by Dr. Massoud Hussein. Imagine waking up one day and losing the drive to do anything. Not sad, not depressed, just nothing. No urge to shower, call a friend, or even turn on music you love. Well, that's exactly what happened to one of Dr. Massoud Hussein's patients after two tiny strokes. You couldn't

even see on a normal scan. Massoud is one of the world's leading neurologists on memory motivation and cognitive decline. He co-leaves the Dementia Research Group at Oxford University and serves as editor-in-chief of Brain, one of the most respected journals in neurology. He spent decades studying real patients, not just theories, to understand what actually drives the way we think, act, and stay sharp as we age. His take is simple. The way most people think about brain health is backwards. memory loss isn't usually the first sign of something's changing. Motivation is. And most of what gets blamed on laziness, burnout, or just getting older,

is actually your brain sending you a signal. Today we get into why the earliest signs of decline show up in behavior, not memory. What dopamine actually does and why the whole dopamine detox trend gets it all wrong. The daily habits quietly protecting or damaging your brain without you even realizing it. and where brain health tested is headed next. If you've ever wondered whether your brain is aging the way you think it is, this episode is going to change how you look at every off day you've ever had. But before we get into today's episode,

one thing I never get tired of is reading what you all write in the reviews. So let me read one right now. All right. A must listen. I love this one. Thank you. A must listen. I love how Jen Cohen just says things with no filter.

She says the things most of us are thinking. Her guests come from all aspects of life, and there's always nuggets to find in all of them. The Dr. Shadezah Zahira interview, so far is one of my favorites. So many lessons and insights. All right, thank you so much. I appreciate that,

and I think I pronounce your name, Jay Bexpetit. I don't know if I did that right, but thank you. Keep them coming. And if you have not yet subscribed to this podcast, what are you waiting for? please do. Dr. Massoud Hussein, I am very happy to have you on this podcast. Thanks for inviting me.

Absolutely. Your background is, I think impressive is pretty much the biggest understatement I can give, right? First of all, what we do on this podcast before we start and you're a perfect person given your background is we do these performance shots that are really good for focus, mental focus, and being more alert. And I want to do it with you, especially because of your background. Okay. So there are these things by magic mind. And so it's all like Lions May, Ashwaganda, which I want to talk to you about, if these things actually, in your opinion, do, like, move the needle for you. So let's take a little, we don't do alcohol, we do healthy shots. So you shake it and we cheers, and then that's all we do. So here we go.

Cheers. Here we go. You tell me if you're more. more focused and more alert than ever before after taking it. Do you like it? It's definitely interesting. Okay, that's okay. This one is a caffeine-free one. I like the one that's more the OG, but okay. This one's caffeine free. People like it because if they've had too much caffeine sometimes. I could grow to like it. Yeah? Good. I love that. All right. Okay, we need to get into this.

And you can tell me after if it ever, if it made an impact. Where do I begin with you? I really do have a million questions for you. One of my first questions is when the brain does start to decline, what do you say is the first thing that happens or people notice? Well, it's a really complex area. So it's not the kind of thing where you can say, this is what happens in everybody. And so it really depends on which part of the brain is being affected. And perhaps the thing that most people notice in somebody else is memory. Because when memory goes, you notice that your mother or your friend or your grandfather isn't working in the same way they used to before. Their brains don't seem to be working as they were.

But what we've realized is that there are other things that can happen long before something like memory shows up as a problem for these people. And one of those things is actually motivation. So it turns out that even in healthy older people, if you start developing, what we call apathy, lack of motivation, lack of goal-directed attention, and lack of goal-directed behavior, then your chances of developing dementia, for example, are twice that if you didn't have apathy. And the reason... Wait, say that again, so if you're somebody who doesn't have...

So if you're somebody who starts to lose motivation in older age, but you're otherwise healthy, it turns out that your chances of developing dementia in the next 10 years is twice that if you had normal motivation. And that, the reason for that, we think, is because there are brain systems which are important in motivation. We've identified some of those that are beginning to degenerate. And that's the first signal that something is going wrong. When one of your family members doesn't seem to be interested in doing stuff that they would have been before that could be, you know, going out to have a walk or being interested in the news or being interested in the family. All of these things can be science. But of course, you know,

this is a complex area because there are many reasons why people could lose motivation. So I'm interested in apathy where a brain system is slowly beginning to fade, but you could lose motivation because you're depressed. I was just going to say that. I mean, you would think if someone changes what they want to be doing, it would be a sign of depression, not a sign of cognitive decline. So what is the different, like, what are the earlier signs that someone is cognitively declining through that, through the behavior versus someone who's just depressed? So one of the features of depression is that you're unhappy, you're sad. Yeah. Usually that's an important feature of depression. Or you may have what we call anahedonia.

You just lack pleasure in anything you do. Now, in patience with pure apathy, those things need not be a feature. So you mentioned the young man that I saw who led to this whole body of research. He was a guy called David, and he was a person in his 30s, and he had been highly motivated. He worked in finance, very productive, socially great guy, really the center of a big network of friends. And then suddenly he loses his motivation. He becomes completely apathetic, very different to the kind of person he'd been. He's not doing anything at work. He's not making an effort to see his friends. People are getting worried and concerned. And it turns out that David

had a very unusual form of stroke. He'd suffered a stroke, an area where you might lose blood supply in the deep parts of the brain called the basal ganglia. And when we saw him, he wasn't unhappy. He was quite absolutely happy with what was going on. He just lacked motivation to do anything.

So much so that he eventually got fired from his job, so much so that he couldn't be motivated to get social security benefit. So his friend said, okay, come and stay with us. But they regretted it almost the minute they did so, because he did nothing. He just sat there all day waiting for them to come home so that they would cook for him. He never helped out in any way with looking after the domestic chores.

And of course, they got annoyed. They couldn't understand why this man had changed. And when we actually saw him and went into this in more detail, what we found was someone who was very dishevelled. He wasn't even looking after himself. He wasn't having a shower. He wasn't doing anything. And when I asked him, well, what would you normally do if you were sitting? He said, well, I'd listen to music. So why aren't you listening to music? Because it would take me a bit of time to put my music system together. How long would it take? Five minutes. So for David, the effort of putting the music systems together was not worth the reward of being able to listen to something pleasurable. And this turned out to be a really important part of what we have done in

terms of trying to deconstruct motivation. Because one part of motivation seems to be how we evaluate whether something is going to be rewarding enough, in this case, music, and whether the effort required, in this case, the physical effort of putting together the wires for the music system is worth it. And in David's case, very few things were worth the effort. He He would just sit there. That still reminds me, that still would make me think it's depression. Right.

Because you don't want to, you're too lazy or lethargic to put the effort in to get the reward. So your dopamine is obviously not at its level that should be. We can come back to dopamine. Or is it serotonin? No, we can come back to dopamine in a minute. But I think the interesting thing here is you have to talk to the person. And one of the things that neurologists do is try to understand the person, not just through the scans, but also through the conversation.

David wasn't unhappy. He couldn't see what the problem was, living in his friend's house. Right. You keep on saying that, the unhapped. He seemed pretty like content. He didn't have any problems about the future. He'd just been fired. He was living in somebody else's house. They weren't very happy with him. He couldn't see what the issue was. He was quite happy, doing nothing. Okay, but that guy is young. He's like in this 30s. So what can trigger something at that young of an age to then bring on cognitive decline? So in his case, we knew that it was two tiny strokes. You know, strokes are when blood vessels become clotted, for example, or bleed, but in the case they were clotted. But the important thing is it showed us one part of the brain, which is so important for making this calculation, is the reward worth the effort? It turns out the basal ganglia are very, very old, 360 million years old. If you go back through evolution, they're there because they link motivation cues in primitive animals to action. And they're still with us. That's what they do. They link cues.

For example, if you are feeling hungry in two hours' time, you will develop an urge to act. And you're not going to expire if you don't eat anything, but there is this urge. It's a motivational urge, gnawing away you to say, you know, Jen, go and open the fridge, have something because you need it. You don't need it really, right? But you have this motivation to do this because this system is there pushing you to do that. Similarly with thirst, right? You don't necessarily need to drink right now, but you can feel thirsty. And these are primitive motivational cues that make you act. And as animals have become more sophisticated, There are other cues. For example, it turns out many of the drugs of addiction use the same system, the basal ganglia to the action system in the frontal lobes. They hijack that system, making you want to seek something which you find rewarding, in this case, a substance of abuse or something like that. So it turns out this is really complicated. The relationship between losing motivation and becoming apathetic, as a way.

in David versus having hypermotivation to seek stuff that might give you some rewarding outcome as an addiction is using the same pathways. We're talking about the same pathways. The same pathways. But I'm really on this idea that what's scary is these two strokes that David had, it didn't even come up on the scans. How did they find them? Like, how did you even, how do you even know to even look for that? It doesn't happen often. Like, that's a very young age. for that to happen. It is. I mean, they did come up in scans. If you do them at high resolution, you can see them. You can see. Okay. But what I'm, I think, coming back to your other point, what about, you know, these other people we're talking about as they get older? David is really

unusual. It's an unusual thing. He's an unusual case. But what he's taught us is if these brain systems that went wrong in David also go wrong through other pathological processes. let's say the pathological process in Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease, if that pathology affects this circuit, let's think of it like this. There's a circuit that goes part through the basal ganglia to the frontal lobes. The circuit could be taken out by strokes, as in David, or it could be taken out by other processes nibbling away at this circuit like the pathology that occurs in Alzheimer's disease. In Alzheimer's disease, proteins called amyloid and tau build up. They have toxic effects on the neurons. And if those toxic effects are occurring in this circuit, what happens is you have a problem with your motivation.

If they were occurring in the memory circuits, you have a problem with your memory. So it depends where in the brain the pathology occurs. Okay, so let me ask you a basic question. Is there a real, is there any difference between dementia and Alzheimer's? There are over 200 causes of dementia, of which Alzheimer's is the commonest cause. So the definition of dementia is a change in someone, a progressive change in someone, such that their cognitive impairment leads to problems with everyday life. So it's got to be something that's relatively new. It's got to be progressive. It's got to be a problem in cognition or, as we now know, behavior that is having an impact in their everyday life. Because there are people who might have developed cognitive impairment, but the level is such that they haven't quite got to a problem in everyday life. They're just about coping.

So all times is just one. It's just one, but it's the commonest. It's the most common. Because I see here, and I've already read about a lot of this myself, that social isolation, chronic stress, poor sleep. in activity, inactivity, these are all can be causes of. Well, they're, they're symptoms. They can be symptoms, yes, exactly. But what I was going to ask you is, if you have somebody, I'm just going to give you my own personal experience. My mom was pretty good, she was excellent cognitively, up until COVID.

COVID then took her down because of the isolation, because of the lonely, and she was living alone for many, many years. she really cognitively took a, like, a major decline. So how can someone go from being, like, perfect? Like, actually, 10 to 15 years below their age, like, physically and mentally. Actually, physically, you could still be perfect. It's just ironic. And then because of these things, dramatically change.

Right. And obviously, I don't know your mom, so I don't know the details. But if we look at the trajectories of cognitive, decline. Often the people who are doing really, really well, the high performers, actually, when it comes to the decline, the decline gradient is much more rapid than the people who were not high performers in the past. It's really interesting that people can go up to a certain threshold, and then all that cognitive reserve and resilience that was helping them maintain their abilities is no longer enough to do it. So that's a really interesting, there's been several

studies which have looked at this, they've looked at people with different levels of cognitive ability before they develop dementia, right? And seeing that trajectory is steepest, when it happens, it's steepest in the people who are high performers. But why is that? Well, you'd have to think that up to that point, all the other things that were helping them cope, all the, we might call them strategies, but it could be actually neural mechanisms, brain mechanisms. Like what? Well, you know, you might be using systems that you wouldn't normally think of when you're doing memory. I mean, a strategy might be, I'm going to take notes to help me cope with this system, right? I'm going to listen more carefully to people because actually I'm aware that there is a problem.

I can easily miss information. So you can have coping strategies to help you. And those coping strategies obviously rely on the brain, right? But what if you don't do those and you're just somebody who is highly functional, who's very active? You always hear, oh, you know, if you want to, if you want to age well, you should exercise all the time. You should eat healthy. You should sleep properly. If you're doing all of those things, what I find extremely ironic, I don't know if that's the right word, is the people I know who've developed this,

horrible decline and disease are all people who did everything right. Yeah. So why is that? Is it genetic? Okay. Yeah. So there are many issues here. So one of the, let's just go back to your first point, that the things you do to help your brain, all those kind of things you mentioned, those physical things you mentioned.

Exercise. Are really, really important. Low stress. There's absolutely good evidence for all of these things. But in addition, what we now know, and sometimes people call this, protecting the mind rather than the brain, but protecting the mind is protecting the brain from my point of you, is that there are other things that are important. One of those, for example, when you retire, your network of friends reduces. The people who keep that net, try and keep

a large network, they do better than people who don't. So people who are curious who actually go out to find out new things, want to develop new ways of doing things, are interested in new information, whatever it is, they do better than other people. And finally, it's people who have a sense of purpose, because all of a sudden, your sense of purpose has been taken away. You know, you're no longer working, your family are now, have left, you've got grandchildren, you don't have to look after anybody, what's your sense of purpose? You've got to have some sense of purpose that will be important for you. And those factors, those three factors, right, sense of purpose, being curious, keeping a network of friends or contacts, turn out to be in some

ways as as important as all the physical things you mentioned at the beginning. Yeah, I think for sure. That's what it's 100% I would say that's true. Just from just practical, just by observation. Right. But I think I wouldn't want your listeners to just think we're talking about older people who are developing dementia and this problem about motivation. is about them because actually what we've learned from looking at people with this sort of problem is we've learned about the brain systems that are involved. And in Oxford, we did a study a few years ago. We took university students of different levels of motivation. We purposefully found people who are highly motivated. And believe it or not, there are students at Oxford who are also really

apathetic. Really? Is that true? Well, it's everywhere. I guess that's true. I guess it's all relative, probably apathetic in relation to the other people there? Oh, no, no, no, no. There are, you know... Did you go to Oxford yourself? I did, I did, yeah. Okay.

Your cognitive abilities don't necessarily map to your, you know, behavioral levels of motivation. Yes, that is true. I have noticed that, though, actually, in life. Yeah, of course. There's a huge variation. So we took these students of different levels of motivation, and we put them into the brain scanner to look at brain activity

when they were asked to make a decision. A bit like David, Is this particular activity, would that be rewarding enough for you to make the effort? Or would you say, no, I'll pass. I wouldn't do this. Right. So we're looking at their brain activity when they're making these decisions in the MRI scanner. And what we found is that the brain regions, like the basal ganglia, which were affected in David,

like the frontal lobe, which is important for action, were active when you and I, when these students are making this decision about, is this reward? worth the effort, right? This is the simple calculation. But the thing that was really puzzling was that the students who were apathetic showed far greater activity in these areas than the students who were motivated. We just weren't expecting that, right? Their brain systems involved in motivation were more active than the students who were motivated. So apathy was associated with greater brain activity. And the way that we've really tried to understand this is thinking that what this means is that for people who are apathetic, they are using more brain energy to make that decision.

Is it worth the effort or not? Now, they might do it for us in the scanner. But at home, they might go, oh my God, it's just too much effort. Having to think about this is just too much. I'd rather not think about it. Let's do nothing. Right. So the default becomes inertia because the cost of working out, is it worth the effort or not? Right. They're constantly thinking back and forth. Right. Well, is dopamine the pleasure chemical or is it serotonin?

Most people have said dopamine is the pleasure chemical, and I'd like to debunk that because all the animal evidence plus all the human evidence suggests it isn't like that. What dopamine does is it's really important in this calculation I was talking about. Is the reward worth the effort? Okay. So what we found in apathetic people is that low rewards are not worth the effort for that. Whereas motivated people will say, okay, that reward, although it's not a lot, I will do it. I'll do this action to get it.

When we have given dopamine to patients who are apathetic, we found that they're more willing to put in the effort for low rewards. So dopamine incentivizes things such that you act, you're motivated to act. And the difference is between something that people call wanting, is this thing worth it for me to want it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is the pleasure that you would get from the reward. Are we, though, because we're living in like a dopamine, like, you know, the whole anxious generation, everything is like a dopamine hit, dopamine hit, like constantly, that are we like going to be numbing ourselves to a place where we need so much dopamine?

dopamine to do something because we're so used to being constantly filled with so much that your body becomes acclimated or desensitized? There is a big dopamine myth. There is no evidence that there are any dopamine hits when you're scrolling through, you know, social media. There is absolutely no evidence for that. That's become a myth. And of course, you'll find some very popular books out there which also perpetuate the myth. The evidence from the animal literature and humans is that dopamine is really important for motivation to act, right? It is not the thing that gives you the hedonic burst of pleasure. So that is actually very, very subtly different, right? What I'm saying is it gives you the motivation to go and find that pleasure, but it doesn't

give you the buzz of the pleasure itself. So what is the chemical that gives you that buzz or pleasure? So the evidence is that there are receptors in the brain for opioids. Right. And those opioids, we have our own endogenous opioids, which are the things that are very important for giving you the pleasure, the liking. So this is the difference between the work on wanting, having the motivation to want something, versus liking, obtaining, obtain. the pleasure from whatever you've worked for. And those two systems are very different neurochemically. So it's a big deal.

And of course, what I haven't mentioned to you is in David, the patient I was talking about at the beginning, we used a dopamine drug. And three months later, this man who you would think is so untidy, so disheveled, comes back to our clinic. I didn't actually recognize him because he had a suit He had a haircut. He had a new job, and most impressively, he had a new girlfriend, which would never have

happened because he met nobody sitting. Where did he meet the girlfriend? Well, because we had treated him with this drug. Which drug was it? It's a drug called ripinerol, which works on dopamine receptors in the brain. And it wasn't that the ripenrol was giving him more pleasure. It was motivating him to do things that he wasn't doing before. him to put his music system together to listen to music. It was motivating him to, you know, have a shower. It was motivating him to go out and get a job. It was motivating him to go and find a girlfriend.

So why isn't, so is this also used now for antidepressants, like for as an antidepressant? It's a really interesting question. Dopaminergic drugs have not classically been used as antidepressants. The usually antidepressants work on the serotonin system. Why? Well, I'm just explaining it. So it turns out that there are about a third of people who have depression do not respond to the serotoninergic drugs. And those people with treatment resistant depression, it seems, are now responding in certain clinical trials to exactly the kind of medication I just mentioned that we used in David, which might mean that even in people who are depressed, there are nuances. between the type of depression you have, you might be sad, but in addition, there may be also some degree of apathy in people who show depression. So, you know, you can have an overlap. You could have pure depression, you can have pure apathy, or you might have depression and apathy. So the question is, is it the case that people who have treatment-resistant depression might respond to drugs which we are beginning to use for apathy?

Wow, that's really, that's fascinating to me, because I would think that if David can change, what is, so what is the role? I guess I keep coming back to dopamine versus serotonin. How does someone respond differently to serotonin than they would to dopamine? So there's different neurochemical systems. There are different circuits in the brain, which use dopamine or serotonin. But does it manifest similarly? I don't think so, yeah. So serotonin. You don't think so.

No, I think serotonin. the effects of serotonin, for example, are not necessarily in terms of reward, but in terms of what we call aversive responses. So something that you learnt is actually not very rewarding, unpleasant, costly in some way. And serotonin has an impact on behaviours where you need to have an aversive response. It's truly complicated in terms of how we map these neurochemical systems onto different components of motivation. So one's the first. thing we've tried to do is to deconstruct motivation. Say, okay, if motivation isn't simply about willpower, what are the potential components of motivation? One of those things I mentioned to you is

this thing about working out whether the reward is worth the effort. It turns out that's really important. But you could imagine that someone would look inert. They wouldn't do anything. If they had a problem, for example, in deciding, thinking about the potential choices for behavior. You know, it's a sunny day outside. What could you do, Jen? I mean, you could probably come up with 20 potential alternatives, right? About, yeah. But imagine if you couldn't, if you couldn't even think of one, right? If the brain system that would generate those choices just was not able to do this.

How much of this is genetic? Oh, I don't think we know about that at all. Like if your mom has it, do you get it? There's no evidence for that in this way. Really? Yeah. You know, they can be biases. But things like, for example, Alzheimer's disease is just a very common disease as we get older.

Yeah. There are unusual genetic causes of Alzheimer's disease, which run in families. Like what? Well, there are mutations in what we call prescenilin one or precinilin two or amyloid precursor protein. They all affect amyloid, that protein that builds up in the brain. Oh, right. So it's like the thing that actually affects the chemical is what then affects that makes you get the Alzheimer's. Early. Not the genetic, so right.

Well, the gene mutation means you're going to get it early. But I'm just explaining that actually that genetic component is quite rare. We also know there's a gene called apo-e, and having the apoe for genotype puts you at a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's. So in that way, there could be familial risks. But in general, the vast majority of patients who develop late on-so-E al-Symbilis. Alzheimer's disease, we have not been able to pin down a genetic cause. Do most people as they, like, what's the, I guess, the percentage of elderly people that eventually get Alzheimer's or dementia?

Well, it depends on the age. Yeah, I say, what is the age? Tell me, it's 80. If you're going to 80, you're getting towards 20%, 25%, and if you're growing older and if you're growing older and older, those percentages keep increasing. So as you get older. Yeah. And, of course, there are other causes of dementia, you know, like vascular dementia.

that can occur with if you have high blood pressure or smoke or diabetes, those things affect the blood vessels in the brain, and slowly you begin to accrue enough pathology, vascular pathology, that you will develop vascular dementia. Sometimes, unfortunately, people can get both Alzheimer's and vascular changes in the brain and have a mixed dementia. That's just the increased risk as we get older because, you know, our brains weren't designed to live this long. We are living a huge amount of time. So that's why there's a 20% around approximately 20% of people after age of 80 get it. Yeah, and the numbers increase thereafter.

Can you reverse cognitive decline for Alzheimer's, dementia? Is it true? So if we just stick to Alzheimer's, the latest clinical trials show that there are drugs which mop up amyloid in the brain and they can make a small. difference to the trajectory of decline. But it is a very, very small difference. And therefore, it's been very controversial because the FDA approved it. People have been saying that that approval was based on a level of evidence which was not really sufficient to do this because it has huge implications. The treatment, it's intravenous, this drug. One of them is something called lacanamab, for example. So it's a monocanamab. It's a monoclonal antibody, which

mops up the amyloid. But, I mean, on the positive side, here is proof of principle that it could make a small difference. When you say small, 2%, 5%, yeah, it's probably of the order of 1%, that kind of level. Okay, it's very little, though? Yeah. So would you, would it change someone's quality of life, though, if it's only 1 or 2%? And that's exactly what people are saying that that probably isn't going to make any huge difference. So why are you putting somebody through this? But on the other hand, you know, 30 years ago, I can remember being a junior doctor, seeing people doing deep brain stimulation surgery in Parkinson's disease, putting in electrodes into the brain to try and help Parkinson's disease patients who were not necessarily responding so well to medication. And I used to think at that point,

why are these doctors doing this to these poor patients? Because there were complications of surgery. But now, now, you know, things have improved so much in the techniques. They can make a huge difference to some people with Parkinson's disease. So I think we have to be open-minded to the possibility that even if something looks a bit odd and maybe making small changes, differences at the moment, in the future, this kind of investigation could open up whole new other ways of treating. So I guess my question is, you can't reverse Alzheimer's. We haven't got any evidence that we can reverse Alzheimer's. You know, there are people out there who say it is reversible. Yeah. I've yet to understand how and how this happens. I called this guy a couple weeks ago, this man, who is a gerontologist and neuroscientist, and he's fairly known. And I was telling him about my mom. He's like, oh, have you tried red light? Have you tried giving her a triple dose of creatine? Like all these things, right? Like all these things. And I went to my mom's doctor. And he's like, you have got to be kidding me.

Like, this is nonsense. You really think that, you know, like maybe it can be help you prevent it, like maybe a percentage, you know, years behind, like years before. But to think that putting a red light on someone's head and giving them some creatine is going to reverse it is wishful thinking. I think it is, yeah. And we don't have the clinical trial evidence for that. You know, on the other hand, one thing we do understand is. So why do people say that? Where are they getting this from?

I didn't say it. I know you didn't. I'm not blaming you. I'm not blaming you. Listen, someone from Oxford is not going to be saying that I can promise you. Yeah. On the other hand, we've got to realize that, you know, people are very different. So these clinical trials just take...

Is there any evidence of this? Not for the things you've mentioned, yeah. What is there evidence of that has been able to move the needle one or two percent in habits? Forget about medication, but in habits. or anything that people can do habitually to help them first, pardon me my question, to prevent it, prevent Alzheimer's, and B, to stop it from getting worse. Right. So now we're going back to the thing that we were talking about before.

Yes. What are the physical things you can do? Yep. And what are the other kind of social things you can do? Right. To help. Purpose, isolate, purpose. Curiosity.

Curiosity. Curiosity. Keeping a big connection with people, as well as all those physical risk factors. you know, making sure your blood pressure is under control, you're doing physical exercise, you're eating well, and not drinking too much alcohol. Other things are important, too, like deafness. You know, when you're beginning to lose hearing, you become socially isolated.

So there's a whole raft of these things, and the evidence is that they might actually make a difference in prevention. So if you put all those things together, it could make a big difference in prevention if you are currently healthy. I want to take a quick break from this episode to thank our sponsor Therisage. Their trite panel has become my favorite biohacking thing for healing my body. It's a portable red light panel that I simply cannot live without. I literally bring it with me everywhere I go. And I personally use their red light therapy to help reduce inflammations and places in my body where, honestly, I have pain. You can use it on a sore back, stomach cramps, shoulder.

ankle. Red light therapy is my go-to. Plus, it also has amazing anti-aging benefits, including reducing signs of fine lines and wrinkles on your face, which I also use it for. I personally use Therisage Trilite everywhere and all the time. It's small, it's affordable, it's portable, and it's really effective. Head over to Therisage.com right now and use code be bold for 15% off. This code will work sitewide. Again, head over to Therasage, T-H-E-R-A-S-A-G-E dot com,

and use code be bold for 15% off any of their products. So if someone were to read your book, right, that's, you know, that you wrote, trying to get the, I want to make sure that I properly, our brains ourselves, what are the top three themes that people will learn about? The book is really about how people with brain disorders

reveal something about how our brains work, how our brains create our identities, our personal identities. So who we are as a person is really the product of our brain functions. We've talked about motivation today, but there are many different brain functions, perception, attention, how we build concepts, how we behave in terms of whether we're impulsive

or not, for example, those control mechanisms that, you know, we have to stop us being impulsive. So there are many different brain systems that produce us, our personal identities. But the other important thing here is our social identities, because we're also defined by our connections to other people, our affiliations to different groups, you know, our religion, place we grew up, where we went to school or university, the kind of job we did. But I also argue in the book that even our social identities really are a product of our brain's abilities to make those social identities. Imagine if you had to go off and live in a different country with a different language. In order to integrate into that society, your brain has to be curious enough and able enough to start learning this language, to understand the customs, the humor, the way things work in this.

to be accepted. So to be socially accepted, we do a lot of stuff with our brain. So the argument in the book is personal identity and social identity is created by our brains. It's an emergent property of the brain. The self is something that's created by the brain. And it's something we take for granted. It's only when things go wrong that we begin to realize, my goodness, the way I see the world, the way I perceive the world, the way I attend to things, how motivated I am or the concepts that I've developed about how things work, how societies work, if any of those, if one of those goes wrong, it's revealing how my self has changed, how my identity has changed. So that's what the book is about.

But once this starts to happen, of course everything is going to start changing, right? Like you're not, are you, but are you even aware of it to know that it's changing? Some people are, but there are brain, some brain disorders like something that. who call front of temporal dementia, where people lose insight. They don't actually understand that they're behaving abnormally. They can't see what's wrong with behaving the way they did. You know, there's a patient in the book called Sue, who's walking down the street and seeing a woman in a short dress

thinking that's inappropriate and shouting out, that's not going to be good for you, Love, because you look terrible in it. Now, we might think that, but we never say that, right? Our control systems are making sure that we don't blurt out something we're thinking. Right. But in someone like Sue, those systems which would normally inhibit you and me from doing that are no longer functioning. Functioning. So she's a change person in that way.

I find that interesting because you're talking a lot about how, you know, it's not people just perceive that when you get dementia or Alzheimer's, that it's just, people just assume it's like your memory is the one to go. But a lot of times it's actually not even the memory. It's all these behaviors that you're saying, I'm like I'm learning it with my own mother. Like it's all this other stuff, the confusion, the, the, the, they're not lot, there's no logic behind anything you're doing. But they still know who you are. That's very common. Can that, does it stay like that or does it eventually? It's one of the most, you know, it's the thing that can last for a long time.

Also, knowing who they are is also something that can last a very long time. But obviously, we get to a point where there is so much neural damage that it's not really viable in terms of them being able to represent who you are. What made you study this so thoroughly and really specialize in this? I mean, it's the bit of medicine that we know least about, right? We know about the heart. We know about the lungs. we know about your big toe. The brain is just an amazing organ

that we've just barely touching the surface of. You're asking me these questions, and I'm trying to give you the state of the art, but I'm also completely open explaining that we don't know much of this stuff. So that's what's really attractive about it. And obviously, these are, if there are diseases that affect the brain,

they have an enormous influence, not only on the people who suffer from them, but on the families, have a huge impact on the families. So this is where we can make the biggest inroads. What are some of the most surprising things that you've kind of turned, like you've kind of learned about or that you found in your research, that would surprise most people?

Well, I think this area of motivation is probably the biggest area that I've got into, thinking that you could try and deconstruct motivation into components. We talked about a couple of them. One, can you come up with the potentials for things you could do today? Right. And if you can't, you could be very... Yeah, the motivation part. But it's really important because, you know,

although we're talking about people with brain diseases, these are take, there are important takeaways for how we live our lives in people who don't have brain diseases, right? So one thing we've learned is people think, for example, there's too much effort to do this, so I won't do it. So how do you make it easier? How do you make the activation energy to start, right? In people, our kids, our friends, who are our colleagues, how do you do it?

Well, one way to think about it is try and break down the problem into smaller parts. Try and make it such that it's not one big thing to do. Try and reduce it. The other thing that I've found useful is start. Don't think you have to do a perfect job right from the beginning. If you start, you can become more motivated, right? even action can lead to more motivation. And I'm also a big believer in routines because if you have those routines,

it means when I'm having my coffee, I will do this, or nine o'clock in the morning, I will do this. Writing the book, it was really difficult because I'm a full-time neurologist. I'm a researcher. I'm an editor of this journal. I don't have a lot of time. But I would say you have to turn up to the screen 6 a.m. it could be rubbish you're writing for an hour, but you're going to write it because, you know, this is the way to make sure it happens. And of course, sometimes it is rubbish that we write.

Right. But just starting, just starting means you get it off on the page. Well, I was going to say, because what was kind of stopping me in my tracks, you're talking about how high performers, when they get some issues with their cognitive abilities, they have the biggest crash, right, because they have all these systems in place versus people who are more like type B personality. Maybe. So then, like, maybe it is actually not good to be so tightly wound. Seriously, with all these systems and routines and mechanisms in place to perform at such a high level. Because once those are gone, it's actually, you have a bigger chance of having, you know, the opposite, the bigger swing happens. Like the pendulum will swing even further. It's kind of like I'm going to give the, you can answer that and now I'm going to say something after. Yeah. Well, I mean, it depends on how long you're planning to live, Jen. I don't know. Hopefully, a much longer, you know. I would rather be, you know, really productive, very good at what I do when I'm able to,

rather than think about what I'm going to be like at the age of 80. No, but what I, yes, 100%. But what I think is interesting is we're doing all these hacks, you know, to like live longer and be like, you know, again, you know, to have our brains be at, like, at such a peak state forever. Meanwhile, like, at the end of the day, from what I get is, like, if we, if the high performers can crash, are the ones who crash the most severely, I'd rather just maybe not, what am I doing to myself?

Well, it's a choice, but, you know, our forefathers, generations before us, they weren't even, this is a luxury to be talking about this. It was survival for them, you know, making enough money to work, do all these things, right? Okay, okay. So we are in a luxury position where we're thinking contemplating, how am I going to do this? How much hack am I going to use? True. Okay, so I have a bunch of questions.

I haven't even asked any of my question questions yet. But like, what would say? I'm going to ask them to you and then you can just answer them as quickly as you can, like, as concisely as you can. Because there's so much information. Yeah. And I know we're kind of, we're tight on time kind of. So here we go. Okay, what's the biggest misconception people have about how the brain actually works?

Hmm. Well, probably it's to do with things like these dopamine bursts and detoxes that people are doing. I think in the current generation, that's probably the biggest misconception. Talk about that again in a way that, so you said that earlier, that like people think that if you're on your social media, people are getting these bursts of dopamine, that's actually not in the literature or research doesn't back that up. Yeah, there's no real evidence for that. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do. It's a bad habit to keep scrolling. Yeah. But there's no evidence that we can link that to dopamine. So what can we link, what does that do to our brain then? If it's not about the, about that, people just scrolling, doom scrolling forever. What is that doing to our brain?

So it's developing a habit. And that habit, once you develop habits, it's very difficult to get out of them. We've been talking about trying to develop good habits like routines. Right. Start. And by the way, I'm a big routine person, obviously. So don't get me wrong. I'm still going to do it because it makes me feel good.

So I'm talking about doom scrolling is probably a bad habit. That for most people, they realize it's a bad habit. They shouldn't be doing it as much as they can, but they're brought back to it. But there's no evidence that it's dopamine that's bringing you back, that you're thinking I'm lusting after dopamine. What is it? What is bringing us back? We don't necessarily know what that is, but no one's measured something that says this thing is the thing that's bringing you back.

And it's definitely no evidence that it's so we don't know. You know what I like about you is that like there's no nonsense. So a lot of times people will be like, they'll say, oh, well, it means it's this. But you're just saying plainly, I don't know. There's no research. We don't know what it's called. We don't know why people are doing it. It's not the dopamine.

It's like kind of unknown. It's okay to not have the answer. We're just being honest. Yeah, exactly. I love that. If you could teach everyone one thing about their brain, what would it be? It has much bigger capacity than you think. I wish when I was a kid, someone had told me, whether it was teachers or parents or whatever,

that actually you can do much more. And we sometimes just limit ourselves because we constrained by the fact that we think we can only do this much. And usually it's in one area. I've learned that brains are capable of multitasking in a way that most of us wouldn't even think about doing it. Well, there's a lot of conversation around that, right? Some people say multitasking is really not great. Some people think it's excellent. So you think multitasking is...

In the way they mean it's not good, it means switching from one thing to another very quickly. Because there is a cost. There's something we call a switch cost, from going from one cognitive problem to another, right? So going, let's say you're doing a math problem and then you're having to translate something in French if you're at high school or something, there is a cost because it takes time to switch from doing one kind of problem solving to another. I'm not talking about switching very quickly. I'm talking about the ability to take on different types of problem. And I had no idea that I could be capable of doing that when I was younger. Well, does multitasking make your brain sharper or less sharp because you're constantly having to do the switch?

whicheroo back and forth, and then neither tasked that's done well. Oh, well, I'd like to think I'm doing them perfectly. Yeah. Good to know, yes. But no, I have a very demanding life where, you know, one moment I'm seeing a patient and doing a clinic for three hours. I'm not talking about switching straight away. And the afternoon, I'm doing a research study or I'm reading papers about something that have been submitted to the journal that I edit and brain. Or I'm having to deal with some university problem that's arisen. And I quite like it. I quite like the fact that these are different types of problem. What about ADD then? Would you say that people who have ADD, do you think ADD is a myth? Do you think it's actually something true in the brain? I don't think it's a myth. I think it is

something that some people have. Whether it's being overdiagnosed is something we could argue about. I'm not a specialist in that area. So, you know, I'm not, I don't think I can be qualified to say whether the levels of diagnosis have risen because it's a genuine thing or not. The evidence from good studies, research studies, is, yeah, there are differences in the brains of people who develop ADD compared to people who don't. We can also measure those differences, particularly in the ability to sustain attention. People with ADD are far more variable in their distractability, their ability to sustain attention. That's one of the key markers, is that they're just variable in the response times.

Let's do something very simple, like pressing a button if you see a flash of light. We are very consistent. If you don't have ADD, if you do have ADD, you're far more variable. I don't think there's any doubt. Well, it's a multitasking piece that you were just talking about, right?

Like, I feel when you have ADD, you're much easier. It's kind of like par for the course, like multitasking and jumping from one thing to another. Like, I've noticed a lot of entrepreneurs have a lot of, that's, and ADD is a very big piece of that. Right. Do you not know, like, do you notice that? Yeah. And you could argue that some people who are very creative have that ability to jump, right, from this problem and suddenly think, actually, I can sometimes also use principles in one area and apply them to another area.

That's another important ability to be able to do. Seeing something you've learned in this particular area might actually be helpful for you to solve a problem in a completely different area. So I think there are people who have ADD. who are very creative, who are very able, and also do this thing about having lots of problems to solve. So I guess my question was more, you're kind of touching upon it. Like, since everyone's now being diagnosed, self-diagnosed or clinically diagnosed as someone who has it, do you see that the research, is there anything to back that the brains

are chemically different than people who don't have ADD? Yeah, there's research studies which show that, either in terms of brain activation. Yeah. And it turns out it's the areas of the brain include the basal ganglia we were talking about, as well as the frontal and parietal regions of the brain, which seem to work differently in people with ADD. And that maps onto our ideas also of the attention networks in human brains. We were talking about circuits for motivation. There are also circuits for attention.

And those are affected in ADD. There are also some people with ADD who are apathetic. And we assume that that's because the brain circuit, for motivation can also be affected in these people. So I hope I'm getting this concept across that we have circuits in the brain, which do different things. They can be affected by different disorders, whether it's ADD, or we were talking about stroke or neurodegenerative illnesses like Alzheimer's disease.

It's what affects those circuits and how they're affected leads to the manifestation of the cognitive deficit or the behavioral deficit. Okay, now with AI, right? because everyone now is relying on AI to do like tasks that they would otherwise not have been able to do, writing emails, putting together sales strategies, decks,

building websites. Are our brains actually getting lazier? Is that actually a thing that can happen? I think if you can lose... Like what happens to our brains if we're just like not using them? That's why they said when you're getting older, it's important to do crossword puzzles and stimulate your brain. I agree.

And in general, I think that's what the evidence might suggest, but I'm going to be, you know, boring and say to you, we don't know if AI is going to make our brains so ineffective at doing the things that we used to do very well. I mean, you remember using maps to navigate, right? I don't even need to be a neuroscientist to figure this one out. That's what I'm saying. I don't know. I can't remember my own phone number, let alone any other phone numbers at this point, because I haven't had to. Yeah, but that's, that's, whether you'd be bad at it if we started all over, right, whether you now had to use the physical map to navigate. I don't know. I would have, I have no clue. Well, we can give it a truce. It's, it's atrophied. I think, again, I'm no neuroscientist from Oxford,

but I would imagine that if you don't use it, you lose it. In general, it's like my muscles, if I'm not working out, even for a week, I feel it. I'm not as strong. I'm not as, you know, toned. But the question would be, my brain is getting... Could you regain it? Chunky.

Could you regain it, those skills? Muscle memory. Yeah, could you regain it, you know, relatively quickly? But if we actually do it, so what I'm concerned about, like, what I think is interesting is, like, when we were kids, we had to memorize our friends' phone number, or we just wouldn't be able to call them. We had to read a map.

We had to do all these things. And, like, we trained our brain constantly. Like, does that mean that the generation that's like my children right now who don't need to remember a phone number, who don't have to do all these basic things, are they going to have like a lazy brain? No, I don't think so. I mean. Or they start learning new things.

Okay, like what? Tell me. Well, the new technology, like how to use. How do you use Snapchat? Wonderful. They can use Snapchat. TikTok. Great.

They're going to be brilliant. They're going to be professors at Oxford because of it. Marbly. No, no. I mean, I don't think there's any reason to fear that human ability, cognitive abilities are going to be killed because this is what everybody said when any new technology came along, right? Yeah, I mean, listen, you can learn how to prompt better. Like, basically, it's like, now it's about, oh, do you know how to prompt AI to get the answer and the information you need? Like,

okay, so, but, so there's different things to be learning, so to speak, in technology that will keep our brains activated. But in the end, we're trying to solve problems. And if you don't solve problems well, you'll screw up and people will notice. And you'll, you know, so, We have to learn new techniques to solve the problems of the modern world. And your kids are going to be able to do that. That's going to happen. Okay. I understand that.

Cultures have changed in technology, right? Human culture has just gone in leaps and bounds. I still think it's really important. That's why we're just becoming a lazy culture, right? Like we don't even go to the grocery store. We order our food. We don't cook. We just use postmates.

Like everything's become so easy. I agree with you. It's like, what are we going to? We could just all sit at home all day, 24 hours a day, watch TV, order our food. Like our society is becoming a very lazy, unless you make a very consorted effort to not be, which is why these habits and routines and creating structures where, you know, you do things are put out there. or else it's very easy to become like literally a plate of mush. I'm remembering the recommendation you quoted right at the beginning of the show that you have no filter.

Yeah, well, it's true. Well, listen, I haven't even started yet. I don't have any filter. That's 100% true. But I just feel like this is like obvious stuff. But like the, okay, so let me just move on from there. Because I got to, I have questions. I think are what you kind of touched upon too, which were, which I think is very important,

which is people who are lonely, who feel isolated, who have no purpose, this is when your brain really starts to decline. So I really want to talk about that because I think that's become so prevalent. And, you know, what I see because of social media, because of what we just talked about, is our society has made it so easy not to socialize, not to deal with people. That, like... Including the tech. Yeah, I'm saying tech has actually made it easier. Like in some ways, yes, they've taken the burden off. of repetitive tasks, taking the burden off of, you know, sending an email with thinking about what to

say because if I use chat GPT, I sound smarter. Meanwhile, I'm more stupid because I use chat GPT and I couldn't have thought of it. But the alternate side of that whole thing is with that technology comes a lot of isolation and loneliness. So my question really is this. What actually happens to the brain when it feels lonely and why do relationships have such a profound impact on our health and longevity? So I think the evidence for that comes from psychology rather than from neuroscience because we don't have enough evidence in this. But the psychology suggests that it's really important in terms of even simple things like

communication abilities, right? So if you are isolated, you lose the ability to have a conversation in this way. 100%. From everything simple from turn taking in this conversation to being curious enough to take that conversation beyond the simple, hello, how are you, how are you doing, to take it to something where you're actually discussing a current event or something that you've both read or something like that. You know, that's a really important part of this. And it seems that that makes people feel well, that the ability to have those kind of interactions with other individuals gives you a boost in terms of your feeling of being well.

Now, exactly what is happening in the brain when that happens. We don't know. We don't know. Okay. So can loneliness actually impair your decision-making then and your cognitive performance? I think that's completely possible, yeah. And the cognitive performance for sure. Yeah.

In terms of everyday decision making, I'm not sure about the evidence for that. Okay. Is there a best, now these are going to be very rapid fire, so just best exercise for the brain. Yeah, I think I would say aerobic exercise. It would be better. If you can do 30-minute exercise two or three times a week where you're actually sweating and you're getting your heart rate up,

that's probably the most important thing to do. But give me some specific. Would you say what's better, weight training or walking for your brain? If you had to decide, I'd go walking or running. Running because it actually elevates your heart rate. Okay. Would you say Pilates or Stairmaster? Stairmaster, yeah.

Because you're against. So you like the things that are much more rigorous. It has to be physical. rigorous for your brain to be activated. I could have told you that, but I'm glad that a professional saying it. Best food for cognition. I'm not sure there is much evidence, apart from the fact that you need to keep that cholesterol level at a reasonable amount because cholesterol is one of these important factors

which affects the vascular risk factors of the brain. It's interesting you say that because if you're a biohacker, they say, oh, that's nonsense and that cholesterol is actually good for you. Oh, cholesterol is important in the sense that lipids, fats, are important in terms of making the neurons. No, but like, you know, like it used to be when, again, when I was younger, right? Butter was like the Antichrist, right? Butter and like eating too much saturated fat, like red meat.

Now it's like talked about to be the panacea for health and wellness. What do you say? In all of these things, you have to have a, you know, you go. ought to be reasonable about this stuff. I eat butter. I read me. But I'm just saying people who have a raised cholesterol level have a higher risk of developing vascular changes in the brain and therefore a higher risk of developing vascular dementia. So people who say, oh, you need to eat blueberries and a lot of omega-3s salmon, I guess, does it do anything? Will I actually? I don't know the evidence that it does anything. Really? Because like for 30 plus years that I know, people are like,

oh, you need to eat your wild salmon and you need to eat your blueberries and you need to have this for your brain. It might make a difference, but I don't know the evidence. You haven't seen the evidence? No. Oh, wow. Okay. I'm not sure anyone's seen the evidence. Well, then where does this all come from?

It's interesting. It's rhetoric that's just out there. Yeah, things take fashions, as you said. Okay, so one brain myth you wish would disappear. Well, I don't want to go back to the dopamine one for you, but I would say that one myth is, that you have a limited capacity to do things. I think, as I said, you have far bigger capacity than you think. One most underrated brain habit.

Sleeping well, that's a brain habit. Yeah. So if you don't sleep well, I mean, people know this already. Does that actually create over time, like a sleepy brain? You know, excuse a pun, but does it actually weaken your brain function over time in a real way? Not just like, oh yeah, I didn't sleep well, so I'll be like groggy and. annoyed tomorrow. Yeah. So the extremes are people who do shift work, and those people have a higher risk

of developing all sorts of diseases, diabetes, obesity, and also cognitive impairment to some extent, right? But even less extreme, when we don't sleep well, we have impaired cognitive performance the next day. Well, yeah, I meant it more chronic, like not just because everyone's wearing, of course, I'm wearing my aura ring. It just gives me more. stress than anything else because I'm always like, did I sleep okay? Did I not sleep okay? A third of the people who come to see me in my clinic with memory problems have either problems with poor sleep, anxiety, or low mood. So it's got to the point where they're really worried about their memory or other abilities and they're coming to seek advice, but we can

actually reassure them that it's not something like dementia that they're developing. it's these things, if they could improve those things, sleep better, become less anxious, perhaps improve their mood. A lot of these things, though, I find are like, a lot of times it's like life that's happening, right? Like if someone is anxious and not sleeping well, it's not their fault. And it's like, okay, it's very easy for a professional, but like, well, just don't lower your stress and sleep better.

Well, yeah, that's great for you to say. But if you have like, you know, a sick child or, you know, a sick child. or a sick parent and you're financially struggling and you have all these problems. It's very hard to get those things in check. I completely understand, but we don't put it like that. I'm not going to say that. Oh, I know you're not. I'm just saying it's funny how like that's, of course these things will make it easier.

That's why. Right. But it's also reassuring for someone to think, oh my goodness, it's not because I'm developing dementia. It's lifestyle. It's something that I might be able to do or a doctor may be able to help me with, right? Well, what I was going to say is after if you're, if you're experienced these things for a long enough period of time, does it become an actual chronic problem? Or can they reverse itself? That was like the bottom line. Yeah, sometimes it becomes so chronic that it's very difficult to

reverse naturally unless some environmental change happen. You know, there were things that were making you really... You made $10 million and you're like, you know, that isn't always... Prince Charming or whatever, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, I guess that would be great. But for most people, it's like as you age and life becomes hard, it's very. It's very, it's very, very easy to be like, oh, yeah, well, just like sleep better when it's really kind of not an easy thing for most people. Well, there are ways in which you could do it, right? But first of all, identify that it's a problem.

Ambien? I'm joking. Yeah, identify it's a problem first, right? I know. So, all right, well, listen, I appreciate your time. I mean, you're obviously a fountain and a wealth of information given where you are and what you're doing. Can you tell people where to find you and if they want to know more about you, what they can do?

Sure. We have a website. If you go to masoodhousaun.org, m-A-U-S-A-I-N.org, you'll find the kinds of research we do, the books are published, the papers we've published, and other resources. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you coming on here. Thank you very much. You guys, grab a copy of his book if you want to know anything or more about your brain. And wait, you don't even have a copy here. It's going to show it for the camera, but that's okay. I'll just, we can just basically, it's called our brain ourselves. And that's it. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks. Thank you very much. Don't forget to subscribe.

Thank you. Bye.