That Neuroscience Guy - Achieving Optimal Brain Function

Episode Date: December 30, 2021

It's been a tough year for most of us, both mentally and physically. We thought it would be a good way to wrap up 2021 by going over all the ways you can improve your mental wellbeing and brain health. In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss the neuroscience behind achieving optimal brain function. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kergolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. 2021 has been an interesting year. We all started the year thinking that COVID would end. Here in British Columbia, where I live, we've been hit by massive forest fires and massive rainfall that caused flooding. And, you know, a lot of people are feeling stressed and anxious. Now, I've talked about some of this stuff before in the past in bits and pieces, but what I thought I'd do today to wrap up the year is talk about ways you can achieve optimal brain function and summarize it. Sort of like a guide to what to do to have the healthiest brain you can. And the reason for that

is you want to be able to deal with the stress and anxiety of COVID or maybe other issues in your life. So here you go. Here's how you achieve optimal brain function. Now I'm going to start with the basics, which I've mentioned before, but I want to summarize them quickly and give you some examples. You don't need supplements or Akai berries or any of this stuff. You need the basics more than anything else. So what are the three basics? the basics more than anything else. So what are the three basics? Well, number one, sleep. Just like your physical body gets tired, your brain gets tired. We experience cognitive fatigue, which I've talked about in the past. That's that state when your brain is literally exhausted and you start making poor choices and you don't respond to stress and anxiety as well.

And probably the biggest thing that sleep does for us is it helps the brain heal. It helps it recover from things like cognitive fatigue. So it's important to get a good night's sleep. And to be clear, for most people in the population, that's between seven and nine hours. It's very, very rare that people can function with less than that for extended periods of time without having a negative impact. The other big thing that sleep does for us is it helps with memory formation. We did a podcast back in season one about the role of sleep, and I specifically focused on the role of sleep and learning. So if you think back to that episode, stage two non-REM sleep, that's when memory formation takes place, which of course is important if you're learning a new sports skill or you're just learning to play a guitar or you're studying for

an exam. A couple of quick reminders here. Good sleep health is really important. So no screens before bed, no caffeine or sugar close to bedtime, and relax before trying to go to sleep. Create an environment that has a positive impact on your sleep. All right, the second pillar for good brain health and achieving optimal brain function is diet. Here in Canada, we have the Canada Food Guide, which suggests that in this day and age, we want to shift towards way more vegetables and fruits, way less sugars and carbohydrates, and keep an eye on the red meats that we eat. Towards the end of the podcast, I'll give you some superfoods for the brain and they're probably not the ones you think they would be. And if you're going to shift your diet to achieve good brain function, remember,

it's very hard for us to change and create new habits. Just, you know, just to snap into, hey, I'm not doing this at all anymore. So small steps. Now I've got a future podcast coming up about habit formation, but the easiest way to think about this is your brain has to adapt slowly to these changes, just like your body adapts slowly to a new environment. So the third pillar, exercise. There's this classic study that I love where they had people perform a math test and then they looked at people that had done aerobic exercise before doing the math test and people that hadn't. And they showed that aerobic exercise had a positive impact on brain function. But anaerobic exercise like lifting weights also works. Dr. Teresa Louie Ambrose at the University of British Columbia has shown pretty clearly that anaerobic

exercise is equally good for brain function. And if you find exercise challenging, it doesn't have to be anything crazy. Just try to walk a little bit more. Walk to the local grocery store. Take a walk around a park. You don't have to become a marathon runner or start lifting massive amounts of weights or pick up a new sport. Just a walk has a positive impact on brain function. So there you go. Three key ways to achieve optimal brain function. Sleep for recovery and memory formation. Diet, which has a positive impact on brain function if you're eating a proper healthy diet. And remember the guidelines have changed from, I know what I grew up on. And exercise, daily exercise, even just a short walk for 15 minutes will have a positive impact on brain function. Now there's more to it than that.

The social connection. So I call this stuff sort of the advanced material. We did the basics. This is the advanced material. There is no doubt that social connection and social interaction has a positive impact on brain function. This is why it's so bad when people get older that sometimes they get locked away and alone and they just never get out of the house. So they don't have that isolation. And that has a negative impact on brain function. Your amygdala starts firing differently, the prefrontal cortex doesn't respond as well. And this is also why you can use isolation as a form of torture.

Putting people in extremely isolated environments has a negative impact on that social connection. So make an effort to engage. You know, in this day and age, we've all zoomed way too much, but you zoom to your advantage or agree to meet a friend for a walk. Most of that is allowed under the restrictions we're facing with Omicron and COVID. And if you know people who are socially isolated, engage them, reach out to them and have that chat, even if it's for five minutes.

Another pillar in the advanced material is mental activity. Now is not the time, as tempting as it would be, to be a couch potato and just watch television. In fact, this is why you can actually make a case that video games are good for you, or at least they're better than TV. TV doesn't really engage your brain. Now, if you're watching a documentary and you're finding it super interesting, then maybe it is to some extent. But if you're just watching reruns of Friends, possibly not. You know, you'll laugh and it seems like you're engaged, but you're not really thinking. And this is why things like Sudoku became popular. They engage the brain. You know,

take up a new mental activity, something that challenges you. Learn to build a website. You know, read books that make you think. Join social clubs that force mental engagement. Just basically anything that gets the prefrontal cortex going. And we all know that feeling. When the prefrontal cortex is thinking, we know that we're engaged and we're concentrating. And that's what you want to do daily, if not more.

And in this day and age, there's new activities that have been shown to have a positive impact on brain function. You know, I lumped them together, but basically breathing activities, mindfulness, meditation, even yoga, these have all been shown to have a positive impact on brain function. They reduce stress, they reduce anxiety, and they increase relaxation. Now, I won't spend too much here because we do have an entire episode on mindfulness and meditation, but these are things you can do. And if you think to yourself, I'm a bit intimidated by yoga because I'm not as flexible as I used to be. And while I've done some work in the meditation space, it's never truly appealed to me. But what you can do is just sit quietly at

home, close your eyes and focus on your breathing. I've made this a part of my daily routine and I can assure you it has a positive impact on brain function. And of course, because I'm me, I've measured this with EEG. We put on one of our portable headsets and you can literally see changes in brain activity if you just sit there quietly, close your eyes and focus on breathing. Just try not to fall asleep. Now, here are some myths and some problem areas. Sugar has been shown to have a really negative impact on brain function. And not natural sugars, but those artificial sugars that we get from candy and chocolate bars and are in all the fast food we eat.

Research from Harvard has shown that those high blood glucose levels, they basically change the brain's functional connectivity. That's how well the different regions of the brain work together. And you want the different regions of the brain to work together. If one region is just off on its own doing its thing, well, heck, that's not good because the brain works in parallel. It's not a serial process. And what I mean by that is while there is a flow of activity through the brain, it's flowing through multiple regions at the same time. And you need those areas to be connected and working together. And sugar has actually been shown to cause brain atrophy. In other words, it makes the brain shrink. So too much sugar in your diet is literally shrinking your brain and you don't need a neuroscientist to tell you that

that's not a great thing to have happen. That's basically what happens with Alzheimer's and dementia and high sugar diets can lead you there. It also leads to physiological issues like small vessel disease, which is basically a restriction of blood flow in the brain, and that causes cognitive difficulty. When the brain is active, basically the blood oxygen levels, that's what recharges your brain. And if you restrict blood flow, then your brain will not function as well. And if this gets severe enough, it leads to something called vascular dementia, which is a specific form of dementia brought on by reduced blood flow in the brain. Now, here's one I've argued about with people because I love a good steak. Now, if you're like me and you love a good steak,

the evidence is kind of equivocable. And what I mean by that is there is some evidence that suggests eating too much red meat has a negative impact on brain function. But the evidence isn't overwhelming and it's kind of a 50-50 split. In fact, some studies have shown that red meat consumption promotes brain growth. So yay, we should eat lots of red meat. Well, no. Sadly, you have to look at the physiology as well. And the physiology suggests that too much red meat in your diet isn't good for

you, which is why the New Canada Food Guide and a lot of food people around the world have recommended a reduction in red meat in your diet. So good for the brain, but maybe not good for the rest of it. Now, superfoods, we've all seen the rages, you know, acai berries are one I like to focus on because for a while it was, you know, have to have acai berries and they put acai in everything. And sadly, there's just not a lot of evidence for these kinds of superfoods. You know, occasionally there's a very small sample study that's run that shows, yes, maybe this food has a positive impact, but a lot of the time, no. But luckily, the medical authorities in North America have sort of agreed on some superfoods. So here's some things that you should eat. Oily fish, no doubt positive impact on brain function.

Dark chocolate. So if you want to get your chocolate fix, great, just switch to dark chocolate. Berries are overall are good for you. So acai berries fit in there. And I guess my point is, is that they're just not better than other berries. They're just a berry. Nuts and seeds, whole grains, avocados, peanuts, eggs, broccoli, kale, and soy products in general. eggs, broccoli, kale, and soy products in general. So there's a list of things that you want to add to your diet to sort of help supercharge your brain. What's another thing we can look at? Well, one that I've thought a lot about is caffeine. I'm not much of a caffeine person. I personally don't drink coffee and never had. And when I started doing some research on this, it was interesting because early research actually

showed positive impacts on concentration. So the early verdict if you hadn't looked at the recent research would be that yeah a cup of coffee in the morning probably is a good thing to do. However more recent research basically shows that caffeine increases energy metabolism throughout the brain but it decreases cerebral blood flow. And if you have a reduction in cerebral blood flow, this is what we talked about in terms of sugar, you're going to have poor brain function. And again, the reason in case you forgot it is the fact that when neurons in the brain fire and are active, you need that blood flow and the oxygen in that blood to help recharge those

neurons so they can keep doing their job. So while early research shows that caffeine might be good for us, more recent research would definitely say you got to be careful there and probably not drink too much. There's a lot of products that are marketed as brain supplements, such as vitamins. And adding these things to your diet in general doesn't do much for you. The reality with a lot of supplements and vitamins is that you're putting so much into your system at once, your body's just discarding it. You're much better off to find foods that naturally have the vitamins you're looking for and absorb them naturally through those foods. I've got a couple more things to talk about. Brain games like Lumosity. This is one I've got

a pet peeve with because when Lumosity came out, they were advertising it as a way to improve memory and improve attention. And the simple truth, it doesn't do that. You can play those games on Lumosity as much as you want, but they're not going to make your brain function better. In fact, there is a famous letter written by a group of neuroscientists that spoke to this saying, yeah, no, that's not a true claim. However, there is one thing that Lumosity is good for in these other games that engage you this way. Well, they do provide you some sort of mental activity. So if you think back to one of those advanced topics,

they do do that. So don't play Lumosity to make your brain better in terms of having better memory or better attention, but do play it to engage your brain. I mentioned this when I did some of the EEG stuff and did the tech marketing. There's a lot of tech devices that are out there that enhance brain function. The big one that's being sold these days is neurofeedback. I'd strongly suggest you listen to that episode, but the reality is most of these devices don't do what they claim they'll do.

They're based on limited data and the evidence just isn't there. Now I'm saying, I'm not saying they don't work. Neurofeedback, I'm kind of on the fence on. You know, some days I think neurofeedback's a great idea, other days I don't. So the answer is a definitive maybe. You're better to stick to the first things that I talked about. And last but not least, before I review, perhaps the best thing you can do for brain health, if you can, and this can be tricky, is achieve a positive mental outlook. The brain, you know, it's kind of like a placebo effect almost, but your brain functions better when you're happy and you have a positive outlook.

And I've talked about this one before, but find things that make you happy and do them. That's another great way to have positive brain health. Now, I won't review everything here, but I'm going to review the basics quickly. Things you can do to combat the stress and anxiety of COVID and achieve optimal brain function. Sleep, diet, and exercise. Get enough sleep, take a look at your diet and reduce sugars

and carbohydrates, and exercise daily if you can. A simple walk, that's all you need. And for the advanced stuff, social connection. Make sure you're engaging other people. Make sure you're talking with them because that has a positive impact on brain function. Mental activity. Do things that challenge your brain. The brain isn't a muscle, but think of it like a muscle where you can exercise it by doing things that cause you to think more. And I use Sudoku as an example. And last but not least, try something new. Breathing, mindfulness, meditation, and yoga have all been shown to have a positive impact on brain function. So these are all things you can do to have a positive impact on brain function. So these are all things you can do

to have a positive impact on brain function and put your brain in an optimal position to drill and put your brain in an optimal position to not only deal with the stress and anxiety of the world like it is today, but also just so you make better decisions and are happier overall. So this is our last episode of 2021,

but not the last episode of the podcast. I just want to thank to all the listeners. When we launched the podcast back in February, we weren't sure what to expect, but we're closing in on 50,000 downloads. We've penetrated over 80 countries. And in December, even without this episode, we've already set a record and had almost 9,000 downloads in one month. So thank you so much for listening. And remember, you can email us ideas. We're trying to incorporate some

and we'll definitely be using more in season three, but it's thatneuroscienceguy at gmail.com. Also, follow me on Twitter, at thatneuroscienceguy. I post stuff about research I'm doing in my lab. And for instance, I did an interview for a local paper the other day, which sort of inspired me for this episode where I was talking about the impact of COVID on the brain and what you can do about it. And we have a YouTube channel. I'll admit it's not that much, that neuroscience guy. But our goal for 2022 is to blow up the YouTube channel and add lots of content for you there.

Thank you again so much for listening. I hope you had a Merry Christmas and you have a Happy New Year. We will get another episode out in the very near future. December has been a challenging month for us with the holidays and everything that's going on in the world, but we will keep bringing you new episodes. My name is Olive Kregolson, and I'm that neuroscience guy. Thank you so much for listening and see you in 2022.