That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Kali featuring Paul McCarthy

Episode Date: January 15, 2023

We've talked about how both exercise and complex tasks can be beneficial for your brain. But what happens when you combine them? In today's episode of That Neuroscience guy, we have guest Paul McCarthy on to talk about cognitive Kali, his program for using a Filipino martial arts style to enhance your brain. 

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. Today, we've got another guest. I'm really happy to introduce Paul McCarthy. He's an old friend of mine, but he's also the founder of Cognitive Kali and also the director of martial arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. So Paul, let's just leap right into this. Welcome to the podcast, first of all. Thanks for joining us. It's great to see you, Olaf. It's been quite a while and I'm looking forward to having a chat properly. Sounds great. As you might have guessed, Paul's from England, but we actually met in Indiana University.

We were roommates during our master's degrees and did some science, but also had a fair bit of fun. I'm not going to lie. I'm assuming you don't want those stories on this podcast. Well, we can at least mention that we are self-proclaimed experts at the video game worms. That's well established. Well, absolutely. And of course, you know, you being my protege in that game is an important

part of that story. We're not going to go down that road of back and forth on who's better. All right, Paul, let's leap right into the neuroscience and the science of this. What is Cognitive Kali? I'm assuming most of our listeners have never heard of Kali, let alone cognitive Kali. Absolutely. Yeah. So first off, like, um, it's a cool, it's a cool sounding name for my, for my method that I've been kind of developing for, you know, over, over 10, almost 15 years now and we're in 2023. And, you know, so I think of it as just a method to use movements, predominantly movements from martial arts, cause that's my main vocation, to improve cognitive functions and specifically executive functions housed in the prefrontal cortex. So things like working memory, response inhibition, creative problem solving, that type of stuff that can be applied to anything, to your daily life, to your relationships, and it's not just about learning how to kick

punch or hit things with sticks. Kali is an ancient martial arts from the Philippines, predominantly. It's well known for its kind of progressively complex movements using these two sticks, rattan sticks, and some other weapons. And the reason I kind of like honed in on this art, as opposed to many of the other different martial arts that exist, is it has the potential to create almost an unlimited number of different combinations and movements. So you can consistently challenge the brain to learn more when training. And I think that's the key thing is that we have to keep our brains active to stave off, you know, cognitive decline or any other kinds of problems.

to stave off you know cognitive decline or any other kinds of problems i was gonna say yeah so you know on this podcast we've talked about the fact that it's pretty well established in fact i'd say it's proven that aerobic exercise like walking or running has a positive impact on brain function and brain health and some work by a friend of mine at ubc and others has shown that you know even anaerobic exercises like weightlifting are good for brain function, even as, you know, as we age or even when we're young and healthy. But the idea, I guess the idea is that cognitive Kali is potentially better than say, just riding an exercise bike or doing some bicep curls. And I think you hinted at that by the complexity of the movements. Yeah, absolutely. That's the hypothesis. So, you know, we came up kind of doing science, right, in our respective programs at Indiana University.

I kind of went the administrative sport management route and you stayed in academics. But that stuck with me for a while. And specifically what you were doing back then stuck with me for a while. And Tom, our mutual friend as well in the modal learning kind of aspect of things. I was fascinated, but probably not, you know, definitely not as dedicated as both of you to following the academic side of things. But it stuck with me. So our hypothesis is that progressively complex movement will enhance cognitive function greater than well-learned or rote movement. Not that those things are not really good for the brain exercise we know does wonders for the brain from a you know cellular biological and physiological level what we think is that combining

that exercise you're getting a specific heart rate or specific resistance up with something that kind of makes you your brain scramble up a little bit jams it up kind of like when doing word searches or sudokus or things that make you really kind of think with it with your exercise we think the accumulative effect of that is going to have a greater impact on cognitive functions and then with regards to Kali or martial arts in general my theory is and and this that you know the there's some emerging research which which supports my hypothesis with different kinds of exercise uh you know complex wrestling those types of things that studies have been done my theory I don't think there's any research out there is that when doing Kali or some types of

martial arts there's a little bit of risk involved. And when that happens, it can potentially knock our brains into the kind of fight or flight response, that very old brain. And potentially that can enhance our learning a little bit better. That's my theory. I don't even know whether there's a scientific background for that. But that's what I think. Well, it is well grounded and you know the my listeners have heard some of this before but if you look at simple versus complex

movements just that idea alone right very simple movements only require the prefrontal cortex to execute as a movement gets more complex you bring in motor planning regions like the supplementary motor area and the premotor cortex, and the more complex a movement gets, again, you're engaging the brain more. So there's no doubt about that. I think what tweaks me when I think about this is, I think what you said, what has always appealed to me, because you and I have talked about cognitive quality for years now, is that the initial stage of learning is cognitive. So when we go through three stages of learning and the first thing that we're doing is we go through a cognitive stage and then we go to an

associative stage and then eventually an autonomous stage where the movement's automatic. Now once the movement's automatic, you're 100% right, you don't re-engage the prefrontal cortex. But what we know is that people plateau, right? So they, they stop improving or at least the improvements become minimal. And a very trendy thing to do at high level coaching is to re try to restart that curve. And one thing they do is, is, is to, to introduce new movement patterns. So I think the increasing complexity of, of, uh, complexity of cognitive K quality lends itself perfectly to your hypothesis. Yeah, that's something that I kind of tried to do very early on in the program.

You know, the idea came to me when I was working at Florida Gulf Coast University. I didn't have a lot of play. I didn't have anywhere to train. So it was I had to take what I knew and I was training up some of my students. And that got old real fast because back then I didn't actually know that much. So we started combining the drills that we knew in just different orders. And we said, right, we're going to do it, you know, one, two, three, and then three, two, one. And we're going to try and do that three times in a row. And we're not allowed to leave the gym until we're finished and and i you know i started to feel the impacts

on my performance so i i introduced that to the ucla football team when we trained them for four four or five years um a while ago and we had some great results from the athletes doing that and the same with the water polo team they got a several national championships while we were training them because we were we were challenging what they they were really good at and they were really good at what they knew but when we kind of pushed a little bit further that I think uh opened them up a bit so Paul the football bit you know and I know you've worked with other teams but I found that fascinating because you told me you were using Kali with a football team I just had this vision of a bunch of UCLA football players with sticks on the field now is that what happened and how did it work and how did you tell us a bit more about how it

benefited them uh yeah we we we started off doing some some different types of movements so like I said cognitive khali I include lots of different martial arts and different movement patterns that I've learned from the sports I've played and from the movement systems I've trained in. We did try with the sticks a couple of times and that was stopped pretty quickly. It wasn't as beneficial. I think if we'd had more time, they would learn some great stuff with the sticks. What the sticks does is really turbocharges the speed of the hands. But we needed something a little bit quicker, a little bit more intentional and applicable in the moment so we so we use movements from the empty hand side of kali uh kali has 12 different areas and you

know just using the weapons is is one one or two of those and so the empty hand stuff would look similar to wrestling it would look similar to judo or something to to people who don't uh kind of see the differences between these arts and it was about about, you know, being able to manipulate balance and manipulate movement, use movement against them. And we had some good results. You know, I'm not the biggest guy in the world. And these D linemen were, you know, two, three, 350 pounds. And I was able to show them how structure was, you know,

sometimes more efficient than just having big muscles. Yeah, I find this fascinating. And again, there's some good evidence for this. I remember I was listening to a former coach of the Canadian women's national ice hockey team. And when he took over coaching them, he said these women were amazing hockey players, but horrible athletes.

And he was shocked at just how they could only move in certain ways. certain ways so he actually with them he taught them how to juggle i remember he had them playing table tennis just doing things to get them moving differently so i could see how collie would would fit in there perfectly and and again for the listeners i i i you know the first time paul told me about this i went to youtube and and i did that and i should mention you should look up collie but paul gave an amazing tedx talk i think it was about six years ago now, but there's some great demonstrations of Cognitive Kali on there. So if you go Paul McCarthy, TEDx, you'll find him. And you can see him with some demos and telling us all about Cognitive Kali and how it works. Now, before we go to my next question, I figure this is a good

time to bring this in. Because in my mind, one of your claims to fame is that you've trained with Dan Inosanto. And for those of you who don't know who Dan Inosanto is, he's one of Bruce Lee's, I think it was three former students that he sort of said that you were the people to share what I know. Tell us a bit about Dan Inosanto and that. Well, that's interesting because, you know, really it's down to Guru Dan. I call him Guru Dan. Guru just means teacher.

He's my teacher. I've been training with Guru for 10, 15 years at the Inosanto Academy here in Los Angeles. And he's an incredibly humble man. He's incredibly intelligent and has an incredible wealth of knowledge of all martial arts, really. His relationship with Bruce Lee was that he was asked by one of his teachers at Parker to take Bruce Lee around when he came to Los Angeles for a Long Beach karate tournament. And I couldn't tell you the date. You could easily look that up. And they became friends.

They started training together. And obviously, Bruce lee's impact on the martial arts world was tremendous and and guru dan has kept that up over the over the decades he's been training it was it was a little story that guru dan tells during seminars during class sometimes that really kind of triggered myself and another professor at u UCLA to look into the scientific backing of this process. And it was a story of a student in Virginia, I believe, who came up to him after the seminar and said, I really wanted to thank you. I had a car accident a while back and I had amnesia from it and I couldn't remember my wife or my kids. And he attributed getting his memory back to doing something called the Heaven Six drill.

It's a very well-known drill in Kali. It involves two of the sticks crossing the midline. It's fast-paced. There's impact, there's smell, there's all kinds of stuff going on and he really attributed getting his memory back to that. And so we were like, you know, crossing the midline, there was some interesting stuff there, research that was there. Why don't we look into this and that we were able to do a pilot study at ucla um dr j o'shea kind of

headed that up with dr robert builder from the samuel institute and we did uh got some tsg money and did a small pilot study and got some interesting raw data we didn't have enough to publish but it was a good start to looking at what what are the impacts of these types of movements yeah well i find it fascinating like we said earlier you know the the scientific basis for this so the neuroscientific basis is makes sense right and even though this specifically hasn't been studied all the pieces are there and in fact you and i have talked about running some studies and then that covid thing kind of got in the way, but we'll have to, to fire that up again in 2023, because I would love to peer inside the brains of people doing cognitive Kali while they do it. It would be, it would be fascinating. Now you talked about sort of your

recent past, but you know, whenever I have a guest on the podcast, I just like to say, well, so where did this start for you? So, you know, you're growing up in the United Kingdom and now you're, you're, you're in la working at ucla and director of martial arts and cognitive collie and danny desantos what what how did that start tell us your story well i think we got to go with the fun part of the story um which is i was working at a summer camp in maine and uh there were a few other brits there and we wanted to do a road trip uh after after the camp ended so So we purchased a vehicle. And you know the vehicle I'm talking about because you've rode in it many times. My VW, 1978 VW camper van that we call Champagne. We bought that and I actually ended up taking it

over to the West Coast to here to Los Angeles and intended to bring it back to the East Coast and ship it back to England. I had it booked on a ship. Really bad decision. I'm glad it didn't work out. What happened was that it broke down in Bloomington, Indiana. I had some good friends there, Tom and Louisa, who introduced me to John Shea, who is the chair of the Department of Kinesiology. He offered me basically a full ride to come and do my master's there and that's that's how i jumped in and one of the first things i did before making this decision this life-changing decision was you know are there any martial arts at indiana turns out it's the largest program in the country

so that was an easy decision for me to make so that's that's how i got into martial arts my first my first um khali class was actually a class in modern Arnis, which is a different word for a similar set of arts. And then I took some more Inosanto based from Guru Dan's kind of lineage. And that's how I got into the Kali. I did a short stint in Florida where I was working, like I mentioned, and then I was able to get the job at UCLA and discovered that the Inosanto Academy was only just down the road. and discovered that the Innocento Academy was only just down the road. And that's how I dove into these arts with the kickboxing and the shoot and the seal up and the Jeet Kune Do and the Kali and everything that I love about martial arts. So that's how it kind of got started.

I always like hearing how people get into academia. You know, for you, it was a breakdown. For me, I was in a train station in Venice, Italy, and I Googled best kinesiology graduate program for a master's degree. And it turns out to be Indiana University, which was my favorite college basketball team. And I was still coaching basketball. And I took that as a sign that I must go to Indiana. And then, of course, I pivoted and fell into neuroscience.

So I find Cognitive Cali fasting, and i know the listeners will is there a website they can go to for more information where would you send them yeah we've actually just redesigned our website uh cognitive khali.com will get you to the information if you are already sold you can go to cognitive khali.online and that's where all of our online classes are and you can learn on your own or take a live class we've got a bunch of free webinars coming up in uh february of this year so if you wanted to jump in and learn a bit more those are going to be available soon and we don't we don't really have show notes so i'll just point out to everyone it's cognitive the word cognitive collie is with a k um and also we we do have my blog on that neuroscience guy.com so i'll dump some information some links there so

people can find things. Before we say goodbye, is there anything else you'd like to share with us? You know, the one thing that I'm always asked, it's actually, I was interviewed by a magazine out here in Los Angeles recently. And one of the questions was, it was about being an entrepreneur.

And it was, you know, what's your biggest business success? And I tried to rack my brain, you know, I'm definitely not a millionaire. None of my videos have gone viral. So really, my success I found is in the ability to help people. And that's where this has been driven from is that, you know, I'm a teacher, I've been in education all of my adult life, I want to help others. And that's what Cognitive Kali is about as well. And so, you know, my basic success was helping Daniel stand up unaided, who was in the TEDx video, you know, Daniel, who has cerebral palsy or, you know, my Parkinson's client who wants to become, you know, become or stay independent longer because of the degenerative disease that he has. that he has. Those are my successes and it's all about helping others. We've got some new certified instructors coming through. They just went through my instructor certification program.

So we're going to try and really kind of get this method out there so that we can help a few more people. I think that's what's fascinating about it. And again, I'd encourage people to check out Paul's TEDx talk. I'll put a link to it on the blog. But yeah, the work he's done with patient recovery is just fascinating. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast, Paul. It's been a pleasure having you. And I know my listeners will find this really interesting. It's great to see you, Olaf. Can't wait to see you on the worms pitch. There you go. Banana bombs and concrete donkeys. So there you go, everyone. That is martial arts in the brain and specifically Cognitive Kali

and my good friend, Paul McCarthy. Just remember, you can support us via Patreon. Even a dollar a month helps out and all the funds go to graduate students in the Kregolson Lab. They don't go to me at all. And there's our Etsy store. There's links there on thatneuroscienceguy.com.

We do have some stuff on YouTube. It's growing. If you've got ideas for the podcast, remember you can follow me on Twitter at thatneuroscienceguy.com. We do have some stuff on YouTube, but it's growing. If you've got ideas for the podcast, remember you can follow me on Twitter at that neuroscienceguy and DM me. Most of the episodes in season four that we're in now have come from you, the listeners. And of course, thank you so much for listening to the podcast and please subscribe. My name is Olaf Kregolson and I'm that neuroscience guy. Thanks so much for listening, and see you on Wednesday for another Neuroscience Bite.