The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Supercharge Your Brain: How to Maintain a Healthy Brain Throughout Your Life by James Goodwin

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

Supercharge Your Brain: How to Maintain a Healthy Brain Throughout Your Life by James Goodwin 'A remarkable book, which turns cutting-edge science into simple strategies for a healthier life that all of us should use.' - Phillip Polakoff ----------------------------------------------- The definitive guide to keeping your brain healthy for a long and lucid life, by one of the world's leading scientists in the field of brain health and ageing. The brain is our most vital and complex organ. It controls and coordinates our actions, thoughts and interactions with the world around us. It is the source of personality, of our sense of self, and it shapes every aspect of our human experience. Yet most of us know precious little about how our brains actually work, or what we can do to optimise their performance. Whilst cognitive decline is the biggest long-term health worry for many of us, practical knowledge of how to look after our brain is thin on the ground. In this ground-breaking new book, leading expert Professor James Goodwin explains how simple strategies concerning exercise, diet, social life and sleep can transform your brain health paradigm, and shows how you can keep your brain youthful and stay sharp across your life. Combining the latest scientific research with insightful storytelling and practical advice, Supercharge Your Brain reveals everything you need to know about how your brain functions, and what you can do to keep it in peak condition.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here. We always appreciate it. Have I ever told you that before? Thousands of shows. I never told you that before. We really appreciate you after 13 years of continuing to tune into the show and see what's going on.

But you know what? If you haven't pressed that bell notification button on YouTube.com, put that on your to-do list. Because, you know, it just makes you feel like you accomplish something you join a family that doesn't judge you and what things are better than that really you get something done you can just leave early if you press that bell notification button on youtube because you've done your work for the day and accomplished you're at the peak of your mountain anyway guys i'll tell the groups on facebook linkedin twitter instagram see everything we're doing over there our big uh linked LinkedIn newsletter over there is killing it in our 132,000 member LinkedIn group. Go join that thing as well.

Go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Fosh. You can see my books over there and also all the books of other brilliant people reading or viewing as well. Today we have Professor James Goodwin, PhD. He's on the show. He's going to be talking to us about his exciting book, Supercharge Your Brain, How to Maintain a Healthy Brain Through Your Life. It just came out April 1st, 2021. I believe that we have that day right. There we go. And so we're going to be talking about his book, How to Supercharge Your Brain. He even just added for the U.S. market, special chapter on COVID. So we'll be talking about some of that data as well. So before we get to him, he is the director of the Brain Health Network

and a special advisor to the Global Council on Brain Health. He holds an honorary chair at the University of Exeter Medical School, is a visiting professor in physiology at the University of... Oh, man, I knew that was going to get me. Loughborough. Loughborough. Loughborough. We went over this in the pre-show, and I still, like, brain farted on it.

And he's clear. I need to go back to university. And he is also a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He's a former officer and a graduate of Sandhurst. He lives in Devon. Devon. I've got to work on my British vowels or something. And when he's not writing books, he enjoys country pursuits and walking his dogs.

Welcome to the show, James. How are you? Chris, it's great to be on the show. Great to be talking to your audience. And I hope we can entertain them as well as inform your readers. I hope they buy my book. There you go. There you go.

And I probably need your books because my brain clearly isn't working this morning. I can't even pronounce universities. So give us your.coms, your plugs, where people can find you on the interwebs. If people go to brain.com, they'll find out all about the Brain Health Network. And most of the messages and information I'll be giving today you'll find on that website. You'll also find a click on to buy the book as well. You can also go to Pegasus Books, New York City. If you go on to their website, you'll find the book also.

And I have a personal website, drjamesgoodwin.com, and you can find little bits and pieces on there about me and about the book as well. There you go. So what motivated you to want to write this book? I think you've written a few other books too as well. What motivated me to write the book was a phone call out of the blue. Some people might call it serendipity or fate from Penguin Books in London. And the phone call said, is that Professor Goodwin?

Yes, it is. Would you like to write a book for us on brain health? I was a little bit stunned to get a call like that from nowhere. And I said, how did you find me? And they said, they looked on the Global Council for Brain Health website. That's an organization sponsored by AARP. Many of your audience know of them. And they said, we wanted someone from Britain, and there were only two of you on that side to write the book, and you're the first person we called. So that's how it all started. I didn't have to write a book and then hawk it around, all the different publishers, getting rejection after rejection. Many of my friends and colleagues

have done that. It fell into my lap. So that's what you call a bit of good luck, Chris, and it's worked out real well. Yeah, I just got, anytime I called for, hey, you want to publish my book, they hung up on me. So I just published my own. Anyway, so give us an overall arcing view of this book. The book really attempts to let people know how to look after their brains right across

their lifetime. What about people who don't have a brain? I see a lot of those on Facebook. Yeah, there are people living out of the ether. We know this. But anybody who can chew gum and walk in a straight line simultaneously is going to benefit from my book. What I really wanted to do was dispel what I call the three lies in one, the big myth about how we think.

And that is, as soon as you get to retirement age, or even before then, you start to go into decline, it's inevitable, and you can do nothing about it. And that myth is widespread, not only on your side of the war, so we're in Britain as well. And what the book does is to scupper all those lies and bring a bit of optimism into people's minds. So is this something we need to do throughout our whole life? Is this something we should just start worrying about? Like I hit 54, I think, in a couple of days.

And I have more supplements and more vitamins and more pills I have to take every day. And those are just the ones that are giving me my drug dealer. No, I'm just kidding. It's a joke, people. Don't do that. But no, I just, people last night, they're like, hey, here's some more workout pills for your gym work. I'm like, come on, man.

So is this something we need to be doing all of our lives? How's that work? You're quite right about the internet you go on there looking for something to help your brain and people will be trying to sell you some snake oil chris there's no one silver bullet that is going to cure all the problems that people might have with their thinking skills you know throughout their lives it's not any single thing you do on one day it's the single things you do every day that's the thing that matters and there's no uh easy way but it's not difficult there's no easy way but it's not difficult so you can't pop a tablet and then suddenly two or three days later you're thinking

better your memory's working okay you're putting your words together. That doesn't happen, but you can do simple things which are not onerous, not difficult, that will enable you to stay sharp and stay sharp until the last years of your life. So what are a few of those simple things that we can touch on? People like to hear the first one I'll mention, and that is there's a lot to be said for physical exercise. But it's not what you think. Most people believe that if they simply jog or cycle or play tennis or swim 30, 40 minutes a day, that's going to be the answer.

There's another side to the coin. And the other side of the coin is if you're a couch potato and you have a sedentary lifestyle, so you're sitting down for eight to 10 hours a day, then the effects of that exercise can be completely obliterated by that lazy lifestyle. What you have to do is on the one hand exercise, and on the other hand, make sure that what I call you declare war on the chair. It's easy, Chris, it's easy to spend eight to ten hours a day sitting down. We ride to work. We sit down at work. We sit down to enjoy things.

We're in front of the laptop. It's easy to do eight to ten hours. And even if you exercise, that isn't enough to overcome the effects of that bad sitting down life. Oh, wow. Wow. Yeah, wow. Wow. Yeah, I've noticed since I started going to the gym more in the last five months, I've been really just going every day. And I've noticed that it's made a huge difference in my mental state,

my sharpness, my focus. I think my eyesight's improved a little bit. It's had a huge effect on me that I was just like, wow, I should have been doing this a long time ago. Yeah, Chris, do you want to know a big secret? Do you want to know how that works? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's the litmus test. That's the acid test.

Can we explain how it works? Sure. When you're at the gym and you're on the cycle or you're on the treadmill or you're lifting the weights and whatever, your muscles are producing special proteins or hormones and these leak out into the blood. They get flushed into the brain, and there they produce a chemical which promotes the growth of new brain cells.

That's an astonishing discovery. But best of all, I think it was 2019, a team in Spain and Madrid, they found that the brain produces new brain cells every decade of your life. So from your 20s, 30s, all the way through until your 90s. And, of course, the old theory was the gas tank is full, and when you're in your 20s, you use it up as you drive through life, and then by the time you get to 90, you're on empty. Oh, wow. Yeah, that was the old thinking. That is now known to be false.

And the great news is that you do the right things, exercise and activity, a good lifestyle, good active lifestyle is one of them that will keep those new brain cells being produced. Oh, wow. So we need to make sure that those brain cells are keeping producing. That probably explains why older people are smarter than younger people. There's a great study in Edinburgh called The Disconnected Mind. And they tested about 1,000 people right into their 60s and 70s.

And all these people had their IQ measured when they were 11 on the same day. Scottish government measured the IQ of its whole nation of children in 1947. And these people now, 70s and 80s, they all had their brains tested again, their genetics done, their blood work done, all of this. And what they found was some of the people in their 70s and 80s were doing better than they were when they were 11 years of age, when the brain is really sharp. They were doing better in their old age. So this idea that we're going to get worse throughout our lives is not strictly true. So what are some other steps that we can take to have better brain health?

I missed the first part of your question, Chris. What are some more steps that we can do to increase our brain health? Sure. Another big one is diet. But again, this is not what you think. One of the things about diet is it's not just the nutrients you swallow, it's how much. And if we overeat and we have too many calories, then that's going to suppress brain function. And if you do that over the whole of your life, by the time you get 70 or 80, you'll be in trouble. There was a great study done in Munster in Germany. It was a joint

study between the US, I believe it was Harvard or Yale. And this study looked at people who cut their calories, not their nutrients, not the food value, but their calories by 10 percent, increased their memory by 20 percent over the course of about three to six months. Yeah. So we know that if you're filling your face full of food every day and you've got you've got struggling to get into your jeans on a daily basis, right? That is not a good idea for your brain over the course of your life. And actually, cutting down by 10% of your normal calorie intake every day is not that hard to do. Yeah. You just cut out, I think, 20% of those shakes that people get. They call coffee from Starbucks. I've gone to Starbucks. I used to go to Starbucks to see what people were getting there.

And I'm just like, it's basically a candy shake. It's not coffee. It's a candy shake. You're just like injecting sugar in your mainstream. So how important is some of the stuff in your book? Or do you talk about dementia, Alzheimer's? There's a lot of late stage things that affect brains and people that don't have that, those issues yet, hopefully they won't get them. Some things are inevitable. Is there ways to try and make your brain stronger and healthier so that maybe you can last longer through those downturns? The development of something like Alzheimer's disease is a long-term job, Chris. It doesn't

happen overnight and you don't suddenly get to be at risk from it on your 65th birthday. It doesn't happen like that, Philip. What happens is a process called neurodegeneration, a decline in the number and the working of the brain cells starts in some people when they're in their 30s, 30, 35, 40. And it carries on a pace for 30 years until people start to notice that the daily things they try to do, looking at their investments and adding up the numbers, working out their shopping bill as they're going around, remembering names, where have I put my keys and all this suddenly starts to quick. And that's at the long end of that process. So it isn't something that happens just when you get old. So actually countering neurodegeneration, putting your boots on the

throat of aging throughout your life is something that's really important. What about, well, you talk in your book too about how important sleep is in social life. Let's talk about that a little bit. We can bring in a bit about COVID here. Social life is enormously important. Why? Because 1.5 million years ago, we became hunter-gatherers. And if you were one-on-one with an antelope, and if there are people who hunt on your show,

they'll know this, one-on-one with a white-tailed deer, an antelope or a zebra, as people did in Africa where we evolved, you're going nowhere and you just starve to death in no time. The secret to that was working in groups. So it became a survival imperative in the brain. And our brain has got what we call social cognition. That's the capability to mix with other people. There's a great experiment done again between Germany and the United States. Group scientists looked at some chimpanzee infants and some human infants. And on the physical prowess, they were neck and neck. They could climb, throw, jump, leap, crawl, run, all this stuff, neck and neck. They were equal. But when it came to social

activity, the human infants, talking about kids two years of age, were head and shoulders above the chimpanzees. They could form groups. They could divide up the work. They could appoint leaders. The leaders would get people to do things. Their social ability was totally amazing. That's all in our brains now. You try and shut that down, you damage the brain. And what happens is levels of what we call inflammation rise in the blood. And that increases neurogeneration,

increases the risk for dementia, makes the brain work less well. Harvard did a study, and this is a huge number. It was 8,000 people over 12 years. Those who said they were lonely, their brains declined 20% quicker than those who said they were not lonely. Yeah, because you're just walking around your house talking to yourself. I found myself doing that a lot during COVID when I was trying to write a book.

I did the worst thing ever. I tried to write a book, and I went on an intermittent fasting diet. I'm losing my brain trying to write a book, and you can't go anywhere. I think we're all mentally damaged after COVID lockdowns. I think we all need international or national mental health programs. But it would help if it would just get damn over so we could hang out and go do stuff again. What about, I've heard, let's talk about sleep because a lot of people don't understand. It's really important to get your sleep.

And the older I've gotten, the more I realized that, like, I had a hard night last night where I worked out really hard with my legs. I took a bunch of protein and I was just fired up for four hours till 4am, which is why I'm a little off today. And I'm building muscles, I guess. What are you going to do? But I was just wired and could not go to bed. And I was laying there looking at my phone going, which I shouldn't have been doing either. I've learned that if I don't get my eight hours, Chris Foss doesn't perform well the next day. And I can cheat sometimes and get away with a nap, but nine times out of ten, it's not performing well. And a lot of people think, I can get away with less, but you really need that to heal your body and heal your mind as well.

Let's talk about that a little bit. Across all populations around the world, we need between seven to eight hours of sleep per 24 hours, and that only changes as you get older. Now, some people are going to say, I need less sleep as I get older. There are a lot of individual differences, so some people might get away with that. But the average across a population, you're talking about 333 million people in the U.S., the average requirement is seven to eight hours per 24 hours. When you're younger, you get it all in one go.

People go to bed at 11, and then they'll get up at 7, 8 in the morning, and they get all their it all in one go people go to bed at 11 and then they'll get up at 7 8 in the morning and they get all their eight hours in one go and they go deep into sleep and then they'll come up with you know some difficulty sleepy in the mornings and the rest of them yeah okay as you get older it isn't that you need less sleep the nature of sleep changes so it's harder to get down it's harder to fall asleep it's easier to wake up and the result of that changes. So it's harder to get down. It's harder to fall asleep. It's easier to wake up. And the result of that is that you feel a bit sleepy in the mornings. The golden rule is you've had enough sleep if you feel okay in the morning. If you don't feel okay, you haven't had enough sleep.

It's a great rule. You can get six hours sleep a night when you're 70 or even when you're 50 and then make it up with a nap in the afternoon but don't go more than 40 minutes oh really yeah if you go more than 40 minutes on a nap 40 50 minutes what you do is you drive down the chemical signal in the blood that means when you get to 10 11 12 o'clock at night there isn't't enough sleep chemical in the blood, and the brain doesn't feel sleepy. So you stay awake longer, you get less sleep, and then you nap longer the next day, and it's a vicious circle going downwards.

I've gotten into some of those vicious circles over the things. I used to nap really two or three hours in the afternoon, and I was sleeping for four hours at night, and it was just killing me. But part of it was just the worrying about the coronavirus, COVID, and the world. And are we going to be here tomorrow? It was just the whole mental thing. And I was in a pretty good place consciously,

but I think subconsciously we're all a little bit jacked up on anxiety. Let me ask you this. So we talked about COVID. What about different activities for your brain? I've heard different theories like doing strategic things with your brain, like reading, educating yourself, challenging your mind, strategic games like chess, different things, crossword puzzles. Is there any merit to those things? All the things that you mentioned, which add up to challenging your brain,

are the ones that actually preserve your mental sharpness, your faculty thinking skills as you get older. If you're just cruising in your comfort zone and you're just doing the same puzzles and crosswords and they're not making any demand on you, well, it's probably making you feel better and your arousal levels in the brain are up a little bit, but it's not going to do as much good as really pushing yourself. Psychologists call these cognitive stimulating activities. They're things like

dancing, learning to dance, learning to use a language. Actually, Chris, you can do both. So if you're a Spanish speaker, learn to dance with someone who speaks English. If you're an English speaker, learn to dance with someone who speaks Spanish. If you're an English speaker, learn to dance with someone who speaks Spanish. You've got two for the price of one. But this wonderful challenge that you can make on the brain is going to maintain your thinking skills. The same crossword every day, the same puzzle every day. No, it won't do the job, I'm afraid.

So you've got to really be pushing your boundaries and stretching, basically. I've recently went to a thing where I'm consuming as many books as I possibly can. And I do a lot of it through audiobook. And I'm spending two hours a day at the gym, and I think it's a 15-minute drive each way. And anytime I'm in the car, I automatically turn on the audiobook. And I've been consuming just a massive amount of audio books. I consume usually about two, 2.5 times, which kind of strains my brain. What's going on here with the speed? I've been loving it because I've been just voraciously learning a lot of stuff.

I just feel like I'm almost trying to play catch up. To me, it's challenging my brain. I like video games. Some people say, oh, video games are bad. There's a bit of a challenge there, especially if you're playing against other players that are really good. And they have skill levels and maybe they're better than yours. I think they're pretty good for people to keep really sharp. I don't know.

All the things that you've mentioned we call building up your cognitive reserve. And we know that's a big factor in preventing dementia. My mother was largely self-educated and one of the most intelligent women I know. And throughout her life, she read everything in sight. She'd read the sauce bottle, the cornflake packet in the morning at breakfast. And she built up this immense knowledge herself. And when she eventually got Alzheimer's disease in her, what was she, 92, I think she was, right? She managed

to counter it. For her, it was an emotional experience. It led to a lot of emotional up and down. For her, a different experience than for most. And she didn't have the memory problems. Why? Because she built it up during her life we call that cognitive reserve so all that stuff chris you're spot on fella you've hit the bullseye oh good i hope i'm on the right track because i gotta repair a lot of damage uh before that my cognitive video games are okay for the brain as long as you don't become addicted so it becomes a compulsion and you can't leave it alone and you have to have it, that's when you've really got to take a grip, get some therapy and move on.

I would agree. Anything that you can do too much of anything. But yeah, I've looked at that. I have a sister who has a multiple sclerosis. She was diagnosed, I think, in her late teens. And she has the kind that takes you fairly quickly. There's definitely two versions. One that you can, if you're pretty good to yourself and you can maintain stress, and I don't know how anybody does in this world, but she had the one that will

put you in a wheelchair when you're 40. And she's been in care centers for many years now, but she's got full stage dementia. I'm not sure if she knows where she's at from day to day. She has a cognitive awareness of where she's at, like right now, but she doesn't know. And so watching her, it's really hard to think, what is that my future? Is that where I'm going? How can I maybe, she has a genetic disease or I don't know if it's genetic, but she has a disease that clearly is having an effect. My daughter has MS, Chris. I'm sorry. I know exactly what you're talking about.

And I've thought a lot about the underlying cause or principle for that. It's a degeneration of nerve cells. And so is Alzheimer's disease. That is the degeneration of those nerve cells, the chemistry inside of them, and how they talk to all the other brain cells around them. And we've got 85 billion of them. And we've got 86 billion cells looking after those. But if it starts to go wrong, and it starts to go wrong quickly, and what is what we call pathology sets in, you've got the devil's own job to slow it down, I'm afraid. So we can slow it down if we try. Yeah, I think it's harder with MS because it's the scabbing system that goes,

it's random everywhere, that goes on across the, if you understand MS. But it's hard. It's definitely hard. It is. Yeah. And what are those things that you talk about in your book that we can cover? One of the things I'd like to just go back to is social life because that is so important. Are you trying to tell me to get a life, Dr. Goodwin?

I don't know your life, Chris, so you'd have to open up to me. There was two great studies done in the US which looked at the health risks of social isolation, being isolated from others, and loneliness. And what they found was loneliness poses the same risk to your health

as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and drinking a bottle of vodka. Holy crap. I used to do that, bottle of vodka. I was half a bottle of vodka. Now, I was about to say that some people who do that, but I wouldn't recommend it. But that's the extent of the health risks. What really worries me is the people in the governments, states,

and national level and everybody else and all their advisors. Didn't they know this about lockdown? We just had a new figure in the UK and that's 40 percent of all the excess deaths. That's the deaths that wouldn't have occurred anyway. 40 percent of all those deaths in care homes with the most vulnerable people would was due to lack of care and loneliness yeah 40 percent and it's i mentioned earlier the little things every day some people have rich social lives some people are apart from their families some people have poorer social lives it's the little things in life like saying saying hello to your neighbor, good morning, good evening, have a nice day even. All these little tiny things have been shown to improve the functioning of the brain.

It's reinforcing that 1.5 million years of evolution that's there. Yeah, just hugging people, touching people. I remember when I was at CES, we weren't supposed to be shaking hands, but I remember when someone held up their hand to me, I looked at it for almost what seemed like a turning. I know I'm not supposed to shake hands, but I really like this. And I didn't need to like it. I didn't need to like going to restaurants where there are lots of people and noise. And now I love to go sit in a restaurant and just sit there and just be like, it's nice to be among human beings. But yeah, my sister in her care center, we couldn't see her for pretty much a year. They had her cut off. We could go stand outside the window and wave at her through the

window and talk to her through the window. But yeah, my mom couldn't hug her. It was really freaking hard. And I think a lot of, especially older people, shut-in people in their senior citizen age really suffered and maybe passed earlier because they just didn't, you couldn't make contact with them. And you're like, well, I don't want to hang out with you because I don't want to give you the virus and kill you, but you may die of loneliness. It is all about balancing risks. If you'd have been interviewing me before COVID and you'd have said to me,

James, could you come up with a plan to damage the health of the U.S. nation or any nation for that matter? I'd have come up with lockdown. It deprives us of exercise. It deprives us of contact with others. It reduces our medical care. We can't go out and shop and get the things that we need.

These are the things that are really damaging about a period of lockdown. And personally, in Britain, I don't think we'll ever have a lockdown again because the cat's out of the bag and people are beginning to see the damage it's done yeah chris it's an extension to social life how about sexual life did you read that chapter in my book i didn't read the chapter in your book on sexual life but i know that's in fact a lot of people during covid yeah especially those who are single because you

don't marry people they don't have that anyway yeah that that's uh that's another one again we've got to thank scientists in the u.s this was in princeton i think it was about 10 years ago 12 years ago these were animal behaviorists animal scientists uh neuroscientists even and they were they were looking at sexual behavior of animals and what what it did to the brain and they found that if you introduced a male rat to an unfamiliar female rat, their stress levels were very high, but the male did it anyway, even though it was stressful, you know, two strange rats. Amazingly, when they checked out their brains, what they found was that one stressful sexual encounter

increased the number of brain cells. So it had helped neurogenesis. That's the the number of brain cells. So it helped neurogenesis. That's the production of new brain cells. So then they said, what happens if we give this dude regular access? They gave it regular access to receptive female, the same receptive female. Guess what? Stress levels went down and the number of new brain cells went through the roof. So the sexual activity between these two with a familiar partner, as it were, was very rewarding to the brain, many new brain cells. And then I think it was about 2008, a scientist in Australia, what he did was he got many thousands. I believe it was about 6,000 people over the age of 50,

and he tested their mental performance and then got them to record their sexual activity. And what he found was that those who had regular sexual activity with a familiar partner had a 20% better memory

than those who did not. Wow. This explains why I'm unmarried. So the more, this seems to be, the threshold seems to be once a week. It's a dose effect. The more sex that you have with

a familiar partner, the better the effect is on the brain. And it's not just memory, math, spatial ability, the ability to put words together, speed of processing, reaction times, all of this improves through this wonderful activity. Do you want to know why? Why?

First of all, it's so you've got all the benefits of social interaction with your partner, and that depresses inflammation in the body, helps the brain. Secondly, there's a lot of physical activity involved. Now, there's a thing we call met-level, M-E-T, metabolic equivalent of task. You don't need to remember that, just met-level. So sitting down like you and I are, it's about one met.

It's a measurement of how much energy we're expending and how much oxygen we're breathing in. Jogging is six met, six to seven met. Sexual activity is 5.8 met. So you've got an exercise benefit on the brain as well as a social benefit on the brain yeah and then you've got a pleasure benefit because you've got all these pleasure hormones released in the brain and they are antioxidant anti-inflammatory

they make the brain glow like the suvius erupting. Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, enkephalin, all these wonderful hormones, right? The moment of orgasm filled the brain. But you imagine that once a week, twice a week, three times a week, four times a week, all right? That is going to benefit your brain. I can hear all the married guys I know out there. I'm single, so I kid the married people. But I can hear all my married guys I know out there. I'm single, so I kid the married people. But I can hear all my married friends right now.

They're going to their wives going, hey, we got to fight Alzheimer's, honey. Yeah, we got to make sure we don't get Alzheimer's. So time to go. There was another app produced by Harvard. It's just a brilliant app called Track Your Happiness. That was the Track Your Happiness app. And amazingly, millions of people all around the world agreed to have this app if they would take a phone call

any time of the day or night. And they asked, how happy are you right now? What are you doing? Well, the activity which hit 95% on the scale of happiness was sex. So I'm imagining somebody in Paris or Singapore or Rio de Janeiro gets his phone call at 11 o'clock at night. What are you doing? And you're actually there with your partner. What are you doing?

You're answering your phone during sex like you're doing it wrong. Number two on the list at 75% was exercise. People really felt happy when they were doing exercise. Number three was learning something new, novel a new great experience that was number three do you know what the two worst ones were self-grooming having to do your hair having to clean your teeth you know getting ready for work in the morning and bottom of the list going to the office actually unless it was something people were thrilled about doing. I love being a psychologist or whatever it is. Wouldn't the bottom be going to the dentist?

I think that would be like, or going in for colonoscopy. I don't know how many people they got in the dentist chair. But I just think they might be like ivory tower academics. But those people at Harvard, they must have had a sense of humor, Chris. I can see all my married guy friends saying to their wife, Oh, you have a headache, honey? That might be the onset of Alzheimer's. We should probably supercharge your brain by getting under the whatever. Anyway, yeah, this may explain why so many sexless married guy friends are brain dead.

I'm a single guy, so I get to pick on all the married people. Anyway, so this has been a wonderful discussion. Anything more you want to touch on in the married people. Anyway, so this has been a wonderful discussion. Anything more you want to touch on in the book before we... Yeah, there's one thing, and this is an amazing discovery that was only made in the late 1990s, and that is that the bugs in your bowel, and we all know what's in our large intestine, but that fermenting, gurgling mess in there

is the world's best pharmaceutical factory. And it is producing enormous volumes of brain good stuff that goes up into our brains and keeps us sharp. A great example of that is the happy hormone serotonin. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Serotonin, only 10% of it is made in the brain. 90% of it is made by the bugs in the bowel.

That's what it's made. So as a lasting message to people, you've got to look after those microbes down there and our diets and how we eat as well. Snacking continuously at all hours of the day and night, eating all kinds of crap food and all that will really hammer those bugs. And if you hammer the bugs and you stress the bugs, you hammer the brain and you stress the brain. Wow. So the message is look after them. Look after what you eat and how good you are. I've gone through periods of my life where I've gone vegan and I've also done intermittent fasting, lost hundreds of pounds.

And then, of course, exercise right now. I'm really loving it because you can tell. You just tell you're sharper. The world's better. The colors are better. Just everything seems more alive. And, yeah, what you put in your gut makes all the difference. If you're eating garbage food, fast food, soda pops.

I used to drink like 10 Mountain Dews a day. I was really, yeah, and then I'd drink vodka at night. Drinking is important the brain is 80 of of water of the remaining 20 that's largely uh largely fats and so on but if you don't drink a glass of water an hour you are drying out your brain and you imagine the effects of that over years and years chris come on how hard is it to drink a glass of water, right? An hour. Oh, it's down.

Yep. For some people, it's hard because they're so addicted to sugar and tasting. They've got to have sugar addiction. And so I had to overcome all that and think about it. And now I drink water. One of the tricks I have is I have a stainless steel. There's actually water in my coffee glass right now, but I have a stainless steel that keeps it really cold. And then I get reverse osmosis water. And when I put it in there,

man, it's cold all day long. And so I can, you tend to like it when it's colder. It has, I think it has like a better flavor. I'm not really sure if that qualifies. A really great kind of water to use is ionized water. And you can buy machines that you plug into your, in a bathroom or in the kitchen, and you can just pour a glass of water out of that. That penetrates the cells of the body real good. And as a result of that,

I'd recommend people that I drink ionized water and I'd recommend in Japan, all hospitals, health, health facilities, all this stuff, they have to have ionized water in them. Now, that's alkaline water, right? Yeah, that's alkaline water. Yeah. That's all. Yeah. I buy a bunch of bottles of alkaline water, and when I go to the gym, I take these giant bottles that I have, and I read that, number one,

part of what it does is it helps open up your arteries, and it really gets you going. So I drink one of those during the gym, and I'm usually still drinking it. It's a giant bottle. The water molecules in regular water, they clump together, and they're in fairly big pieces, if you like. The thing about ionized water is it breaks them down into these little micro clusters, and they go zapping between the

cells and they get you hydrated very quickly. Well, there you go. What's been wonderful you have on the show. Give us your plug as James, so we can look you up on the interweb. My personal website, drjamesgoodwin.com. The company I work for, www.brain.health. And if you want to buy the book and it's great reading, I have to say full of stories and artwork, not just science, full of stories and artwork, go to Pegasus books, uh,

on their website and you'll find it there. There you go. Thank you very much for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate it. It's been a pleasure, Chris. Thank you. There you guys go.

Order up the book, supercharge your brain, how to maintain a healthy brain through your life. Also go to a youtube.com for Supercharge Your Brain, How to Maintain a Healthy Brain Through Your Life. Also go to youtube.com, goodreads.com, see everything we're reading and reviewing over there in all of our groups. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys

next time. Bye, everyone.