The Dr. Hyman Show - Brain Fitness: Reversing Cognitive Decline And Improving Brain Function with Dr. Majid Fotuhi

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Essentia, Cozy Earth, and AirDoctor. It’s never too early to start protecting your brain, and with more than 6 million Americans living with Alzheimer's—projected to rise to nearly 13 million by 2050—this is something we should all contemplate more often. On today’s episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy, I’m excited to talk to Dr. Majid Fotuhi about the top actions we can take to prevent cognitive decline and optimize brain function. Dr. Majid Fotuhi is a neurologist with expertise in the fields of memory, concussion, and successful aging. Through his 30 years of teaching, clinical work, and neuroscience research at Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins, Dr. Fotuhi has developed a multidisciplinary program for helping people of all ages improve their memory and attention. His innovative Brain Fitness Program addresses lifestyle factors and cognitive stimulation, and he has published the successful results of this program in several scientific journals and three books, including Boost Your Brain: The New Art and Science Behind Enhanced Brain Performance. Dr. Fotuhi received his doctorate degree in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University in 1992 and his Medical Degree from Harvard Medical School in 1997. He serves as an adjunct professor at George Washington University. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Essentia, Cozy Earth, and AirDoctor. Access more than 3,000 specialty lab tests with Rupa Health. You can check out a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com today. Receive an extra $100 off your mattress purchase on top of Essentia’s Huge Black Friday Sale! Go to myessentia.com/drmarkhyman and use code HYMAN at checkout to get this great deal. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com and use code DRHYMAN. Right now, if you go to drhyman.com/filter you can get the AirDoctor filter for $349. That’s $280 off the normal price. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): The evolution of Dr. Fotuhi’s understanding of memory and brain health (7:34 / 5:41) Why Dr. Fotuhi started his own brain center (14:10 / 12:17) Incredible science to slow and prevent memory loss (19:07 / 17:14) The myth of diagnosis (23:03 / 21:10) Four ways to support the brain (30:03 / 26:10)  The connection between belly size and brain size (31:36 / 27:43) Common culprits of poor brain function (36:29 / 32:36 Reactions of Dr. Fotuhi’s colleagues to his work (47:07 / 43:14) Lifestyle practices for a healthy brain (54:17 / 50:24) Modifiable risk factors for brain dysfunction (1:00:14 / 56:24) Learn more at Drfotuhi.com and try the Brain Portfolio/Brain Fitness Calculator.

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of The Doctors Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about your brain and you want to know how to make your brain better, or if you feel like you got brain fog or memory loss or ADD, or you can't focus, there's a reason. And there's also a way out. And we're going to talk about that today with one of the world's experts on brain fitness, something that maybe most of us don't think about. We go to the gym for our body and our muscles and our heart, but how do we actually create a program or a way of

living or engaging practices that optimize our brain, that protect our brain, that prevent it from depression, ADD, and dementia. So we have an amazing guest today, friend of mine, Dr. Majeed Fatui, a neurologist with expertise in the field of memory concussion and successful aging. I love that, successful aging. He has 30 years of teaching and clinical work in neuroscience research at Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins, he's developed a multidisciplinary program for helping people of all ages to improve their memory and their attention, which we all need because this is like a distracted world. He created an innovative brain fitness program, exactly what I was talking about, that addresses lifestyle factors,

cognitive stimulation, and other things. And he's published the results of this successful program for patients with memory loss, with aging, concussions, and ADHD in several scientific journals and three books, including Boost Your Brain, the new art and science behind enhanced brain performance. He received his doctorate in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins and his medical degree from Harvard Medical School. And he serves as an adjunct professor at George Washington University. Welcome, Majid. Good to see you again. Thanks very much for having me on your show, Mark.

It's so nice to see you. Yeah, well, you know, we first met when you came to Cleveland Clinic to do a presentation at one of our innovation summits. And we talked about the sort of revolution in brain science that's happening right now. And I think most people have kind of heard about how we can help our brains, but don't really have a clear understanding. We know for our heart, for example, we need to eat healthy and to exercise and to make sure we don't smoke and don't have high blood pressure and control our blood sugar and diabetes. But most of us have really never thought about how do we optimize our brain function?

And it's the most important part of our anatomy. I mean, obviously, you talk to any specialist, they think their organ's the best part. But the truth is that the brain, without that, we're not us. And as it declines, as we have various insults to it from our modern world and stress and toxins and our diet and so many other things, our brains tend to not function as well. And many people walk around with brain fog, with trouble concentrating, with paying attention, and even with significant memory loss. So you've really pioneered a whole approach to rethinking how we take care of our brains. And I'd love you to sort

of share as a neuroscientist, you know, how you first came upon this. Because, you know, typically as doctors, we're trained to essentially just, you know, treat and street, right? We basically, we have a terrible thing we say. We say we treat them, just treat them. Basically, give them the medication or the treatment and not really figure out how to get people healthy, but just treat the disease. Or in neurology, the other thing we often say is we adios and diagnose. We diagnose someone, okay, you have Parkinson's, you have dementia, you have ADD, you have this. We basically say goodbye because there's not much we can do about fixing the brain. But the truth is there's a lot we know. And I created a broken brain documentary a number of years ago that many of you can watch online.

It's part of our Dr. Hyman Plus community. And I think there's other ways to access it as well. But it's really a map of a different way of thinking about the brain and how we can optimize our brain function. So let's kind of jump right in. You know, one of the things we're seeing is this rapid explosion in dementia in America and globally. I think six million or so are living with Alzheimer's now. It's projected up to 14 million in a decade or two. And the cost is, you know, half a trillion dollars a year to America. This

is a massive cost because of the cost of taking care of these patients. It's the number one costly disease. And yet there are no real therapies for this or no real therapies that conventional doctors actually will recommend other than drugs, which don't really work. There's been, you know, $2 billion plus spent over foreign studies and not a single drug really has any real impact. Maybe they mitigate things a little bit. Maybe they delay your admission to nursing home for a couple of months. That's a successful study. So I think we really need to rethink this whole approach. So what are the top things that people can do today to prevent cognitive decline and to optimize their brain function what would be your highlights and then we're going to kind of dive into all of it um i think it will help for me to explain how i got to where i am now yeah i've been able to help a lot of people with

brain fog or brain dysfunction memory loss. And we have seen remarkable results in the program that I have developed and is actually available on my website. But let me tell you how, you know, ask me how I got to this point. You know, when I was in Harvard Medical School, I became really interested in brain and what happens to our brain with aging. And when I went to do my residency in neurology at Johns Hopkins, as a part-time job, I work in the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. My job was to just see these patients who come every year

and for us to monitor their progress. This is a one-to-two study looking at people for 30, 40 years. They would come every year. We did questionnaires, testing, MRIs, and so forth. And I was curious that many of them who came with the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease had diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnea, the things I knew would cause memory loss. And I was wondering, well, why do we call these people as having Alzheimer's disease? They don't have Alzheimer's disease.

They have vascular cognitive impairment. So I digged in to see where do people talk about these things. And back then, it was 1997, 1999, there wasn't much. And I was surprised. I said, well, this is so obvious. There were some articles about how we are over-diagnosing Alzheimer's. And then I wrote a book about this thing. It's called The Memory Cure. And in it, I explained that a lot of things we call Alzheimer's is not really a single disease. It's a soup of different things happening over time.

Your blood vessels shrink and become hardened. You know, dementia used to be called hardening the arteries. And I remember from my medical school days when I actually held brains of people who died. And those who had vascular risk factors had very crunchy arteries. You can actually... Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was such a vision I never forget that I would hold their blood vessels and they were hard like little pipes. As a healthy person, blood vessels are more malleable.

You can move them around. And that book actually did very well, considering that I was just the resident and fellow. You know, I was very happy. And I continued to work at Alzheimer's Research Center. And I was an assistant professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins at a science hospital. I opened a center for memory and brain health. You know, back in 2002, 2004, the idea that you could do things to improve your brain health was still quite new. It was quite obvious. And I can see sometimes you're frustrated

about the fact that people don't know how important food is. And if we take care of people's diet, we can have such a huge impact on our country's healthcare and economy. And it's frustrating. Like, come on, guys, this is so obvious, you know? It is. So I did that. I wrote several articles. I published an article in Nature Reviews Neurology about how we have changing perspective about

Alzheimer's. It's not just plaques and tangles. There's a lot more to it. And, you know, I wrote. And then meanwhile, I was following the literature and some recent studies at the time, 2005, showed that you can actually grow your brain. You exercise, you grow your brain,

you increase neurogenesis. I was just amazed. Meaning you've new brain cells new brain cells yeah then i read that meditation can grow your brain and i thought really just sitting there breathing slowly meditating for like 15 20 minutes for three six months you have anatomical changes in the brain. There's one thing for you to feel better. It's one thing to change the level of neurotransmitters in the brain. It's another thing to grow the brain to the extent it can see an MRI. It's not microscopic, it's macroscopic. And then I was just blown away by the fact that an otherwise healthy person, we don't have to work with a diseased person, an otherwise healthy person can grow his or her brain. And the hippocampus, which is the memory center of the

brain, is the part that grows the most. You know, hippocampus is the size of your thumb. You have one on the right, one on the left. And this part of the brain is ground zero for learning and memory. And this part of the brain shrinks by about 25% per year after age 50, on average. But there are things you can do to grow it by a lot. And as I will explain to you in a minute, we did it for our 12-week program. On average, people grew their hippocampus by 3%, which is equivalent to six years younger in brain age within three months. Wow. So then I wrote another paper

and I published in Nature Reviews Neurology, which as you know, is a very prestigious journal. And one thing I remember from back then, I think it was 2009, where I wrote that paper, I sent it for reviews. And you know, when you send paper for reviews, usually one likes it, one doesn't like it,

and one is in the middle. When I sent that review article, I got three very positive feedbacks. Like these people said, yeah, he's right. This is right. And yet nobody else was talking about these things. And to me, it was surprising that my neurology colleagues are too busy doing the same old things with DMT, MRI, thread prescription go, where we need to hit the pause button and say, wait a minute, what we call Alzheimer's is really not Alzheimer's. It's the soup of problems. And then- A soup of problems. I really like that. It's a soup of problems. And I think I just want

to say something really important here. In traditional medicine, the diagnosis is king. You know, once you have these criteria for a bunch of symptoms, we say, oh, we know what's wrong with you. You have got Alzheimer's. But the truth is Alzheimer's is the name of the thing that happens to people who have certain symptoms, right? You have memory loss and so forth. So it's not actually the cause. Alzheimer's doesn't cause your memory loss. Something is going on in your brain.

And so there's many, many causes and many different people will have different causes for their dementia. Yeah. It's interesting that Dr. Alzheimer's himself, Aloy Alzheimer's in 1903 wrote a paper that talked about aging and dementia in people is because of multiple factors. He never said I've discovered a disease. He just said, Hey, I saw these few cases. You have these unusual abnormalities. I don't know what they are. But the chairman of his department at the time wanted to make his department look better. It was Berlin versus Prague back then, Harvard versus Hopkins. And he called it an Alzheimer's disease.

So he himself, I have a quotation that says that the conclusion of the brain is because of multiple reasons. But anyway, you know, as I went along, I decided to start my own brain center and provide all the things that I know grow the brain for our patients and teach them, educate them about all the things they're not supposed to do. Because if you can stop the things that shrink your brain and do more things that grow your brain, then you're good. And if you understand why things are the way they are, you will continue that lifestyle for the rest of your life, which means you change your trajectory from getting demented at 75 or 79 or 82 to 95.

Because a lot of things... 105, right? Exactly, 105. And the things that you do actually affect telomeres. The same things that are good for the brain are also good for epigenetics and genes, as you know. So then I started this program and I published a paper in 2006. When I came to Cleveland Clinic, at the time I had finished the paper and it a paper in 2006. You know, when I came to Cleveland Clinic,

at the time I had finished the paper and it got published in 2006 in the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer's Disease, where we provide this 12-week program, which had three elements. It was an element of lifestyle modification, all the things you tell people to do, and had an element of brain training.

And we provided targeted brain training for people. So if somebody had memory loss, we provided memory training. If they were slow to think, we challenged their processing speed with games, all fun games, and we provided biofeedback, a form of biofeedback called neurofeedback

and other forms like HRB biofeedback. And we saw that people who came to our clinic twice a week for 90 minutes at a time over a period of 12 weeks had improved their memory you know a lot of the drugs you talk about these are people who are like 60s and 70s and some 80s most interventions that are done for these drug trials look at the rate of slowing change and rate of decline. Not that people get better. It's that they help a certain percentage of patients get worse slower. They don't actually help patients get better from zero. Instead of minus eight, they go to minus five, but nobody goes plus two. In our program, 84% of patients

had MCI, mild cognitive impairment, which is a stage between normal and adult emergencies got better they had objective improvements in the cognitive tests so i was really encouraged with that and and then i thought by the way just to stop you there for a minute yeah okay there there's really no drug that has ever shown reversal or improvement yes in the treatment of dementia there is is no drug. There has been a trial called the FINGER trial, which is a large clinical intervention that looked at aggressive lifestyle intervention, optimizing a person's health with diet, exercise, sleep, et cetera, aggressively treating all the risk factors, blood sugar, blood pressure. And they saw not only a slowing, not only a stopping, but actually a reversal of cognitive decline in these patients who already had early memory loss.

So this is really important for people to understand that you can go to the doctor, but they're not going to be able to give you anything that's going to address your memory. You have to do the things that Majeed is talking about, which is essentially addressing brain fitness. Absolutely. And the person who runs that program, Mia Kivipelto, is a friend of mine. We've been talking about how people got things wrong since late 1980s when we were at the Alzheimer's conference. And we have sort of, you know, we see each other every year at the Alzheimer's conference. And I'm so proud of her for, you know, putting this large program. And this program, this finger control trial is done in Denmark and Sweden where people already have a good lifestyle. They were not in a place where obesity is everywhere and people have poor diet. These people on average eat well and exercise and

are healthy on average person. So to provide a program to make them better and see results is really remarkable. If you do that program in a small town where people are obese and sleep apnea is common and smoking is common, drinking is common, you would see much, much more robust results. And my program is very similar to hers, except that the difference between my study and her study is that we provided this in a real-life clinical setting. This is not a clinical trial in an academic center where people come to the center for the purpose of clinical trial. This is a real-life neurology practice where an average person shows up and we provide

this treatment for them. And the only exclusion criteria was that at the time they start, they wouldn't have schizophrenia or dementia when they start. They could have MCI, they could have memory loss, they could have everything else, but they didn't have a major psychiatric disorder. And I saw a few people, just because of neurology practice, people show up. So the other thing we did, which was really fascinating to me, I mean, I knew that my program would work. But we did MRIs, and half of our patients had a growth in the volume of their hippocampus as I had expected.

I knew it would happen, but the fact that it actually happened for real, I remember the day I saw the MRI, I was just jumping up and down. I said, oh my God, we did this. And, you know, one of our patients... Hold on for a sec, Majeed. So just for people listening, what he just said was nothing short of revolutionary. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that's the memory center. It shrinks often as we age, and it's very shrunken in people with memory loss.

We've never seen anything that actually makes it bigger or grow. And now this is what Dr. Fatouhi is talking about, which is this incredible science that allows us to intervene with people and actually help them not only slow and prevent the disease, but actually potentially even reverse all sorts of brain issues. And Mark, if a drug had done this, it would be big. Yeah, yeah. If a drug had done half of this, a third of it, a tenth of it, if a drug had done a tenth of what we did,

which is just improve people's cognitive performances on objective testings. You know, just that. Never mind that it actually grows the brain. And by the way, all the drugs that are current drugs for Alzheimer's disease all shrink the brain. And this is something that people need to figure out why it happens.

Anyway, so back in 2007, 2008, I was so excited. I was providing this program. But since I had a neurology practice, I would also get patients, 2008. I was so excited. I was providing this program. But since I had a neurology practice, I would also get patients who had concussion or other things. And some people have persistent concussion symptoms, something called post-concussive syndrome. And these are people who have had headaches or memory problems. They can't work.

They can't think. They have irritability for months to years. And they've seen multiple doctors and nothing has worked. So I had some of those patients and I put them in the program and I saw that our program worked for them as well. And the reason I think the program was so successful is that we had a multidisciplinary intervention. We didn't just say, here's a prescription for your memory

or your headache or your sleep. I actually took the time to do an inventory of all their problems, and then we addressed them. We addressed their memory, I mean, their sleep, their anxiety, their irritability with non-medication interventions, things like meditation, counseling, exercise, diet, stress reduction. And we saw, again, about 80% of patients improved. We did objective testing, which is standardized neurocognitive evaluation.

And we did a series of four or five questionnaires. We did like a Pittsburgh insomnia assessment. We did Upforth for sleep apnea. We did Beck anxiety. We did Beck depression, the the scales and we did my own questionnaires for brain fitness and multiple questions and these are and these are standardized legitimate peer-reviewed validated metrics for looking at mood brain function so forth so it's not like this hey i think i my memory was better it's literally how we measure success. And we used validated standardized tests. And I felt like I needed to do my own. So I made three

questionnaires. And one of the things that we found is that the questionnaires I developed for brain fitness, paralleled with the results we saw in the standardized. And so this study also validated my questionnaires, because we saw results in our own patient population. So it was exciting. We published that in Journal of Rehabilitation in 2020. And again, being a neurologist, I saw patients would come for attention problems. I had many patients with ADHD, whether they were teenagers, kids, or adults, or people in their 40s, 50s. The one thing I learned, and you referred to this

earlier, is that we put a label on people. We say you have ADHD, but it's not like cancer where you look at the mutation and you say you have colon cancer because of this. These diagnoses are based on a group of experts sitting together, making a list of criteria, and then calling it this and that. There's nothing absolute about ADHD. It's just a group of experts coming together and deciding this 5 out of 9 here, 5 out of 9 here, and you put a label on people. A lot of times people who have attention deficit disorder, in my practice, had poorly treated or untreated sleep apnea yes they had attention problems and they did say yes to all the questions but the real problem was sleep apnea which yeah i mean i think i think this is such an important point because you know you know people don't

understand how screwed up medicine is and and most of the diagnoses we have are really just description of symptoms and don't tell you cause so when you say i have depression or i I have ADHD or I have Alzheimer's or dementia, it's like saying about headache. You know, why do you have a headache? Did someone hit you in the head with a hammer? Did you not sleep? Did you eat gluten? Are you having a hangover because you drank too much last night? Do you have a brain tumor? Do you have an aneurysm? Like there's a million reasons why you could have a headache and headache is just means my head hurts right and so the same thing with depression or adhd or dementia we have to really start to look at the personalization of health care and the individualization of our treatments that address the root cause or causes and and you're you know what you do is really radical which is what we

call a multi-modal set of interventions typically doctors and science is all about the one thing, you know, one drug for one disease. Try to find that magic bullet, right? The silver bullet that's going to fix it. And that's what most drug research is about. What you're talking about is, you know, doing all the things we need to help our brain. We know we need the right diet. We need exercise. We need sleep. We need stress reduction. We need all sorts of different things that we're going to talk about that actually help to optimize your brain function and address your causes. So we really have to start to get this paradigm shift that's happening. And it's not just sort of on the margins of medicine. This is in peer-reviewed journals. But you're right. Like if this was a drug,

it would be the biggest blockbuster. It would be bigger than Viagra or bigger than Ozempic or any other drug because it's basically doing something that nothing else can do about a disease that is devastating our society. Absolutely. I think the key word you said is paradigm shift. We need a paradigm shift in looking at patients who come with memory loss and realizing that it's not just the plaques and tangles. And as you mentioned, there'll be several hundred clinical trials on eliminating amyloid

and we still don't have a cure. Yes, the newest drug that was presented in Alzheimer's conference does seem to have a slowing of the worsening. One of my colleagues said, yeah, it's great. You get a drug that's going to help you stay in that confused state for a longer period of time. And by the way, it's like $50,000 a year or more.

And increased risk of death as one of the side effects. But anyway. Oh, by the way. Yes. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark. Getting quality sleep is incredibly important to me. Sleep is really one of the pillars of good health. So you can imagine my frustration when I used to lie down

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of The Doctor's Pharmacy. In 2020, when I did that and patients with ADHD or ADHD came to see me, whether they were teenagers or adults, we provide this program and we saw again about 80%. This was like our sweet spot. And so I just published a paper in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease Reports in June of this year, where we looked at three groups of patients who completed this program. It's a 12-week program where people get a full assessment at the beginning, cognitive testing, blood tests, and questionnaires. They go to our program twice a week for 12 weeks, and then we see the testing results at the end.

We check them every week, but then we do a formal evaluation at the end. Yeah. And the thing that was interesting to me is that we saw similar results in three groups of patients with three different labels. And both cognitive tests and responses questionnaires show dramatic improvements. And to me, it shows that if you improve the biology of the brain, your cognitive performance improves. And so the question is not for us to put a label on patients and say, you have this and that.

The challenge for us is to figure out why aren't you paying attention? You know, for some people, sleep apnea, for some people, headaches. Some people have so much headaches that they can't pay attention. They're tired. They're irritable because they're frustrated. The driving wears them out. They can't sleep at night, they're sleep deprived, the headache is worse, they get into fights, and they can't think straight. Well, listen, they can't think straight. It's not because they have Alzheimer's or they have ADHD. It's because their migraine is not completely treated.

And the other thing I find fascinating is that we do four things for our patients overall to the principle diet, exercise, sleep, and stress reduction. These four things seem to help these group of patients different presenting symptoms. The other thing I found interesting was people also use supplements or anything like that. Yes, I recommend omega-3 fatty acids. You know, again, I published a study myself in nature, um, early 2000, where I reviewed, I did a meta-analysis and I found that people who had high levels of omega-3 fatty acids were less likely to get cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease. So I recommend it to people. I take it myself, but, um, in people who do like to take multivitamins or other things, I have no objection, but the one

that is a part of the program, we recommend Mediterranean diet and supplements. And I totally like your idea of a diet, you know, you don't have to be fully vegetarian or fully carnivore, you can have a mix. And as long as you stay away from processed food and you have a diversity of things you eat and fruits and vegetables and a common Cisco diet is really what I recommend. And surprisingly, not too many people do that. The thing I found interesting is that when I sat down with patients, I always spend an hour in the first visit with my patients where I would educate them. You know, I have pictures of the brain shrinking, the bigger the belly, the smaller your campus.

The more stress, the smaller your campus. Wait, wait. I just want to emphasize what you just said. The bigger your belly, the smaller your brain. Exactly. The bigger your belly, the smaller your brain. Can you kind of unpack that for a minute? Cause that's a big statement

and because so many people have a big belly, right? Or even a little big belly, like you don't have to have a giant belly. It could just be like a little extra pushiness in there. And that's gonna have an impact on your brain. Yeah, so this finding was first published in 2006. And I have a slide that shows a correlation. If you cut body mass index and the size of the hippocampus, it goes down. The bigger the belly, on average. Now, there are some people

who do have a big belly, but hippocampus is good. And there are some people whose belly is small, but hippocampus is not good. And I think that sort of puts, you know, emphasizes the importance of multifactorial basis of this. So if somebody has a big belly, but that person does exercise and does use his or her brain all the time, it's not stress, that person may be better off than somebody who's thin, but stressed out, doesn't sleep, and has a poor diet and so forth. So, but on average, on average, there's a very clear relationship between the size of the belly and the size of the canthus.

And now this year at the Alzheimer's Conference in Amsterdam, which I attended myself, there was an article by my colleague, Dr. Raji, that showed if you do MRIs, body MRIs of people, and look at their visceral fat, you can see a direct correlation between the visceral fat and the size of the brain overall, and particularly the size of hippocampus.

So, you know, in previous studies, they just do a sort of gross evaluation of being overweight, the body mass index, which is not perfect. But in this study of 10,000 people, they saw that there was a correlation between measurement, exact measurement of visceral fat and the size of the brain. And they put something side by side,

and you would think this person has Alzheimer's disease. This is, you know, a normal person. And the degree of shrinkage in obese people, unfortunately, is sad. Yeah. And, you know, when I showed these kind of things to my patients, they would definitely think twice to eat the kind of food they ate before. And the thing is that I feel bad for people who are overweight because they didn't choose to be overweight or obese.

They didn't say, look, in two years, I want to be 200 pounds heavier. I teach about these things at university for my students, and I explain to them that this process is slow. You know, first you have this sugary food that spikes your insulin levels and then you have hypoglycemia afterwards. So you're tired and hungry. So you eat more and that extra food that you eat, especially if it's a can of soda or cookies or things that are not good for you, high in trans fats and high in sugar, that contributes to more of these getting packed in your fat tissue. And then you still have not enough glucose for your eyes and your brain, your nerves.

And this process is sort of a gradual vicious cycle that gets you. And the other thing that happens is that it worsens the brain and the cognitive part of the brain decides how much you eat. So you've had your meal, you say, okay, I had enough, you stop because you're so much stretched and you have to stop. But, you know, you see a trimestoo and you say, look, I have to eat this. And that's your reward system. And then your cognitive part says, no, we've had enough, we should stop.

So there's a usual balance and people usually a balance of their cognitive and their emotional decision-making of how much to eat. But one thing that happens is that when you eat too much, this system breaks down and the reward system shuts down the frontal lobe. Then when you see the food, you just forget about thinking about it. You become blind to the whole idea that you've had enough. So I feel bad for people who are overweight or obese, and I sympathize with them. But I also explain to them that it is doable for them to lose weight, and it's never too late. So anyway, in our program, we did diet, exercise, sleep, and stress reduction,

and we saw remarkable results because I think what we do is that we improve the biology of the brain. We do the investigative work at the beginning to find the five or six causes for a person's suboptimal cognitive function because their brain is not healthy

and focus on those things in a personalized individualized program within the 12 weeks so what what are those five or six causes what are the things that are causing our brains to not yeah the common culprits are poor sleep some people get uh have difficulty falling asleep some more difficulty staying asleep and unfortunately a lot of people think, well, sleep problems are common. I'm just, I tell about sleep problems

like everybody else does, but that's not true. Sleep problems are totally treatable. The other part is sleep apnea. When people sleep is fragmented because they snore, wake up, you know, sometimes they wake up 40 times or 60 times in an hour and it's terrible. They don't know because they're so knocked out. But when they wake up in you know, sometimes they wake up 40 times or 60 times in an hour and it's terrible. They don't know because they're so knocked out. But when they wake up in the morning, they're tired

and they're foggy. And everything is sedentary lifestyle, poor diet, and too much stress, too much anxiety. These are the common culprits. And of course i do blood tests i do see vitamin d deficiency quite often and after that i see low b12 levels low b12 elevated homocysteine which is you know full a b6 those are the common things i see you know it's interesting to me that people who come to me and they they're told with other doctors or they think themselves they have alzheimer's disease they have bread and butter conditions. They just have multiple of them at the same time. Yeah, that's right.

You have to include everything. Maybe they see a therapist. The therapist talks to them about, you know, you should settle things. Or they see depression. They see a psychiatrist who prescribes a medication for them. Then they go to a cardiologist because of their obesity. And the cardiologist prescribes medications for their high blood pressure. And they may have sleep problems.

They see a sleep specialist who tells them about sleep hygiene and may prescribe a medication for them. And, you know, so they have a whole bunch of medicines, and they feel horrible. And what needs to be done is for them to take fewer medicines and do the things that increase blood flow to the brain, that rejuvenate your brain. You saw your podcast, you talk about the garden we have inside us.

I think that's a great analogy because we have also a garden here. And I think this is, you know, everybody's biased about which is the most important organ in the body. But as a neurologist, I tend to think that the garden here, and it's like, you know, when you garden, you flower your tomato plant, and, you know, three weeks later, you see a tomato, or two months later, you see a bunch of tomatoes. And it's so rewarding because it wasn't there and it's there,

and it's definitely because you took care of it. And what I see in my neurology practice is equally rewarding because we see these people who are tired and worn out and hopeless. And they're just frustrated with things. And they say, listen, we can do this for you. We've done it before. We have about 80% success rate. You will get better. And we go through this program with them.

And at the other end, they come back, they're dressing nicely, their skin glows, they're sitting upright. And I love it. That's the joy of my practice, to see these people who look like a wreck. And not six months later, not a year later, you know, six weeks later, they have some improvement. And by 12 weeks, yeah weeks later, they have some improvement by 12 weeks. No, it's true. It's amazing how just, you know, 12 weeks can reverse off in a lifetime of insults.

And I think what you're saying is that, you know, there's so many different factors that can cause brain dysfunction. You mentioned a number of them, but in my practice as a functional medicine doctor, I see even more things, whether it's heavy metal toxicity, Lyme disease or tick infections, mold exposure, leaky gut, inflammation from the microbiome, gluten sensitivity, and the list goes on. So really, it requires a very deep dive. And what's quite amazing about your program is that you do just the basic stuff with a little bit of tuning up here and there, and you still get remarkable results. And it's just so powerful. And there's so many other things you can stack onto that, that now we're learning can help the brain, whether it's hyperbaric oxygen therapy or things

like NAD. And there's a lot of stuff that's actually emerging that can probably even accelerate your results, I would imagine. Yes, I did check for Lyme disease in many of my patients. And, you know, I did not check for mold in all my patients. I would listen to hear a correlation. And, you know, I think you see a lot more of those kind of patients than I did. People who have this hyper-inflammatory state, they have this tired look on their faces. They just come, you know, again, I've seen patients for 25 years now. I get a feel for what this person's issues are. And, of course, we do testing.

And every once in a while, I get results I don't expect. But, you know, people who just have this totally worn-out face and they're just sitting there barely talking. They're frustrated because they've seen so many doctors. I do find that those kinds of patients, I ask about mold exposure or when did the symptoms begin? You know, they were fine until 25 and late 20s started. There's something new that happened to them.

And so I do have a panel that sort of I do level two for patients who didn't get better with my initial intervention. And what do you do with that? What's level two? Oh, so these are kind of things you just said, you know, check for mold, you know, dig deeper for possible infections, you know, check inflammatory markers. And, you know, I didn't get MRIs for everybody. I would get MRIs for them.

You know, a lot of our patients had an EEG. We looked at their brain's electrical activity. And that was very helpful for me because, you know, somebody was sitting in front of me and the EEG was all blue. You know, we used the color coding where red and yellow was hyperactivity, green was normal, and blue was, you know, lower level activity in different brain regions. So they were sitting in front of me and look at their EEGs, all blue. And I think, wow, that's abnormal.

And then I would ask them, you know, I would say, if somebody came to me with memory problems, the EEG was normal, and somebody would come with the same degree of memory problems, but the EEG was blue, I would wonder what's wrong with this second person. What's wrong with them? And that's where I find that they would have other things going on with them. And I think, I said my program is 80% success, and I think that 20%, and 100% of patients get better.

Nobody comes and says, oh, I don't see any improvement. Everybody who comes there gets better. And we have glowing remarks, you know, reviews on Google reviews that people say, you know, I changed our life, this and that. The 20% are people

who did not statistically significant results on their objective testing. That's the 20% that's not there. But, you know, pretty much everybody, and that's a no-brainer, obviously. I mean, if you get somebody who doesn't exercise and you get them to, you know, tweak their sleep so that they sleep better and change their mindset. I think one of the things I did for my patients, it was to help them change their mindset that, yes, we're going to do this. You know, yes, I've had these problems for, you know, 10 years, 20 years,

but brain is very malleable and your brain is a tissue, is an organ, just like your skin, just like your heart. And you can do things to heal it and make it healthier. And those things happen to be the same things that are good for your skin and they're things for prostate and for your eyes. Right, right. It's not like there's one lifestyle that's good for your brain, but not good for your heart or for cancer or for your immune system.

Yeah, you do have to tweak some things for your skin versus your heart versus your hair versus your teeth. But the overall interventions that are good for the brain are good for prostate. And I was watching a documentary once about prostate cancer and things you could do to reduce prostate cancer. And the person talking was talking about exercise and diet and homeopathy fatty acid and meditation i said wait a minute i tell this to my patients and you tell exactly exactly it's it's actually just one human body and everything is actually designed to work well and uh what we often do is do all the things that make it not

work well and by doing the basic foundational things of diet, exercise, managing sleep and stress, just foundationally and maybe a few supplements, it can have a profound effect on so many people. And it's more powerful than most medications we have to treat disease, and yet it's not being applied. And that's what's so great about your work. And you're not the only one. I mean, there's many others in the neurology space, like Richard Isaacson from Cornell, who published data that was really compelling about the same approach, which is a kind of multimodal intervention approach based on addressing the

particular findings in each patient on a personalized way. Dale Bredesen does the same thing. He wrote a book called The End of Alzheimer's. He was at Cleveland Clinic with us on stage when we did our presentation. And so, yeah. And so I think, I think that sort of Alzheimer's. He was at Cleveland Clinic with us on stage when we did our presentation. And so, yeah, and so I think that sort of there's a zeitgeist change. And I think we're kind of still stuck a little bit in the whole amyloid hypothesis or in the, you know, chemical imbalance hypothesis for depression. And, you know, it's really, it breaks my heart. You know, I have a very close friend whose mother is very severely depressed and there she's on a pile of medications and she's like zombie and really not better and i'm like wait a minute depression is just a symptom it's not a cause let's figure out what's causing the depression and let's let's get her better and i think we have now the tools and i wrote a book uh gosh i don't

know in 2009 was published uh so i probably wrote it in 2007, called The Ultramind Solution, where I really mapped out a lot of this. And I didn't have chapters on Parkinson's. I mean, I didn't write chapters on Parkinson's or dementia or depression or anxiety or bipolar or schizophrenia. I didn't write, or autism. I didn't write chapters on all these different problems because they all have common causes. So I talked about how do we optimize our biological systems? How do we optimize our biological networks and tune things up and remove the things that are causing damage to the brain and add the things in that are actually helping keep the brain healthy? And so that's what you've done. And it's really remarkable. Your work is, you know, listen, I'm a

practicing physician, haven't published that much research, but you've been publishing research and designing programs and working in academic centers. And I think, I think this is exciting. I'm wondering what your colleagues think. They go, oh, but gee, that's nice, but let's, let's do real medicine or what, what are they saying to you? I tell you, you know, just like you said, you know, there are standard neurologists who are skeptical of these things. And one of the questions I get is that, you know, you don't have a placebo arm in the studies.

The one good thing about the finger study, I give credit to Miyakebibelto for doing that, is that they do have a, first of all, they have a large clinical trial, and they have a controlled trial where people just do the same as usual, which, as I mentioned, for European countries is pretty high. But I feel like, as a neurologist, how could I have a placebo for my study? I teach this meditation. I tell people to do diet changes, sleep changes, improvements, and it's hard to really do a controlled trial for these things.

And the other thing is that, you know, some things are so obvious. They're, as I mentioned, like no-brainers. Like if you improve exercise, you have increased blood flow to your brain, that's a good thing. You really need, I i mean at some point things have been done so many times that are obvious and i feel like the fact that i took a bunch of things that are that have been shown by hundreds if not thousands of our studies that are good for the brain and combine them into one program yeah it's a it's like obvious why why why are you arguing with that what is the like i mean i don't you know it's you know what you know why it's it's like we're stuck in this

old paradigm where you know if we want to prove something we have to just do one thing okay we want to know if exercise is good for the brain just change that one variable get people to exercise but don't change your diet don't get them them to sleep better. Don't deal with stress. Don't make sure their vitamin D levels are okay and their mercury levels are low and their thyroid's good. Just do one thing. Or let's just do meditation and see if that works. And nobody understands that the body is a system and you have to do everything. You can't just do one thing. You have to tune all the dials it's like you're it's like you know if you want to just sort of grow a plant i always say this analogy but you can't just you know put it in the soil and have no light and no water or you can't have no

soil you know and light and water and you need all the things ingredients you need for health that's that's an excellent analogy that you need and the reason, I guess it goes back to a dogma, that if you have memory problems, you have Alzheimer's disease, let's find a drug. If you have attention problems, you have attention deficit disorder. And, you know, we put a label as if we know what caused it. And then how could you come up with a simple intervention when we know that most people's symptoms are

because of multiple issues that that is well established i rarely had a patient i mean i think that early onset alzheimer disease is a disease it's a unified bad thing that happens to people and it's not because they didn't have good lifestyle. If somebody at 52 cannot operate their microwave, cannot drive, cannot do reading or do simple things, that's because they have a disease. They have, you know, some of them have the genes that increase amyloid, and that is a disease, and I don't argue with that. But once you go to your 70s and 80s, only 12% of people have mostly amyloid and nothing

else. And multiple studies have shown that. Multiple studies, one in Honolulu, one in Chicago. Several studies have shown that if you look at thousands of people who participate in these longitudinal studies, similar to the one I did at Hopkins, and you chop the brain and look at it, 10 to 15% of the time, you find only one thing. 85% of the time, it's a soup of problems. There's some amyloid, there's some vascular cognitive impairment, there may be some synuclein

that you see in Parkinson's disease, and, you know, there's increased inflammation, huge amount of inflammation. So, you know, this increased inflammation, huge amount of inflammation. So, you know, an average 75-year-old has at least four things in their brain that accounts for their memory or attention problems. So it's how could you expect the one drug work? And I think one reason the clinical trials fail over time is because different people have different issues. And I think one thing they've done recently that has increased the yield

for the anti-amyloid is that they do an amyloid PET scan and they seek out a small minority of people who have mostly amyloid in their brain. This is the minority. And they give drugs that reduces the amyloid

and they see a slow reduction in the rate of worsening. And so they think if amyloid was everything, then they should be cured anyway. These studies, they do show complete clearance of amyloid, yet the persons are a little less worse. If amyloid was culprit, you cleared the brain. They have this impressive before and after slides that show the newest anti-amyloid drugs. Clear, it's like the brain doesn't have any more red on it. But if the brain is free of amyloid, why is it that the person is less worse? Why is the person not better if amyloid is the culprit?

Well, Rudy Tanzi from Harvard talks about patients, for example, have brains full of amyloid. But on autopsy, when they see an optometrist, but they have no inflammation. They have some weird gene that prevents them from having inflammation. And with no inflammation, there's no Alzheimer's. And they have perfect cognition at the time of death, even though their brains are full of amyloid so it's sort of you know alzheimer's you know goes with stages one to six and and there are and there are several reports actually that

there are people who have stage six alzheimer's in the brain and yet in life they did not have memory problem they did not have any reported problems they just had a life life, they did not have memory problems. They did not have any reported problems. They just had a life and they did not act or appear to have dementia. And so that's possible. So I think amyloid is a particular thing on the side. I would never have any of my family members try these medications that are recently approved by FDA. I think FDA approving it is a mistake

because they don't make the patients better. These medications are expensive. That's fine. I mean, these drug companies do spend billions of dollars making these things, so let them have some money. It's fine. But the thing is, they're hardly effective. The effect size is small.

And also, they have high side effects and increase fatality and they have infusions it's not like a supplement you take yeah no it's super expensive too it's really yeah so i think i think the principles that apply to the brain are the same things that apply to skin and the heart and the bones and eyes and they are well established nobody would argue i don't think this day and age anybody would argue with you that eating a healthy diet is good for you i don't think anybody would say well wait a minute i i i beg to differ nobody says that i don't remember anybody said i don't think that it's played rule i think everybody unanimously agrees that a healthy diet is good for you. And everybody agrees that exercise is good for you.

Everybody agrees sleep is good for you. And everybody agrees that stress reduction is good for you. So there's unanimity on the fact that these four things are good for you. And I think what we did is that we said, okay, let's coach people to incorporate these four things in their lives. Because if you're already tired, if you already have brain fog, you can't organize your days and your schedule to have some time for exercise,

to have a better choice of what you eat, and to do meditation. You just are overwhelmed already with your job and your kids and driving and everything else. So our brain coaches were like cheerleaders. They said, look, Smith, we're going to do this. We're going to walk five minutes a day, just five minutes. We're not asking too much until next week.

Next minute, no, please walk 10 minutes a day. And by the way, just cut French fries from your diet. We don't ask you to totally change your diet. We have, we don't ask you to, no, totally change your diet. You got to junk food. But just cut one thing. And the third week, I mean, and the thing was when people made those minor changes,

even with those minor changes, they would see results in their own day-to-day life. They say, oh, I had difficulty memorizing phone numbers and now I actually can see, I don't know. I don't know what you did

or just a coincidence. And in the week four, they say they would actually have seen some improvement by week four. They would say, look, how about walking half an hour three times a week? And, you know, and then really don't eat junk food. Don't change everything else. Just don't say no to cookies and no French fries and try to get your food from a farmer's market as much as you can. I love this pharmacy with

an F that you put. And so, you know, by six weeks when people came back, we had shown them some meditation little by little, but that's not easy. And I think I give credit to my brain coaches who are so patient in dealing with our patients. And, you know, we had a very small attrition rate. We only had only 7% attrition, which is 93% of people who came to the program. It's a 12-week program. Twice a a 12-week program. Twice a week, very few people dropped out of the program.

And people who dropped out... Is this something that you have to come see you? Or can this be done online? Do you have a program online? We have it on my website, drfatouille.com. And I outline the questionnaires that people need to do. And we'll put all this in the show notes so everybody can kind of track it. And, you know, the interventions that we did for our patients are available.

I think what would help people who want to do this on their own is to have a partner, whether it's a spouse, their best friend, someone who would partner with them and they would do it together because they can encourage each other and they can have some accountability. I think the most difficult challenge was the first two, three weeks when people had to break away.

The behavior change, yeah. Yes. You know, people have routines. People have a routine for what they eat in the morning, what they eat for lunch, what they eat for dinner, what they do. And those routines need to change but once the routines change that's how it is from now on you don't have to think about it anymore like once you have a routine of just eating fruits and vegetables and legumes and high fiber it becomes just the common way of looking at things you don't have to think about

it yeah i mean it does take there's a lot of science around habit change behavior change there's a lot of supports there's coaching programs uh vita health is a great one where you can get support or or just you know getting your friend or your spouse or your partner or your kid or somebody to do it with you makes a huge difference and i think uh there's books like atomic habits and there's no lack of resources, but it does require just setting the conditions up for success. If all you have in your house is junk food, then that's what you're going to eat. I mean, I was listening to a podcast the other day with Bill Maher and he was talking about

how, you know, he doesn't, you know, what's going on obesity in America and the challenges and problems with it. And he understands, you know, he says what it's like to be hungry and he, you know, he smokes pot and he gets the munchies, but he says he makes sure in his house he doesn't have any crap so that when he gets the munchies, all he can eat is nuts or something like that and not get into trouble eating a bag of cookies. So it's really making your home environment safe, setting things up for success. You know, I, I have that in my kitchen i have on my counter all my smoothie ingredients out all my supplements i want to take all bagged up in little baggies so i don't

have to like go sort throughout the bottles all day i have my workout station in my house where i have my bands and all the little things i use i have everything set up so that it's not a huge effort or friction to actually do it is good for me and i think that's really important for people to understand that you have to make it automatic and easy. And once you build those habits and structures in your life, that it's not something you have to think about, right? I don't really think about it. I just, it's like, takes me five minutes, I do it. Not a big deal. So I feel like what you're really sharing with people is a revolutionary idea, Majid, that actually our brains are fixable. That we often have broken brains,

as I say, and we have this sort of dysfunctions that are treatable, that are based on modifiable causes. And I'd like you to sort of unpack a little bit, you know, we know, for example, for heart disease, that, you know, what are the modifiable risk factors, your cholesterol, your blood sugar, smoking, exercise, you know, making sure you don't sleep out. There's things we know that make a huge difference in preventing heart disease. And there's been, you know, billions and billions of dollars spent on teaching people that, on educating people that, on teaching doctors about it. But doctors are clueless when it comes to how to fix the brain and what we can do and what are the modifiable risk factors so can you talk about what those are and what we need to be thinking about and how we start to sort through uh our

our sort of own personal history as well as our patients as doctors to really understand what are those modifiable risk factors um i think the one easy way to think of it is the things that are good for the heart are good for the brain. Many of the risk factors, the modified risk factors that apply to the heart apply exactly to the brain as well. For example, stress affects the heart and affects the brain. Poor diet affects the heart, affects the brain. Poor sleep affects the heart and affects the brain and poor sleep affects the heart and affects the brain. And the one thing that is different here is a degree of cognitive challenges that you put yourself up for. You know, a lot of people retire, stop using their brain as much, and that accelerates their cognitive decline.

And brain training doesn't have to be like, you know, using apps that you sit down and, you know, play chess or play memory games. I think one thing that can be done is for people to explore the world around them. Have a sense of curiosity, a sense of try to learn a new language or try to take a class for pottery or take a class for dancing. Things that require multi-sensory involvement are actually better for the brain compared to those that are just sit down. Like playing tennis because I started tennis when I was 45. And so it's not easy for me. I have to really think about it.

And I was working on my backhand yesterday. And it's like you're kind of creating new pathways. And it's constantly challenging. It's in multiple directions. So I really love that. Yeah. You know, my brother, Omid Fatouhi, he's a psychologist. And he told me something that's really interesting.

And he said, you know, you need to look forward to failing. A lot of people don't try new things. They say, I'm not good at it. You need to say, look, I'm going to enjoy failing the next hobby or challenge that I pick. And go for it. Go play tennis, mess up your backhand, and laugh about it. Say, see, I did it. Because a lot of people have this barrier to learning new things

because they feel intimidated because they're not good at it. A lot of older people may not feel comfortable with all the IT progress we've made in terms of the different gadgets on the phones and different gadgets to adjust the temperature in the house from remote, all these things. These days we have so much electronics all around us. And there is still some elderly who still have those phones.

They don't wanna try a new phone because they feel uncomfortable trying it. So I think a good way to do things is what my brother Omid said is, you know, look forward to failing. Try new things. And if you fail, say, see, I did it. And keep doing it. And as, you know, your brain gets better, the more you do it.

One of the quotes that I always share with my students and my patients is that practice makes cortex. Cortex is down there in the brain that accounts for all your cognitive abilities, whether you do your taxes, type your email, have a conversation with colleagues, everything you do is your cortex, which is like a blanket on top of the brain. So different parts of the brain, cortex have different functions. And what happens is that when you do things that challenge that particular part of the brain, that part of the brain grows. So for example, let's say you decide to do a lot of math exercises, or you decide to learn a new musical instrument, the parts of the cortex that are involved in doing that task grow,

just like your muscles grow. And the more brain you have, the more brain reserve you will have when you get to your 80s and 90s. So if your campus is part of brain or memory, and it's the size of your thumb and sits inside your temporal lobe like this, inside it. But all these other cortical areas are important for your abilities to do the things you do every day. And the more cortex and hippocampus you have, the more functional you will be in the future.

And so, for example, one study showed that if you learn to play golf, the parts of the brain that are important for hand-eye coordination and planning your movements literally grow. They did MRIs at the beginning of this 72-hour golf lesson and then after that, and they compare MRIs and parts of the frontal lobe actually grow. So I think growing the brain is easy. It requires a good blood flow to the brain. It requires good nutrition, low levels of stress. But brain training does make a difference. Talk about that. What is brainercise?

You know, we talk about exercise. What's brainercise? How do we exercise our brains? It's not something we think about. We know how to lift weights. We know how to go for a run. But nobody talks about that. Yeah.

Let me explain one thing, and then I'll answer that question. You know, we're talking before that people say, oh, this intervention didn't work. It's because it was an isolated intervention, and the patient has multiple issues, and that's why that isolated intervention didn't work. Whether or not brain training is good for you is controversial. Some people say, you know, studies show that people who played chess or did these brain games did not have any difference in the outcome two years later, eight years later. Well, I think the problem is that you can't do one intervention and see results on like outcome, like whether or not you're demented. Because if this intervention helps something 5%, 10%, and the cutoff you've set up to see

results require 80% or 60%, you did have result, but you failed to capture that result. And the other thing is that if you do that and somebody who exercise and do other things, then you will see results with your cut off. So if you have sleep apnea, sedentary lifestyle, poor diet, and you just sit home and just do these brain games on your phone, don't expect that six months later, you feel like someone sharper. Right, right. Because sleep apnea is your enemy. And you can't just do brain games and expect that six months later you'll be. So I want people to appreciate that you need to put things in the context of a personalized multimodal intervention.

In our program, we provided a coaching for diet, exercise, sleep, and stress reduction. And this was all in the category of lifestyle modifications. And then we had a category of brain training. and then we had a category of biofeedback. So brain training does work. Of course it works. Again, it's one of those things that are so obvious. There are at least several hundred, if not thousands of studies that have shown that if you do something, that part of the brain grows.

And clearly, the more brain you have, the less likely you get demented. So that's a no-brainer. You know, the thing to do is to realize that. No, it should be called a brainer, not a no-brainer. I think people need to know that if you do, let's say, a brain game that requires memory, don't expect that your processing speed or your executive function may improve. See, brain has different areas, different networks. And if you work on your biceps, don't expect your quads to be stronger.

There is some subdivision of functions in the brain. And so don't expect that you do some things on these. But there's ways to work the whole brain, right? With these programs. Yeah. So the things to do, what I recommend to people is to do things that are body engaging. Like, you know, if you learn to play tennis, it's, it's, you keep track of of scores you learn how to do different things and then if you really you know when i go at it you watch some videos you have it and it's not there to teach you and then do a variety of things like you know for a while do that and then try pottery and get a feel

for texture and and you know how much to do and then i learned surfing at 61 years old so it's like you know it's never too late yeah i think you know the idea of um you know enjoy failing is to try it a lot of people say i can't do sailing but just do it and have fun with it it's okay if you fail you need to fail Well, I definitely fell off the surfboard a lot. But I'm doing better now. Exactly. Exactly. I was told I'm intermediate. I was told by my surfing instructor that I'm intermediate now, which is good.

Good for you. That's awesome. That's the way to do it. A lot of breath watching. And there are books for things like how to memorize a deck of cards or memorize a hundred words. You know, I do that for, we did that for our patients where we, you know, we showed them how to memorize a hundred words. And most of our patients did it. A lot of people say, no way, Dr. Petugia, I can't do this.

Then you can memorize cards. You can go to Las Vegas and make a lot of money. Well, this is incredible. I can't emphasize enough for people to understand that we're in a revolution in brain science right now, that we're in a moment where people like Majid and Dr. Isaacson and Dale Bredesen and others are really pioneering work that's helping us to rethink our approach to brain health. Dr. Amen also has been involved in this work. And I think we need to take it seriously. Our brains are our most precious possession. It's who we has been involved in this work. And I think we need to take it seriously.

Our brains are our most precious possession. It's who we are. It's our identity. It's how we basically go through the world. And if we actually lose our brains, you know, you can get a heart transplant. You can't get a brain transplant. So it's really important to take care of our brains. And this is a model that does this. And I encourage you to check out the work that Dr. Fatouhi is doing. It's drfoutuhi.com. You can learn about his brain fitness program there. You can actually take the brain questionnaire. I did that this morning and I scored very good to excellent.

I'm very happy about that. You can take that too. I encourage you to check out his books and learn more about his work. His books, The Memory Cure or Boost Your Brain, they're awesome. And if you know anybody who might benefit from listening to this podcast, you can do a great job for us by sharing it with them on social media. Also, leave a comment. How have you helped to understand your brain and optimize your brain function? We'd love to know tips from you.

And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do, introducing you to all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introduce to you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to

tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements, to gadgets, to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise.

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stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or professional advice or services. If podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner.

If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.