התמלול המלא של #486: Unlocking Brain Plasticity: How Speed Training Can Help Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline With Dr. Henry Mahncke

bringing together world-class scientific minds and pushing the science towards the clinic where it can actually change lives. 54 00:04:38.383 --> 00:04:42.826 Remember that podcast that we aired earlier this year about mitochondrial transplants? 55 00:04:43.626 --> 00:04:46.889 Yeah, that with Dr. Natalie Yivga Ohana, that's right. 56 00:04:47.169 --> 00:04:50.111 Her work is funded by Countdown. 57 00:04:50.331 --> 00:04:51.632 That's how we found each other. 58 00:04:52.152 --> 00:04:57.517 Now, I believe in this mission so strongly that I serve on Countdown's board of directors. 59 00:04:58.037 --> 00:05:03.882 And now there's a really cool way for you to become part of it too, called Countdown Insiders. 60 00:05:04.262 --> 00:05:15.131 Now, for just $21 a month, you're directly helping fund mitochondrial research while getting exclusive access to events, science briefings, partner perks, and a real voice in what Countdown does next. 61 00:05:15.151 --> 00:05:16.252 I'm going to be a little bit more. 62 00:05:16.392 --> 00:05:18.533 I would so love for you to see what we're doing. 63 00:05:18.733 --> 00:05:31.961 So longevity listeners will get their first month free with code Natalie, that's N-A-T-H-A-L-I-E. You can learn more at joincountdown.org forward slash membership. 64 00:05:32.461 --> 00:05:36.223 That's joincountdown.org forward slash membership. 65 00:05:36.543 --> 00:05:38.645 Dr. Henry Manka, welcome to the show. 66 00:05:38.705 --> 00:05:40.366 Thank you for taking the time to be here. 67 00:05:40.646 --> 00:05:44.288 It is, this is a conversation I've been looking forward to for a long time. 68 00:05:44.808 --> 00:05:45.849 I'm delighted to be here. 69 00:05:45.909 --> 00:05:47.029 Thank you for having me on. 70 00:05:47.730 --> 00:05:51.172 I needed to yell at the guy who made the game that, you know, makes me crazy. 71 00:05:52.392 --> 00:05:58.936 You know, I often introduce myself and I say, look, I helped invent these brain training exercises that are part of Brain HQ. 72 00:05:59.376 --> 00:06:01.818 I'm probably responsible for the parts you don't like. 73 00:06:02.638 --> 00:06:05.882 that they're very challenging and they push your brain very hard. 74 00:06:06.203 --> 00:06:08.906 And as a result, they drive neuroplasticity and they work. 75 00:06:09.327 --> 00:06:15.635 And I have a wonderful team of artists and sound designers and game designers that are responsible for all the parts you probably do really like about. 76 00:06:16.575 --> 00:06:16.815 Yeah. 77 00:06:17.075 --> 00:06:17.315 Yeah. 78 00:06:17.496 --> 00:06:20.937 Well, there's, I mean, I think anyway, we're, we're, let's not jump into that yet. 79 00:06:21.017 --> 00:06:25.960 I want to, I want the audience to get to know you a little bit better before we jump into the, to the meat of it. 80 00:06:26.000 --> 00:06:26.480 Is it worse? 81 00:06:26.540 --> 00:06:33.404 So, so before you were a neuroscientist, you were a child who watched your grandfather lose his cognitive ability to Alzheimer's. 82 00:06:33.944 --> 00:06:36.446 So what do you actually remember from that time? 83 00:06:36.626 --> 00:06:40.888 Not the diagnosis, but the little things like the little moments that what stayed with you? 84 00:06:41.288 --> 00:06:49.270 So when I was about 10 years old, growing up in Washington, D.C., you know, around that time, my grandfather started to develop Alzheimer's disease. 85 00:06:49.770 --> 00:06:51.490 Now, of course, this was in 1980. 86 00:06:51.650 --> 00:06:56.071 And this was at a time where we didn't have a very sophisticated understanding of Alzheimer's disease. 87 00:06:56.512 --> 00:06:58.392 In fact, he never got diagnosed with Alzheimer's. 88 00:06:58.412 --> 00:07:02.273 He was told he had senile dementia, which is what we used to call this back in the day. 89 00:07:02.973 --> 00:07:07.836 And, you know, that was at a time where we thought, well, I guess you get old and I guess you lose your memory. 90 00:07:07.936 --> 00:07:10.017 And if you live long enough, you get senile. 91 00:07:10.137 --> 00:07:10.297 Right. 92 00:07:10.317 --> 00:07:13.679 We just sort of understood this as a natural the natural order of things. 93 00:07:13.719 --> 00:07:14.259 Progression. 94 00:07:14.319 --> 00:07:15.320 Yeah, exactly. 95 00:07:15.340 --> 00:07:18.782 Just like just like your old VW bug eventually wears out. 96 00:07:18.882 --> 00:07:20.703 You know, your brain eventually wears out. 97 00:07:21.243 --> 00:07:23.905 And so he went into he went into assisted living. 98 00:07:23.985 --> 00:07:29.428 And what I remember as a kid is going with my dad on the weekends to go visit him at the home that he was in. 99 00:07:30.308 --> 00:07:39.871 And, you know, he gradually, I mean, he was, he could sort of remember me at first, he was happy to see his grandson, but we sort of lost that over time and he wasn't able to interact with us. 100 00:07:40.651 --> 00:07:48.534 And honestly, that the thing that I remember the most is after each visit, my dad and I would go to the Lionel train store across the street from where my grandfather's home was. 101 00:07:48.574 --> 00:07:54.676 I don't know if you had model trains when you were a kid, but my dad and my grandfather had big model train folks and so was I. 102 00:07:55.196 --> 00:07:57.617 And when I was a kid, I sort of thought, well, that's a treat, right? 103 00:07:57.637 --> 00:08:00.618 We've gone to do something somewhat hard and now we're going to have a treat. 104 00:08:00.638 --> 00:08:01.579 We'll go look at trains. 105 00:08:02.099 --> 00:08:12.383 But when I got older than that, what I really came to realize is that it was actually therapy for my dad and how incredibly hard that was to watch his dad kind of slip away from him in that way. 106 00:08:12.403 --> 00:08:24.388 And how my dad, more than me as the 10-year-old boy, my dad as the 40, 45-year-old man needed to take some time to process and engage in something that he truly

loved to kind of then move on about the rest of his day. 107 00:08:25.048 --> 00:08:25.748 Yeah. 108 00:08:25.768 --> 00:08:29.510 You know, that's the challenge of this disease is it is as they diagnose it. 109 00:08:29.550 --> 00:08:29.750 Right. 110 00:08:29.790 --> 00:08:30.470 It is slow. 111 00:08:30.610 --> 00:08:31.551 It is insidious. 112 00:08:31.691 --> 00:08:35.772 We perceive it to be irreversible, although you and I may talk a little bit more about that. 113 00:08:36.532 --> 00:08:39.534 And I want to challenge that is for anyone to go through that. 114 00:08:39.574 --> 00:08:43.155 And so when when Brain HQ was founded, and I'm sure we'll talk more about that as well. 115 00:08:43.695 --> 00:08:44.015 Yeah. 116 00:08:44.415 --> 00:08:49.277 I sort of like, well, hey, come coming to work every day and working on a problem that's as important as that. 117 00:08:49.297 --> 00:08:51.138 I mean, that's an incredibly exciting opportunity. 118 00:08:51.443 --> 00:09:01.687 So that'll take us to how you ended up in Dr. Michael Merzenich's lab at UCSF, which is ultimately, I mean, and I kind of vaguely remember this. 119 00:09:01.747 --> 00:09:05.568 This is the lab that proved that the adult brain could still change. 120 00:09:05.868 --> 00:09:10.790 Like we'd always been told, you know, by the time somebody, people, it's like they were pulling numbers out of the air. 121 00:09:10.830 --> 00:09:14.591 By the time you're two, by the time you're three, by the time you're five, that's it, you're done. 122 00:09:14.691 --> 00:09:16.392 And it was like, kind of like, holy shit. 123 00:09:16.432 --> 00:09:20.033 Like if I don't get, if we don't get it together with our little kids, we're... 124 00:09:20.513 --> 00:09:21.334 they're going to be doomed. 125 00:09:22.755 --> 00:09:30.861 But what did it feel like the first time you personally saw evidence that the brain everybody said was done, was actually rewiring itself? 126 00:09:31.341 --> 00:09:31.661 Yeah. 127 00:09:31.681 --> 00:09:37.445 So I came to graduate school in the early 1990s and we were told exactly what you just said then, right? 128 00:09:37.465 --> 00:09:40.568 We were told the brain is really plastic when you're a little kid. 129 00:09:40.588 --> 00:09:42.549 We know kids learn language really quickly. 130 00:09:42.589 --> 00:09:45.051 We know they recover from brain injury remarkably well. 131 00:09:45.071 --> 00:09:45.211 And 132 00:09:45.571 --> 00:09:55.702 But, hey, after the age of five or 12 or 19 and there was some magic number, like you said, the critical window is closed after that is what we were taught as scientists. 133 00:09:55.802 --> 00:09:56.002 Right. 134 00:09:56.583 --> 00:10:02.930 And so I I was in a lab run by Mike Merznik and he was a absolute heretic. 135 00:10:02.950 --> 00:10:05.132 He was an absolute revolutionary at that point. 136 00:10:05.312 --> 00:10:06.072 Love those guys. 137 00:10:06.512 --> 00:10:20.677 And, you know, he was coming from a

pretty good place to start, which is in the late 1970s, he was part of the team at UCSF that invented the cochlear implant, which is you and your listeners may know is a medical device that replaces the cochlear and fundamentally cures deafness. 138 00:10:21.277 --> 00:10:25.419 And so, you know, he had accomplished things in the world of science. 139 00:10:25.439 --> 00:10:26.679 He had chops. 140 00:10:27.059 --> 00:10:27.779 Yeah, exactly. 141 00:10:27.799 --> 00:10:32.981 When you go on to your great reward, if you can put cure deafness on your resume there, like you're in pretty good shape. 142 00:10:33.381 --> 00:10:35.683 And I'm going to tell Mike's story and then I'll tell my story. 143 00:10:35.703 --> 00:10:44.671 You know, the way Mike says that he first really came to see brain plasticity in action is that they had implanted the first cochlear implant in a patient who was deaf. 144 00:10:45.231 --> 00:10:47.914 And they the huge win for them was very primitive. 145 00:10:48.174 --> 00:10:48.714 The huge win. 146 00:10:48.734 --> 00:10:53.018 They're like, hey, man, if I can clap my hands and this guy could hear it like that would be a miracle. 147 00:10:53.098 --> 00:10:53.318 Right. 148 00:10:53.378 --> 00:10:53.899 He can hear it. 149 00:10:54.459 --> 00:10:55.480 And so that happened. 150 00:10:55.760 --> 00:10:56.800 They popped the champagne. 151 00:10:56.861 --> 00:10:57.561 It was miraculous. 152 00:10:57.581 --> 00:11:04.385 But a couple of weeks later, what Mike started to find is that this person with this primitive cochlear implant could start to understand spoken speech. 153 00:11:04.845 --> 00:11:10.549 And that is insane because spoken speech is so fast and in so many characteristics. 154 00:11:10.869 --> 00:11:12.910 And they have such a junky cochlear implant. 155 00:11:12.930 --> 00:11:13.411 They had it. 156 00:11:14.131 --> 00:11:19.274 And Mike said right then he realized the only way this could work is not because he invented a great cochlear implant. 157 00:11:19.334 --> 00:11:20.275 Mike's a very humble guy. 158 00:11:20.355 --> 00:11:29.141 He says we did not invent a great cochlear implant, but the brain must be changing to adapt to the new kind of input it was getting so that it could process the information. 159 00:11:29.521 --> 00:11:31.522 And that was the light bulb moment for Mike. 160 00:11:31.562 --> 00:11:34.744 And so when I came to the lab, there were experiments around this that were ongoing. 161 00:11:35.184 --> 00:11:39.167 And, you know, he and people in the lab, we were at war with a lot of neuroscience, right? 162 00:11:40.047 --> 00:11:43.449 Mike went to conferences and Nobel Prize winners would say, none of this is true. 163 00:11:43.489 --> 00:11:44.470 The brain does not change. 164 00:11:44.490 --> 00:11:45.310 You need to get out of here. 165 00:11:45.631 --> 00:11:50.713 And there we are in the lab and we're training rats to use their whiskers to feel different shapes. 166 00:11:50.773 --> 00:11:56.777 And we're teaching monkeys how to get really, really good at distinguishing between a C note and a C sharp note on the piano. 167 00:11:57.137 --> 00:12:02.440 And then we go in and we look at these brains and these brains are dramatically different after these animals have been trained. 168 00:12:02.800 --> 00:12:07.463 Like any of a second year graduate student, I can see this in the electrical recordings. 169 00:12:07.483 --> 00:12:07.883 Yeah. 170 00:12:08.063 --> 00:12:10.564 And so it was a very odd time, but Mike went on to win. 171 00:12:10.744 --> 00:12:15.786 And any textbook in neuroscience at this point has a chapter on brain plasticity. 172 00:12:15.866 --> 00:12:19.407 And those Nobel Prize winners came back to him eventually and said, hey, I guess you were right. 173 00:12:19.867 --> 00:12:27.810 So we've been through with this brain plasticity revolution, but we're now in the middle of starting to say, well, hey, how can we put that to work? 174 00:12:28.070 --> 00:12:30.691 That's an incredibly exciting laboratory invention. 175 00:12:32.271 --> 00:12:36.793 But hey, none of this really matters unless it gets out of the lab and into the world to help people. 176 00:12:37.464 --> 00:12:37.724 Yeah. 177 00:12:38.445 --> 00:12:41.627 Where do you think the idea that the brain didn't change came from? 178 00:12:42.748 --> 00:12:43.569 Oh, yeah. 179 00:12:43.889 --> 00:12:48.212 Especially with that moving bar of by the time you're two, three, four, five, you know, which is. 180 00:12:49.333 --> 00:12:51.875 I would say there's three threads that came together here in different ways. 181 00:12:52.015 --> 00:12:53.456 And all these threads are true. 182 00:12:53.657 --> 00:12:55.398 They were just wrong about the big picture. 183 00:12:55.438 --> 00:12:55.638 Right. 184 00:12:55.978 --> 00:13:00.722 There was one thread, like I mentioned, hey, we know if you take a kid to France, they learn French immediately. 185 00:13:00.842 --> 00:13:03.584 And if you take your me to France, we have a somewhat harder time. 186 00:13:03.624 --> 00:13:03.764 Right. 187 00:13:04.105 --> 00:13:05.526 Something about the brain is changing. 188 00:13:05.986 --> 00:13:16.410 There were also these experiments done in the 60s and the 70s by visual neuroscientists looking at the development of the visual parts of the brain and basically how the two different eyes kind of connect to the brain. 189 00:13:16.850 --> 00:13:21.933 And it turns out they connect to the brain in this pattern of overlapping stripes called ocular dominance columns. 190 00:13:22.333 --> 00:13:25.494 And you can move those things around a ton when you're little. 191 00:13:26.154 --> 00:13:28.915 But, you know, hey, once they get wired up, you can do anything you like. 192 00:13:28.955 --> 00:13:31.576 And those patterns, those stripes are pretty immutable. 193 00:13:31.877 --> 00:13:35.498 And that led to this idea that, hey, the brain wires itself up when

you're young but not actually. 194 00:13:35.618 --> 00:13:35.898 Right. 195 00:13:36.559 --> 00:13:41.082 And then also psychologists in the late 70s had done these cognitive training experiments. 196 00:13:41.502 --> 00:13:44.685 And in one particular science paper, of course, that's an influential journal, right? 197 00:13:45.025 --> 00:13:49.328 They taught a guy to be able to remember 100 numbers, incredibly long list. 198 00:13:49.368 --> 00:13:50.169 And that's impressive. 199 00:13:50.209 --> 00:13:52.570 I can't remember 100 numbers and I run a brain training company. 200 00:13:53.031 --> 00:13:53.191 Right. 201 00:13:53.371 --> 00:13:56.393 But what they found then is that they asked him to remember 100 letters. 202 00:13:56.413 --> 00:13:57.154 He couldn't do it. 203 00:13:57.554 --> 00:14:01.237 And so that led to the idea that, hey, this training, you know, this kind of stuff, it's 204 00:14:01.697 --> 00:14:03.780 It's super specific, right? 205 00:14:03.820 --> 00:14:06.604 We're not we're not changing the brain in any broad way. 206 00:14:06.925 --> 00:14:09.889 You know, it's like I'm super good at tennis, but can I win a football game? 207 00:14:09.909 --> 00:14:10.430 You don't know. 208 00:14:10.650 --> 00:14:12.933 So we had the idea of the brain didn't change. 209 00:14:12.973 --> 00:14:16.519 We had the idea of the training was very specific and that led to, you know, this very 210 00:14:16.919 --> 00:14:19.580 crystallized sense of the brain. 211 00:14:19.980 --> 00:14:21.661 Like again, once you have it, you have it. 212 00:14:21.681 --> 00:14:28.563 When I was in graduate school, they told me that because this was true, every drink that I might have at a party, I was going to kill a few brain cells. 213 00:14:28.743 --> 00:14:30.824 I was going to lose a few synaptic connections. 214 00:14:31.204 --> 00:14:33.565 And it was just a one-way path to dementia. 215 00:14:33.945 --> 00:14:37.026 Now, for the record, that didn't stop us in graduate school. 216 00:14:37.466 --> 00:14:39.387 Nonetheless, that is what we were told. 217 00:14:40.167 --> 00:14:40.508 Right. 218 00:14:40.788 --> 00:14:48.195 You know, what a revolution to have been through to realize that, you know, every part of the body can be, you know, reworked and strengthened. 219 00:14:48.215 --> 00:14:50.056 Your muscles can be strengthened. 220 00:14:50.076 --> 00:14:51.858 Your lungs can develop better capacity. 221 00:14:51.878 --> 00:14:53.319 Your heart can become healthier. 222 00:14:53.359 --> 00:14:56.903 Your liver can, you know, do its job more effectively. 223 00:14:57.163 --> 00:14:59.926 The brain isn't magically not part of the body. 224 00:15:00.526 --> 00:15:05.228 And when you sort of approach it through that lens, it's perhaps less surprising the brain can change. 225 00:15:05.528 --> 00:15:07.188 Now, there's an art to getting it right. 226 00:15:07.508 --> 00:15:10.129 And there's things we can do better and things we can't do better. 227 00:15:10.449 --> 00:15:12.950 But that notion is finally dead. 228 00:15:13.110 --> 00:15:15.291 And I'm pretty happy about that. 229 00:15:15.591 --> 00:15:19.473 So now we can enter a true world of progress about what can we do with brain plasticity. 230 00:15:19.733 --> 00:15:20.293 Beautiful. 231 00:15:21.093 --> 00:15:22.594 All right, let's go back to the training. 232 00:15:22.774 --> 00:15:25.416 This is not memory game or a crossword. 233 00:15:25.596 --> 00:15:27.457 This is not solitaire guys. 234 00:15:27.797 --> 00:15:33.620 This is about the speed of visual and auditory processing, not just visual. 235 00:15:34.040 --> 00:15:36.942 Having played the games and screamed at my phone a few times, I can tell you. 236 00:15:37.603 --> 00:15:45.147 So talk us through why speed specifically turned out to be the lever that matters most. 237 00:15:45.830 --> 00:15:47.812 Yeah, that is exactly right. 238 00:15:47.872 --> 00:15:51.536 We are really speed people and we are really brain plasticity people. 239 00:15:51.936 --> 00:15:58.062 And in our own language, we might call ourselves sort of bottom up training people as opposed to top down training people. 240 00:15:58.563 --> 00:15:59.584 And here's what I mean by that. 241 00:15:59.644 --> 00:15:59.824 Right. 242 00:16:00.205 --> 00:16:04.289 There's a rich history of like cognitive training and cognitive rehabilitation, like in brain injury. 243 00:16:04.829 --> 00:16:09.892 A person has a memory problem after a brain injury, and so, hey, let's teach them how to use a memory notebook, right? 244 00:16:10.212 --> 00:16:13.054 Let's train them to use a calendar so they know what they're supposed to do. 245 00:16:13.374 --> 00:16:16.256 Those are what you might call compensatory techniques, right? 246 00:16:16.496 --> 00:16:20.058 We can kind of reroute the information so that you can still get the job done. 247 00:16:20.238 --> 00:16:20.819 And those are great. 248 00:16:20.839 --> 00:16:21.479 Those are helpful. 249 00:16:21.639 --> 00:16:22.280 Don't get me wrong. 250 00:16:22.380 --> 00:16:23.621 I'm a big fan, right? 251 00:16:24.021 --> 00:16:25.883 But what we're trying to do is something deeply different. 252 00:16:25.943 --> 00:16:28.165 We wanna fix the brain from the bottom up. 253 00:16:28.485 --> 00:16:31.828 And in many ways, we're not directly targeting cognitive function. 254 00:16:31.848 --> 00:16:33.570 That's why these aren't memory games. 255 00:16:33.870 --> 00:16:36.392 We're not teaching you facts. 256 00:16:36.432 --> 00:16:38.514 We're not giving you this sort of thing's the other. 257 00:16:38.754 --> 00:16:39.475 We're fixing the brain. 258 00:16:39.495 --> 00:16:46.180 Well, there's one, the one where you have to remember that Bob likes turtles and went to Spain and Susie likes horses. 259 00:16:47.041 --> 00:16:51.945 Yeah, but you might have also come the one that's like pick up the plow before the hammer and then grab the plant. 260 00:16:52.246 --> 00:16:55.228

So there's some that are sort of these kinds of list of things. 261 00:16:55.488 --> 00:16:57.670 But even those have a little art to them, which I'll mention. 262 00:16:58.351 --> 00:16:59.292 Why are we speed people? 263 00:16:59.392 --> 00:17:05.197 We are speed processing people because speed processing is fundamental to both cognitive performance and brain health. 264 00:17:05.637 --> 00:17:14.380 There is a whole literature called the processing speed theory of aging, which basically says, hey, every problem you have around cognitive function, you might think it's memory. 265 00:17:14.400 --> 00:17:15.760 You might think it's faces and names. 266 00:17:15.980 --> 00:17:19.661 There's a strong argument from the psychological literature that it's all processing speed. 267 00:17:19.841 --> 00:17:19.981 Right. 268 00:17:20.321 --> 00:17:25.183 Information does not get through your brain quickly enough to be able to activate memory attention. 269 00:17:25.483 --> 00:17:28.466 We agree with that, but more than that, we're bottom-up neural information people, right? 270 00:17:28.486 --> 00:17:43.642 When you put an electrode into a brain and you hear those neurons being active in response to something you see or something you hear, you cannot escape the very first sense that, hey, a healthy brain responds to anything you see or hear or touch correctly. 271 00:17:43.742 --> 00:17:46.284 quickly, accurately, sharply. 272 00:17:46.644 --> 00:17:48.345 It's a very quick response. 273 00:17:48.365 --> 00:17:51.488 And in fact, large parts of the brain turn on synchronously, right? 274 00:17:51.508 --> 00:17:56.672 I'm sure you and your listeners are familiar with the idea with all kinds of brain waves, alpha waves, gamma waves, these kinds of things. 275 00:17:56.992 --> 00:18:01.355 Those all represent the synchronous activity of large populations of neurons. 276 00:18:01.755 --> 00:18:12.023 And so when you are listening to an electrical recording from a brain that's healthy, you hear those sharp responses, you hear those fast kind of synchronous activities, the whole brain is communicating and working well. 277 00:18:12.543 --> 00:18:28.953 And then if you do the same kind of experiment with any kind of brain that's unhealthy, maybe you're working with an older rat, or maybe you're looking at a chemically damaged brain or a traumatic brain injury brain, the first thing you hear, you can't avoid it, is all of that sound that you hear when those neurons are active. 278 00:18:29.434 --> 00:18:30.555 It's slower. 279 00:18:30.895 --> 00:18:32.015 It's kind of murkier. 280 00:18:32.336 --> 00:18:35.077 It's not strong across different parts of the brain. 281 00:18:35.518 --> 00:18:40.621 And so one way to think about, hey, what's happening as we age or for that matter after a brain injury, right? 282 00:18:41.021 --> 00:18:43.642 Well, hey, information processing has slowed down. 283 00:18:44.042 --> 00:18:50.884 And so you might see something, but it's

not quickly processed and it's not engaging a lot of neurons at the same time. 284 00:18:51.264 --> 00:18:54.245 So it doesn't get passed on to your attention centers very strongly. 285 00:18:54.525 --> 00:18:59.347 And then it doesn't get passed on to your frontal cortex where you're doing working memory and thinking and planning. 286 00:18:59.707 --> 00:19:04.428 It's, you know, it's kind of like it's being pushed through a pipe that's got a lot of gunk in it, right? 287 00:19:04.468 --> 00:19:06.389 And the water just comes out slow and murky. 288 00:19:06.629 --> 00:19:16.052 Another way to think about it is that, hey, as we age or have these brain damage conditions, it's almost like the brain is an old radio that's kind of gotten off the signal and it's got some static in it, right? 289 00:19:16.072 --> 00:19:18.873 There's this extra activity that's not about the signal. 290 00:19:19.153 --> 00:19:21.174 The signal is fighting through the noise. 291 00:19:21.194 --> 00:19:24.555 We think of an older brain as having noisy information processing. 292 00:19:24.575 --> 00:19:31.638 And hey, when you have noisy information processing, of course, it's harder to hear, it's harder to pay attention, it's harder to remember, it's harder to act on what you hear. 293 00:19:31.998 --> 00:19:35.459 And there's a ton of psychological and psychophysical evidence for this. 294 00:19:35.459 --> 00:19:35.719 Right. 295 00:19:35.739 --> 00:19:38.520 We know older adults don't hear as well in noisy environments. 296 00:19:38.580 --> 00:19:39.340 Right. 297 00:19:39.400 --> 00:19:43.882 So that you give a younger adult the memory of an older adult just by putting them in noise. 298 00:19:44.142 --> 00:19:45.002 That's all it takes. 299 00:19:45.543 --> 00:19:45.863 Right. 300 00:19:45.883 --> 00:19:46.463 Really? 301 00:19:46.643 --> 00:19:48.323 Or a night of tying it on, maybe. 302 00:19:48.864 --> 00:19:49.684 Well, exactly. 303 00:19:49.744 --> 00:19:50.364 Because same thing. 304 00:19:50.384 --> 00:19:52.425 That party night is going to cost you. 305 00:19:52.805 --> 00:19:54.747 So why is speed training so important? 306 00:19:54.767 --> 00:19:56.889 Well, we want to drive brain plasticity, right? 307 00:19:57.210 --> 00:20:04.538 And there's this old saying from back when brain plasticity was originally discovered in the 50s, neurons that fire together, wire together, right? 308 00:20:04.798 --> 00:20:07.721 If you have synchronous activity, those brain networks get stronger. 309 00:20:08.061 --> 00:20:12.366 So speed training is just the most efficient way to deliver large synchronous activity, right? 310 00:20:12.686 --> 00:20:19.729 When you are doing a speed training exercise, your visual system or your auditory system gets all this input briefly and all at once. 311 00:20:20.129 --> 00:20:23.430 And it turns on all those neurons and it helps them connect to each other better. 312 00:20:23.450 --> 00:20:27.512 And it helps send that information up to

your attention and your memory and your planning centers better. 313 00:20:27.892 --> 00:20:29.913 And that's literally rewiring the brain. 314 00:20:30.173 --> 00:20:35.915 And when you're rewiring the brain, and we can talk a lot more about this, you know, you are literally building a healthier brain. 315 00:20:36.295 --> 00:20:38.956 And so speed training is in many ways as simple as this. 316 00:20:39.056 --> 00:20:43.618 It's the most efficient way to drive brain plasticity because neurons that fire together wire together. 317 00:20:43.898 --> 00:20:46.499 And if you're driving brain plasticity, you're gonna build a healthier brain. 318 00:20:46.839 --> 00:20:49.980 And if you build a healthier brain, it's gonna have better cognitive function. 319 00:20:50.380 --> 00:20:54.722 And that's why in many ways, we're not explicitly targeting cognitive function. 320 00:20:55.042 --> 00:20:57.223 We're really explicitly building a healthier brain. 321 00:20:57.483 --> 00:20:59.844 And hey, great news, a healthier brain works better. 322 00:21:00.569 --> 00:21:00.829 Yeah. 323 00:21:01.250 --> 00:21:01.470 Yeah. 324 00:21:01.490 --> 00:21:05.833 Well, it's a bit like doing strength training for an athlete that is not a lifter. 325 00:21:06.114 --> 00:21:06.454 Right. 326 00:21:06.534 --> 00:21:07.375 Exactly. 327 00:21:07.515 --> 00:21:07.795 Right. 328 00:21:07.815 --> 00:21:14.341 It's it's it's fundamentally building the machine and then so that the machine can perform better in every other context. 329 00:21:14.501 --> 00:21:16.002 It is such a great analogy. 330 00:21:16.022 --> 00:21:16.182 Right. 331 00:21:16.202 --> 00:21:18.244 Think about training to be a basketball player. 332 00:21:18.304 --> 00:21:18.484 Right. 333 00:21:18.844 --> 00:21:21.907 You know, you don't just play basketball all day. 334 00:21:21.967 --> 00:21:22.508 long, right? 335 00:21:22.528 --> 00:21:24.309 I mean, you have to do some of that, don't get me wrong. 336 00:21:24.629 --> 00:21:36.860 But you know, you will go to the gym and the personal trainer is going to target your specific muscle groups and actions to create physical building blocks so that when you are on the court, those physical building blocks empower you to do what you need to do in basketball. 337 00:21:37.220 --> 00:21:39.821 Brain training and brain HQ in particular are exactly the same way. 338 00:21:39.881 --> 00:21:49.324 We're building those underlying building blocks of quick information processing, accurate information processing, plastic healthy brain, attention and working memory. 339 00:21:49.344 --> 00:21:53.866 So that when you go out into the world, hey, you just you have those you have that scaffolding to build on better. 340 00:21:54.086 --> 00:21:58.510 Okay, let's talk about the landscape of the world we live in right now. 341 00:21:58.590 --> 00:22:09.579 The US spends about $3.8 billion a year on dementia research, and the overwhelming majority of it chases drugs targeting amyloid plaques and tau tangles. 342 00:22:10.960 --> 00:22:13.743 We know how medium that is. 343 00:22:14.103 --> 00:22:20.488 So as someone who spent two decades in a different lane, what do you think that spending ratio is getting wrong? 344 00:22:21.879 --> 00:22:29.827 I mean, I think everyone in this field is united in the hope that, hey, there's going to be a breakthrough that's going to prevent or even reverse dementia. 345 00:22:30.287 --> 00:22:33.771 You know, for everything I went through with my grandfather and other people in our family. 346 00:22:34.331 --> 00:22:40.377 I'm not a drug industry person, but I would be very, very happy if a drug sort of magically turned out to work. 347 00:22:41.018 --> 00:22:55.251 That being said, having been in this field, like you say, for well more than 20 years now, I just do not think we're going to have a knight in shining armor riding over the hill in the form of a pill that is going to, at this point, arrest or reverse dementia. 348 00:22:56.172 --> 00:23:00.015 And we have had an enormous amount of money, as you said, sunk into the amyloid idea. 349 00:23:02.197 --> 00:23:17.542 And hey, the best case scenario now is a drug that slows decline by maybe 10 or 15% in a way that is maybe essentially imperceptible to patients or family members and that carries with it the risk of brain swelling and costs $50,000 a year. 350 00:23:18.042 --> 00:23:22.303 Like this is not the future we were aiming for after 25 years of this research. 351 00:23:22.723 --> 00:23:28.705 And so we have simply got to significantly rebalance our nation's investment. 352 00:23:29.145 --> 00:23:30.767 in dementia prevention and treatment. 353 00:23:31.107 --> 00:23:41.937 And we've got to think about innovative behavioral approaches, obviously involving brain training, which I think a lot about, but also involving physical exercise and nutrition and sleep and social connection. 354 00:23:42.598 --> 00:23:45.400 And that's very, very hard, right? 355 00:23:45.440 --> 00:23:46.161 People want a 356 00:23:48.583 --> 00:23:51.886 you know, funding, you know, investments in molecular mechanisms. 357 00:23:51.906 --> 00:23:56.990 Now, that being said, we've been very fortunate to see some great investments from the NIH in cognitive training. 358 00:23:57.030 --> 00:23:59.211 So that's been nice to see. 359 00:23:59.492 --> 00:24:02.134 But nonetheless, that imbalance is still there, right? 360 00:24:02.394 --> 00:24:08.038 You know, you're incredibly excited to see a $20 million cognitive training grant, and we're out here spending $2 billion on a drug. 361 00:24:08.078 --> 00:24:15.824 Like, you know, these numbers, they're dramatically out of whack, and people are starting to realize that, but we need some change in how we think about this. 362 00:24:15.844 --> 00:24:16.405 But we might see some. 363 00:24:16.905 --> 00:24:17.185 Why? 364 00:24:17.245 --> 00:24:17.886 Why do you think that? 365 00:24:17.906 --> 00:24:24.272

Do you think it's just because they don't do you think it's just that people still don't really believe about the plasticity? 366 00:24:24.573 --> 00:24:30.959 And we're not saying here that playing these games is going to stop you from prevent you from developing Alzheimer's or dementia necessarily. 367 00:24:30.999 --> 00:24:37.005 I mean, there's so many other factors that can be at play, but there's a protection mechanism here. 368 00:24:37.025 --> 00:24:37.125 Yeah. 369 00:24:37.485 --> 00:24:38.966 It's a protection mechanism. 370 00:24:38.986 --> 00:24:39.946 You're exactly right. 371 00:24:40.167 --> 00:24:42.668 And, you know, I talked about how brain plasticity works. 372 00:24:42.748 --> 00:24:50.592 Talked about how speed training, you know, builds new connections and so forth that builds a healthier brain that should contribute to brain health and cognitive resilience. 373 00:24:51.273 --> 00:24:56.976 And, you know, just to say it out loud, there in fact was a study that just got published in February from the active study. 374 00:24:57.016 --> 00:25:00.918 Again, thanks to the NIH, very large scale randomized control control brain training. 375 00:25:01.458 --> 00:25:06.061 including a speed training component that's now the double decision exercise in Brain HQ. 376 00:25:06.722 --> 00:25:22.692 And hey, that study showed that over a 20-year period, people who did that speed training, and they didn't train for 20 years, they only trained for about 20 or 30 hours at the beginning of the study, they did actually reduce their risk of going on to Alzheimer's and dementia by 25% in Medicare records. 377 00:25:23.113 --> 00:25:23.313 Wow. 378 00:25:23.353 --> 00:25:23.553 Now, 379 00:25:23.913 --> 00:25:25.214 That is an amazing result. 380 00:25:25.594 --> 00:25:27.335 Now, I'm not trying to disagree with what you said. 381 00:25:27.355 --> 00:25:30.076 There's a lot of reasons people can get Alzheimer's and dementia. 382 00:25:30.917 --> 00:25:35.219 But the impact of building a healthier brain is really clearly there. 383 00:25:35.579 --> 00:25:39.482 But why haven't the priority changes is a great question. 384 00:25:39.862 --> 00:25:45.805 And I think one of the biggest reasons is there's just a positive cycle of momentum around drug development. 385 00:25:45.885 --> 00:25:46.125 right? 386 00:25:46.545 --> 00:25:49.406 You know, you had the last drug that made a billion dollars. 387 00:25:49.706 --> 00:25:54.327 So now you've got the money to invest in a really gold standard clinical research program. 388 00:25:54.607 --> 00:26:01.749 And then when the new drug launches, well, you can go out and you can be at every conference and you can get every leading doctor to sing its praises. 389 00:26:01.809 --> 00:26:06.830 And you can work with patient advocacy organizations, talk about this breakthrough. 390 00:26:06.890 --> 00:26:11.891 And you can go talk to folks in Congress about how, right, the, you know, the money kind of feeds on

itself. 391 00:26:12.311 --> 00:26:14.632 If you're out doing something that is like we're doing, you 392 00:26:15.932 --> 00:26:16.312 a year. 393 00:26:17.213 --> 00:26:19.254 It ain't $50,000 a year. 394 00:26:19.774 --> 00:26:24.797 And so, you know, you're just have a different, you know, set of cards in your playing hand as a result. 395 00:26:25.017 --> 00:26:26.418 But we've just got to break out of that. 396 00:26:26.438 --> 00:26:27.779 We've got to break out of that metaphor. 397 00:26:27.799 --> 00:26:28.659 It's incredibly important. 398 00:26:28.679 --> 00:26:30.080 The science is demanding it. 399 00:26:30.120 --> 00:26:31.301 I think patients are demanding it. 400 00:26:31.561 --> 00:26:33.942 But we're seeing some positive movement around that. 401 00:26:33.962 --> 00:26:35.143 And that's exciting in the field. 402 00:26:35.283 --> 00:26:42.007 You know, the big hurdle is really convincing people that there is an alternative and that they will get benefit. 403 00:26:42.147 --> 00:26:43.488 And, and, you 404 00:26:44.048 --> 00:26:54.496 I just think that once, I mean, not everybody will respond to this, but a lot of, a big chunk of people want to know, are moving into the space of what can I do to stop this from happening? 405 00:26:54.536 --> 00:26:55.777 Or what can I do to prevent? 406 00:26:55.817 --> 00:26:56.357 Like, this is... 407 00:26:57.472 --> 00:27:14.784 You know, I, my podcast and this whole movement of N of One and the, you know, the unfortunate name of biohacking and all, you know, whether it's functional medicine or alternative or integrative medicine, the questions that are being asked is what can we do before or... 408 00:27:15.602 --> 00:27:18.485 I mean, certainly once somebody is ill, why? 409 00:27:19.486 --> 00:27:21.328 But we are all asking, how can we prevent? 410 00:27:21.388 --> 00:27:25.932 Like, there's the oldest saying in the book, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure or whatever. 411 00:27:26.072 --> 00:27:26.773 Absolutely. 412 00:27:26.913 --> 00:27:27.374 Absolutely. 413 00:27:27.394 --> 00:27:35.281 And who would rather get Alzheimer's disease and then slow its decline as opposed to simply lowering your risk of getting in the first place? 414 00:27:35.642 --> 00:27:36.903 And there is this powerful movement around. 415 00:27:37.123 --> 00:27:42.044 right, which is that people are realizing that, hey, they do need to take their health into their own hand, right? 416 00:27:42.364 --> 00:27:48.726 We do not need to wait for that, you know, night from a drug company coming over the field to deliver us a pill and be on our way. 417 00:27:49.206 --> 00:27:51.967 And you know, we know this from so much about metabolic health, right? 418 00:27:51.987 --> 00:27:54.747 I mean, you look at type 2 diabetes, what is the biggest thing we've learned? 419 00:27:55.047 --> 00:27:56.808 Hey, you do not need to get it. 420 00:27:56.888 --> 00:27:59.788 You can change your diet, you can change your exercise habits. 421 00:28:00.049 --> 00:28:05.950 There are structured behavioral health programs out there like the diabetes prevention program that can lower that risk. 422 00:28:06.990 --> 00:28:15.375 And, you know, it's not just that I'm avoiding this dread disease, but, hey, my life is going to just be better if I eat better and I exercise and reduce my risk. 423 00:28:15.495 --> 00:28:16.776 I'm going to be stronger. 424 00:28:16.796 --> 00:28:17.756 I'm going to have more fun. 425 00:28:17.776 --> 00:28:20.137 I'm going to play with my kids and stay more active. 426 00:28:20.477 --> 00:28:25.480 Like it's not just a it doesn't have to be just a negative message about avoiding a dread scenario. 427 00:28:25.500 --> 00:28:27.241 It's about, hey, I want to live my best life. 428 00:28:27.841 --> 00:28:33.064 And a lot of the brain health and brain training commentary I think needs to go in that direction. 429 00:28:33.204 --> 00:28:33.384 Right. 430 00:28:33.824 --> 00:28:39.847 So, hey, we are thrilled to death that this study came out in February showing that speed training reduces the risk of Alzheimer's disease and dementia. 431 00:28:40.227 --> 00:28:47.110 That being said, I think most of when we talk to folks about the benefits of brain training, it's not about, hey, don't fall off the cliff. 432 00:28:47.550 --> 00:28:53.653 It's about, hey, think about everything you want to do at every stage of your life, whether you're a middle aged adult, whether you're an older adult, whether you're a grandparent. 433 00:28:54.073 --> 00:28:55.075 And hey, what do you want to do? 434 00:28:55.095 --> 00:28:56.797 You want to probably want to keep driving. 435 00:28:56.817 --> 00:28:58.360 You probably want to play with your grandkids. 436 00:28:58.380 --> 00:29:00.022 You want to have an active social life. 437 00:29:00.042 --> 00:29:01.905 You want to want to be the life of the party. 438 00:29:01.925 --> 00:29:06.772 You know, like you were saying, you want to be a quick witted person who's on top of the conversation one step ahead. 439 00:29:07.092 --> 00:29:08.695 Well, all of those are benefits. 440 00:29:08.995 --> 00:29:12.516 of brain training and building a strong, healthy brain right now. 441 00:29:12.897 --> 00:29:15.698 And while that reduces your risk later, it helps you right now. 442 00:29:15.738 --> 00:29:23.521 And I think a lot of the communication around risk reduction has to also incorporate this idea that you want to live your best life right now. 443 00:29:23.881 --> 00:29:25.762 And as a result of that, you're going to reduce your risk. 444 00:29:25.782 --> 00:29:28.183 But let's talk about something that's going to help you right now. 445 00:29:28.763 --> 00:29:29.323 Absolutely. 446 00:29:29.363 --> 00:29:36.327 Like, I mean, look, if you improve your peripheral vision or your ability to see things on the outside of your vision, you might avoid that accident. 447 00:29:36.527 --> 00:29:37.728 You might avoid that

accident. 448 00:29:37.988 --> 00:29:41.610 You might be a better tennis player. 449 00:29:41.690 --> 00:29:43.411 And you might be a better tennis player, right? 450 00:29:43.752 --> 00:29:48.154 You're probably going to stay on your feet a bit better than anyone of an upper, things like that. 451 00:29:48.174 --> 00:29:50.996 You're just going to feel sharper as you're out there and around in the world. 452 00:29:51.016 --> 00:29:53.077 And that is what so many people want. 453 00:29:53.377 --> 00:29:58.721 But I think that movement is really happening that people need to take control of their health and wellness. 454 00:29:59.022 --> 00:30:04.066 And what we want to add to the conversation is, hey, you got to think about that, not just from the neck down, but from the neck up. 455 00:30:04.086 --> 00:30:05.767 The brain is an integral part of that. 456 00:30:06.048 --> 00:30:09.090 Let's go let's go dive into an actual Brain HQ session. 457 00:30:09.550 --> 00:30:13.574 So let's help the audience understand what what are they what would they be looking at? 458 00:30:13.694 --> 00:30:18.498 What's happening in their brain at that moment that wouldn't happen if they were just doing a crossword? 459 00:30:18.518 --> 00:30:20.840 Because people talk about crosswords being really good for your brain. 460 00:30:21.200 --> 00:30:22.161 A great example, right? 461 00:30:22.181 --> 00:30:27.065 So let's go through the architecture of a Brain HQ exercise and we can compare it to crossword puzzles and other things. 462 00:30:27.666 --> 00:30:34.351 So, hey, one of the Brain HQ exercises people start with, and you mentioned this yourself, is an exercise called Hawkeye, right? 463 00:30:34.651 --> 00:30:39.876 You're looking at the center of the screen and then off in your peripheral vision, a ring of birds are going to appear. 464 00:30:40.276 --> 00:30:41.937 And all of them are the same except for one. 465 00:30:42.318 --> 00:30:43.999 And you have to notice where that one is. 466 00:30:44.520 --> 00:30:46.461 And, hey, after it goes away, just click. 467 00:30:46.481 --> 00:30:47.182 Where's the different one? 468 00:30:47.762 --> 00:30:48.063 Easy. 469 00:30:48.603 --> 00:30:49.084 It's easy. 470 00:30:49.124 --> 00:30:53.748 So when you do this, if I show you that screen, you would look at it like, well, Henry, that's the different one. 471 00:30:53.768 --> 00:30:54.689 That didn't seem so hard. 472 00:30:55.250 --> 00:30:55.530 Okay. 473 00:30:55.831 --> 00:30:59.074 But we want to train in a way that drives brain plasticity. 474 00:30:59.254 --> 00:31:00.275 So here's the secret sauce. 475 00:31:00.295 --> 00:31:05.000 I'm going to teach everyone, including you on this podcast, how to build an effective brain training exercise. 476 00:31:05.020 --> 00:31:06.541 We want to share this wealth of knowledge. 477 00:31:07.302 --> 00:31:10.825 So first of all, if you're going to rewire the brain, it needs to be about speed, like we talked about. 478 00:31:11.185 --> 00:31:14.227 So we don't see the birds for as long as we might like to, where we get to look around. 479 00:31:14.787 --> 00:31:16.168 They are fast, right? 480 00:31:16.388 --> 00:31:19.330 So your brain gets a short window of information to process on. 481 00:31:19.370 --> 00:31:20.291 It has to work quickly. 482 00:31:20.891 --> 00:31:22.493 Second of all, you have to be accurate. 483 00:31:22.593 --> 00:31:24.554 You can't just sort of vaguely guess something. 484 00:31:24.814 --> 00:31:26.797 where that is, you got to click on where that bird was. 485 00:31:27.217 --> 00:31:28.439 Speed and accuracy. 486 00:31:28.920 --> 00:31:31.323 Second of all, the exercises demand attention, right? 487 00:31:31.643 --> 00:31:40.155 If those birds pop up on the screen, but then the UPS driver arrives and your attention gets distracted, the dog barks, whatever, the toast pops up, hey, you're not paying attention. 488 00:31:40.635 --> 00:31:45.218 Right now, when your brain pays attention, it releases a neurochemical called acetylcholine. 489 00:31:45.619 --> 00:31:49.061 And what acetylcholine does is it actually turns on brain plasticity. 490 00:31:49.361 --> 00:31:53.764 Your brain can only rewire when it's being bathed in acetylcholine and you're paying attention. 491 00:31:54.124 --> 00:31:59.088 And that's why if you were in math class and you were the one looking out the window and you weren't paying attention to the math teacher... 492 00:31:59.268 --> 00:32:01.009 You may not have learned very much math, right? 493 00:32:01.429 --> 00:32:03.970 So speed, accuracy, and attention. 494 00:32:04.270 --> 00:32:06.431 The final part of the secret sauce is reward. 495 00:32:06.791 --> 00:32:10.933 So when you get it right, when you click on that bird, there's a little animation, there's a ding. 496 00:32:11.273 --> 00:32:14.774 It may not seem like a lot, but it tells your brain, hey, you got it right. 497 00:32:15.234 --> 00:32:17.976 Now, when you get something right, your brain pumps dopamine. 498 00:32:18.316 --> 00:32:23.578 And a lot of people have probably heard of dopamine, and often we think of dopamine as a pleasure chemical, right? 499 00:32:23.598 --> 00:32:29.040 You know, it's, hey man, that's why we, when we eat chocolate, it pumps some dopamine, or you know, that's why cocaine is so great. 500 00:32:29.060 --> 00:32:29.280 great. 501 00:32:29.440 --> 00:32:31.682 It pumps a lot of dopamine. 502 00:32:31.983 --> 00:32:32.823 Cocaine is not great. 503 00:32:32.843 --> 00:32:34.785 Let me say that for the record. 504 00:32:35.206 --> 00:32:38.869 But what dopamine also is involved in is it's involved in neuroplasticity. 505 00:32:39.189 --> 00:32:47.837 When you do something right, your brain pumps that dopamine and that actually helps rewire your brain to say, hey, whatever you just did, that worked out well for me. 506 00:32:48.117 --> 00:32:50.980 I'd like to rewire the brain so I do more of that. 507 00:32:51.500 -->

00:32:54.562 That's why we have that next bottle of bite of chocolate and so forth. 508 00:32:55.082 --> 00:32:57.603 But in the concept of brain training, hey, it helps rewire the brain. 509 00:32:57.623 --> 00:33:00.385 So speed, accuracy, attention, reward. 510 00:33:00.425 --> 00:33:05.748 If you build exercises based on those features, you're going to build exercises that efficiently drive brain plasticity. 511 00:33:06.068 --> 00:33:08.349 The final part of it is adaptivity. 512 00:33:08.649 --> 00:33:12.772 So if you got that first one right, well, Brain HQ is going to get a little bit faster. 513 00:33:12.892 --> 00:33:13.952 It's going to get a little bit harder. 514 00:33:13.992 --> 00:33:15.673 If you get that right, it'll get faster still. 515 00:33:15.933 --> 00:33:18.875 Now it's okay if you get one wrong, it's going to back off and get slower. 516 00:33:19.355 --> 00:33:23.879 And so you're always training at a level that you might be getting 70% of them correct. 517 00:33:24.279 --> 00:33:25.520 And you have to do that. 518 00:33:25.560 --> 00:33:27.202 Nobody likes getting things wrong, right? 519 00:33:27.582 --> 00:33:32.546 But you have to do that because if it was too easy, your brain wouldn't change, right? 520 00:33:32.566 --> 00:33:35.208 If you got 100% of them right, why would your brain change? 521 00:33:35.228 --> 00:33:36.429 It does not need to change. 522 00:33:36.449 --> 00:33:38.831 It already can do the job you're asking it to do. 523 00:33:39.212 --> 00:33:44.496 Of course, if it's too hard, your brain can't change either because it can't kind of get a finger hold on the situation. 524 00:33:44.896 --> 00:33:46.838 So it's got to be at that right level of difficulty. 525 00:33:47.268 --> 00:33:49.570 Now, let's compare that to crossword puzzles for a moment. 526 00:33:49.710 --> 00:33:57.037 And, you know, we've done this in randomized controlled trials where we use things like ordinary video games or crossword puzzles as control activities as placebos. 527 00:33:58.058 --> 00:34:02.141 You know, people feel like, hey, when I'm doing a crossword puzzle, my brain's busy, right? 528 00:34:02.162 --> 00:34:04.864 I'm here trying to think of, you know, what is the synonym for this clue? 529 00:34:05.485 --> 00:34:08.067 But, hey, let's go through those magic criteria again. 530 00:34:08.087 --> 00:34:08.627 Is it fast? 531 00:34:08.808 --> 00:34:09.148 Yeah. 532 00:34:09.348 --> 00:34:10.108 Well, not really. 533 00:34:10.128 --> 00:34:12.270 You can sort of sit there and think for as long as you like. 534 00:34:12.670 --> 00:34:13.691 They have to be accurate. 535 00:34:13.711 --> 00:34:14.631 I mean, I mean, it kind of. 536 00:34:14.651 --> 00:34:15.792 You have to get it right eventually. 537 00:34:15.812 --> 00:34:16.432 I'll give you that. 538 00:34:16.872 --> 00:34:17.993 Does it require attention? 539 00:34:18.313 --> 00:34:29.560 I mean, kind of yes and kind of no, because I think a lot of people experience

a lot of mind wandering while they're doing, and there's lots to like about mind wandering, but you're not driving attention to drive brain plasticity, and reward probably not as intense as well. 540 00:34:29.600 --> 00:34:36.844 So we're not making the brain faster and accurate in a way that kind of combats that noisy information processing or drives brain plasticity. 541 00:34:37.324 --> 00:34:39.265 So, hey, man, if you like crossword puzzles, that's great. 542 00:34:39.385 --> 00:34:40.986 I enjoy playing a lot of video games. 543 00:34:41.026 --> 00:34:41.627 They're fun. 544 00:34:42.047 --> 00:34:49.691 But, you know, that doesn't mean they have that kind of recipe to drive intensive brain plasticity and build better brain health in that way. 545 00:34:49.791 --> 00:34:51.432 It's it's the pressure, right? 546 00:34:51.552 --> 00:34:53.574 It's the and it's not just the pressure. 547 00:34:53.694 --> 00:34:56.896 It's the skating on that edge of your ability. 548 00:34:57.136 --> 00:34:58.657 There's there's a game. 549 00:34:59.097 --> 00:35:00.478 If people really like crosswords. 550 00:35:01.417 --> 00:35:02.898 I want to bring a little bit of this in. 551 00:35:03.478 --> 00:35:05.859 I don't know if you've ever heard of a game called Bananagrams. 552 00:35:06.380 --> 00:35:07.700 Oh, I know Bananagrams, sure, yeah. 553 00:35:08.321 --> 00:35:25.650 And it's, I mean, it's nowhere near, but when you're playing with someone who's better than you, it pushes you because you're constantly rearranging your board to adapt to the letters you pick up and you don't have time because the other person, if they get a word before you do, they're going to force you to pick up another letter. 554 00:35:26.628 --> 00:35:28.910 Yeah, I think that's exactly right. 555 00:35:28.990 --> 00:35:35.794 And, you know, with Brain HQ, we've tried to like distill this into like a particularly potent form. 556 00:35:36.194 --> 00:35:43.499 But, you know, hey, there are a lot of things people can do that aren't crossword puzzles that probably tap into some of these core things. 557 00:35:43.799 --> 00:35:48.743 So think, for example, about, oh, I don't know, let's say learning a language, right? 558 00:35:48.783 --> 00:35:50.264 Let's say you want to go back and learn French. 559 00:35:50.624 --> 00:35:53.905 Well, that actually does have some speed and accuracy components. 560 00:35:53.945 --> 00:35:57.026 The spoken language is quick and you have to keep up and you have to get it right. 561 00:35:57.466 --> 00:36:04.567 And if you are doing language training, like you are very carefully paying attention as people are speaking, for example, spoken better than written, I would suggest. 562 00:36:04.907 --> 00:36:07.568 And then, hey, if you can communicate with someone, that's incredibly rewarding. 563 00:36:07.588 --> 00:36:11.489 How great is it to go to France and order a sandwich and a glass of wine in French, right? 564 00:36:11.749 --> 00:36:14.870 Your brain's going to pump some dopamine before you drink that glass of wine, I guarantee it. 565 00:36:15.310 --> 00:36:17.790 So, but, you know, speed, accuracy, attention, that's good. 566 00:36:17.810 --> 00:36:20.551 Think about something like, well, we talked about playing tennis briefly, right? 567 00:36:20.691 --> 00:36:20.991 Yeah. 568 00:36:21.031 --> 00:36:24.233 You can't play tennis super slow right now. 569 00:36:24.473 --> 00:36:25.333 It can be adaptive. 570 00:36:25.353 --> 00:36:32.257 You can have a coach or a partner that is slower or faster, but your brain has to operate at speed in order to play tennis, right? 571 00:36:32.277 --> 00:36:35.458 It happens to operate accurately, does require that focused attention. 572 00:36:35.798 --> 00:36:37.219 And it is pretty rewarding, right? 573 00:36:37.239 --> 00:36:39.540 To get that smash or to really stretch and get that. 574 00:36:39.920 --> 00:36:43.682 So I think there are a lot of things like that that are absolutely kind of, 575 00:36:43.922 --> 00:36:48.904 brain healthy ways to live your life, and I would argue, or even, you know, real world forms of brain training. 576 00:36:49.244 --> 00:36:56.306 But it is true, it's often, it's not what people think, right, it's not crossword puzzles, and it's not Wordle, and various things of that nature. 577 00:36:56.666 --> 00:36:57.026 For sure. 578 00:36:57.426 --> 00:36:59.167 Let's go back to the active study. 579 00:36:59.407 --> 00:37:01.268 So, I mean, that's an impressive study. 580 00:37:01.308 --> 00:37:04.431 It followed nearly 2,800 people for two decades. 581 00:37:04.511 --> 00:37:05.952 Like that's wild. 582 00:37:06.092 --> 00:37:09.134 We keep getting told you can't do a study that big for that long. 583 00:37:09.894 --> 00:37:14.938 So what's it like as a scientist to wait 20 years to find out if you were that you were right? 584 00:37:16.797 --> 00:37:21.239 I mean, it's rewarding, I guess, is how I would say it, speaking of bumping dopamine. 585 00:37:21.299 --> 00:37:23.460 Thank God I'm still alive to say I told you so. 586 00:37:23.920 --> 00:37:28.182 Yeah, so I should emphasize that, hey, we did not directly fund the active study. 587 00:37:28.302 --> 00:37:34.905 I'm a scientist who's collaborated with scientists who ran the active study, but it would be inappropriate to describe myself as a member of the active study. 588 00:37:34.925 --> 00:37:35.885 It's very independent. 589 00:37:36.265 --> 00:37:38.006 And in that way, it's all the more authoritative. 590 00:37:38.566 --> 00:37:42.628 And we talked about the NIH a moment ago, and hey, I just will say hats off to the NIH. 591 00:37:42.688 --> 00:37:44.429 They were so ahead of the time 592 00:37:44.929 --> 00:37:50.832 to well more than 20 years ago, say, hey, we're gonna do a rigorous gold standard study of cognitive training, right? 593 00:37:50.852 --> 00:37:54.655 They said, hey, we wanna evaluate this the way a drug or a medical device would get

evaluated. 594 00:37:55.315 --> 00:38:02.179 And they designed it, and actually to your point, at first it was only supposed to last five years, right? 595 00:38:02.479 --> 00:38:12.085 They start off the training, they did some training in the first year and some booster sessions in the first and the third year, and then their big idea was, well, hey, we're gonna have this follow-up in year three and eventually year five. 596 00:38:12.465 --> 00:38:25.674 And at the end of year five, the results were so good in terms of showing that these kinds of brain training and then cognitive training programs had developed driven, sustained improvements in cognitive function, but also other things like health related quality of life. 597 00:38:25.734 --> 00:38:29.376 And people who did the speed training had fewer depressive symptoms, right? 598 00:38:29.396 --> 00:38:35.820 Their brains were healthier and helped them bounce back faster from mood disorders and showing that actually improved driving safety. 599 00:38:35.860 --> 00:38:39.583 People who went through the speed training had almost a 50% reduction in at fault crashes. 600 00:38:39.923 --> 00:38:44.085 that the NIH, and again, to their credit, said, hey, let's extend this for five more years. 601 00:38:44.105 --> 00:38:46.126 We're going to follow everyone up at a 10-year time point. 602 00:38:46.526 --> 00:38:47.107 And they did. 603 00:38:47.247 --> 00:38:52.229 And so many of those benefits were sustained, although they were wearing off because people hadn't continued training at 10 years. 604 00:38:52.709 --> 00:38:57.592 And then to my amazement, the NIH at the end of 10 years said, hey, let's do a 20-year follow-up. 605 00:38:57.872 --> 00:38:59.973 We're not going to actually do all the cognitive tests. 606 00:38:59.993 --> 00:39:02.354 We're actually going to connect this with Medicare records. 607 00:39:02.694 --> 00:39:05.876 Let's figure out, like, what were the long term outcomes of this? 608 00:39:06.396 --> 00:39:09.878 And that's where that true gold came from, which is in Medicare records. 609 00:39:09.898 --> 00:39:12.560 Of course, they know if you have Alzheimer's disease or dementia. 610 00:39:12.960 --> 00:39:23.926 And then the researchers involved at Johns Hopkins and University of Alabama and Penn State, you know, could go back and say, OK, if you did that speed training way back when, right? 611 00:39:24.506 --> 00:39:29.208 18 years ago, hey, were you less likely to get Alzheimer's, diabetes, dementia, and they could. 612 00:39:29.508 --> 00:39:32.209 So hats off to the NIH, but you're right to say what you did. 613 00:39:32.569 --> 00:39:34.229 It can be done. 614 00:39:34.630 --> 00:39:38.091 We just have to invest the money and the time and the effort. 615 00:39:38.131 --> 00:39:40.292 And there's so many promising things. 616 00:39:40.752 --> 00:39:53.116 The way cognitive training was promising in the early 2000s when this kicked off in the late 1990s, really, there's so many other things where we should be as a society, as a research enterprise, looking at it and saying, hey, you know what, this is worth $100 million. 617 00:39:53.536 --> 00:39:59.097 to figure out if this can improve health or change longevity or reduce the rate of Alzheimer's. 618 00:39:59.557 --> 00:40:04.859 And we just got to have people in leadership who make those commitments to that studies. 619 00:40:05.079 --> 00:40:05.839 So it can be done. 620 00:40:06.539 --> 00:40:09.000 So how long did they train for, the people? 621 00:40:09.100 --> 00:40:09.580 Remind me. 622 00:40:09.660 --> 00:40:12.761 You said- Yeah, it is so wild, right? 623 00:40:12.801 --> 00:40:15.421 So inactive- Well, I'm like, what do you mean 20 years later? 624 00:40:15.521 --> 00:40:16.461 Like, how long did they do it? 625 00:40:16.481 --> 00:40:16.982 I know, it's crazy. 626 00:40:17.002 --> 00:40:18.062 It's the craziest thing in the world. 627 00:40:18.762 --> 00:40:19.903 God bless their crazy hearts. 628 00:40:19.923 --> 00:40:21.625 It worked inactive. 629 00:40:22.106 --> 00:40:26.692 They did two hours of cognitive training a week, twice a week. 630 00:40:26.992 --> 00:40:27.172 Right. 631 00:40:27.192 --> 00:40:29.034 So an hour on one day, an hour on another day. 632 00:40:29.335 --> 00:40:30.556 They did that for five weeks. 633 00:40:30.917 --> 00:40:31.137 Right. 634 00:40:31.157 --> 00:40:34.301 So 10 hours of training was what you might think of as the onboarding dose. 635 00:40:34.441 --> 00:40:34.601 Right. 636 00:40:34.821 --> 00:40:36.042 So less than two months, right? 637 00:40:36.082 --> 00:40:38.302 Twice a week, not a lot of brain training, right? 638 00:40:38.342 --> 00:40:38.663 10 hours. 639 00:40:39.423 --> 00:40:52.708 And then they came back and they did, some of them, not all of them, some of them came back and did some booster sessions, four more training sessions at the end of the first year, and then four more training sessions at the end of the third year, right? 640 00:40:53.028 --> 00:40:56.850 So a total of, depending on how you count it, 20, 23 hours, but spread. 641 00:40:57.410 --> 00:41:01.512 over three years in these kind of intensive, short week components. 642 00:41:01.772 --> 00:41:04.994 It's almost like high intensity interval training, right? 643 00:41:05.314 --> 00:41:08.096 In the sense that, hey, we're going to do a bunch, and then, hey, go about your life. 644 00:41:08.536 --> 00:41:10.717 And then we're going to come back and we're going to do a bunch more, right? 645 00:41:11.358 --> 00:41:14.680 And on the one hand, they drove this incredible result, right? 646 00:41:14.720 --> 00:41:17.281 25% reduction in the risk of Alzheimer's disease and dementia. 647 00:41:17.601 --> 00:41:22.324 But I got to say, Nat, what if this had been done in a way that we might recognize as sensible? 648 00:41:22.839 --> 00:41:27.883 I think we can all agree that exosomes are all the rage right now, especially in the

skincare world. 649 00:41:28.144 --> 00:41:36.851 I've spoken to quite a few skin health and longevity experts on the podcast, and they all agree that this is an incredibly promising space for exosomes. 650 00:41:37.391 --> 00:41:43.537 So naturally, I look for the best companies who are using exosomes, and more importantly, how they're derived and what their data says. 651 00:41:44.177 --> 00:41:49.582 It's no surprise that Yungoos was one of the first to market with their vampire exosome product in the fall of 2025. 652 00:41:51.123 --> 00:41:54.367 It is designed for people who want more from at-home skincare. 653 00:41:54.747 --> 00:41:59.192 They want smoother looking, firmer looking, more radiant, hydrated, and resilient skin. 654 00:41:59.513 --> 00:42:00.834 Let's be honest, who doesn't? 655 00:42:01.355 --> 00:42:06.761 Now, Young Goose put vampire exosomes through a 90-day real-world self-assessment study. 656 00:42:07.181 --> 00:42:19.367 So among the 32 people who completed twice daily use, 78% reported better overall skin quality by day 90 and 72% reported improvement in fine line smoothness. 657 00:42:19.827 --> 00:42:21.708 The routine could not be easier. 658 00:42:22.028 --> 00:42:26.290 One to two pumps on clean dry skin morning and night before your other serums. 659 00:42:26.730 --> 00:42:28.250 Just let it absorb for a few minutes. 660 00:42:28.471 --> 00:42:29.691 I go off and do something else. 661 00:42:30.191 --> 00:42:33.613 Then layer on moisturizer, sunscreen, makeup, whatever. 662 00:42:33.913 --> 00:42:43.177 The formula delivers 3 trillion quantified exosomes per bottle and is backed by batch testing for things like count, integrity, sterility, and purity. 663 00:42:43.677 --> 00:42:47.478 That is the kind of detail I want when a product is going on my face twice a day. 664 00:42:48.058 --> 00:42:57.522 To learn more and to try vampire exosomes for yourself, you're going to want to head on over to younggoose.com and use code NAT10 to save on vampire exosomes. 665 00:42:58.082 --> 00:42:58.683 I mean, what is it? 666 00:42:58.843 --> 00:42:59.283 20 minutes? 667 00:42:59.583 --> 00:43:00.223 15 minutes? 668 00:43:00.463 --> 00:43:01.203 A training session? 669 00:43:01.284 --> 00:43:01.784 It's nothing. 670 00:43:01.824 --> 00:43:02.104 That's right. 671 00:43:02.684 --> 00:43:02.884 Yeah. 672 00:43:02.904 --> 00:43:05.465 So what if what if they had just done booster sessions every year? 673 00:43:05.665 --> 00:43:05.905 Right. 674 00:43:06.125 --> 00:43:12.287 Would that have been a 25 percent risk reduction of dementia or would it have been, I don't know, I dare say it much larger. 675 00:43:12.527 --> 00:43:13.428 Right. 676 00:43:13.448 --> 00:43:17.409 What if we did 15 minutes every other day or what if you just made it a habit? 677 00:43:17.429 --> 00:43:17.569 Right. 678 00:43:17.809 --> 00:43:19.050 Think about physical exercise. 679 00:43:19.330 --> 00:43:23.831 You would never do an exercise study and say, well, let's just do five weeks of exercise. 680 00:43:24.031 --> 00:43:29.073 And then, hey, maybe a couple of years later, like, look, man, I exercised a lot when I was in graduate school. 681 00:43:29.093 --> 00:43:31.714 I got to tell you, when I hit middle age, it didn't hold up. 682 00:43:32.334 --> 00:43:33.855 I had to get back to it. 683 00:43:34.415 --> 00:43:37.876 And this is often held as a criticism of brain training. 684 00:43:38.056 --> 00:43:40.136 Oh, you have to keep doing it to get the benefits. 685 00:43:40.156 --> 00:43:42.777 And I'm always like, well, what isn't like that? 686 00:43:43.137 --> 00:43:46.758 There's no pill that the pharmaceutical industry will sell you that you don't have to keep taking. 687 00:43:47.258 --> 00:43:52.240 And hey, you want exercise and nutrition benefits, you have to stick with healthy eating and healthy exercise. 688 00:43:52.260 --> 00:43:54.360 So we should just accept brain training is going to be like that. 689 00:43:54.760 --> 00:43:56.321 But it shows how big the possibility is. 690 00:43:56.621 --> 00:44:02.943 But the active study did show that that rewiring that they did initially stuck. 691 00:44:03.463 --> 00:44:05.723 Like that is remarkable. 692 00:44:05.803 --> 00:44:14.326 And that is remarkably different from musculoskeletal muscle that, you know, after a couple of weeks of not training anymore, you've lost a lot of the benefits. 693 00:44:14.606 --> 00:44:18.587 You even start to lose the neural connections from the brain to the muscles. 694 00:44:19.115 --> 00:44:20.197 Yeah, you're exactly right. 695 00:44:20.297 --> 00:44:23.722 And it often comes to me like, how can this kind of brain training be so long lasting? 696 00:44:24.143 --> 00:44:27.228 You know, people are like, hey, man, I can't remember what I had for lunch last week. 697 00:44:27.648 --> 00:44:30.132 How am I supposed to believe this brain training? 698 00:44:30.152 --> 00:44:31.394 And some of those nutrition studies, yes. 699 00:44:31.414 --> 00:44:32.155 Yeah, exactly. 700 00:44:32.195 --> 00:44:34.158 Well, that's another concept. 701 00:44:34.639 --> 00:44:44.333 But the answer is that, hey, this kind of speed training in particular we talked about, this is not driving learning like fact learning, like, hey, three days ago I had a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch. 702 00:44:44.673 --> 00:44:49.500 This is driving what we think of as procedural learning or non-declarative memory or having learning. 703 00:44:49.540 --> 00:44:51.162 It's more like learning to ride a bike. 704 00:44:51.663 --> 00:44:55.066 So I'm in San Francisco and my daughter was 10 years old. 705 00:44:55.087 --> 00:44:57.729 She learned to ride a bike, a lot of hills here, but she wanted to learn to ride a bike. 706 00:44:58.210 --> 00:45:02.834 And, you know, we went out every couple of days and she pedaled around a flat part and learned to do hills. 707 00:45:02.894 --> 00:45:09.741 And hey, after about, I would say, 10,

maybe 12 hours of bike riding training, you know, she's a pretty competent bike rider. 708 00:45:09.981 --> 00:45:10.201 Right. 709 00:45:10.522 --> 00:45:11.823 Wasn't great, but you can get around. 710 00:45:12.063 --> 00:45:14.446 Now, she ended up not riding her bike that much after that. 711 00:45:14.806 --> 00:45:18.789 But then when she went to college four years later, she hopped on a bike and, hey, she could ride. 712 00:45:19.129 --> 00:45:19.950 And why is that? 713 00:45:19.990 --> 00:45:29.237 It's because that kind of brain plasticity, that kind of non-declarative memory, procedural learning, skill learning, that drives this very long-lasting changes in the brain. 714 00:45:29.257 --> 00:45:37.723 That 10 hours of bike riding training rewired her brain into what I would only say as a neuroscientist, a bike riding brain would be the technical term for it. 715 00:45:38.063 --> 00:45:41.387 And then, hey, it wears off slowly, but those skills last forever, right? 716 00:45:41.407 --> 00:45:45.172 You can not ride a bike for 10 or 20 years and you get back on it and those brain circuits are there. 717 00:45:45.553 --> 00:45:52.802 That's the kind of brain training we're driving with this kind of adaptive, intensive speed and accuracy computerized training in this way. 718 00:45:52.822 --> 00:45:54.104 And that's why it's so effective. 719 00:45:54.887 --> 00:45:58.548 So tell me a little bit about why, what do we know? 720 00:45:58.608 --> 00:46:07.611 What does the fact that it's the speed training group only that showed the long-term protective effect versus the memory and reasoning training groups? 721 00:46:07.651 --> 00:46:09.191 What does that tell us about dementia? 722 00:46:09.611 --> 00:46:11.972 I can see you have really dived into these papers. 723 00:46:12.272 --> 00:46:13.532 So that's fantastic. 724 00:46:13.793 --> 00:46:14.653 You're exactly right. 725 00:46:14.773 --> 00:46:16.533 Active actually had four groups in it. 726 00:46:16.853 --> 00:46:21.915 There was a speed training group that did this computerized adaptive processing speed training that we've been talking about. 727 00:46:22.275 --> 00:46:24.058 There was also a memory training group. 728 00:46:24.318 --> 00:46:27.282 And what this group did is they learned what I would call mnemonics, right? 729 00:46:27.302 --> 00:46:30.808 I would call this strategies or tips and tricks for remembering things, right? 730 00:46:31.148 --> 00:46:33.952 And when you meet someone, rhyme their name with something, right? 731 00:46:34.633 --> 00:46:37.197 Or if you have a list of things, try to put it into groups, right? 732 00:46:37.357 --> 00:46:37.557 Right. 733 00:46:37.637 --> 00:46:39.619 But they're very much top down strategies. 734 00:46:39.739 --> 00:46:39.919 Right. 735 00:46:40.279 --> 00:46:42.361 And then the third group was a reasoning training group. 736 00:46:42.381 --> 00:46:44.923 They did what I would call SAT prep for adult. 737 00:46:44.943 --> 00:46:45.143 Right. 738 00:46:45.583 --> 00:46:52.268 If you see these certain patterns in numbers or letters and shapes, you know, here's some ways that you can think about what's the next item in the pattern. 739 00:46:52.288 --> 00:46:57.072 If you've ever done an IQ test for better or worse, you've seen these kinds of things in them. 740 00:46:57.152 --> 00:46:57.332 Right. 741 00:46:57.752 --> 00:46:59.494 So the big difference between these. 742 00:46:59.514 --> 00:47:01.035 And of course, there was also a control group. 743 00:47:01.796 --> 00:47:12.024 And the big difference is that those memory training and reasoning training programs were very strategy based, kind of like going to a class and having a teacher teach you how here's how you do something. 744 00:47:12.464 --> 00:47:17.208 Whereas the speed training, as you know, because you've done it, you know, it's intensive adaptive computerized speed training. 745 00:47:17.228 --> 00:47:19.990 There's a teacher there, but only just to make sure the computers work. 746 00:47:20.450 --> 00:47:20.670 Yeah. 747 00:47:20.690 --> 00:47:21.891 So what is the difference there? 748 00:47:21.911 --> 00:47:24.574 And the answer is back to what we talked about, that bike riding learning. 749 00:47:24.594 --> 00:47:31.661 Those memory, those reasoning learning, that's a lot more like learning that I had, remembering when I had a ham sandwich or a salad for lunch. 750 00:47:32.101 --> 00:47:33.442 It's facts, right? 751 00:47:33.462 --> 00:47:37.847 And then if you're ever in a grocery store and you're trying to remember your list, you have to be like, oh, what did they tell me to do? 752 00:47:37.947 --> 00:47:40.569 Okay, I should remember the vegetables and then I should remember the frozen fizzy. 753 00:47:40.589 --> 00:47:42.271 You have to like do it actively. 754 00:47:42.711 --> 00:47:48.615 Whereas speed training, a little bit like we said, training a basketball player, you're building those fundamental building blocks and they're there. 755 00:47:48.655 --> 00:47:49.796 They're subconscious. 756 00:47:49.836 --> 00:47:50.737 You don't need to call them. 757 00:47:50.757 --> 00:47:52.118 The whole thing just works better. 758 00:47:52.538 --> 00:48:01.204 And so in my view, that is almost certainly the difference between why the speed training was shown to reduce the risk of dementia and the other ones weren't. 759 00:48:01.224 --> 00:48:05.287 They didn't really rewire the brain and build a healthier brain in that way. 760 00:48:05.627 --> 00:48:10.589 Now, I should say all three groups actually experienced benefits in their target domains, right? 761 00:48:10.889 --> 00:48:15.971 The memory folks did remember lists better, but they didn't experience benefits in driving safety. 762 00:48:16.311 --> 00:48:21.914 It didn't experience benefits in mood symptoms or health-related quality of life in all these kinds of ways. 763 00:48:22.414 --> 00:48:25.655 And so it probably just didn't build a

healthier brain. 764 00:48:26.035 --> 00:48:32.678 It did help you remember a list better, whereas speed training seems to really build a healthier brain and then have these very long-term benefits. 765 00:48:33.138 --> 00:48:33.398 Yeah. 766 00:48:33.818 --> 00:48:34.038 Yeah. 767 00:48:34.098 --> 00:48:41.099 It's building that infrastructure and the, it's kind of like the muscle you don't think of using, like you, you, you, you subconsciously. 768 00:48:41.520 --> 00:48:46.941 When you talk about athletes, it's being able to catch the ball that's coming at your head without even thinking about it. 769 00:48:46.961 --> 00:48:47.161 Right. 770 00:48:47.521 --> 00:48:47.941 Yeah. 771 00:48:48.601 --> 00:48:49.041 Exactly. 772 00:48:49.061 --> 00:48:49.281 Right. 773 00:48:49.881 --> 00:48:59.883 So the McGill imaging study found that 10 weeks of this trend, where you talked about how it upregulates acetylcholine production, it bathes the brain in this incredible neurodegenerative, 774 00:49:00.867 --> 00:49:25.505 transmitter and rejuvenate it's kind of like a rejuvenation brain chemical right and that collapses in alzheimer's like we basically lose it because people talk about parkinson's and losing the dopamine but in alzheimer's it's that acetylcholine that kind of disappears so in plain terms what is it that that acetylcholine is doing and why does that matter so much 775 00:49:26.240 --> 00:49:27.201 I mean, you're right to raise it. 776 00:49:27.221 --> 00:49:29.863 It's a very important chemical, right? 777 00:49:29.903 --> 00:49:31.965 And what is acetylcholine involved? 778 00:49:32.025 --> 00:49:33.226 It's involved in attention. 779 00:49:33.266 --> 00:49:38.150 Like when you pay focused attention, like your brain is pumping out acetylcholine. 780 00:49:38.190 --> 00:49:38.990 And I should step back. 781 00:49:39.010 --> 00:49:40.752 You know, what are we even talking about here? 782 00:49:40.812 --> 00:49:42.093 As you say, it's a neurotransmitter. 783 00:49:42.473 --> 00:49:46.437 But often we think of neurotransmitters as, hey, I'm helping this neuron talk to that neuron. 784 00:49:46.457 --> 00:49:46.697 Yeah. 785 00:49:47.097 --> 00:49:49.799 Acetylcholine, dopamine, they're a little bit different, right? 786 00:49:49.839 --> 00:50:03.447 What you have is you have a system down in your brainstem that sends these broad projections all over your brain and then releases acetylcholine in this case or dopamine as the case may be very broadly across all regions of your brain. 787 00:50:03.767 --> 00:50:07.570 You know, scientists sometimes talk about it as it's almost like setting the room temperature, 788 00:50:08.170 --> 00:50:15.133 You know, it's not communicating a specific message, but hey, we're in a zone where we're paying attention or we're in a zone where we're resting, right? 789 00:50:15.513 --> 00:50:19.234 We're in a zone where we're being reported or we're being a zone where, hey, things aren't so great. 790 00:50:19.615

--> 00:50:20.775 So that's what acetylcholine does. 791 00:50:20.795 --> 00:50:22.176 You make it when you're paying attention. 792 00:50:22.516 --> 00:50:25.977 And then as I went on to say, it's also involved in neuroplasticity. 793 00:50:26.317 --> 00:50:27.978 Your brain cannot change. 794 00:50:28.138 --> 00:50:29.940 unless acetylcholine is present. 795 00:50:30.360 --> 00:50:39.730 And conversely, if you artificially create acetylcholine in the brain through brain stimulation or what have you, you can make the brain change even though you didn't want it to, if I can put it that way, right? 796 00:50:39.750 --> 00:50:41.372 So it's really a gate in that sense. 797 00:50:41.832 --> 00:50:49.020 And then as you very correctly pointed out, in the earliest studies of Alzheimer's disease, what researchers noticed is that acetylcholine production goes down. 798 00:50:49.520 --> 00:50:51.282 And that was one of the original observations. 799 00:50:51.302 --> 00:50:54.145 Hey, this is why this person can't pay attention and can't remember. 800 00:50:54.165 --> 00:50:57.148 Hey man, they don't have acetylcholine left in their brain, right? 801 00:50:57.628 --> 00:51:00.891 Now it turns out Alzheimer's affects other chemical systems as well. 802 00:51:00.931 --> 00:51:09.240 But the first drugs that came out, if you remember, Aricept and things of that nature, these are drugs that try to preserve the level of acetylcholine in the brain. 803 00:51:09.580 --> 00:51:10.781 Yeah, that's the next question. 804 00:51:10.821 --> 00:51:11.921 So why don't the drugs work? 805 00:51:12.402 --> 00:51:13.922 Well, they work a little bit. 806 00:51:14.423 --> 00:51:15.963 Yeah, but they didn't work a lot. 807 00:51:16.204 --> 00:51:17.244 They didn't work a lot. 808 00:51:17.544 --> 00:51:24.348 And of course, the underlying system, it's called the basal forebrain that's producing acetylcholine is still not working. 809 00:51:24.408 --> 00:51:25.228 It's degenerating. 810 00:51:25.268 --> 00:51:26.229 It's falling apart. 811 00:51:26.269 --> 00:51:29.831 And so with Aricept, you kind of have this last ditch rear guard. 812 00:51:29.851 --> 00:51:37.415 Well, let's keep a few molecules of this going, but you're not changing the underlying trajectory of the brain health issues that are causing that decline. 813 00:51:37.475 --> 00:51:37.575 So- 814 00:51:38.135 --> 00:51:41.597 A little bit of benefit, but it doesn't fully reverse it. 815 00:51:41.637 --> 00:51:44.078 But that opens- It's kind of like L-DOPA, right? 816 00:51:44.138 --> 00:51:46.739 It just doesn't- That's precisely correct, right? 817 00:51:46.759 --> 00:51:52.222 You got to, in the end, fix what's broken if you're going to kind of change outcomes here. 818 00:51:52.642 --> 00:51:58.505 And of course, that's what we're most excited about from a neuroplasticity perspective is, hey, can we fix what's broken? 819 00:51:58.945 --> 00:51:59.165 Right. 820 00:51:59.345 --> 00:52:03.187 We're not going to inject a giant test tube full of acetylcholine into your brain. 821 00:52:03.487 --> 00:52:07.129 But hey, can we use the power of brain plasticity to rewire the brain? 822 00:52:07.149 --> 00:52:12.572 So, hey, your acetylcholine systems are working better and producing more acetylcholine all on their own. 823 00:52:12.652 --> 00:52:12.832 Right. 824 00:52:12.852 --> 00:52:17.254 That would be the right approach from a brain repair or a wellness perspective. 825 00:52:17.578 --> 00:52:17.798 Yeah. 826 00:52:18.178 --> 00:52:25.282 So, you know, there's also emerging work connecting this training to amyloid, which is the plaque and which is so cool, right? 827 00:52:25.302 --> 00:52:28.203 Because the drugs don't help, right? 828 00:52:28.283 --> 00:52:36.727 So the amyloids, the plaques that everybody associates with Alzheimer's, there's a lot of argument about the role that they play, whether they're as bad as people think they are. 829 00:52:37.567 --> 00:52:44.151 But how do you think a purely behavioral screen-based exercise ends up influencing something at that biological level? 830 00:52:44.471 --> 00:52:46.031 Is it like the glymphatic system? 831 00:52:46.071 --> 00:52:46.932 Like, what's it doing? 832 00:52:47.332 --> 00:52:49.173 Yeah, it's such an exciting question. 833 00:52:49.273 --> 00:52:53.435 And, you know, as you say, and just to build on that a little bit, you know, we've had 20 years of amyloid research. 834 00:52:54.055 --> 00:52:59.077 And, you know, as we talked about, you know, these new drugs, I mean, they are effective, right? 835 00:52:59.117 --> 00:53:00.797 They remove amyloid. 836 00:53:00.857 --> 00:53:02.238 Simply no question about that. 837 00:53:02.298 --> 00:53:03.338 And it doesn't produce the wind. 838 00:53:03.479 --> 00:53:03.679 Right. 839 00:53:03.739 --> 00:53:04.939 Why doesn't it fix the brain? 840 00:53:04.979 --> 00:53:05.139 Right. 841 00:53:05.239 --> 00:53:06.700 Why doesn't it fix the brain? 842 00:53:07.340 --> 00:53:09.943 So it's not to say I would never say amyloid has no role. 843 00:53:09.983 --> 00:53:10.123 Right. 844 00:53:10.143 --> 00:53:12.045 It's clearly involved in Alzheimer's disease. 845 00:53:12.485 --> 00:53:18.691 But, you know, I think when when scientists first discovered amyloid and Alzheimer's, they thought it was going to be like, I don't like tuberculosis. 846 00:53:18.771 --> 00:53:18.972 Right. 847 00:53:18.992 --> 00:53:22.074 Like you have a bacterium that gives you tuberculosis. 848 00:53:22.095 --> 00:53:22.995 We're going to kill the bacteria. 849 00:53:23.015 --> 00:53:24.116 We don't have tuberculosis anymore. 850 00:53:24.136 --> 00:53:24.777 And that was the thought. 851 00:53:25.057 --> 00:53:26.198 Hey, we have amyloid. 852 00:53:26.239 --> 00:53:26.999 It's neurotoxic. 853 00:53:27.019 --> 00:53:27.720 We're going to get rid of it. 854 00:53:27.740 --> 00:53:28.341 You're going to be fine. 855 00:53:28.381 --> 00:53:29.742 Obviously, that's simply not

true. 856 00:53:30.562 --> 00:53:34.944 And so the question with brain training, you know, brain training could have worked in either one of two ways, right? 857 00:53:35.324 --> 00:53:41.967 Maybe it makes the brain healthier and we have this concept now of brain reserve or cognitive reserve or brain resilience, right? 858 00:53:42.227 --> 00:53:46.769 It's the ability of our brain to resist the effects of amyloid, right? 859 00:53:47.110 --> 00:53:52.172 We know, for example, that exercise in middle age probably makes you less likely to get Alzheimer's. 860 00:53:52.712 --> 00:53:55.113 maybe exercise in middle ages, building brain reserve. 861 00:53:55.133 --> 00:53:59.534 You still have amyloid, but you don't manifest the clinical symptoms because your brain's resisting. 862 00:53:59.554 --> 00:54:05.356 That's a very powerful idea because it tells us, hey, amyloid might be involved, but we can fight back against it, right? 863 00:54:05.436 --> 00:54:06.417 By building a healthier brain. 864 00:54:06.657 --> 00:54:10.318 So one way brain training could have worked is, hey, man, it does not affect amyloid at all, right? 865 00:54:10.638 --> 00:54:14.439 It just builds a healthier brain, have all the amyloid you like, your brain's still working pretty good, right? 866 00:54:14.659 --> 00:54:16.660 That's an okay outcome as far as I'm concerned. 867 00:54:17.020 --> 00:54:19.181 But there's a whole other thing that might be going on. 868 00:54:19.261 --> 00:54:23.622 And here we're going to have to go back to my mentor, the founder of Brain HQ, Mike Mersnick. 869 00:54:23.742 --> 00:54:37.766 You know, he would come at this and he has said, and then I'll say what the study showed us, is, hey, when you are driving all that brain plasticity, you're building those new connections, you're releasing growth factors, you're thickening the insulation around neurons and so forth. 870 00:54:38.106 --> 00:54:42.271 He would also say, hey, you're also revivifying the blood-brain barrier. 871 00:54:42.632 --> 00:54:53.765 And it's important to remember that, hey, the brain, you know, does all that thinking and working memory, but it's also an organ in your body that is fed by your vasculature system and, in fact, consumes 40% of the energy you consume, right? 872 00:54:53.805 --> 00:54:53.945 Right. 873 00:54:55.006 --> 00:55:01.172 And of course, we know that the blood-brain barrier, one of the goals is to keep stuff in the blood and not let it into the brain, right? 874 00:55:01.192 --> 00:55:05.897 You always have little bits of fungus and viruses and infectious agents and toxic proteins. 875 00:55:06.317 --> 00:55:08.579 It's all this crazy stuff floating around your blood, right? 876 00:55:08.980 --> 00:55:10.321 We don't want it to get into the brain. 877 00:55:10.741 --> 00:55:17.328 And so we know that as we get older, in particular as we go on to mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease, it just gets a little leakier. 878 00:55:17.688 --> 00:55:20.249 and stuff starts to flow out of the blood and into the brain. 879 00:55:20.589 --> 00:55:22.169 And hey, that might be what amyloid is. 880 00:55:22.189 --> 00:55:25.130 There's a lot of viewpoint that amyloid is part of the immune response, right? 881 00:55:25.150 --> 00:55:28.551 A little bit of this junk floats into your brain, you deposit some amyloid around it. 882 00:55:29.111 --> 00:55:37.133 So Mike has had the theory for quite some time that, hey, when you do this kinds of neuroplasticity-based brain training, you're actually resealing the blood-brain barrier, right? 883 00:55:37.613 --> 00:55:40.154 Now, that is a super interesting idea. 884 00:55:40.174 --> 00:55:42.155 I would have to say it's been looked at in animals. 885 00:55:42.195 --> 00:55:43.555 We don't know this yet in people. 886 00:55:44.135 --> 00:55:45.615 But Mike made that prediction. 887 00:55:45.635 --> 00:55:58.719 He said, hey, we are going to see that brain training lowers amyloid indirectly by resealing the blood-brain barrier and reducing kind of that toxic, infectious assault on the brain that comes from having a leaky blood-brain barrier. 888 00:55:59.119 --> 00:56:12.743 Now, this beautiful study came out this summer that you're referring to, small study, preliminary study, but exciting nonetheless, called the ANAC study run out of Clemson, showing that with a blood marker of amyloid, that people who did brain HQ, and men in particular, 889 00:56:13.083 --> 00:56:13.984 Interesting question there. 890 00:56:14.404 --> 00:56:21.029 Showed lower, showed an improved amyloid levels, reduced the bad kind of amyloid in the brain. 891 00:56:21.669 --> 00:56:31.697 And so the first evidence that, hey, maybe this is having this very biological effect, maybe by resealing the blood-brain barrier and reducing the infectious burden on the brain. 892 00:56:32.380 --> 00:56:34.583 So, you know, and- That's fascinating. 893 00:56:35.304 --> 00:56:36.966 There's a whole biochemical study here. 894 00:56:37.026 --> 00:56:43.594 And to loop way back, if you don't mind, you know, we were talking a little while ago about, hey, what's it going to take for people to accept that cognitive training and brain training is effective? 895 00:56:43.614 --> 00:56:49.762 And I think what it's going to take for a lot of scientists and doctors is, hey, just a very clear molecular line of action, right? 896 00:56:50.162 --> 00:57:00.570 And to be able to start to tell the story that, hey, brain training improves acetylcolony levels, as we talked about, the McGill study, it helps reseal the blood-brain barrier that reduces the risk of having these amyloid deposits. 897 00:57:00.590 --> 00:57:01.351 That's what's going on. 898 00:57:01.711 --> 00:57:07.816 As this science starts to become more fleshed out, more and more people are going to be like, yeah, this just kind of makes sense, right? 899 00:57:07.856 --> 00:57:11.879 Now, I got to tell you that they should be saying that

right now, but we're going to get 900 00:57:14.201 --> 00:57:14.421 there. 901 00:57:14.822 --> 00:57:15.122 All right. 902 00:57:15.182 --> 00:57:17.323 So let's talk about the little elephant in the room. 903 00:57:17.344 --> 00:57:19.946 We kind of talked about it earlier before we started recording. 904 00:57:20.466 --> 00:57:23.729 The brain training industry has a bit of a checkered reputation. 905 00:57:23.749 --> 00:57:26.271 There have been a couple of bad actors. 906 00:57:26.311 --> 00:57:27.331 We need to say this, right? 907 00:57:27.371 --> 00:57:30.314 Because it's important for us to discuss it. 908 00:57:30.754 --> 00:57:33.016 There are certain companies that may or may not remain 909 00:57:37.219 --> 00:57:56.818 signed up for they made which is too bad because actually those games were also pretty good but they made claims that didn't hold up and one pay wow and and and so one of them that the whole company kind of almost disappeared but didn't but they paid a major ftc settlement for it so when somebody tells you brain training is all snake oil 910 00:57:58.208 --> 00:58:04.529 I mean, I don't know, now that we have these studies, I don't know that they could ever say that with a straight face, but what's your response? 911 00:58:04.790 --> 00:58:15.772 They really can't say it with a straight face, but I'm a scientist and what I would say is, hey, different brain training programs are different and they have different scientific effects on different brain health conditions. 912 00:58:16.212 --> 00:58:18.953 And it's a super boring answer, makes me a scientist. 913 00:58:19.353 --> 00:58:19.793 That's okay. 914 00:58:19.833 --> 00:58:20.753 That's how it works. 915 00:58:21.033 --> 00:58:27.575 Think about this, you would never say small molecules don't cure cancer. 916 00:58:28.556 --> 00:58:31.499 Hey man, some small molecules drugs don't cure cancer. 917 00:58:31.579 --> 00:58:33.561 If you take aspirin, it doesn't cure your cancer. 918 00:58:33.901 --> 00:58:37.365 Other small molecule drugs are pretty effective at curing cancer. 919 00:58:37.705 --> 00:58:39.607 And so we recognize, hey man, there's a lot of molecules. 920 00:58:39.627 --> 00:58:41.169 They do different things in different situations. 921 00:58:41.429 --> 00:58:43.291 We've just got to come to that viewpoint. 922 00:58:43.591 --> 00:58:45.093 When we think about behavioral health. 923 00:58:45.473 --> 00:58:55.945 whether it is brain training, but hey, whether it's different kinds of physical exercise or different approaches to sleep or different approaches to nutrition and supplements, we've got to stop putting them all in the same basket. 924 00:58:56.005 --> 00:59:04.495 And because one of them doesn't work or whether one of them is made up by charlatans, we've got to not be throwing the baby out with the bath. 925 00:59:05.015 --> 00:59:06.996 And so in that sense, I'm just a rigorous scientist. 926 00:59:07.016 --> 00:59:10.358 Hey, if you build a new brain training program, it's on you to show that it works. 927 00:59:10.678 --> 00:59:11.638 Launch a new supplement. 928 00:59:11.658 --> 00:59:13.239 You should have some evidence that's helpful. 929 00:59:13.639 --> 00:59:16.081 But no one should be saying supplements work or don't work. 930 00:59:16.381 --> 00:59:18.582 No one should be saying brain training works or doesn't work. 931 00:59:18.822 --> 00:59:21.143 No one should be saying medicine works or it doesn't work. 932 00:59:21.363 --> 00:59:24.705 You know, it just you know, we have to be more specific than that. 933 00:59:24.985 --> 00:59:27.466 But hey, people should be thoughtful about that. 934 00:59:27.526 --> 00:59:34.390 My field brain training, I'm a little bit sorry to say is elements of this are still the Wild West and, you know, people need to 935 00:59:35.050 --> 00:59:42.914 you know, do a little bit of research, do a little bit of looking at the scientific claims and, hey, just make sure there's some real randomized controlled trials behind what's being put out there. 936 00:59:43.254 --> 00:59:44.635 I think we're moving in that direction. 937 00:59:44.775 --> 00:59:49.117 Well, I mean, I think, yeah, this is an easier question now than it would have been a year ago. 938 00:59:49.337 --> 00:59:50.097 Let's put it that way. 939 00:59:50.817 --> 00:59:52.158 I think that's fair. 940 00:59:52.438 --> 01:00:00.362 So now what I also think is super fascinating about this particular technology is it's used by people from people on Medicare Advantage plans. 941 01:00:00.382 --> 01:00:01.122 Yeah. 942 01:00:01.617 --> 01:00:05.399 hospital systems right through to elite athletes in the military. 943 01:00:05.739 --> 01:00:07.540 And that is amazing, right? 944 01:00:07.600 --> 01:00:16.484 Like the fact that you can have, I mean, you named one earlier, we're not going to name names, but you have a super elite, really well-known athlete using this tool. 945 01:00:17.004 --> 01:00:21.687 And then somebody's grandmother is like hard at it, looking for that bloody eagle. 946 01:00:22.367 --> 01:00:32.756 So, you know, what what does that really say about brain training that those two worlds, geriatric medicine and peak performance, both benefit and land on the exact same tool? 947 01:00:32.797 --> 01:00:39.022 You know, I got to tell you, as a scientist, it came as a surprise to me when we built these exercise. 948 01:00:39.042 --> 01:00:41.665 We kind of assumed we're building them for older adults. 949 01:00:42.225 --> 01:00:46.188 who, hey, they wanted to maintain or sharpen their brain function as they aged. 950 01:00:46.609 --> 01:00:47.810 And it was very much a deficit model. 951 01:00:47.870 --> 01:00:49.171 It was very much a remedial model. 952 01:00:49.511 --> 01:00:50.712 And that got us a long day. 953 01:00:51.153 --> 01:00:55.717 And then, you know, one day we got this call from a guy, and I will name names here because it's on the record. 954 01:00:56.517 -->

01:00:58.619 And he said, hey, I'm Tom Brady's personal trainer. 955 01:00:58.659 --> 01:01:00.481 Did you know that Tom's using Brain HQ? 956 01:01:00.581 --> 01:01:04.244 I said, well, we have a deep-seated commitment to patient privacy. 957 01:01:04.324 --> 01:01:05.365 I did not know that Tom. 958 01:01:06.935 --> 01:01:08.956 He's like, hey, you want to come out and meet him and talk about brain health? 959 01:01:08.996 --> 01:01:12.897 I'm like, you know, as a matter of fact, I didn't want to come out and meet Tom Brady and talk about brain health. 960 01:01:13.258 --> 01:01:14.298 So we flew out to Foxborough. 961 01:01:14.318 --> 01:01:15.338 He was playing for the Pat's Spec Day. 962 01:01:15.358 --> 01:01:17.119 And first of all, like the nicest guy in the world. 963 01:01:17.159 --> 01:01:20.620 I just cannot emphasize what a fun and nice and engaging guy. 964 01:01:20.761 --> 01:01:28.023 And you know, long story short, what he basically said is, hey, I spent a lot of effort training my body to not be at the 90th percentile. 965 01:01:28.324 --> 01:01:30.805 I can't win a Super Bowl if I'm a 90th percentile. 966 01:01:30.825 --> 01:01:31.725 What are you talking about? 967 01:01:32.085 --> 01:01:36.087 I'm training my body to be at the 99th percentile for what it needs to do on the field. 968 01:01:36.127 --> 01:01:44.431 A couple of years ago, I thought, hey, I should be training my brain to be at the 99th percentile as well, because think of the cognitive demands on him as a quarterback. 969 01:01:44.471 --> 01:01:48.953 He gets the snap and like, hey, you can have the best offensive line in the world. 970 01:01:49.053 --> 01:01:52.035 Three and a half seconds after you get the snap, you are going to be tackled. 971 01:01:52.355 --> 01:01:54.336 So during that three and a half seconds. 972 01:01:54.576 --> 01:01:56.757 You got to remember which of the hundred plays you're running. 973 01:01:56.777 --> 01:01:57.818 You got to look downfield. 974 01:01:57.838 --> 01:01:58.818 You got to see your receivers. 975 01:01:58.858 --> 01:01:59.619 Some of them are covered. 976 01:01:59.659 --> 01:02:00.559 Some of them aren't covered. 977 01:02:00.839 --> 01:02:03.201 You got to do a little fancy stepping as he is known for. 978 01:02:03.521 --> 01:02:04.621 And then you got to hit that pass. 979 01:02:04.681 --> 01:02:07.303 He's like, so you have to have an incredibly high performing brain. 980 01:02:07.663 --> 01:02:15.407 And I got to tell you that that opened the eyes of everybody here that, hey, this isn't about taking someone from the 10th percentile to the 40th percentile. 981 01:02:15.427 --> 01:02:16.908 Although we do that, that's a great win. 982 01:02:17.328 --> 01:02:20.232 But we can take people for the 90th to the 99th percentile. 983 01:02:20.472 --> 01:02:22.995 That's led to work that we're doing with Special Forces Command. 984 01:02:23.035 --> 01:02:32.907 We actually have a wonderful partnership with the National Tactical Officers Association, where we have law enforcement agencies, sheriff's offices, and SWAT teams doing Brain HQ across the country. 985 01:02:33.467 --> 01:02:41.554 And, and, and of course, what's hilarious to me, I'm a lab rat, I did a PhD in neuroscience is that a football quarterback had to teach me how neuroscience worked. 986 01:02:41.754 --> 01:02:41.934 Right. 987 01:02:42.155 --> 01:02:43.115 And that's what happened here. 988 01:02:43.416 --> 01:02:45.457 Because in that sense, of course, it works this way. 989 01:02:45.477 --> 01:02:46.558 Think about physical exercise. 990 01:02:46.879 --> 01:02:49.841 Physical exercise is not just for you when you're out of shape. 991 01:02:50.141 --> 01:02:51.843 It's for you when you're in shape to stay in shape. 992 01:02:51.903 --> 01:02:54.085 Brain training works exactly the same way. 993 01:02:54.625 --> 01:02:57.147 And so that was a lesson that we learned from Tom Brady. 994 01:02:57.167 --> 01:02:58.228 And thank you for it, Mr. Brady. 995 01:02:58.788 --> 01:03:04.573 And that really changed how we think about this, which is this is a health and wellness intervention that's appropriate for anyone. 996 01:03:04.593 --> 01:03:06.755 No matter where you start, we can help you get better. 997 01:03:07.315 --> 01:03:08.116 Well, and that's the thing. 998 01:03:08.456 --> 01:03:10.778 It's the game's adaptation to the speed of your brain. 999 01:03:10.838 --> 01:03:14.761 So Tom's seeing the eagle faster than I am, which is depressing. 1000 01:03:14.781 --> 01:03:21.226 Yeah, Tom may be doing the same exercise as you and I are doing, but he's doing it a lot faster or so. 1001 01:03:21.366 --> 01:03:22.867 But he's in that percentile, right? 1002 01:03:22.907 --> 01:03:26.168 So if I'm 85th percentile, I'm in there. 1003 01:03:26.328 --> 01:03:26.968 That's right. 1004 01:03:26.988 --> 01:03:29.269 You think, well, it's pretty good because it's Tom that's ahead of me. 1005 01:03:29.349 --> 01:03:31.069 Because Tom's setting the bar. 1006 01:03:31.650 --> 01:03:32.310 Exactly. 1007 01:03:32.410 --> 01:03:33.430 That's exactly right. 1008 01:03:33.650 --> 01:03:35.771 So just a few more questions before we go. 1009 01:03:35.891 --> 01:03:38.692 So what does your own personal relationship with this look like? 1010 01:03:38.772 --> 01:03:39.772 Do you train yourself? 1011 01:03:40.113 --> 01:03:41.633 I can't imagine you don't. 1012 01:03:42.653 --> 01:03:46.855 And has anything about building this company changed how you think about your own aging brain? 1013 01:03:47.682 --> 01:03:49.665 Well, it's the bigger question, because I know you train. 1014 01:03:49.725 --> 01:03:50.546 It's a fun question. 1015 01:03:50.566 --> 01:03:50.966 Great question. 1016 01:03:51.066 --> 01:03:56.273 I do train quite regularly and I'm often trying out new versions of the program because we're always trying to make it better. 1017 01:03:56.654 --> 01:03:59.137 But I just train regularly on a lot of

exercises. 1018 01:03:59.177 --> 01:04:02.802 But the speed ones in particular, because, of course, you know, we know that speed is so important. 1019 01:04:03.262 --> 01:04:04.843 And I have noticed the difference quite directly. 1020 01:04:04.903 --> 01:04:09.265 A couple of years ago, I was driving my family up to Lake Tahoe on the south route, which is Route 50. 1021 01:04:09.705 --> 01:04:14.767 And it was nighttime and there was snow on the ground that it was late and had been stop and start traffic. 1022 01:04:15.407 --> 01:04:16.808 And, you know, we're cruising along. 1023 01:04:16.948 --> 01:04:20.689 And before I knew it, I felt that I was stepping on the brake as hard as I could. 1024 01:04:21.029 --> 01:04:25.291 And it was only after that that I saw this deer jump across the road right in front of me. 1025 01:04:25.351 --> 01:04:26.232 You saw this person. 1026 01:04:26.292 --> 01:04:28.053 And I'd seen it out of the corner of my eye. 1027 01:04:28.153 --> 01:04:38.240 And before my conscious mind had processed that, my unconscious mind, as you and I were talking about, had connected that sensory experience to the right motor response, which was to stop the car. 1028 01:04:38.720 --> 01:04:41.702 And we hear these kinds of stories from brain HQ users pretty commonly. 1029 01:04:42.243 --> 01:04:45.205 But, you know, more broadly, you know, when I joined this company, I was... 1030 01:04:45.765 --> 01:04:46.346 How old was I? 1031 01:04:46.466 --> 01:04:47.146 A younger man. 1032 01:04:47.166 --> 01:04:48.127 Let's just say that. 1033 01:04:48.487 --> 01:04:51.250 And there's something fun about aging into your own target demographic, right? 1034 01:04:51.450 --> 01:04:52.271 My opinions matter now. 1035 01:04:52.291 --> 01:04:52.911 It's people like me. 1036 01:04:52.971 --> 01:04:54.052 They're doing brain HQ. 1037 01:04:55.213 --> 01:05:04.221 But, you know, what I would say that I've really come from both doing the science and working at this company is I sometimes get up on my soapbox and say, yeah. 1038 01:05:04.942 --> 01:05:12.889 Hey, the single most important lesson of all this is the lesson you and I talked about at the very beginning of this call, which is, hey, the brain can change itself. 1039 01:05:13.169 --> 01:05:16.492 And the more you think about that, the more powerful that becomes. 1040 01:05:17.032 --> 01:05:17.252 Right. 1041 01:05:17.553 --> 01:05:22.417 You know, I still to this day run into people who think I'm going to get Alzheimer's because my granddad get Alzheimer's. 1042 01:05:22.957 --> 01:05:26.040 I run into people who say I'm not a math person, a nerdman good at math. 1043 01:05:26.460 --> 01:05:31.505 I run into people who, you know, you know, feel like, hey, I could never learn music. 1044 01:05:31.545 --> 01:05:31.705 Right. 1045 01:05:31.725 --> 01:05:32.426 I'm a music brain. 1046 01:05:32.726 --> 01:05:33.487 One of those things are true. 1047 01:05:33.607 --> 01:05:34.928 You may not have a

good music teacher. 1048 01:05:34.968 --> 01:05:38.411 He may not have a good music experience, but I guarantee you, your brain can rewire itself. 1049 01:05:38.992 --> 01:05:42.615 And we are just at this point where we're exiting the dark ages. 1050 01:05:42.635 --> 01:05:42.975 Right. 1051 01:05:43.316 --> 01:05:45.658 You know, we've been through the physical fitness revolution. 1052 01:05:45.698 --> 01:05:49.141 We know that you can work on your body to have a healthier life. 1053 01:05:49.401 --> 01:05:50.522 Everybody does something, right? 1054 01:05:50.922 --> 01:05:52.983 Some people do a little, like, hey, I'm gonna take the stairs. 1055 01:05:53.283 --> 01:05:54.263 Other people do a lot, right? 1056 01:05:54.283 --> 01:05:56.424 I'm gonna buy a thousand dollars worth of gear and get a personal trainer. 1057 01:05:56.704 --> 01:05:58.385 But all of us know we should be doing something. 1058 01:05:58.785 --> 01:06:01.326 We are entering that age for brain health right now. 1059 01:06:01.667 --> 01:06:06.769 And I guarantee you that we're gonna remember this call two years, five years, 10 years, 20 years later. 1060 01:06:06.829 --> 01:06:09.050 And we're gonna think, my God, we were coming out of the cave. 1061 01:06:09.270 --> 01:06:13.695 We're going to look back, you and me, and we're going to say, can you believe we had people coming back from the war? 1062 01:06:14.035 --> 01:06:17.138 And we said, oh, go back to school, take care of your family, get a job. 1063 01:06:17.699 --> 01:06:19.240 I'm sorry you have all that brain fog. 1064 01:06:19.260 --> 01:06:19.801 Don't worry about it. 1065 01:06:19.821 --> 01:06:20.842 It's purely psychological. 1066 01:06:21.543 --> 01:06:22.644 Oh, my God, that was insane. 1067 01:06:22.664 --> 01:06:28.450 We're going to look around and we're going to say, I can't believe we had people with severe mental illnesses with bipolar and schizophrenia. 1068 01:06:28.770 --> 01:06:32.234 And we gave them medications, which helped their symptoms, but we didn't try to fix. 1069 01:06:32.254 --> 01:06:36.558 fix what's wrong in the wiring of their brains that are causing these illnesses. 1070 01:06:36.658 --> 01:06:43.704 We're going to look back and we're going to say, Hey man, we just let people get old and think, Oh, I should watch some, I love Lucy reruns and figure you're going to have a good life. 1071 01:06:43.784 --> 01:06:44.725 Like that's not true. 1072 01:06:45.065 --> 01:06:46.226 It doesn't work that way. 1073 01:06:46.666 --> 01:06:50.249 You need to build that brain health, but we are coming out of those dark ages. 1074 01:06:50.329 --> 01:06:52.451 It's a very exciting moment in this whole field. 1075 01:06:52.751 --> 01:06:53.352 And, um, 1076 01:06:54.212 --> 01:06:55.253 And he asked me what I learned. 1077 01:06:55.293 --> 01:07:02.395 That's mainly what I've learned is that we have all of us in us have this incredible potential and there's a million things we can do to realize it, which is exciting. 1078 01:07:02.875 --> 01:07:03.095 Yeah. 1079 01:07:03.115 --> 01:07:05.656 I mean, listen, we just added another leg to the stool, right? 1080 01:07:05.776 --> 01:07:06.837 On longevity science. 1081 01:07:06.917 --> 01:07:08.857 It's, I mean, we talk about metabolic health. 1082 01:07:08.897 --> 01:07:16.360 We talk about senolytics, peptides, hormone optimization, physical, you know, circadian rhythm, sleep, stress management. 1083 01:07:17.516 --> 01:07:18.217 We have a new leg. 1084 01:07:18.657 --> 01:07:19.418 Brain training. 1085 01:07:19.658 --> 01:07:20.098 We do. 1086 01:07:20.118 --> 01:07:20.519 We do. 1087 01:07:20.739 --> 01:07:31.949 All of it's going to be important because our bodies are complex and biological, but this is all within our reach and our aim and what we can do from science and the clinical benefit to help us live a great life. 1088 01:07:32.230 --> 01:07:32.770 So let's do it. 1089 01:07:33.131 --> 01:07:33.891 Let's do it. 1090 01:07:34.071 --> 01:07:34.792 Let's do it. 1091 01:07:34.812 --> 01:07:35.152 All right. 1092 01:07:35.192 --> 01:07:36.634 Last couple of questions on legacy. 1093 01:07:37.014 --> 01:07:38.676 What's one myth about brain training? 1094 01:07:38.756 --> 01:07:41.979 You are so sick and tired of correcting, but you will still do it. 1095 01:07:42.359 --> 01:07:47.580 The myth about brain training that I am sick and tired of correcting is that brain training doesn't generalize. 1096 01:07:47.840 --> 01:07:52.021 You only get good at what you practice on a computer screen and you don't experience any other benefits. 1097 01:07:52.441 --> 01:07:57.882 And that's been put to death by dozens, hundreds of studies at this point, but it keeps coming back to me. 1098 01:07:58.342 --> 01:08:00.383 So I'm always happy to answer it. 1099 01:08:01.923 --> 01:08:07.184 The studies show broad ranging benefits of the right kind of training, especially speed training. 1100 01:08:07.843 --> 01:08:08.624 Yeah, for sure. 1101 01:08:09.424 --> 01:08:12.187 If your grandfather could see what you've built, what do you think he'd say to you? 1102 01:08:12.807 --> 01:08:13.428 Oh, my gosh. 1103 01:08:13.468 --> 01:08:14.649 No one has ever asked me that. 1104 01:08:14.689 --> 01:08:15.930 What an interesting question. 1105 01:08:16.350 --> 01:08:21.514 My grandfather was an engineer and he worked at Westinghouse for a long time in lubrication science. 1106 01:08:21.534 --> 01:08:25.117 So he made pieces of metal, you know, spin more quickly and so forth together. 1107 01:08:25.497 --> 01:08:31.983 I, to this day, have a little gavel that he used when he was, you know, chairman or what have you of the American Society of Lubrication Engineers. 1108 01:08:33.004 --> 01:08:35.866 And I, he had a PhD in chemistry from Brown. 1109 01:08:35.966 --> 01:08:41.209 If you Google my name, sometimes you will find my grandfather's publications on how much salt there is in the ocean. 1110 01:08:42.050 -->

01:08:44.692 And things like that, that I guess people were figuring out in 1930. 1111 01:08:45.432 --> 01:08:54.999 And I think, I'd like to think that my grandfather would be proud of me for two reasons, which is that he was a scientist and he would be happy to see these advances in scientists. 1112 01:08:55.539 --> 01:09:04.706 And I think I'd also like to think that he'd be proud of me because, hey, outside of all this work, I'm very blessed and fortunate and have a wonderful family life. 1113 01:09:04.726 --> 01:09:10.050 I have a wonderful wife and two wonderful kids and had wonderful relationships with my parents and all these relatives. 1114 01:09:10.110 --> 01:09:20.337 And I think my dad, who my grandfather, who grew up with without a lot in rural Washington before he got his Ph.D., would be happy to see that things had worked out in this way. 1115 01:09:20.558 --> 01:09:20.738 So. 1116 01:09:21.238 --> 01:09:22.000 That's a nice thought. 1117 01:09:22.020 --> 01:09:23.323 I think, thanks for asking that. 1118 01:09:23.403 --> 01:09:25.548 I haven't thought about that, and I should think about that more. 1119 01:09:25.848 --> 01:09:28.775 Well, it's been a really great conversation. 1120 01:09:29.096 --> 01:09:30.839 Where can we send people to learn more? 1121 01:09:31.855 --> 01:09:36.819 Anyone who wants to try out these brain exercises can come to www.brainhq.com. 1122 01:09:37.119 --> 01:09:38.540 Hey, you can register for free. 1123 01:09:38.560 --> 01:09:39.901 There's no credit card required. 1124 01:09:39.961 --> 01:09:44.105 It'll give you one exercise a day to try out and see if it's for you. 1125 01:09:44.585 --> 01:09:52.151 There's also a tremendous wealth of information on our brain health blog there about all kinds of aspects of brain health, not just brain training, but everything else we've been talking about as well. 1126 01:09:52.431 --> 01:09:53.312 So come see us there. 1127 01:09:53.892 --> 01:09:54.232 I love it. 1128 01:09:54.672 --> 01:09:54.993 I love it. 1129 01:09:55.093 --> 01:09:55.553 Thank you. 1130 01:09:55.853 --> 01:10:03.896 Um, I'm going to keep going at those Eagles and the sound thingy, God, that sound thing, um, guys, actually it's really fun. 1131 01:10:04.037 --> 01:10:09.239 And listen, if you want to be on your phone and you want to play a game, it's, it's kind of like games with benefits. 1132 01:10:09.779 --> 01:10:13.641 So Henry, thank you so much. 1133 01:10:13.801 --> 01:10:18.183 It's been a pleasure getting to know you and this has been a great conversation and, um, 1134 01:10:19.408 --> 01:10:23.013 I don't know, maybe there'll be another study down the road and we'll have to have another conversation at some point. 1135 01:10:23.033 --> 01:10:24.074 Science is coming all the time. 1136 01:10:24.114 --> 01:10:25.956 This has been super fun to talk to you, Nat. 1137 01:10:25.976 --> 01:10:27.458 Thank you really for this invitation. 1138 01:10:27.979 --> 01:10:35.388 Hey folks, just a quick reminder that all of the information presented in this podcast is for information purposes only. 1139 01:10:35.929 --> 01:10:39.794 No medical advice, no diagnosing, no treatments suggested here. 1140 01:10:40.054 --> 01:10:45.521 Before you try anything that you hear about or learn about here, make sure that you check with your medical provider.