Dr. Wendy Suzuki: Boost Attention & Memory with Science-Based Tools
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I made huberman, and i'm a professor of neurobiology optimo gy at stanford school of medicine. today. My guest is doctor Wendy suzuki. Doctor suzuki is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at new york university and one of the leading researchers in the area of learning and memory.

Her laboratory is contributed fundamental text book understanding of how brain areas such as the hippo campus, which you will learn about today, how the hippo campus and related brain circuits allow us to take certain experiences and commit them to memory so that we can use that information in the future. Doctor suzuki is also an expert public educator in the realm of science. A few years back, SHE had a ted talk that essentially went viral.

If you haven't seen IT already, you should absolutely check IT out, in which he describes her experience using exercise as a way to enhance learning and memory. And on the basis of that personal experience, SHE reshaped her laboratory to explore how things like meditation, exercise and other things that we can do with our physiology and our psychology can allow us to learn faster, to commit things, to memory longer and indeed to reshape our cognitive performance in a variety of settings. As such, i'm delighted to announced that doctor's suzuki is now not only running a laboratory at new york university, but he is the incoming dean of arts and science at new york university.

And of course, he was selected for that role for her many talents. But one of the important aspects of her program, SHE tells me, is going to be to incorporate the incredible power of exercise, meditation and other behavioral practices for enhancing learning, for improving stress management and other things to optimize student performance. Today, you are going to to get access to much of that information so that you can apply those tools in your daily life as well.

Dota z zu ki is also an author of several important books. The most recent one is entitled the good anxiety, harnessing the power of the most misunderstood emotion, and a previous book entitled healthy brain, happy life, a personal program to activate your brain and do everything Better. And while that is admittedly a very pop science type title, I will remind you that he is one of the preeminent memory researchers in the world and has been for quite a while.

So the information that you've lean from those books is both rich in depth and breath and is highly applicable. By the end of today's discussion, you will have learned from doctors sauk I A large amount of knowledge about how memories are formed, how they are lost, and you will have a much larger kit of tools to apply for your efforts to learn Better, to remember Better and to apply that information in the ways that best serve you. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford.

IT is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. Our first sponsor is athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is in all in one and vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink. I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that their sponsor in the podcast, the reason I started taking athletic Greens and the reason I still take athletic Greens once or twice a day is that IT helps me cover all of my basic nutritional needs to makes up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, IT has probiotics, which are vital for microbial on health.

I've done a couple of episodes now on the so called gut microbiome and the ways in which the microbiome interacts with your immune system, with your brain, to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system relevant to health throughout your brain and body. With deleted Greens, I get the vitals I need, the minerals I need and the probiotic to support my microbial. If you would like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com slash huberman and claim a special offer.

You'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin three k two ton of data now showing that vitamin three is essential for various aspects of our brain and body health. Even if we're getting a lot of sunshine, many of us are still efficient in vitamin d three. And k two is also important because IT regulates things like carrasco function, calcium in the body and so on.

Again, go to athletic Greens. Dog comes so huberman to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs and the ear supply of vitamin d three k two. Today's episode is also brought to us by element. Element is an electronic light drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the exact ratios of electrolier ts are an element and those are sodium, magnesium and plastic um but IT has no sugar.

I talk many times before in this podcast about the key role of hydration and electoral lights for nerve cell function, neuron function, as well as the function of all the cells and all the tissues in organ systems of the body. If we have sodium anisim in pattani an present in the proper issues, all of those cells functioned properly in all our botley systems can be optimized. If the electronics are not present in a hydration is low, we simply can't think as well as we would otherwise.

Our mood is off, hormonal systems go off. Our ability to get in the physical action, to engage in endurance and strength and all sorts of other things is diminished. So with element, you can make sure that you're staying on top of your hydration and that you're getting the proper ratios of electoral lights.

If you like to try element, you can go to drink element that element t dotcoms slash huberman and you'll get a free element sample pack with your purchase. They're all delicious. So again, if you want to try element, you can go to element. Element t docomo slash human. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eja, recessions and nsd r non sleep depressed protocols.

I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I start doing yoga edra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations, and that had a lot of different types of military to place the bringing body into different states, and that he liked IT very much. So I gave the waking up up a try, and I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate. Other times I have longer to meditate.

And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up up has lots of different types of yoga eda sessions. Those who don't know, yoga eza is a process of line very still, but keeping an active mind is very different than most meditations.

And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yogananda and something similar to IT called non sleep deep breath or nsd r, can greatly restore levels of cognitive physical energy, even which is a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial again. That's waking up dot com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. And now for my discussion with doctor Wendy sizii ki, when he great to see you again and to have you here. It's been in a while.

been a while. So great to be here and here you. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, delighted. I'd like to start off by talking about memory generally. And then i'd love to chat about your incredible work, discovering how exercise and memory interface, and what people can do to improve their memory and brain function.

Generally, yes, but for those that are not familiar, maybe you could just step us through the basic elements of memory, a few brain structures, perhaps. You know what happens when I printed this mug of t pretty unremarkable. But the fact that now i've talked about IT, I don't know that i'll ever forget about IT maybe, well, maybe I won't. So what happens when I look at this mug and decide that it's something special for whatever reason?

yeah. Well, I like to see there are four things that make things memorable. Number one is novelty.

If it's something knew, the very first thing, the very first time we've seen something or experienced something, our brains are drawn to that. Our attentional systems draw us to that. And when you are paying attention is something that's that's part of what makes things memorable.

Second is repetition. If you see that cup of tea every single day and every single time you do an interview, you talk about your cup of tea, you're going to remember IT that's just um how our brains work. Repetition works.

Third is association. So if you meet somebody knew that knows lots of people that you know. So you and I share many, many, many, many people that we both know.

It's easy to remember. It's easier to remember you, especially if you were somebody knew that I hadn't met before. We have met before. H so association um and then the fourth one is emotional resonance. So we remember the happiest in the satish moments of our lives.

And that also includes you funny, surprising things, that is the interaction between two key brain structures, uh, the amygdala, which is important for processing a lots of emotional, particularly threatened kinds of situations, but those threatened surprising kinds of situations. The immigrate takes that information and makes another key structure called the hippocampus work Better to put new long term memories in your brain. So that in fact, is the key structure for long term memory, the structure called the hippocampus anta tic.

So novelty, repetition, association and emotional resonance. Yes, you could tell us a bit more about the hippo campus. I think, at least for my generation, while a neuroscientist, but for most people, my generation, I think they first heard about the hip campus from the movie moment, I campus.

And if, if, for those of you have haven't seen that movie, it's a bizarre constructed movie, but an interesting one nonetheless, about memory. But even as a neuroscientist, sometimes i'm perplexed that how the hip campus works. No, maybe could if you wonder if you would step us through on what this structure is, what IT looks like, maybe a few of its sub regions.

Because you, unlike vision, the time i've work, most of my career on where we know the eyes, does this part in the film, does this part in the cortex, is that part I always been little perplex about the hippocampus, Frankly so um and i've read the textbooks and i've heard the lectures. I'd love to get the update you know what are the general themes of the hippocampus as. Structure yeah. And its function yeah. What do you think everyone, including neuroscientists.

should know about the amp above? So let's start with the basics. The word hippo campus means sea horse. IT is shaped, the structure shaped like a kind of curly q SHE sea horse that is accurate um everybody, including news scientist, you should know it's a beautiful structure. IT is visually and atomically beautiful with these kind of interact twenty totally sub regions with in IT.

And I think that's one of the reasons why early anatomists, who are the very first neuroscientists god, attracted to IT because it's this interesting kind of totally structure deep in the hard, the brain. So that's anatomically, functionally. What does he do? Well, it's easier to understand what IT does when you a look at what happens when you don't have a hip campus anymore.

What if you what if buy some disease or or you have your hippo campus removed by accident um what happens? Well, we know this from the most famous neurological patient of all time. Uh, his initials were hm.

So all psychology, neuroscience, news science students know him. Um he was Operated in nineteen fifty or and the paper was published thousand and fifty seven. Um they removed both the cipla campaigns.

He had very terrible epilepsy and um they knew that the hippo campus was the genesis of epilepsy and this was experimental. His epilepsy was so bad that they decided not just to remove one hip campus, but both. And what happened was immediate, immediate loss of all ability to form new memories for facts and events.

Think about that for a second. All facts or events you're not able to remember. I can't remember this interaction between us. I can't remember any of the fact that we were just chatting in about in our neuroscience lives. Um none of that can move into our long term memory.

So this ipc campus does something with all of these perceptions that are coming at us every single day, every minute of the day. And not for all of them, but for some of them that have these features that we just talked about. Maybe they're novel, maybe they have associations, maybe they're are emotionally relevant, maybe, uh, uh, maybe they've been repeated.

Some of those things in the realm of events get included in our long term memory. And that's that's the textbook of why the hippocampus is so important. I like to always add.

And I mean, this is why I studied IT for so many years. The hippo campus in what IT does really defines our own personal histories. IT means that defines who we are. Because if we can't remember what we've done, the information we've learned and and the events of our lives that IT changes us, that that what really defines us. That's why I wanted to study the hip campus.

And I think that exciting new, new ideas about the hippocampus was, is that know hippy campuses important for memory? So if you say that, you'll be impressed all your people like you at your cottage party. But what people have started to realize that it's not just memory.

It's not just putting together associations for what, where and when of of events that happened in our past, but it's putting together information that is in our long term memory banks in interesting new ways and talking about imagination. So without the hippo campus, yes, you can remember things, but actually you're not able to imagine uh, events or situations that you've never experienced before. So what that says is that I up is is important for memory, is a too simple way to think about IT.

What the hypo campus is important for is what we ve already talked about, associating things together, rid large. Any time you need to associate something together, either for your past, your present or your future, you are using your hippocampus. And IT takes on this much more important role in our cognitive lives. When we think about IT like that, that is kind of the new the new hippocampus that that neuroscientists are studying in these days.

That's fantastic. Sounds like IT really sets context, but IT can do that with elements from the past, the present or the future. yes. And the IT. Well, for neuroscientists, the phrases domain, we say the time domain meaning as well just evaluating things in space IT sounds like the time you mean of hip campo functioning is incredibly interesting IT is and even the fact that we can have short or medium long term memories and we could go down any of these roles. Um i'll ask you a true false most because I just really want to know the answer OK uh few years ago, the theme in various high profile reviews seemed to be that the hippocampus was involved in in coding, in creating memories, but not in storing memories, and that the memory storage was in the neocortex or the other overlying areas of the brain. Is that two general statement?

Um that's a that's a tRicky statement because I think that ultimately, yes, that long term memories are stored in the cortex, but those memories are stored in the hippocampus sometimes for a very, very long time. So how long is too long where you say let's not to hit the confusing more if it's four years, is that does that mean that is not stored in the hippocampus? I think that's a that's a tRicky question.

And yes, IT was coming up a lot because people were debating IT and and some people did think that you shouldn't think about the hippocampus as a storage area. But I think it's a long, long, long term kind of in immediate storage area, maybe not the long term storage area. That's why it's hard to answer that question.

great. As I recall, H. M could remember facts from before his surgery, and he conform. New memories create. And given that he had no hippo campus, IT would at least partially support the idea that some of memories are retained outside the histamine. s.

However, he did have part of his poster hippo campus intact uh so that's the tRicky thing I think initially in fact scovel the um nursery on over estimated the number of millimeters he had one he intended to remove at the hippo campus. And then when they did this, the the very historic MRI of hm later in his life, they showed that, in fact, he did have that poster hippo campus part of the poster hippocampus tact. So now that makes makes IT a little bit more complicated to interpret what's going on. Not that IT was never uncomplicated any interpretation of a legion in in a patient as you know IT is complicated but um you know hm had this mythical role in in neth science in neurology and that was IT was IT was complicated because he he does have more the happy campus intact .

I did not know that there are some memories that can be formed very quickly so called one trial learning yeah and i'm just looking at this list and novelty, repetition, association and emotional resonance. IT seems like some experiences can buy past the need for multiple repetition and so and unfortunately, IT seems that our neural system is key toward creating one child memories for negative, which has a survival adaptive mechanism.

What is the neural connection that allows that to happen? Is that the amiga hippocampus connection? I mean, as you and I know, that seems like every brain area ultimately is connected. Everything else, just question through how many notes, just like every city is connected to another city, is just a question of how many flights and words do you have to traverse before you get there.

What is IT about one trial learning? I mean, at a kind of top control level, how do how can we learn certain things so fast? Yeah and other things are are tRicky. And now every time I look at this White mug, it's queuing up something special that simply by virtually saying IT, so is that one child memory? But what is what is IT about very emotionally sAiling events that allow memories to get stamped in?

Yeah I mean, I think you've already eluded to IT that is there is this protective function um of our brains that has evolved over the last two point five million years that you need to pay attention and remember certain things for your survival so some things that get stamped in um you know there are memories, but their fear memories you know if I get marked on the subway or you know they're terrible things that could happen on the subway as we just learned but if something terrible happens, if something very scary happens, um you remember that and that that fear and that memory of all those things.

I mean, I have one. When I lived in washington, D. C. I went to work at nih on the sunday afternoon, and I came back, and when I rounded the corner to my door of my apartment, IT was crowded, y barred in.

Somebody had taken a crowbar, opened up my door and store all of my, all of my, the nicest things in my apartment, which wasn't that nice because I wasn't making that much money but ever since um ever since then, whenever I rounded the corner, I still have that memory was terrible because you know put me in a terrible state when I was just coming home and that that's a survival mechanism. Do you want to um be alert to possible danger? Absolutely yes. So part of those one trial memories, I think, is often taking advantage of this evolutionary developed system to camp in things that could be potentially dangerous to you into your memory so you forever will remember this particular corner or this, this hallway, because that is where something.

what happened to IT seems like a location. We talk about conditioned place aversion, which is just a geeks be wanting to avoid the place for something bad had happened, or condition place preference, wanting to go back to a place for something positive happen. We're even looking at a photograph of where you had a wonderful time with somebody.

And that kind of vocal sorts of on positive sensations, IT seems, at some level, the as complex as the brain is. The basic elements of feeling good or feeling louds are states within the brain and body. And linking those to places seems like IT.

It's a pretty straight forward formula. No link place to state, link state to place. It's Better, as your description just provided, when we learn more complex information, you know A A poem, a concept, or we have to rach IT through a set of ideas. And that also involves memory.

I'm sure that will talk more about this, but is any way that are you you're aware of that state, bodily state can be leveraged to enhance the speed or the the quality of the of memories and memory formation because you know that so to be clear about IT IT seems there is something very important about this fourth motion resonance component yeah right um novelty the crow bar into the door then goodness is a sounds like he was novel IT wasn't repeated human thankless ness. So repetition is out and the association is very, very strong. But for people trying to learn information that they're not that excited about, right? Or that repetition is hard. Or the the novelty is simply that is painful. Yes.

i've been there. So yeah as as have I is .

there is something that we can do to to leverage knowledge of how the memory system works naturally to to make that a more straight forward process.

So I immediately turned to um the things that i've studied that you talk about so beautifully on your podcast, which are uh strategies generally to make your brain work Better. I was just reminding myself your podcast about cold uh um because I use that every morning.

I do. I just take men.

So my. Uh at the end of every morning shower that I that I take um you you the showers is warm but I give myself a big blast of cold at the at the end of that and IT makes me feel so good and because i've been doing IT for several years it's so much less painful OK I admit I was really painful at at the beginning um but it's much less painful I could could handle the cold water and my pipes are give nice really cold water um and I just I could feel I could feel the the awakened kind of come up in me after that and so and I miss IT if I forget to do that. Sometimes I run back in and give myself that called blast because IT is IT is up in yes, I think you talk about this on your podcast. What's happening in the brain.

basically the cold stimulus, that shock that know catching your breath at setter is a general from the aerials. But also from what we understand now, some new neural imaging. There's ean afternoon or ean, a release from local as which again is the brain structure in the back of the brain sprinkles the rest of the brain, kind of a wake up chemical.

And there's a long arc on documentation. This paper back in two thousand shows that it's a steady increase up to about two point five acts of circulating dope. They weren't looking directly in the brain, admittedly, but IT goes on for four, five. wow. So the improved mood and the feeling of alertness is a real thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so I use that. I mean, so basically I use my morning routine. What my morning tine I get up, I do a um forty five minute t meditation, so meditating over the brewing and drinking of tea that I learnt from a monk um who has a institute in taiwan where teachers team meditation love IT.

I've learned all about tea, different kinds of tea, and then I do a thirty minute cardio cardio weights workout. Then I take my shower with the with the hook hold contrast and oh and before that key thing, if I want to learn something and and I want to be able to um get over the the the difficulty of repeating things or just just push myself to do stuff. Sleep so good, good sleep.

I've learned that over the pandemic. I did sleep experiments on myself and I learned that I was sleeping in our less than I really needed. So I really need seven and half to eight hours of sleep.

And I was getting six and a half. And so now, you know, I get get that seven half, eight was every single night. And guess what? I come to different difficult tasks. And I am more willing to give IT a try to try longer, to try harder, and my brain works Better. And so I think probably if you go back to all of your podcast, you will learn exactly why each one of those things that I do, which I would bet that you probably do to helping my brain.

I guarantee they are. I'm impressed that you do all these things, although not surprised. And I should say that the extra sleep is really impressive and extremely beneficial and curse you get that in the early part of the night. I going to Better earlier flic.

And I should just mention um because you're too humble to do that but i'll say that again that is not only you are you a full professor running a uh ten years full professor and running abati you teach, graduate, have an important role in public education, multiple books anywhere now dean of the the the college of arts and sciences at M Y U. So the extra hour is benefitting you and and as a consequence, benefiting everybody else as well. Thanks for sharing with us your protocol.

I took you off the trajectory of what one can do, but I I think that people and and I appreciate no, come with the practical steps yeah yeah. Knowing the science is important mechanism, I do believe this is important for embedding protocols in people's minds and why they might want to do them. But really hearing that the the mechanics of IT is for IT sounds like everything together takes about an hour. It's not an excessive amount of time, but that IT probably gives you an outsized.

a positive effect on your day. absolutely. I definitely notice IT if I not able to do IT a and and when I don't so I do this seven days a week. It's also not just you know five days, seven days a week and um when I can't do IT, it's usually early morning flights or things like that and and and I get over IT but it's critical critical for the working of my brain.

And now just highlight one thing that you said before we move on, which is that you said went sometimes if you get out the shower before the cold, you'll get back in that to me, a really beautiful example of condition plate preference, you know. So now the cold showers become something that sort of look forward to. I should say that nobody is immune from the adjournment increase of cold, no matter how cold this is.

What's interesting about cold is one of the reasons why it's such an important part of the screening for special Operations. And so sort seal things, but other other brands of military to which is that there are very few stimulus you can give anyone and consistently get in a gentle and released from that without harming them. Eventually, you need to use so much, you sue with exercise you have to use when exercises you can damage joint IT, you know and it's this very kind of, uh, brilliant.

I I don't know if this was intentional or not. Is an intentional genius that they the special Operations sending people back into the cold over and over and never really gets easier. But over time, people actually start to cry IT yeah and IT provides this reduction and inflation tion at that.

So anyway, beautiful practice. Thank you. I want to learn more about your team meditation later in the episode but um in any event, returning to wait that we can improve memory formation. Yeah.

maybe if you would tell .

us your story around this. I know you've told IT before, but a lot of members of the audience and I lived here know how you came to this. Because growing up in newer science, I new U S.

One of the I would say one of the three or four and they're all alongside one another not um this isn't a hc statement at three or four top memory researchers in the world, right? Textbook materials sazegara h in the my text books are filled with the suzuki you're last name according to the information on memory and memory formation. So you were doing that and doing the things that academy s do, and then you're still doing that.

But yes, IT still at a very high level. But then things take a different interaction. And then maybe we could talk about your story and how you came to the place you are at now. Yeah because I think IT provides a number of tools that people .

could implement themselves. Yeah yeah. So this story happened as I was working to get tenure at nyu and and as you know, it's a stressed field process. They give you six years to, you know, show your stuff and you are judged in front of all your colleagues and either that they say, okay, you can do in the club, or they say, sorry, you are humiliated in front of everybody this was .

they actually tell people to leave.

Don't you have to leave your institution and so um so know you work really, really hard. And so my strategy was i'm just going to not do anything but work and i'm just going to work and i'm i'm going to uh just work as hard as I can for the six years. And um what happens when you work and you don't have any sort of life outside of work and you live in new york where there's all sorts of really good take out, you gain twenty five pounds, which is exactly what I did and you get really, really stressed and you start to ask yourself, how come i'm living in new york city and I love broadway and i've never I haven't gone to a broadway show in two years um and so I I so I I twenty five pounds overweight I am I decided to go on vacation and I went by myself because I don't friends and I went to um I did a adventure river rafting trip in perou and so I go by myself and meet other interesting people and um I was the weakest person on this whole trip like I there were so much in Better shape IT was embarrassing and they won't say this. They wanted admit this to me but I was true and I kind came back and I say, okay, I cannot be the weakest person.

I mean my late thirties I have to do something so I went to the gym and um I said, oh my god, i'm forty five pounds of ea wait let's let's try at least to um lose this weight and so I go to gym um I notice how much Better I feel when I go to just a single class. I remember the very first class I went to was a hip p dance class m terrible hip hop, the answers but I still felt good after after that class and then fast forward, you're in a half. I've lost twenty five pounds, so proud of myself, so much happier.

And i'm sitting my office doing what you when I do a lot, which is writing age grant, which is our life blood, right? And writing, writing, writing. And this thought goes through my mind that had never gone through my mind before, which was during the six years of age of frantic grant writing when I was trying to get ten year.

And that thought was great. Writing went well today. You know, that felt good. I like ve never had that thought before. What what's going on here this is really weird.

I don't know that anyone is that that thought before.

Now i'm sure we love about that thought but I thought maybe i'm just having a good day um but when I thought about IT, I thought it's not just today. My grand riding seems to have been getting smoother like i'm able to focus longer IT the sessions feel feel Better to me and you know at that point the only thing that I changed in my life that was a huge thing but I had become a gym rat rather than a working holic.

And that's when my no spider sense for neuroscientists popped up. And I said, what do we know about these things of exercise on your brain? Because if I think about IT, what was Better about my riding is I could focus longer and deeper, very important.

And I could remember those little details that you try and pull together for your million dollar nih grant from thirty different articles that you have open on your screen all at the same time. That's a hip camp l memory. I was studying that I was writing the grants on on hypocrite l memory. And so that's when I got really interested in the effects of exercise on both prefunding focus and attention function and hypothecating ful function because of my own observation and this kind of, I still remember where where I was sitting, which office I was in, when I had this revelation. But the thing that really sealed IT for me, that made me think not just, oh, this is interesting, but I wanna study.

This is right around that time um I got a phone call from my mom um who said that my dad wasn't feeling well and that he had um told her that he got lost driving back from the seven eleven which is literally seven blocks from our house that I grew up in and um I knew that was that was hyper campo function I suspected dementia I suspected I didn't I admit alzheimer's dementia what he had and IT was funny because I mean IT wasn't funny but my mom and dad are two sides of very different coin my dad is the the 呃 the engineer， not so active all his life, but would loved and sit, read books all day. My mom was the athlete. SHE played tennis, team tennis into her eighties and a and I started to show at at that point.

And so then I had, then I had even A A more pressing reason to think about what the effects of exercise were, because I noticed that all the things that we're improving in my brain suddenly went away. My my dad's brain, really, really smart guy, engineer and stately silicon valley helped, helped that push in silicon valley in the seventies happen. He had no more memory.

He couldn't focus his attention. His mood was rock bottom. He's a very happy guy, and everything was the opposite in me.

And I started thinking, this isn't just something to help. You know, somebody who wants to get ten. Um this is something that could help millions and millions of people, most importantly, our aging population.

What if what's happening? And so the thing that makes me wake up in the morning is when I realized that every single time you move your body, um you are released in a whole bunch of newer chemicals and some of them we've talked about that the good mood comes from dopamine and serotonin or journeyman but the thing that gets released also, particularly with erotic c exercise, is a growth factor called brain derived neutral fc actor or B D N F. And that is so important because what IT does is that goes directly to your hippocampus.

And IT helps brand new brain cells grow in your hippy campus. We all have that. Even if you're couch potato, you can get new brain cells in your hip campus to grow but it's like giving your hip campus a boost with this regular beat enough if you are exercising which means that we all have the capacity to grow a bigger theater fluff er hit a campus.

And so what i'd like to give people is this image of every single time you move your body, it's like giving your brain this wonderful bubble back of neurochemicals. What's going on? I I mean my bubble bath of neuro renal len and dopamine and serotonin and growth factors. And with regular bubble bats, what am I doing on growing a big, fat, fluffy, hipper campus? And i'm not gonna cure my father's dementia, alzheimer's, demented, but you know what, if I go into seventies with a big, that fluffy hippy campus, even if I had that in my genes and IT starts to a kick in, it's going to take longer for that disease to start to affect my ability to form and retain new long term memories for facts and events, which is my motivation for getting up and doing my thirty forty five minutes of .

over the exercise.

Quick question about your .

protocol just because and then will discuss a few mechanistic things related to what signals the body might be sending the brain and a little bit more detail on B, D, N, F and some circuitry.

So thirty to forty five minutes, that sounds like cardioscopes erc's might be special, yes, but as I say that I and I think about the literature that i'm aware of in mice and summer monkeys, and certainly humans, looking at the effects of exercise on brain function, and typically the outcome is improvement, almost always. I I don't think paper showing that when animals or humans s exercise more that the brain gets worse um I just can't think of a single paper doesn't mean that doesn't exist. I'm sure someone will put one in the comments section, they'll find that one and thank you for if you can find that.

But but IT seems like it's always Carry vascular exercise. And experimentally in a lab, it's lot easier to get a mouse to run on a bill, to get a mouse to lift weights. All people have put angle, wait. And yes, and the ways of getting nice to do resistance work is actually a little bit barberry because in times they are they're incapacitate limb to overload another limb so an emetrius thing it's not the same as sending them in deduce squat right um more lives or something yeah so um but cardio accused exercise might be .

special yeah yeah .

what are your thoughts on that? And please first though, tell us your routine. Your routine is thirty to forty five minutes of are you a palatal cycle? Are you does IT matter.

Um I think that, uh, the data suggests that as long as your heart rate is getting up for these long term affects on your hippo campus and prefrontal cortex, you you also um get Better at shifting and focusing your attention um for that you need cardio accused and when I use is a video workout that I started even before the pandemics called daily burn and is just thousands of different workouts.

But I love they are thirty minutes that I sometimes add on a ten to fifteen minutes stretch at the beginning or at the end. But um I love the variety. Sometimes I do IT with wait.

Sometimes I do without weights. I love kick boxing. So they have a lot of kick boxing in there IT just fits my fits my fits my routine and it's always there. And I don't have to get all dressed up to go to the gym to to work out. So that's that's what .

I do and that's a daily thing. Seven days a week. Yeah, days a week. fantastic. So in terms of the the way that some of these changes are being conveyed from the body to the brain, that fascinates me. yes.

I mean, as you and I know, and I am sorry of repeating record on the a podcast, always saying, you know, a brain by yourself, a spinal cord, and then your ervy system connects everything. Every organ in your body is basically signal to buy the nervous system and back to the nervous system, yet you're spring everything. But so let's imagine your morning routine, you you your kind exercise, okay, see you you're pumping more blood as the definition of a higher heart rate.

Stroke volume of the of the heart goes up over time, you getting fitter. So blood flow, the brain is increasing. Do we know how that get translated to a signal to release more media? Yeah, you know.

And then IT raises the other question, which is, does that matter where your mind is when you exercise ultimately, the brain? Of course, you can anchor your attention, the exercises. You can be listening to a podcast or something else.

Always wondered about this. yeah. Can we enhance the effects of exercise by combining the enhanced blood flow with cognitive during exercise? Or is IT simply a matter of just getting more blood .

flow up to the hip campus? Yeah, I wish I had the answer to that question. To my instinct is, yes, IT matters partially because of the work of your colleague, a chrome on on mindset, in the power of that to change how physiologically our body is responding.

So how could I not work in her experiments and work in her experiments and not work for my my morning or our morning exercise routine? So but but are their studies point to a study? I don't know what.

Once so exercise neuroscientists out there, i'd love to see, you know, that studying done. So yes, IT worked. Um before I go into the erotic c thing, I would like to start with the least amount of exercise to get something really useful because I don't want people to say, my god, I hate you know, sweating. I don't want to listen anymore. So so I always like to start with um studies have shown that just ten minutes of walking outside can shift your mood. That is part of that neurochemical bob bath that you're getting dopamine certa in nor general um and ten and anybody can walk for ten minutes um and so that is a for all of you thinking that out there, what is the minimum that I could get some of these brain effects, ten minutes of walking anybody .

can do IT is outside important a big believer in getting four.

I think that that study was done indoors on a tread mill so and and the comparison wasn't done but moving your, which is great. I some in the middle of the pandemic, I walked around my apartment for thirty minutes, sometimes just for some variety of, felt like i've read on a running wheel bet. But yes, so so that that minimum amount of movement in your body can get you the those mood effects.

But what about the big fat fuck y hip a campus? What about the Better performing prefrontal cortex? That's where you start to need the the cardio cardio workout. And from my reading of the literature, there haven't been in your studies you know um uh directly comparing contrasting kickboxing with running with whatever whatever other cardio that you need to do. But any cardio workout that is done has this possible effects.

So i'm going to say my interpretation of that is that whatever way you get your heart rate up, including a power walk, a power walk and get your heart weight up, that that is beneficial. And what is happening, there are two pathways that have been studied about how you go from moving your body to more b DNF that neuro trophy that uh that um increasing the growth of new hippo camp brain cells. The two pathways of the following one is a milo kind, which is a protein release by the muscles, so and not your heart.

These are straight muscles in your body. And so by running, these are studies done in rats on running wheels. They showed that the running rats had more of this milking, released the milk, passed the blood brain barrier, so got into the the verified, very protected blood of inside the brain.

And that milk stimulated the release of b DNF in the brain. That's a pathway number one. Pathway number two comes through the liver because exercise is a stress on generally and how do we know that? Well, cortisol released whenever we exercise, we need we need a that sugar uh in our blood.

And so so that's how the physiological mechanisms work. And so um there is a um key tone um beta hydrox y beauty rate that we've known for very long time that gets least by the liver during exercise. And we also know that that particular key tone passes that blood drain barrier and is another stimulant for B D N F.

So kind of the final common pathway seems to be B D N F stimulation in the hippocampus. Is that the only one? Probably not. But that's the one that has been studied most, most clearly. So it's, you know, IT comes from all of our physiological systems, our muscles working, our liver um responding to the stress of of exercise. And what is he doing IT is making our um you know giving more bd f press to get into our brain to cause the uke of b DNF which is part of your bubble bath that you're getting every time you move.

I love that description of a factor from muscle of factor from liver because anytime we're thing about movement of the body and translating that to the brain, as you so clearly pointed out, that needs to be IT needs to reverse the blood brain barrier. Not everything that happens in the body is communicated to the brain yeah and these seem like really important signals um bta, how drugs y beautiful uh, you mention is a key tone.

Um I just wanted underscore that doesn't mean folks that you need to be on a kiosque diet. I think people hear a key tone and they think, you know I know some people are most people are not. I imagine um there are key tones that are released in your brain and body that can function even if you're um interesting cover hydrates tes and not key genes.

Just for a point of clarification, this issue of new neurons is one that you hear a lot no neurogenesis you're going to grow new neurons s and in my understanding is that the road and literature is very clear that animals that run on wheels more often, that turns out rules, love to run on wheel. Do you know these studies by happy hope star? Pretty funny.

Um they're very cool by way. Happy investigator are not making light of them. They put running wheels field and wild roads will run to the running wheel and run on that running wheel. So there's something they really enjoy.

Yeah ah I find amusing the reasons that cally only in new scientists find amusing in any case in audience that seems that a running more on a wheel can trigger neurogenesis literally the the the birth of new neurons and the addition of new neurons. The hippo campus in monkeys. This has been controversial IT seems that does happen in the hip campus in the neil factory.

Bob are probably not in the neocortex. Thinking back to the decades moral controversy between this goal and posc o rookh, I hope they that their differences there, a neuroscientist s love to argue, um it's know what we do. And in humans, I think it's been a bit controversial. People say absolutely yes. Other people say absolutely no.

There are new neurons added to the adult brain I haven't followed that literature down to the detail um but I do remember one study that I don't think is contested which is the work of rescue ge at the sole institute where they actually injected a sort of die type marker into the brains of terminally ill humans, yeah, who very graciously offered to have their brains removed and dissected after death yeah. And in these very, in some cases of very old, terminally humans, they did see evidence for new neon. Yes, being born in the camp. Can I trust that idea still? Is that generally accepted?

Well so after that study, which was quite a while ago, uh there are more recent studies still controversial but um showing and demonstrated using even new and Better techniques that were used that the original rutile ge study, which was groundbreaking at the time that um that success I think show that there are new neons born in a adult human brains into the ninth decade of life so they not only did this, I think those those patients were in their sixties.

Then they they died of cancer um but but these new studies are looking across the timeline. Can we see because the other thing was there maybe you have someone, you're twenty, but by the time you're older and you might need these new neurons, you have no new neuron growth and so these studies seem to uh suggest that yes, yes you did. Yes you do and we all do even into old age. So yeah great.

And i'll just take a moment to say that I am personally not aware of any studies looking at other forms of exercise besides cardiovascular exercise for sake of brain health. And this I think is an important um gap in the literature that ought to be filled whether or not, for instance, high intensity interval training or whether or not weight training um which has other effects on the musculars.

You can imagine perhaps the mya kind to be DNF pathway. The pathway one might be signal but maybe not deliver pathway maybe yes, i'm speculating here. Those studies need to be done to my knowledge they just haven't been done yeah um and but they should be done if you would could you talk about some of the more specific effects of exercise on memory? You when memory is a broad cat or gory of effects and phenomena so things like I what comes to mind is shorter, medium and long term memory reaction time.

Learning math, at least for me, is quite a bit different than learning history, although there's certainly overlap in the neural neural london pinchings. What has been demonstrated in the laboratory yeah in animal models but but especially in humans. And and if you want to share with us any results from your your lab published and sure that the audience will be delayed to learn about them.

absolutely. Let me start with kind of the immediate facts. Acute effects, as they're called of exercise on the brain.

So this is asking, what does a one of exercise session do for your brain? And there um um there are three major effects that have been reproduced. I've seen you in my lab, many labs have reproduce this.

So how do you get with the one off? This is usually in a robot type type exercise session, thirty, thirty to forty five minutes. What you get is that mood boost very, very consistent. You get a, uh, you get uh improved prefrontal function typically uh tested with a strop test, which is a test that I ask you to shift and focus your attention in specific ways um is a chAllenging task and clearly dependent on the prefrontal cortex largely and significant improvements in reaction time. So your your speed at responding often a motor kind of uh but cognitive motor response is is improved um over the pandemic. One of the unpublished studies that I did looking at the effects of thirty minutes of age appropriate workout um in subjects region in age from their twenties all the way up to their nineties so what are the um the things that I saw more consistently irrespective of your age everybody got a decreased anxiety, depression and uh hostility score which is very you know so it's it's not just decreasing your anxiety, depression but decreasing .

your hostility levels.

making the world Better Better place energy the feeling of energy went up. And um what we found is in the older population, even more than in the Younger population. We saw improved performance on bold stripe and erikson flank kr task, which are which is another task dependent on really focusing in on different letters and paying attention to what letters being shown.

嗯， so, so these are consistent effects. How long do they last? One of the states that I did publish, my lab, showed that the immediate effects of exercise lasted up to two hours. Unfortunate that was so longest that we last. They were still there at two hours um so that you know that's that's a pretty big bang for your book that is one thirty minute started interrupt.

I just want to make sure I understand. So if when you say the effects lasted up to two hours, does that mean up to two hours after you finish exercise or up to two hours of memory? ChAllenging ing work to be clear. Yeah.

that's a great question. So um my study looked at a two hours after you finish your workout. We gave you this cognitive test during that two hour period um you are free to do anything except exercise or eat and so there was no no extra load on people but two hours later you do significant Better on these uh focus attention tasks um compared to to uh a group that uh watched videos for for the exercise pure this was an hour of cycling that they did these were Young Young subjects .

in their twice okay so um if I finished my exercise at nine m even if I start this cognitive work, this mental work at eleven, i'll still see benefit.

yes, at least by eleven because I didn't go farther than two hours. So IT could last even longer than that. But but I have evidence that last for two .

hours and and perhaps if I had started the cognitive work and forty five minutes after my exercise ended IT would also be helpful. Yes, there is no reason, I think that there are to eight before starting on.

no reason asking .

questions of the sort that I get in the comments that we are going to get in the comments section. We always dry for clarity here so what this tells me is that um exercising early in the day may have a special effects, right? Uh, I realized that some people cannot exercise until later in the evening.

But you mention something earlier that I want to cue people to very, very important. I don't think i've ever mentioned this on the podcast, which is any kind of physical activity will increase cortisol to varying degrees, yes. And so sometimes it's a healthy crease.

Sometimes it's an unhealthy crease. If you do two hours of really intense exercise and you're not prepared for IT, yeah that's a big biking courses all not a good thing yeah for most people. But if you are going to do your cardiff asked lar or way training later in the day, that increase in court is all can promote too much wakefulness for sleep.

But that shifting that court is all bike early in the days associated with the number of important things related to mood um IT said a but more and more what i'm thinking and hearing is that exercise early in the day is key our former dinner, the medical school fizzer what wasn't is kind of famous steel for jogging between the hours like four and five, eight, five and six, and then running the medical school. So and you're up early doing your exercise and cold shower and meditation will talk about meditation, but this is more and more of a push. I I feel like a stimulus for us to think about moving our exercise earlier in the day.

yeah. I mean, I like to say that. You know, I I know there there are moms and dads out there, and they just say, look, I have a kid that the kids more important than my doing my exercise.

So you will get benefits if if you do whatever, whenever you can. So that's great. More power to you.

But what all the news science data is, the best time to do your exercise is right before you need to use your brain in the most important way that you need to use IT everyday. And so that is why the morning for most of us, is beneficial. That's why I do IT in the morning. I'm luck enough to be able to do that. But yeah, that makes sense with all everything we know about how how this works and how a benefits our brain.

I think about our colleague, eric can del not incidentally, has a nobel prize and studying y's memory and and rumor has IT that he's been A A swimmer for a lot of years that he will put in I think nowadays in his nineties now um he'll put in half a mile, but he used to do swim a mile a day.

something that so I heard that too, that he was a swimmer and he does IT very, very religiously.

And so there are a few other news scientists that do that. I only a lot of neuroscientists that probably should exercise more.

And I don't say that a pocket that might just would love to see them doing their incredible work for many more decades and everything they were tied about today indicates that if one doesn't, yes, unless you have incredible genetics, we all experience age related dementia, right? And the story of your father is a assailant, one. And we should remember that as we go forward.

But I also want to emphasized and lovely your thoughts on just memory and memory loss in general. Yeah that seems we all get worse at remembering and learning things even if we don't get all time. Yeah when does that typically start for for humans?

You know I think there's so much variability, not only because we are individuals, but because our stress levels are different and everybody's an anxiety level has gone up in the last in the last couple of years. But that also has an effect. We we don't remember as much in highly stressful, highly anxious situation. So so you as you know, it's hard to answer that question. People say, okay, just tell me how much exercise .

I have to do OK thirty, forty days. But I love that per day. You know, i've been doing this whole thing of telling people all the data, say, one hundred and fifty to two hundred minutes zone two cardio, which is kind of moderately hard, but not excessively hard. But I love this everyday. And because when I want to do that, the questions that come back, what if I take a long hike on the weekends and so people start negotiating, there's something that's very powerful about negotiable everyday day through oud cover day. You my understanding of the literature is that somewhere in our fifties or sixties, we start noticing little hick cups in memory yeah um for some people Younger, for some people later yeah but I have to imagine that doing the exercise throughout one's entire life is going to help offset some of this simply because of the B, D, N, F and other downstream facts.

Ah yeah I mean, that what IT suggests, one of my favorite studies, and then I want to get back to you, wanted you invite me to share some of my unpublished data on the east long term exercise. But first I want to share one of my favorite studies, which is a launch udal study done in swedish women. And this was published in twenty eighteen.

And what they did was, back in the one thousand nine hundred sixties, they found swedish women, three hundred studies women in their forties, and they characterized them as low fit, mid d fit, high fit okay and then forty years later they came back and found these women, they let them do live their lives, and they asked what happened to these women as a function of whether they were low fit, mid fit, hy fit in their forties. They're now in their eighties um and what they found was that um relative to the low fit or midd fit women, the women that were high fit gained nine more years of good cognition later in life. Now this is not a analyzed control study.

Um this is a correlation study but does IT agree with everything that we've been talking about today? Yes, does IT agree with this idea that, you know, the women that were high fit, we're giving their brains this this bubble bath, you know, maybe not every day, but very, very regularly for that entire forty years. And that built up there big, that beautiful hip c campaign. IT does so.

um for my favorite studies. Yeah, another cause for getting the exercise and consistently yes yeah there's I am impressed by this ten minute walk and the improvements in mood from just a ten minute walk. yeah. But again, I think that daily repetition also, I have to imagine, has effects on the very pathways that allow plasticity.

This is something we, in the realm of neuroplasticity, we don't often hear about everything, but even as neuroscientists, which is that the pathways for engaging plasticity probably can be probably, i'm speculating here, can be made Better by engaging in the sort of behavior this stimulate plus to see. In other words, if one gets Better coming themselves down under stress, those circuits Better yeah doing that there's neural circuits gain proficiency yeah and so because of blood vessels can grow, capabilities can grow in the brain. You can imagine that more pumping of blood to the brain, delivery of these various muscle, liver factors, would also establish larger or more efficient portals to getting that stuff there.

yeah. So you could imagine kind of an amplifying effect of exercise. And again, i'm speculating here, but i've seen this over and over again in college.

The ones who exercise consistently seem to be really, really smart and doing amazing work well into their eighties and nineties and the ones who aren't, some of whom actually pride themselves on how little they exercise. Yeah um they get worse over time. You see them each meeting each decade and i'm not poking fun of them at all.

It's actually like quite hard to see yeah and they're kind of a fading light. They're starting to flicker yeah um so there is this incredible relationship between body vitality and brain vitality that is of course is not an excuse for spending all day in the gym right right the gym right now I enjoy working out so I could imagine doing that but um but that doesn't make a smarter. Unfortunately, you actually have to do the cognitive work also. It's not just exercise. So i'd love to hear about some of these .

new unpublished data yeah yeah so when I jumped into the exercise work, um everybody was studying people sixty five or older because that's when cognitive decline begins and if the ideas exercise can help you with your cognition, then make sense. However, I thought, well, you know that it's great. There's lots of work there.

I wanted to know what happens in people in their forties and the fifties, maybe even their their thirties in their twenties. why? Because that's when we as humans are able, ready, will willing and able to increase our exercise and gets a set set up to you know build our brains as we go into our sixties.

And so um the first study that I did looked at low fit participants from their thirties to mid fifties, and we wanted to ask this question, you know how much exercise you really need to start seeing benefits? Do you see benefits or maybe you have to wait until you start seeing cogan decline to get benefits? That was one of the the theories out there.

And so that's what I wanted to do. And so what we did was three months of two to three times a week. Cardio IT was a spin, spin. Classical spin classes are great for cardio. And the the comparison group was two to three times a week of competitive video scrubby, so no heart rate change.

But but they had to come into my lab in and being a group, just like they were in a group for the, for the spin class, we teched them cog, the cognitively at the beginning of the end of the session, what we found was two to three times a week of cardio. In these people, there are low fit, which means specifically, that they were exercising less than thirty minutes a week for the three months previous to the experiment. So they went from that to two to three times a week of spin class.

And what we found was changes in baseline rates of their positive mood states went up relative to the videos rappel group. Um their body image got more positive because they are exercising, which is great and really important. Their motivation to exercise went up significantly compared to the video gravel group, which which is great.

So the more you exercise, the more motivated you are to exercise. What about cognition? What changed in the cognitive circuits of their brain? Number one, we got improved performance on the stoop task. But um we're headed towards my favorite structure, which is the hip camp. What we found was improved performance on both a recognition memory task, which was A M memory encoding task um and uh that is can you can you differentiate uh similar items that we are asking you to remember, and an spac epithetic memory task where we had them play one of those doom like games when they went into the spatial amazon s and they had to do things in a virtual city. The performance there got Better, which is very, very classically dependent on the hippocampus.

So so this, I IT was so satisfying to to do this study because, uh, i've been wanted to answer this question, what is a minimum amount or doubled amount of exercise that will get you these cognitive benefits? And now I can say, in thirty to fifty years old, that are low fit two to three times a week, is that doable? absolutely.

Will IT be hard if your low fit? Yeah, it's gonna chAllenging, but absolutely doubled. And so you know that that is, uh, IT makes sense with all of the all of the mechanisms that we are.

I didn't study the mechanism, just to be clear, but with all the mechanisms, we are imagining our playing a role here that absolutely makes sense and and IT is durable. This is not like you have to become marathon runner to get any these benefits. This is you have to start moving your body on a regular basis two to three times a week. And I, so I love that for its realness.

How long are those sessions?

again? Forty five minutes, forty five minutes. Forty five minutes. Uh, is a typical spin. Spin kind of class.

Is a warm up for five minutes and a cool down for five minutes. So it's really uh, thirty thirty five minutes, thirty five minutes of you. They're really pushing you yeah so .

so they're breathing reasonably hard. Rate is up.

Heart rate is just something up.

Yeah yeah. I find that the all of those results are really interesting, that the results shown improvement in motivation to exercise isn't because he gets back to this issue kind of a self implying of fact. And um the neuroscientist in me wants to uh think about kind of promoter circuits in the fact that you know we have a motor system that can obviously do things like live cups and walk and run if what you want or need to, but that um it's possible to create a kind of anticipatory the activity in our nerve system where our body and craves a certain stimulus. You mentioned the cold and you save the cold.

Now whether not that the adjournment and the dopamine at sea or whether or not somebody who exercise is started going from zero less than thirty minutes per week to two to three times a week, forty five minutes, as you describe for this study. I'd had that experience before of, if I, the cardio that I tend to battle the most. And I like, I love lifting heavy objects at this.

Happy for me. I am happy to go to the gym every other day and just lift the objects for hour IT just makes me happy. I like the way that feels.

And i've been doing this since I was in my teen. So thirty years, cardio was a little bit tRicky. I like to run, but if I stop running for a little while, I find IT very hard to get back into.

But if I start running three times a week for thirty to forty five minutes, and I do this pretty consistently on the days I don't wait train, I find that I started to crave IT. It's almost as if my body needs that in order to, I always say, clear out the cobwebs, but it's like my mind doesn't function as well clearly. Now I understand why and why exercise helps, but also, physically, I almost feel like my body needs to engage in that movement, like the promoter circuits are kind of raving ah. So the motivation exercise obviously could be multifaceted, could be purely psychological. But do you think there's any reason to speculate at least, or believe that we can build an anticipatory reverbed ory activity and system?

Yeah you know I I agree with that because I also have the same kinds of thoughts and and I do have anticipatory. I exercise when I can do IT. So I just got back from a week and we going to have in paris where I got to do a booklet unch of of my last book good anxiety and I really I walked around a lot but I did not do my exercise for that whole week and a half and um but there was a lot of stress because I had to do all these interviews in french. So I gave myself break.

You speak rench, I speak french. Yes, I was really impressed. I, I, I, I would actually I would follow your morning routine to t but okay, very impressive.

none less so. But I got back and and you know coming back this direction from from paris, I I live in new york um is much easier. And so I was able to get get up at a Normal time in the next day and that exercise session that first day like, okay, i'm back in my home, i'm back in my environment and IT felt so good as like I want you to come back and and I know it's because I I worked up over years now I could truths say seven days a week.

But I was for IT was four to five, then I was five to six and um yes, seven, but that includes a yoga day or sometimes I due to for ten minutes instead of thirty because I have to leave. But but that habit of you do that even for five minutes, you do either the wait ten minute thing or five minute thing or or stretch um that is a uh, tiny habit. Who is that somebody at stanford that invented idea of tiny habits? I thought I was.

well, we've got A A number of people there. There's and I apologize, advanced all the people I neglect in the statement um but i'm happy to put in the comments smoke um B J fog .

is there has done yes and .

yes yeah done really a great work and then um James clear rote, a book about habits and I has a very popular newsletter about habits. You ve done an episode about how it's covers some of their work and and some of the the more laboratory issue, but not ish, laboratory science peer reviewed work on, yes, daily behaviors, also, daily behaviors performed at roughly the same time day. yes.

I mean, one thing we know for sure is that the circadian system is part of our neuro system's way of anticipating when things will happen, just what will happen, and telling you things you obviously know already. But for the audience, performing your exercise at roughly the same time each day will make IT easier. Yeah, I suppose you're saying i'm going to do at seven days week sometime today. But of course, getting IT done sometime is Better .

than not getting IT done. Yes, absolutely, absolutely.

Well, those are impressive effects. And I love that you are starting to look in populations that are a bit Younger, not because some of these um older populations are important, but I think that building good habits in across one's entire life is really what it's about, right? You as I say, with anything related to longevity or offsetting an age related decline, we don't know. It's hard to know things work because there's no within subject control. But what we also know for sure is that you don't want to be the control of you.

absolutely.

We don't want to be the control experiment, especially for something that's purely behavioral. I mean, you're not talking about interesting a particular supplement. You not talking about changing your die in anyway. But I am curious, do you know diet is a very barbed wire topic on on the internet um which diets whether not they work at that but in general, do any of these studies do they evaluate whether not people change they're eating habits when they start exercise more?

Ah I think i've seen one study that that controlled for that, but I feel for them because it's hard enough to get people to exercise at the level and at the time. And you know that you you need for your study if you also ask them, okay, fill out this survey to tell us exactly what you ate all day, they're going to say forget forget you joining your study.

So um it's a critical question and um um again, there's only been one that i've seen and and the evidence was that that diet got Better when they less progress foods when they did add here to this exercise. But lot more information needs to be gathered in that in that realm. The second study that I wanted to share unpublished, we're riding IT up right now, is part two of that study I just describe, which was the low fit people.

Next, we moved to midnight IT. People like, what about us? You know, we're already exercising.

how? How am I gonna benefit from increasing my exercise? So here again, we collaborated with a great spin studio that had a whole bunch of midd fit people that that by our definition, were exercising um two to three times a week on a regular basis. That's great. All you people out there that are doing that, you should know you're already benefiting your brain.

But our question was, what if we invited them to exercise as much as they wanted at the spin studio for three months, from two to three times all the way up to seven times a week, and let to see what happened? And the control group, we asked them not to change their exercise. And so what we ended up with was a nice big array of, starting with mid dvi people, that exercise between staying at two to three times a week all the way up to seven times a week.

And the bottom line from that study is every drop of sweat counted that is, the more you change and you increase your workout up to seven times a week, the Better your mood was you had lower and lower amount of depression, anxiety, higher amount of good um good effect and the Better your hippo camp memory was with the more you worked out again, this was for three months. So I love that too because IT gives power to to those of us that are regularly exercising in and wondering. But I really need to I mean, it's really going to help me and the answer is yes. I mean not all of us can exercise go go to a spin class seven times a week but um I love the message that our bodies responsive to that and and you can get Better hit a Campbell function, Better overall baseline mood effect with with a higher love also works for uh the mid fit people as well.

And tasted the more I I learned from you the more I ve started to conceptualize the brain as an organ that is privileged in so many ways you know has this unique blood brain barrier um as this incredible quality of being able to predict things and its job mainly is of course to predict things among among other functions of course, but that our brain isn't necessarily going to stay stable or get Better over time.

That IT needs a signal that IT is insufficient to you say that we can't take IT for granted that that our brain is actually an organ that requires a signal in order to maintain its own function yeah and IT sounds like enhanced blood flow. And these pathways that you describe earlier, these two pathways um are at least among the more critical signals um I tempted now to move my frequency of craiova al exercise from, I confessed about days thirty five minutes lately and IT should be more uh to daily. There's something really again, really special about daily because it's not negotiable.

You just do IT and IT sounds like if one word to do higher intensity exercise in a spin class, i've never taken a spin class, but i've seen there times when they're standing up on the bike competence very hard. yes. So that is included .

in these kinds of work. I yes, I mean that what the instructions or is doing, I cannot control. A, we did not monitor heart rate of all the subjects.

And IT was clearly compared to the video scrawl. IT was highly, would hope so. Yes.

I guess IT depends on how intense that game is scrawled. Is could we just briefly talk about mindset and affirmations you've talked to bit um before about affirmations and as you mentioned, the beautiful work of my colleagues stanford alia rm um and we can summary her work prety simply although we won't do IT complete justice but she's already been on the pot test that just to say that one's beliefs about a behavior also impact the outcomes of that behavior.

If you learn a lot of true facts about stress being good for you, then you will experience stress as Better for you than if you only focus on or learn about the negative. Stress, if you learn about the plausible effects of exercise, you actually derive greater benefit from exercise, believe IT or not, credible, incredible effects, but they make sense when you understand. And what the brain is doing, which is a lot of this predictive coding and mindsets, don't seem as mysterious and wu anymore. Want to understand what the brain is really doing. But what is, if any, the value of affirmation of telling yourself something positive about yourself, for of exercise on not the exercise itself, but on mood, self image, memory and rain function?

Yeah so you know, I am I I looked into this because I am also a sort of exercise instructor in the form of exercise that I teach is called intensity, that it's a form of exercise that was developed by this. Amazing is the structure petition marino um and SHE combined physical movements from kick box and dance and yoga and martial arts with positive spoken affirmation.

So each move, if you're punching back and forth, as you would do in a kick box class, you don't just punch. You say something like I am strong now, which every punch is associated with the word and you know you you can um create your own series of affirmations with the move that you put together. And the first time I did that, I just wandered into her class.

I didn't know what I was and I felt idiotic is like what i've came into the wrong class. I clear, I don't want to come into this class, but then I thought they didn't care whether I thought they were. They look silly saying these, not saying, yelling these affirmations out loud while doing the choreography at the same time. And then I tried IT, you know, okay, I didn't yell out. I kind of whispered at IT at first and then, but by the end I was really yelling IT out.

There's something about the declaration using your own voice of same things that you, you know, don't often say yourself like, i'm strong, i'm inspired, I believe I will succeed are all the kinds of affirmations you say and you walk out that class or I walked out that class thinking, ah, I feel really good now where I want I can I wait to come back to this class, which is why ultimately you took teacher training to be able to teach that class. And so I 呃， i started to look into what was known about affirmations, and they were never combined with with physical activity. But IT was clear that there was a literature showing that that positive affirmation saying them or reading them um could change mood in the same ways we're talking about you earlier chromes work.

If you if you have this, this is a belief. You once you start saying these things, these are not know difficult things to believe. But it's amazing how much you you don't say these kinds of things to yourself or with your own voice, you might say them about somebody else.

Oh, you you're strong. You're so smart. Do you say that about yourself? And that's a thing about the the self affirmations IT really gets you into a habit of of saying good things about yourself. And then you start to remember, start to realize, oh god, i'm so mean to myself. I have lots of negative thoughts going on about about myself in my head, and which was part of the other reason why I love this, this particular form of exercise. So what you get in intensity is the mood boost from the positive spoken affirmations together with all the other brain and affect boost that we've been talking about for this whole uh, podcast from the exercise because it's a sweat workout as well. So interesting.

There's a book I confess I haven't read IT, but I have had the pleasure of having a discussion with a psychologist from I, I believe, is a university michigan in an arbor eaten cross, where a book called chatter, which focuses on the fact that so much of our inner dialogue IT is indeed negative. He certainly wasn't the first to point that out.

But that explicit statements to counter that negative chatter, I believe, is one of the hallMarks of of the adJusting one's zone, not just an internal reference frame, but actually self image generally. And it's a fascinating, and I think a very important of psychology and neuroscience because and and I acknowledge we're talking about this two laboratory neuroscientists who record from neurons and label neurons and look at stuff down the microscope. We are now deep in the territory, in the deep water of what some of our colleagues and and um people who think about their our science would consider like really on the kind of subjective edges.

Yeah and yet I think it's worth pointing out that the brain does all these things is responsible for simple reflexes and motor behaviors, but also high level conceptual ideas about the universe and what I might look like ten years or one hundred years or thousand years, but also high level conceptual understanding of what who we are and what we are about yeah and so even though you might seem a little bit out on on the fringes there, I say I think that these are some of the more important on trade landscapes of neuroscience ah and I just wanted acknowledge my appreciation for the fact that i'm gonna neck the dots here and safe you went from somebody who didn't exercise, who went on this rafting trip yeah that discovered and its benefits for your grant writing and then and then on and on and on and then became a certified yeah exercise instruction so you don't do anything halfway. It's clear i'd like to touch on something you mentioned earlier, but we haven't into IT all in any debt, which is meditation. Yeah, you mention this team meditation, you a publication recently on a ten minute meditation.

Maybe you could tell us about this ten minute meditation seems like such an attractive amount of time, right? And then if you maybe tells a little bit about the tea meditation but sounds like you've discovered a minim, a close to minimum threshold and meditation that can really benefit us. yeah. So maybe you tell us about that that .

study so the study was um as you as you um very study pointed out, very practical study um just ten minutes, not minutes, not an hour meditation that's too hard ten minutes guided meditation. They logged into a sites so we can tell that they logged in and they listen to um it's a body skin, very basic but easy to follow kind of meditation. And we ask them to do IT how often daily, seven days a week, you know, just ten minutes a day.

And the shocked at the most shocking thing about the study is that we got more adhesion adherence to the ten minute daily meditation than the ten minute daily podcast listings, which was our control. So the highest retention rate i've ever gotten in any this kind of study that i've done, exercise or meditation, they wanted to do IT. Ten minutes today I was IT was great. I mean.

to just start leading meditations, yes, for three hours as was during three our broadcast.

So so we looked at cognitive effects um before and after this IT was eight weeks of daily IT was actually twelve minute meditation, twelve minutes of bodies skin meditation and um what we found was significant decreases in stress response. So we did stress test to see how how you responded to an unexpected stressful situation. The meditators did much Better.

Their mood was Better and their um their cogan performance was also Better. And this was my first little for ray into meditation after I had started my my personal tea meditation that that really shifted my relationship with with meditation and but but is consistent with many other studies showing the beneficial effects of um meditation. And but the unique thing was we tried to make IT doable that many, many people out there could actually follow this, this typical regiment.

And and so where we're continuing that, in fact, my research in my lab right now is all about those doubles short things that and why you college students will do not just at the beginning of the semester but at the end of the semester, when the stress and anxiety levels are now at record breaking high levels. And they need something to bring that level down so that they could show their professors what their brains can actually do. And so IT includes very short meditations, sound, sound meditations, visual meditations, walking things that any college students, but we're obviously focused on N Y U students um will do to, and I want to get at graduation rates, I want to get add, but class performance with these kinds of h interventions. But I started with that study that I just described, meditation.

if you would. And here's where we can highlight this. Again, as some educated, highly educated speculation is coming from you.

What do you think is going on during meditation? And I mean, so a body skin involves the of interaction, t, of awareness, like interception, of course being an attention to what's going on on the surface of and within the confines. Es of our skin is opposed outside the world.

Um drawing our attention to anything inside us are outside us involves four brain function, prevent the cortex pressured ly and and other things. Typically eyes are closed. Typically it's relaxing. So there are lot of variables that could be feeding into a number of different effects.

But as a neuroscientist, what do you think is going on that just that this period of kind of in a self induced, somewhat unusual state, what do you think is going on in terms of network behavior and networks within the brain that IT can have these long term effects? Because we got to some of the ones who late downstream exercise, and I think there's so much evidence, I know there's so much evidence that meditation is beneficial. Yes, how do you think it's working or what is what do you think it's doing?

Yeah I think that one of the most important things that gets um worked when we are doing a simple ten minute or two thousand minute body scan meditation regularly, this ten minutes a day, twelve minutes a day is um the habit building and the practice of focusing on the present moment. I think that is very hard for us modern humans to do because i'm worrying about the thing that to do um at the end of the week that that I need I need to do and how many hours I going to have to be able to do that or i'm worried about you know, whatever the email that wasn't as polite as that should be that I sent.

What are the we repercussions for that instead of focusing on this moment, which is fun, I get to talk to you uh it's a beautiful day outside it's um um i'm feeling good right at this moment and I think that those all of the meditative practices um that i've that i've done and this one also um whether you know IT or not, is getting you to focus on on this moment and I think is even more important in this day and age where anxiety levels in the next. Variant might come out and what what are the repercussions there? And I have a mother whose older and she's more exceptio to IT and there's a war and and what's gona happen there?

Um those are all future possibilities and and we should be worry about that. That is a possibility. You need to plan for that, but you also need to focus on this moment.

Right now, I am healthy. I could breathe. I get to have this interesting conversation right in this moment.

If I started thinking about other things, then IT takes away from this moment. Do I know what circuits are being are involved? Not exactly. That is not my area. I think there are some studies that have have focused on that that present moment kind of uh, activity. But that is what I think is most important about about the practice of meditation or one of the important things that comes us down because if you know how to do that, that gives you this powerful tool for the rest of your day, you're not locked into that fearful future thinking that so many of us have or that that uh just reliving of a terrible past but you could enjoy enjoy the present moment yeah .

I that really resonates. I think that um going back to the earlier part of our conversation, the hip campus has this incredible storage capacity and ability is set context about past, present and future and that's a beautiful thing because as much as i'd like to think he had some sembLance of a healthy life, none of us want to be A H M.

None of us want to be in the position of not being able to form new memories and have no context to the past or or the present. So we're grateful that we should all be grateful that our hip campus can draw from past, present and future in various combinations. And we should support IT through the daily exercise and other habits, let's call them habits, so that people make them habits now that you've highlighted.

But if we are not deliberately anchoring within past, present and future according to what we need, and we're just shuffling between past, president, future, that is not a good way to live. No, it's not effective. No, that sounds like meditation can really help us go to the right stacks.

I guess people don't go to libraries anymore. But in but in the old days, you would go you need to go to the right location library. You actually can't get distracted by the the books that you're interesting if you need to go just reflexively, you need to go study a particular topic. So that kind of how I think about IT yeah that makes us more linear perhaps in our yeah in our way of being.

I think so. And IT actually cannot acts, you know not that i'm against technology, but having our phones and being connected to every good and bad thing going along, going on in the world today is incredibly distracting and and take you away from the present moment virtually twenty four hours a day. And so we have to work extra hard right now compared to in the forties when we didn't have all this technology or at the same level. So um yeah IT becomes even more important practice I think for for .

everyday life even ten fifteen years ago felt like smart phones when he does intrusive yeah one final question and and maybe A A A request OK. As the new incoming dean of logical letters and sciences, I must say i'm delighted, thrilled actually to hear that a lot of the practices that we've been discussing today and that you've pioneers are going to be incorporated in under graduate education.

I predict, and i'd be willing to wager that that will become a tempt for how universities and university systems you should function because if indeed and IT is true, that there is this incredible relationship between physical movement and mental deliberate practices and performance, ah any corporation, school, household would be crazy ah would be self self limiting and self productive to not in corporate those i'm so happy that you're going to do this and collect data. Yes, please will have to touch back with you and here uh what what comes to that. But one of the main things that I hear so much about, there are issues with attention.

And we haven't talked about attention. We mainly about memory, cognition, a lot about attention. And here i'm not being diverging. I think people have done what i'm about to say as a as a consequence of need and lack of other resources. There's an immense amount of adorable use, riddling use, my definitely use and caffeine abuse I have in the light caffeine. I I don't use the other compounds I described, but it's just incredible to me how the date date on this of a colleague, stanford c, claims that you something like two thirds or more of college students use these without .

prescription for adhd.

What can we expect in terms of the effects of regular exercise on attention? And are there any other things besides exercise and meditation that you would like to see people do in terms of trying to increase their powers of attention? Because I think the ability to to focus and attend yeah is really the distinguishing feature between those that will succeed in any endeavor and those that won't.

And that's a scary thing for a lot of people to hear because a lot of people think they have adhd. They may they might not. But I bet that a number of students at both stanford and and why you feel chAllenged with holding their attention to the thing they need to .

hold their attention. So I would say the top three, a tools that everybody read this minute today can use to up their capacity to attend where they want to, uh, include exercise for the reasons we we've talked about, has a direct effect on functionally the provenal cortex meditation. Also clear clinical studies showing improved ability to to focus and and particularly focus on the present moment.

Um and the third has to be sleep. So sleep is you you can it's out of the three IT is the most physiological. I mean, I could I could live my whole life without meditating one minute.

Could I? Could I survive without sleep? No, none of us quit. So it's it's more basic physiological, but IT is so important for all core cogent functions, uh uh including attention, including creativity, including uh um just a uh just good good basic brain brain function. Um that is why it's you know it's so critical to get that information, that basic nor science information into the heads of the students that are trying their best to show us how their brain work. But but being hampered because they're not moving enough, they're not meditating and um there's all these distracting things that they include in their lives, some of which a little bit is good, but twenty four hours a day on your phone and and linked in, not linked in, but linked to your phone um is damaging to your attention. So exercise, meditation, sleep can help you learn, retain and perform Better than if you do not have these three things in your life.

Wonderful music to my years. And also either very low cost or zero cost. Considering that the exercise doesn't require a class, one could do use the freely available resource of gravity to to do jumping jack or burpy or perhaps or whatever or sit ups all I .

don't forget youtube, the freely accessible millions of youtube videos. If you don't want to do your gym jex by yourself, I would say this. I talk about breath meditation in um for my book good anxiety. And if you don't like the one that I suggest, there's only about a million more on youtube with with ratings from one star to five stars. So use that resource IT .

is a wonderful resource and you are an amazing resource that when you thank you so much for coming here to data, have this discussion and share your knowledge about not just existing data, but new data coming coming out soon. And for your leadership in the university system, for your leadership in public education, for the decades of important work on memory and neural circuitry, which we ve got to learn about today as well. Thank you ever so much.

Thank you and you fun conversation. Thank you for joining me today .

for my discussion about learning and memory and how to get Better at learning and remembering with dr. Wendy s. Zui, if you would like to learn more about doctor suzuki s work, you can go to Wendy suzuki dot com.

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