Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says, I like
Speaker 1: the big brains. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Falkon, and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. So so, guys, uh we here in
Speaker 1: this room and in this podcast room, I think all
Speaker 1: agree that brains are in general delicious. That's not the
Speaker 1: word I was going to use, But now we do
Speaker 1: know something specific about you, Joe. I was going to say,
Speaker 1: there are things that squishy, you know. I wasn't actually
Speaker 1: going to make this a guessing game. I was just
Speaker 1: going to tell you tell me about brains, John, I
Speaker 1: was just gonna say that we were going to consider
Speaker 1: them in general to be good things to possess, right,
Speaker 1: to be able to think and problems solve and anticipate things.
Speaker 1: This is these generally good traits. I I enjoy mine
Speaker 1: about fifty of the time. That's more than half. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll notice that in the animal kingdom, or let's say,
Speaker 1: in nature more generally, organisms that don't have brains usually
Speaker 1: are not very funny. They don't have much good technology, yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: their stand up comedy is lackluster at best. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: pedestrian truly. Yeah. Okay, so we probably all agree that
Speaker 1: we have the power to develop our minds through education, right,
Speaker 1: so we should learn new skills and absorb new knowledge.
Speaker 1: But what I want to talk about today is whether
Speaker 1: we have the power to actually increase our base aptitudes
Speaker 1: in things like memory, reasoning, focus, all of the abilities
Speaker 1: that make up what we call intelligence or brain power.
Speaker 1: So can a person tune up his or her brain
Speaker 1: and simply make it a more effective machine. Also, we
Speaker 1: should just go ahead and address this right off the bat.
Speaker 1: I didn't put this in the notes, but we really
Speaker 1: it's one of those things that I'm sure all of
Speaker 1: our listeners already know. But unlike the popular depiction in media,
Speaker 1: such as in films like Lucy, we do in fact
Speaker 1: use of our brains. Where the whole idea of you
Speaker 1: only use ten percent and if if you could just
Speaker 1: unlock that other of gray matter that's just laying dormant
Speaker 1: inside your skull, you could fly and look like Scarlett Johanssen. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What I've always thought about this is, um, if you
Speaker 1: only use ten percent of your brain, how come brain
Speaker 1: injury matters. I mean, wouldn't like nine percent of brain
Speaker 1: injuries miss the part that you use, or or you
Speaker 1: would just have another dormant part of the brain take
Speaker 1: the place of the injured part. Thus you essentially have
Speaker 1: have greater life in that brain. That that's one of
Speaker 1: those that's such nonsense. I don't even know how it
Speaker 1: got started unless it's just one of those things that
Speaker 1: was just where a metaphor came to be taken literal
Speaker 1: by accident, Like somebody was just saying, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: we have untapped potential. We probably only use ten percent
Speaker 1: of our brains. And they didn't even mean it literally,
Speaker 1: or they minute some way of saying, like ten percent
Speaker 1: of your brain is dedicated to cognitive thought and the
Speaker 1: other nine is to everything else that the brain does.
Speaker 1: Even even then it's really misleading at any rate. So
Speaker 1: we're not going to talk about the ability to suddenly
Speaker 1: unlock some potential in your brain that otherwise will remain untapped.
Speaker 1: We're talking about actually making your brain work better. So
Speaker 1: it's still gonna be working, it's just now it is
Speaker 1: more efficient that it's able to pack more in that
Speaker 1: than it was before. And uh, this in this particular episode,
Speaker 1: we wanted to really look at the ways you could
Speaker 1: do so through either dietary changes, chemicals, this kind of thing.
Speaker 1: How because our brains are electrochemical organs, right, they communicate
Speaker 1: through electrochemical uh processes, and so it's not a huge
Speaker 1: surprise that chemicals and affect that. But before we get
Speaker 1: into all that, we should probably look back on just
Speaker 1: the idea of how humans as a species, how how
Speaker 1: we've seen our brain sizes increase over the ages. Right
Speaker 1: over the last seven million years or so, the human
Speaker 1: brain has nearly tripled in size. A lot of that
Speaker 1: growth took place over the last two million years, actually
Speaker 1: partially because in general, the more healthier diet, the larger
Speaker 1: our brains could get. So the development of agriculture was
Speaker 1: a big step up from us as hunter gatherers. Access
Speaker 1: to a variety of foods also helped. And some researchers
Speaker 1: are speculating that when humans began eating meat, you know,
Speaker 1: which we can see in the fossil record as human
Speaker 1: teeth marks on bones about two point three million years ago,
Speaker 1: they speculate that that led to our brains to start
Speaker 1: really growing. And you know that that when we started
Speaker 1: cooking our food. That helped a lot more as well,
Speaker 1: because we can get more nutri shin out of it
Speaker 1: when we have cooked it. Now, our brains haven't been
Speaker 1: growing steadily this entire time. Eventually, as agriculture became organized
Speaker 1: and then industrialized, and also as we didn't need to,
Speaker 1: you know, to raw food really hard, our our skulls
Speaker 1: and brains began to shrink a little over the past
Speaker 1: like ten thousand years or so. But there's a lot
Speaker 1: of friendly scientific disagreement among various researchers in various fields
Speaker 1: about what humans have done or haven't done exactly to
Speaker 1: make that happen, and furthermore, whether we can change our
Speaker 1: brains on purpose. Absolutely, And then there's also just the uh, Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: there's also all on misinformation out there for from various individuals, organizations, companies, whatever,
Speaker 1: that are trying to market specific substances that are supposed
Speaker 1: to give specific effects and may or may not have
Speaker 1: any actual scientific foundation to make such claim. So it's
Speaker 1: a complicated substance subject, certainly, and it's it's not all
Speaker 1: necessarily malicious. I mean, there have been many instances in
Speaker 1: history where people had the best of intentions but just
Speaker 1: we're operating under a very basic misunderstanding of what's going
Speaker 1: on in the brain. Yeah, I suggest we take a
Speaker 1: brief stroll through history and look at what people have
Speaker 1: thought in the past the brain did, and ideas they
Speaker 1: might have had about how its powers could be improved.
Speaker 1: So what I mean, when did we figure out that
Speaker 1: the brain was for thinking on a universal timeline? Actually? Yeah,
Speaker 1: like about about it was pretty late, right when I
Speaker 1: read the script? Yeah, yeah, no, Um, folks have been
Speaker 1: pretty confused about the brain's functions and and our capacity
Speaker 1: to influence it for most of history, starting in ancient Egypt.
Speaker 1: Is really when we have record of this by way
Speaker 1: of uh, the the Egyptian funerary practice, which dictated that
Speaker 1: the brain just kind of be discarded during the embalming
Speaker 1: process because the heart was considered the seat of knowledge.
Speaker 1: And you've probably heard about that before. Yeah, but how
Speaker 1: about the fact that this theory still dominated around four
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty BC, thousands of years later. Okay, that's
Speaker 1: when Alcman, who was a Greek physician around that time,
Speaker 1: wrote down for the first time that we can determine
Speaker 1: now in modern history, Um, that the brain was actually important.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just something that you had to pull out
Speaker 1: through the nose and discard in a little trash urn. Yes, um,
Speaker 1: And like a hundred years after that, even Aristotle stated
Speaker 1: that the brain is basically just a radiator designed to
Speaker 1: keep the heart at at its appropriate temperature. And it
Speaker 1: wasn't until dissection and comparison of human brains with animal
Speaker 1: brains became more widespread. Circle like three hundred BC two
Speaker 1: two D b C or b C E I should
Speaker 1: be saying all of this time that the idea of
Speaker 1: the brain being responsible for memory and intelligence was actually popularized.
Speaker 1: That's really interesting to me. It makes me wonder what
Speaker 1: people in the ancient world thought when someone suffered a
Speaker 1: head injury and their their ability to uh to to
Speaker 1: function would be impaired, And wonder how they they were
Speaker 1: able to reconcile that with this belief of that the
Speaker 1: heart the heart of thought. Oh. Interestingly enough, there's also
Speaker 1: records from a few physicians and more kind of like
Speaker 1: lower class physicians that we're doing preliminary, kind of crude research,
Speaker 1: albeit into how to fix brain injuries and help people
Speaker 1: out for for all of this time, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: really popular. It wasn't the common widely held aristocratic belief
Speaker 1: certainly then, Okay, Starting around a hundred and seventy b
Speaker 1: c E. We got the Roman physician Galen's ideas about humors.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure that everyone's heard of this kind of thing.
Speaker 1: It's one of my favorite terrific, completely untrue things. It's
Speaker 1: the no it's the concept that the balance of four
Speaker 1: fluids being blood, FLGM, color, and black file are responsible
Speaker 1: for a person's mental and physical health. And furthermore, that
Speaker 1: the brain is a gland that creates those four humors. Right,
Speaker 1: so you have an imbalance of humors when you are
Speaker 1: not well, and depending upon your your your symptoms, you
Speaker 1: have a deficiency or surplus of a certain humor and
Speaker 1: they must be rebalanced. I still go to a physician
Speaker 1: who does this. Your primary care physician doesn't know. Well,
Speaker 1: it's funny got out of this around a thousand. See,
Speaker 1: we still have it in our language, right, like you
Speaker 1: can be really sanguine about something, or you can be
Speaker 1: flegmatic flegmatic however you say that word phlegmatic automatic. But
Speaker 1: so this this theory persisted for like a thousand years, okay,
Speaker 1: and it was just the idea that the brain was
Speaker 1: basically only a place where this fluid developed and that
Speaker 1: was all it was really good for. When we finally
Speaker 1: started getting out of that concept, the Church went ahead
Speaker 1: and banned human dissection in anatomical study as desecrations of
Speaker 1: the body. So, uh, we didn't really get any more
Speaker 1: research into the brain for another four or five hundred years.
Speaker 1: Are you saying you're in favor of desecration? Yeah? Actually
Speaker 1: scientifically speaking, so okay, it wasn't until about the sixteen
Speaker 1: hundreds or so that we started to actually understand anything
Speaker 1: about the brain and it's and its functions, um, at
Speaker 1: which point we promptly continued to bork the entire business.
Speaker 1: Uh So, powdered human skulls, dissolved brains, and even the
Speaker 1: moss that grew on unburied heads was thought to improve
Speaker 1: various brain related conditions from like the sixteen hundreds to
Speaker 1: the nineteen hundreds. I feel like that's part of a
Speaker 1: sort of common way of thinking about medicine in the
Speaker 1: olden days, which is, if something touches something or if
Speaker 1: it's like something that's what you use. It's a type
Speaker 1: of magical thinking. Yeah, sure, sure, And I mean specifically,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about cannibalism, not about the in in Western
Speaker 1: culture at any rate, it was mostly cannibalism and not
Speaker 1: animal brains and skulls. So I mean, like, to the
Speaker 1: point that duties were placed on skulls imported to England
Speaker 1: from the battlefields of Ireland in the seventeen hundreds. Is
Speaker 1: that big of a thing that people were like, we
Speaker 1: could tax this and make some money, y'all. That's okay,
Speaker 1: all right, Well, how about something closer to modern time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in better news. Coca cola back when it you know,
Speaker 1: actual facts, had cocaine in it in the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: was sold as and I quote, the ideal brain tonic.
Speaker 1: There were, in fact, a lot of cures, cures in
Speaker 1: quotation marks being sold around that time for neurasthenia a
Speaker 1: k A, nervous exhaustion a k A. Basically any mental
Speaker 1: health issue one could possibly have, um, most of which
Speaker 1: were just us and whatever else seemed good at the
Speaker 1: time to grind up and putting booze. There were just yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, mental health problems weren't all booze. I'm sure
Speaker 1: that part of that was it says it cures everything.
Speaker 1: It's got to work. One of the one of the
Speaker 1: rural synonyms for coke for coca cola is dope. Did
Speaker 1: you guys know that? Yeah, and certain areas of the
Speaker 1: southeast it was referred to just as dope because it
Speaker 1: was known to have, you know, stimulants in it, so
Speaker 1: it was doped with stuff. Um, And it was you know,
Speaker 1: supposed to be this kind of approach to you know,
Speaker 1: the sort of tonic exactly as you were saying that,
Speaker 1: it was not considered necessarily just a drink, but also
Speaker 1: a potential cure for things. Um. As it turns out.
Speaker 1: We'll we'll return to stimulants a little bit later in
Speaker 1: this episode and talk about how those are currently being
Speaker 1: um uh, experimented with as far as brain function goes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these days many remedies that are on the market are
Speaker 1: a little bit more reliable. However, you know, there's still
Speaker 1: a lot of claims that go on and f d
Speaker 1: A not approved kind of warning labels that packaging is
Speaker 1: required to have on them if, for example, it's totally
Speaker 1: not been checked out by the f d A to
Speaker 1: affirm whatever claim they're making. Um. And I think it's
Speaker 1: interesting the very first court trial that tested The Pure
Speaker 1: Food and Drugs Act, which sprang up in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds, was about one of these brain tonics. It
Speaker 1: was called Queue for Headache, brain Food, food fu d
Speaker 1: it might be food food. Yeah, makes me think of
Speaker 1: a far side cartoon that was Harper's Cure for Headache
Speaker 1: brain food to be specific, and also cure broken bones emphysema.
Speaker 1: It made a lot of claims and I don't think yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: well for Actunately, once we get into more recent medical history,
Speaker 1: we do start getting a better idea of some compounds
Speaker 1: and chemicals that actually do have a positive effect on
Speaker 1: brain health and brain power. Yeah. One of the big
Speaker 1: ones we can first point to and say here, here's
Speaker 1: a definite Yes. One thing we really know for sure
Speaker 1: is iodine um so. Iodine has been shown to be
Speaker 1: very important in brain health, especially for pregnant mothers and
Speaker 1: how this will affect their baby. So early gestational iodine
Speaker 1: deficiency is known to be a cause of later mental disability.
Speaker 1: In a study published in the Lance that found that
Speaker 1: even a mild iodine deficiency during pregnancy can cause lower
Speaker 1: verbal IQ scores for children. And then there was a
Speaker 1: paper published in in the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Speaker 1: I thought this was really interesting, and it's called the
Speaker 1: Cognitive Effects of Micronutrient deficiency Evidence from salt iodization in
Speaker 1: the United States. Salt iodization right, adding iodine to salt. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously iodine effects health in more ways than just your
Speaker 1: mental powers, like you can get goiter and thyroid issues
Speaker 1: if you don't have proper iodine in your diet. So
Speaker 1: iodized salt was widely introduced in the United States in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty four. Um, we don't have large distributed samples
Speaker 1: of intelligence scores to work with from the time, So
Speaker 1: how do we look back and see if salt made
Speaker 1: a difference in intelligence back then? Well, the authors of
Speaker 1: this paper I just named came up with a really
Speaker 1: interesting method. They looked at the placement of armed forces
Speaker 1: recruits to infer data about mental aptitude UH for children
Speaker 1: before the introduction of IODI salt and then after, and
Speaker 1: from the looks of it, the salt made a difference
Speaker 1: in parts of the country where there was previously known
Speaker 1: to be an iodine deficiency. Introduction of IODI salt led
Speaker 1: to a greater number of young men from those areas
Speaker 1: being admitted to a branch of the armed forces with
Speaker 1: higher aptitude requirements. And you could see the effect pretty
Speaker 1: much immediately kids and after it's a spike in Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so there's one example where we know pretty sure
Speaker 1: that this is a chemical that really does affect brain
Speaker 1: brain function for the better. You get it in your diet.
Speaker 1: It's something you need. Your body can't manufacture it naturally,
Speaker 1: so you've got to get it through the foods you eat,
Speaker 1: or through a supplement, or through salt or whatever it is.
Speaker 1: And it really does make a difference. But I dine
Speaker 1: is not the only chemical we know of today that
Speaker 1: can have a positive effect on our brain power, right,
Speaker 1: And some of these chemicals, actually, the one I'm going
Speaker 1: to the broad category of chemicals I'm going to tackle next,
Speaker 1: has a temporary effect. So this is not something that
Speaker 1: you know, you take a pill and then suddenly you're smarter.
Speaker 1: This is you end up taking some dose of this
Speaker 1: chemical or this type of chemical, and part of your
Speaker 1: brain function might be sharpened or focused for a given
Speaker 1: amount of time until the effects of the chemical wear offs. Okay,
Speaker 1: so it's not increasing like your continuous base i Q,
Speaker 1: but it might might give you a really good edge
Speaker 1: on the study session. Yeah, it's not going to be
Speaker 1: across an entire population. This one is truly individual, right,
Speaker 1: this and this may very well mean that you're able to,
Speaker 1: like you said, study more effectively and that you are
Speaker 1: able to form memories more effectively and you remember more
Speaker 1: of what you studied or that you memory is a
Speaker 1: really big one. That's one of the more popular uses
Speaker 1: for this broad range of chemicals which are are known
Speaker 1: as new A tropics, which essentially means to bend the mind.
Speaker 1: So if sure sure does like matrix style like there
Speaker 1: is no spoon, no like what they call the Matrix
Speaker 1: the movie right on Netflix, it's a mind been ding thriller. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now we'll get into more like the matrix style stuff
Speaker 1: in our in our Companion episode where we talk about
Speaker 1: the tech that can manipulate your brain. But in this case,
Speaker 1: these are drugs that have an effect of some sort,
Speaker 1: or at least they're supposed to, and not everything necessarily
Speaker 1: listed as a new tropic might have an actual effect.
Speaker 1: This is one of those things where you're going to
Speaker 1: be able to find a lot of stuff that's out
Speaker 1: on the market that isn't necessarily um overseen by the
Speaker 1: f d A, so some claims may be unfounded, whether
Speaker 1: on purpose or not. But there are stimulants that can
Speaker 1: affect the way the brain functions, and in fact have
Speaker 1: been used in medicine for quite some time, often to
Speaker 1: treat various disorders and diseases, things like Parkinson's disease or
Speaker 1: a d h D or Alzheimer's. These are all various
Speaker 1: conditions that doctors have treated with the use of certain
Speaker 1: types of drugs, including UH stimulants. Not all new tropics
Speaker 1: are stimulants, just a lot of them happened to be
Speaker 1: so kind of similar to something like caffeine. If you
Speaker 1: guys have ever had a study session where you drink
Speaker 1: some caffeine so that you could really kind of feel
Speaker 1: focused and just zone in specifically on what you wanted
Speaker 1: to look at and ignore everything else. That's really what
Speaker 1: we're talking about here. But then you end up playing
Speaker 1: contra until four in the morning. That is that that
Speaker 1: can be an issue. Actually, one of the things that
Speaker 1: I have heard about people who you know, there are
Speaker 1: obviously people who are prescribed this medication in order to
Speaker 1: treat an illness or condition. There are some people who
Speaker 1: get hold of it to use it specifically to try
Speaker 1: and sharpen up their their minds for a specific purpose.
Speaker 1: And uh, that's not what the drugs are being sold
Speaker 1: as officially anyway, legally, um, but that there is a
Speaker 1: huge market for it, particularly in places like uh, prestigious
Speaker 1: schools where there's a high pressure environment to do really well.
Speaker 1: And so um. The thing is that sometimes it can
Speaker 1: really help you focus on what you need to do.
Speaker 1: Does not necessarily make you a super genius. It just
Speaker 1: means that you are able to focus much more effectively
Speaker 1: than you normally would. You might be able to recall
Speaker 1: things more effectively, or you may just be able to
Speaker 1: really concentrate well, so that if you have the dedication,
Speaker 1: it's helpful. It does not magically have you learned everything
Speaker 1: in your class by taking a pill? Right? No, No,
Speaker 1: it's not an osmosis of knowledge pill. Right. And so
Speaker 1: then better at low doses, yes, yes, higher dose often
Speaker 1: will actually impair neurological function. So normally the doses that
Speaker 1: would have this kind of effect where you're able to
Speaker 1: focus your attention would be very very low doses, at
Speaker 1: least initially. Uh. The body has this habit of building
Speaker 1: up tolerances to chemicals depending upon the type of chemical.
Speaker 1: So sometimes you will have people who just realize that
Speaker 1: the effect no longer has the kick that used to have,
Speaker 1: and that pupping the dose does not necessarily give them
Speaker 1: that same feeling they had at the onset. It may
Speaker 1: just be that it's not effective at all for them, uh,
Speaker 1: at least to you know, sharpen up their brains. It
Speaker 1: might be very effective in hurting them, which is one
Speaker 1: of the issues about New A tropics. Another is that
Speaker 1: if you aren't focused on the specific task you wanted
Speaker 1: to to really concentrate on, you might find yourself, you know,
Speaker 1: distracting yourself with anything else to do that will take
Speaker 1: up your time. I read accounts of people who said, yeah,
Speaker 1: I did. I took some fully fully intending to study
Speaker 1: for a big you know, mid term or something along
Speaker 1: those lines. Instead spent four hours reorganizing my music collection,
Speaker 1: or you know, endlessly cleaning the room I was in
Speaker 1: as opposed to or or yeah, or the proving to
Speaker 1: my friends that I can get there without using the
Speaker 1: Konami code. Um, you know, these are certain things that
Speaker 1: can happen. And uh, it's again I us that this
Speaker 1: is something I would really recommend staying away from until
Speaker 1: science is able to catch up and determine what stuff
Speaker 1: is actually effective, what stuff is safe, whether or not
Speaker 1: anyone should ever try this kind of thing, because the
Speaker 1: thing with a lot of these uh man made brain
Speaker 1: chemical altering substances is that we're not sure why they
Speaker 1: do what they do. That's a big thing. The inner
Speaker 1: workings of the brain are still so mysterious to us
Speaker 1: that we can't be completely certain that something that at
Speaker 1: least on the surface appears to be beneficial does not
Speaker 1: have some other effect that could be really bad. And
Speaker 1: we don't know what the long term effects are because
Speaker 1: these drugs have not been out there that long, and
Speaker 1: especially haven't been used to treat someone indefinitely. Right, It
Speaker 1: wasn't necessarily a drug that you're going to be taking
Speaker 1: this for the rest of your life type thing, or
Speaker 1: or as regularly as someone who perhaps is really trying
Speaker 1: to excel at a particular high stress environment might be doing.
Speaker 1: And since the drugs are fairly new, we don't have
Speaker 1: any lifetime studies about all of that long term kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. We do have a lot of people who
Speaker 1: have UH tested it quite a bit, and you know,
Speaker 1: like like the and not just not just people who
Speaker 1: are testing it, you know, self testing, like I tested
Speaker 1: that whiskey a lot less week, but like like the military.
Speaker 1: You know, obviously the military has a vested interest in
Speaker 1: making sure that certain individuals are able to really focus
Speaker 1: on tasks at hand, like the Air Force being a
Speaker 1: great example. If you have pilots who are going to
Speaker 1: be on a particularly long mission and you want their
Speaker 1: mental acuity to remain at peak performance throughout the entire uh,
Speaker 1: the entire endeavor, then you may say, hey, you're going
Speaker 1: to want to take this type of medication. It's going
Speaker 1: to keep you sharp so that you and your team
Speaker 1: are remaining as safe as possible through the duration of
Speaker 1: this mission. But we should say that not all of
Speaker 1: these chemicals that affect to the brain are necessarily a
Speaker 1: man made Some of them occur naturally in foods that
Speaker 1: we might consume. Well, I mean, maybe our ancestors didn't
Speaker 1: consume chocolate, but certainly we consume a lot of chocolate.
Speaker 1: There's a there's a substance in cocoa called flavanols. Is
Speaker 1: that what makes chocolate so very tasty? No, that's sugar
Speaker 1: and fat. I'll just be over here eating my vat
Speaker 1: of sugar fat. You guys, go ahead, no, I mean
Speaker 1: people love to be told eat chocolate and you'll be smart.
Speaker 1: But there may be some evidence to this, not necessarily
Speaker 1: that you should go just buy candy bars of chocolate
Speaker 1: and eat them, but there might be healthier ways of
Speaker 1: preparing the cocoa inherent to chocolate so that you get
Speaker 1: the chemical that we're about to talk about without so
Speaker 1: much sugar and fat and all that. But anyway, here
Speaker 1: here's the scoop. There is evidence that consuming cocoa flavor
Speaker 1: als could have brain enhancing effects. And the sample I'm
Speaker 1: going to site is a twelve study published by the
Speaker 1: American Heart Association's journal Hypertension. So here's what we had.
Speaker 1: There were ninety elderly participants with mild cognitive impairment, and
Speaker 1: they were separated into three groups, and each of the
Speaker 1: groups was going to consume a cocoa flavor and all
Speaker 1: beverage in different quantities. So you had the high consumption group,
Speaker 1: which was nine milligrams, then you had the intermediate consumption group,
Speaker 1: which was five twenty milligrams, or the low group, which
Speaker 1: was forty five milligrams, and they had them consumed this
Speaker 1: beverage for eight weeks, not like continuously just consuming all day.
Speaker 1: That sounds like some kind of extra bonus material from
Speaker 1: seven a journal, Day three. I must escape. It's all
Speaker 1: stained with chocolate. Okay, No, So then a researchers gave
Speaker 1: the participants neuro psychologic exams to test performance on different
Speaker 1: mental functions like UH. And they gave the list. It
Speaker 1: was quote executive function, working memory, short term memory, long
Speaker 1: term episodic memory, processing speed, and global cognition. And what
Speaker 1: do they find. Well, they found that for the people
Speaker 1: drinking the high level flavoral consumption and the intermediate flavoral consumption,
Speaker 1: there was significant improvement on the scores UH for the
Speaker 1: tests of the ability to relate visual stimuli to motor responses,
Speaker 1: the test of working memory, task switching, and verbal memory.
Speaker 1: And they also said that the people who drank the
Speaker 1: high levels of flavoral drinks just had higher overall scores
Speaker 1: on the cognitive tests. That's pretty cool and so the
Speaker 1: idea there, and we see this a lot in studies
Speaker 1: about improving brain function is a lot of these tests
Speaker 1: tend to be not so much focused on Let's get
Speaker 1: a group of you know, twenty five year olds and
Speaker 1: and see if we can make them smarter. But a
Speaker 1: lot of it's on counteracting damage done by neurodegenerative disease
Speaker 1: or by dementia. It's it's just like the the approved
Speaker 1: uses of the new A tropics tend to be in
Speaker 1: treatment of various conditions, not not meant to be sold
Speaker 1: over the counter as necessarily a brain booster. It was
Speaker 1: the work that was done was really meant to try
Speaker 1: and uh find new ways to treat these these various conditions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and let's step back for a minute and acknowledge that
Speaker 1: that's really i'd say the most important thing here, right, sure,
Speaker 1: I mean, the real priority before we get about going
Speaker 1: to you know, how can I be smarter? I'm not chocolate,
Speaker 1: is to think about what can we really do for
Speaker 1: people who have had some kind of loss of ability
Speaker 1: through disease or through injury or whatever it is. That
Speaker 1: seems like something that's a truly profound and important thing
Speaker 1: to achieve. Absolutely, therapeutic uses, you know, medical treatment uses
Speaker 1: obviously our number one priority, and chocolate consumption is a
Speaker 1: distant second, still very important, but a distant second. Most
Speaker 1: of the experts that cover this cocoa flavor all news.
Speaker 1: By the way, I want to remind you yet again,
Speaker 1: as we did earlier, this does not just mean you
Speaker 1: have license to go eat as much chocolate as you want.
Speaker 1: That's probably not going to be good for you overall. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that can actually be counter productive in in several ways.
Speaker 1: Uh I can I can actually talk about one of
Speaker 1: those ways right now. Let's talk about antioxidants, y'all. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: and sorry, sorry guys, if if there's any weird awkward pauses,
Speaker 1: we're jumping all around in our notes. So that's that's
Speaker 1: what that is. That's not our editor fallen down on
Speaker 1: the job. Noel is great. We are scatter brained, yes
Speaker 1: that thing. Okay, So antioxidants. Let me tell you a
Speaker 1: story about brain cells. Brain cells are perhaps particularly susceptible
Speaker 1: to oxidation. Oxidation being the destruction of cells by unstable,
Speaker 1: electron deficient free ranging punk rock, oxygen and or oxygen
Speaker 1: involved molecules which are created as a byproduct of the
Speaker 1: conversion of glucose to energy. Fascinating story. I know everyone
Speaker 1: is waiting on no, no, no, I understand. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: you take some sugar, you need to turn that into
Speaker 1: something your body can do with it, right, makes some oxygen.
Speaker 1: In the process, you create these little particles that are
Speaker 1: not going to do your cells any good brain cells
Speaker 1: in particular, and eating too much food can make this
Speaker 1: worse because perhaps obviously your body will be breaking down
Speaker 1: more glucose. This is where all that extra chocolate comes in. Um.
Speaker 1: But antioxidants are these molecules that will prevent cell damage
Speaker 1: from oxidation by sacrificing themselves to the oxidation process. And
Speaker 1: lots of stuff, I mean mostly fruits and vegetables, green tea,
Speaker 1: stuff like that, are really terrific sources of these. And
Speaker 1: so if you've ever heard anyone harping on about how
Speaker 1: you should eat stuff with antioxidants in it, that's that's
Speaker 1: what they mean. Right. I've actually seen green tea listed
Speaker 1: as another one of these chemical compounds that may improve
Speaker 1: brain function, right right, As far as I know, it's
Speaker 1: because of the antioxidants in them, but I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if there's other claims, right, And to
Speaker 1: be fair, again, this is one of those things where
Speaker 1: we know that the antioxidants are important, that does not
Speaker 1: necessarily mean that that buying supplements that are labeled as
Speaker 1: being antioxidants are necessarily going to give you the same
Speaker 1: effect as eating a good diet. Okay, And this transitions
Speaker 1: me into what we're going to call Lauren's rent time. Okay,
Speaker 1: Lauren's rent time. So, nutritional supplements are really shady business.
Speaker 1: Most of them are not approved by the f d A,
Speaker 1: and in general, every single scientific study I don't have
Speaker 1: any to site for you right now because it is
Speaker 1: all of them, you guys, indicate that eating food is
Speaker 1: way better for getting nutrients into your body than taking
Speaker 1: a supplement. The food is what your body is used
Speaker 1: to processing in order to get nutritional content out of
Speaker 1: the supplements, I don't know it's in m You don't
Speaker 1: know what's in them. The people who made them might
Speaker 1: not know what's in them. So eat good food. I
Speaker 1: heartily approve of this rant, and in fact that it
Speaker 1: flows right into the next point that I was going
Speaker 1: to mention, which you all have heard that Fisher brain food, right,
Speaker 1: That's not just me, Fisher brain food. Fisher brain food
Speaker 1: is that a person fish fish? Are you from the South?
Speaker 1: You know what I'm talking about? Fisher brain food. Are
Speaker 1: we talking about the band? Because I love them? No?
Speaker 1: Not fish with a pH what has happened in here
Speaker 1: definitely not brain food. Look, fish are brain food. That's
Speaker 1: one of the things I remember hearing all the time
Speaker 1: when I was a little kid, and I absolutely detested fish.
Speaker 1: As an adult love it, love it, but hated it
Speaker 1: as a kid. It was, to be fair, they only
Speaker 1: gave you the heads. I think it was. I think
Speaker 1: it was mostly, first of all, that implication I resent.
Speaker 1: The Second of all, I think it mostly had to
Speaker 1: do with the fact that my I grew up from
Speaker 1: ages one through five about two blocks away from a
Speaker 1: Captain D's. So yeah, so my idea of what seafood
Speaker 1: was was pretty twisted. The fish to hollow, brittle, grease
Speaker 1: ratio is not that high. Yeah. The breading, let me
Speaker 1: just put it this way. My favorite thing to get
Speaker 1: from Captain D's was like the little, the little canst
Speaker 1: thing of all, just the breading that had been fallen
Speaker 1: off of everything else, that was just in the fryer.
Speaker 1: That was my favorite thing. I've gotten better anyway. As
Speaker 1: it turns out, fish are brain food UM, and specifically
Speaker 1: fish have a lot of omega will. Certain fish have
Speaker 1: a lot of Omega three fatty acids UM, which look
Speaker 1: they helped slow down the aging process in the brain.
Speaker 1: Or really, if you want to think of it another way,
Speaker 1: if you don't have omega three fatty acids in your
Speaker 1: diet a sufficient amount, then your brain will age more rapidly.
Speaker 1: So perhaps it's better to look at it that way,
Speaker 1: to say that you really want to have this, not
Speaker 1: to not necessarily to uh slow down the aging process,
Speaker 1: but to prevent a rapid aging process. It's kind of
Speaker 1: a glass have full glass, have empty kind of argument,
Speaker 1: but it is an important distinction to make. Um. So
Speaker 1: in other words, you want to have these omega three
Speaker 1: fatty acids in your diet. So one way of doing
Speaker 1: that is just to make sure you're eating you know,
Speaker 1: a good amount of fish, not like an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of fish. No. No, And if you're, for example, pregnant,
Speaker 1: you might want to avoid fish that are high in
Speaker 1: heavy metals like mercury. Absolutely very good point um. But
Speaker 1: a Mega three and also a Mega six fatty acids
Speaker 1: for that matter, are known as poly unsaturated fatty acids,
Speaker 1: which you can contrast with the saturated fats that your
Speaker 1: food labels all warn you about and the trans fats
Speaker 1: that are currently being banned from lots of fast food
Speaker 1: and packaged products. The difference chemically speaking, is that unsaturated
Speaker 1: fats aren't carrying as much hydrogen as they could, which
Speaker 1: allows them to bond differently with stuff and things. Honestly,
Speaker 1: I don't understand it very well more than that, but
Speaker 1: I just wanted to put in there that there's a
Speaker 1: reason that they're called saturated, and that it's a chemical
Speaker 1: thing at any rate. Um saturated fats and trans fats
Speaker 1: can negatively affect your brain health and that they well,
Speaker 1: first of all, they negatively affect the body's vascular system.
Speaker 1: And yes, eating heart healthy foods means that you're also
Speaker 1: helping your brain because your brain contains blood vessels and blood.
Speaker 1: So when you do stuff that hurts your blood vessels,
Speaker 1: you are, in the long term, hurting your brain. Very good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: our bodies are just it's a big ol interconnected system.
Speaker 1: And yeah, sometimes when you affect one part of that system,
Speaker 1: it can have long reaching effects in other parts that
Speaker 1: you wouldn't necessarily think about just from the top of
Speaker 1: your head, so to speak. I feel like there's a
Speaker 1: few brain puns that I should be making right right
Speaker 1: in here. I didn't mean to make that one you
Speaker 1: have the brain pun of a stagecoach Tilter and Fisher
Speaker 1: brain food tripped you up. So poly unsaturated fatty acids
Speaker 1: um also have a more direct connection to brain support.
Speaker 1: They They help create more plasticity and synapses, and have
Speaker 1: been shown to improve learning and memory. A deficit of them,
Speaker 1: in fact, has been associated with increased risks of mental
Speaker 1: health problems like a d D or dyslexia, dementia, depression,
Speaker 1: and schizophrenia. Yikes. So it's it's good to have them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And again, just like we were saying, it's good to
Speaker 1: have them in your diet, like by actually going and
Speaker 1: eating fish as opposed to taking fish oils up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly the same sort of thing. And if you don't
Speaker 1: like fish, like child Jonathan, there are many other sources
Speaker 1: of them which I do not have listed in front
Speaker 1: of me, but the internet can tell you all about that. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I love fish now. In fact, I'm kind of
Speaker 1: craving it right now. But let's let's continue through the
Speaker 1: rest of this. We're a little power through the end
Speaker 1: of our episode, so we can tell people other important
Speaker 1: things to know about brain chemistry and how to best
Speaker 1: make sure that you're operating at peak levels. Okay. So,
Speaker 1: in addition to fats, which your brain is made up
Speaker 1: a lot of and is required for stuff to happen
Speaker 1: in it, glucose is one of the other really important things.
Speaker 1: And we were just talking I know about how breaking
Speaker 1: down glucose can be sort of bad. But the thing
Speaker 1: is that the brain draws its energy from these sugars,
Speaker 1: meaning if you're meaning that, if your bodily sugar levels
Speaker 1: drop too low, it gets harder for your brain to
Speaker 1: keep all of those important or transmitters flowing. Uh. Steady
Speaker 1: stream of sugars, in fact, is best for your mental health.
Speaker 1: And you know, via complex carbohydrates like whole grains or vegetables,
Speaker 1: not candy bars. I can specifically state that when my
Speaker 1: blood sugar level drops, all I can think of is murder. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's physiologically identical to having a panic attack, is it. Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Well that that explained a lot of things. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're angry is a real thing, it is. It's a
Speaker 1: danger to all of us. Joe has Joe has yet
Speaker 1: to have experienced the two of us. Lauren, yea double
Speaker 1: double hangar, hangar? What are you talking about? I've experienced this,
Speaker 1: what with both of us at the same time. I
Speaker 1: don't think, so you're still here, so I suspect that
Speaker 1: you have not. So these are some of the more
Speaker 1: common things that have been researched and vetted as having
Speaker 1: a direct impact on brain health, but lots of this
Speaker 1: research is still being done very recently in the past
Speaker 1: like year or two. It turns out that even the
Speaker 1: bacteria in your gut can impact your brain. Um. Some
Speaker 1: bacteria have connections to depressive behaviors or autism behaviors, and
Speaker 1: others to the immune system, which can in turn impact
Speaker 1: brain cell related diseases and risks of things like schizophrenia
Speaker 1: in mice. At any rate, as far as I know,
Speaker 1: none of this research has extrapolated out to humans yet,
Speaker 1: but it's it's really interesting stuff. And if this proves
Speaker 1: true across the spectrum the spectrum, then it could mean
Speaker 1: it could have huge impact. Yeah, that's true. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's one of those things where, uh, like we've been
Speaker 1: stressing all along. The brain is one of those those
Speaker 1: organs that just we don't know everything about yet, we
Speaker 1: don't understand everything as we learn more, as we learn
Speaker 1: more about its operation and uh, at what is within
Speaker 1: the norm versus outside the norm. We will perhaps find
Speaker 1: new ways to leverage that information and perhaps not just
Speaker 1: treat people who have lost some capacity uh in in
Speaker 1: mental function, but also improve those of us who you know,
Speaker 1: are fall within that range of typical whatever that might
Speaker 1: be defined as UM. And also just the thought that
Speaker 1: as our society progresses, as it becomes more complex, and
Speaker 1: as people get access to uh nutritional foods, healthy foods,
Speaker 1: that will continue to see a development on an evolutionary basis,
Speaker 1: not grinded. That's a scale that's so long that you know,
Speaker 1: we can only guess about it. We're not going to
Speaker 1: be around for it unless we've all figured out how
Speaker 1: to download our brains. In that case, it's just really
Speaker 1: software patches. Yeah, curse while it's going to be around
Speaker 1: for it. Yeah, he'll he'll be upgrading us. We'll put
Speaker 1: you up to Jonathan fifteen point two and get it
Speaker 1: so that you stop being so neurotic. Would be fantastic.
Speaker 1: I don't know what I think about the whole singularity thing,
Speaker 1: but I know it's a little bit of extra Kurtzweil snark.
Speaker 1: I didn't intend to go quite that snarky. My bad guys. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm just saying that I certainly do hope with humankind
Speaker 1: at least that if we do continue to improve our
Speaker 1: intelligence that as a species that does come as a
Speaker 1: result of technology and medicine and something deliberate rather than say,
Speaker 1: natural selection, which is maybe how we got as smart
Speaker 1: as we are now. It's not something we want to
Speaker 1: encourage happening to humans. Well, I also hope that it
Speaker 1: comes about through rigorous scientific inquiry and not so many
Speaker 1: d I y projects that could potentially go awry and
Speaker 1: negatively impact a person's life. Right, So we really got
Speaker 1: to narrow it down here. Okay, good science, compassion, tasty food,
Speaker 1: tasty food. Yeah, yeah, I think I'm on board for
Speaker 1: all of that. So uh. The interesting thing here is
Speaker 1: that that we will continue to learn more about the brain,
Speaker 1: and we will find ways to use that information to
Speaker 1: help people. Whether or not we ever get to a
Speaker 1: point where you take a pill as a kid and
Speaker 1: you're magically super intelligent, I doubt it, but it's you
Speaker 1: know who knows. We don't know enough to say that
Speaker 1: that will never happen. So I'm interested to hear what
Speaker 1: our listeners think about this. If you guys, have any
Speaker 1: opinions about anything that we've talked about, everything from the
Speaker 1: nutrition to neo tropics, you should let us know. Drops
Speaker 1: a line on Twitter or Facebook or Google Plus, or
Speaker 1: handle it all three. As f W thinking we'll be
Speaker 1: addressing this again in another episode about using technology to
Speaker 1: boost our brains and how that is both interesting and terrifying,
Speaker 1: So look forward to that and we will talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. For more on this topic in
Speaker 1: the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought
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