Tommy Wood

Their words

but I mean in reality when you look at the data on sleep loss and dementia risk The cut off is really around 6 hours. So if you're consistently sleeping fewer than 6 hours, that's where risk starts to increase.

Their words

But the way that I think about it or I try and talk about it is that actually the stress response and this is as kind of Sier originally described it is stress drives adaptation.

Their words

Whereas aerobic exercise on that kind of intensity spectrum we just talked about seems to particularly benefit the gray matter which includes the hippocampus. Resistance training seems to particularly benefit the white matter.

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This study directly shows that working really hard, releasing a lot of cortisol in high-intensity interval training actually improves hippocample structure and function um over over time.

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And we know that how you feel, so how an athlete feels is a much better predictor of their performance than their HRV or any of their blood test.

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So there there are studies that show that um uh giving people caffeine makes them [snorts] feel like they're performing better, but they're actually performing worse on certain cognitive tasks.

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I will say that the best evidence we have just says in reality don't be deficient. If you can reach that threshold of not being deficient or insufficient, maybe that's enough.

Their words

But there are now at least three randomized control trials that have shown that omega-3 status and B vitamin status interact and they're dependent on one another. So, if you give uh B vitamins to somebody who has elevated homocyine, you bring down their homocyine, but they have poor omega-3 levels, you don't see any benefit.

Their words

And what they found is there's kind of this um bell-shaped curve between energy availability and brain volume. And in general, brain volume, right, the more the better, right, we think. And so if you're chronically calorically restricted, your brain is smaller um because you just don't have the resources to invest in, you know, the structure um and to maintain it. At the other end, you see the same thing. So if you're chronically in a chronic state of chloric excess, you also tend to have a smaller brain on average.

Their words

And there was no food or you know olive oil or food group or you eating more or less meat that changed the relationship between the Mediterranean diet and dementia risk. So what that tells me is it's much more about whole foods.

Their words

We kind of expect that we can go to work and we can work really hard for eight hours straight during the day, but like the brain doesn't really work like that.

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The simple answer is what the study showed was that 10,000 hours was the average amount of time that an expert violinist had spent practicing by the time they reached 20 years old. That's what the study showed. They weren't even experts by that point.

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And what they [snorts] found was that the most important predictor of how well somebody performed at those piano specific skills was not their age, it was how much they practice.

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If you want to get better at that skill, you have to work even further beyond your current capacities which which will move you out of flow, right?

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And both of those are perfectly reasonable states in which to perform. And assuming that you have to be in flow to perform just isn't true if you look at like how you know athletes perform in the moment.

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potentially one of the reasons why we lose lose cognitive function as we get older is because we stop giving our brain novel inputs or complex inputs that help maintain function, drive neuroplasticity. And I think one of the reasons that that happens is because adults hate being bad at things, right?

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there are meta analyses of these interventions in older adults showing that ballroom and line dancing have the greatest effect on cognitive function. And so both of those require other people as well as learning you know various sets of of movements.

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This is one of the main arguments against online or you know digital brain training is that you get very good at doing that one specific thing but it doesn't transfer over to other areas of your life.

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Even if you're doing hard ones, if you look at the work of people like uh Gloria Mark, the things like crossword and sudoku, they're less of like a true cognitive challenge, right? It's it's almost has more of like a meditation meditative like effect, right? Which can be a good thing, right? So you're focused but not challenged really.

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They just published a secondary analysis of the active trial that showed that um those who did processing speed training with uh booster sessions at one and three years had a significantly decreased risk of dementia 20 years later.

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However, there's an increasing body of literature that shows that by engaging older adults in novel cognitive activities, you see improvements in function. So that can be language learning. Uh that can be uh complex like coordinative movement or exercise. You see the same things with um like musical training like people learning a new musical instrument or learning um musical theory trying to identify different patterns in music. And you see in randomized control trials improvements particularly in executive function that seems to be most common across those different interventions.

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A lot of people don't realize that particularly brain development, but then also the refining of functions in the brain through neuroplasticity includes the pruning or removal of signapses. Often we think about it's all about growth and new connections, but actually it also involves the refining or removal of of other connections that aren't needed.

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But just because we have a fixed relatively fixed number of cells doesn't mean that we can't change the connections between those cells. And that's happening all the time. And that is, you know, the main principle of neuroplasticity.