The Brain's Role In The Body

The brain is the most efficient organ on earth, period. Our liver is quite amazing, especially when we look at what happens to your liver with exogenous growth hormone. On research studies, when they correlate the liver changes. Even with ped studies in research, it's always muscle cell, hepatic or prostate and the brain, and they measure all this stuff together. The liver is an amazing organ. Amazing. It is not even a third of as miraculous as what the brain can do. In fact, we use 300% of our brain. The mass and the neurons in our brain alone is not enough to describe how cool and how advanced the things that actually go on up there are.

Now stepping back big picture. I mean, this might be asking somebody who holds a hammer whether or not the world looks like a nail. But how true is it, this idea that the brain kind of like runs everything from a pattern or a habit cycle. And like, do you have any examples of how it is that the brain is so in control if it is?

I think you could say that accurately for two reasons. One, everything that has to do with like, there's no behavioral enzymes in your muscles. So just geographically and real estate wise, you know, it is running the show. It doesn't mean that it could run the show without the muscles. But just as far as like where all the employee important employees, all the important employees are up north, is what I call it, like north or south of the neck. Up north of the neck just happens to be where most of the important employees, business buildings, all that stuff lives. Now you can also say that because, you know, there's plenty of cool research studies that show us it's cortical areas of your brain being inhibited or disinhibited that really modulates behavior. And you can't step too far outside of that. So for example, we have famous research that was done with legitimately meth. And they were put in a doctor's office waiting, you know, while on meth double blind, they didn't know they took meth, put in a doctor's office waiting, and the doctor was never going to show up. There was one other person with them in the doctor's office. And in, you know, both independent variables, One of them was so happy with the doctor. This guy is just amazing. I'll wait for him for three days if I have to. He's the best doctor ever. And the person I met, meth, reciprocated that behavior. They were more than happy to sit there. Then on the other independent variable group, it was very agitated. The person was banging at the door. This guy's a scumbag. He's always late. He's not worth it. The person on meth also reciprocated that behavior. Now, it's a little convoluted to initially deconstruct in your head, but recreational drugs, something as potent as meth, is just going to promote whatever is instinctually going to happen. It's going to make you less hesitant, and it's going to make you just kind of go with the flow easier. Now, what it shows is that when that amygdala is turned on because of the environment, and your amygdala in any area is going to be sensitive when you're on recreational drugs, it's going to automatically incite aggressive behavior. Whereas in the other one, we're inciting our anterior cingulate, which is a really important part of the prefrontal cortex, where empathy is specifically processed. So it's more that we can take, you know, what was his name? I'm forgetting it. The old story where in, like, the 1800s, the miner who gets the rod, metal rod.

Phineas Gage. That guy. I think it's Phineas Gage.

Yeah. Right. So the stories, you know, we don't know how true they are, but the stories were, his wife always said he was the most docile, amazing guy ever. They had a perfect marriage after this tragic incident, which no one thought he was going to survive, which also shows us how cool the brain is. He literally had an iron rod go through perfectly the front of his frontal cortex, obviously, and it changed his behavior because his frontal cortex obviously was atrophied and died neurologically because of the metal rod. So his amygdala took over as his primary behavioral complex. And I actually believe not only did he die young of, like, essentially high blood pressure, like, symptoms, he actually divorced his wife and everything was terrible at home after that, even though he was medically fine.

Yeah, yeah. It's kind of interesting because the way I think about this, about the brain being in control, and I'd be actually super curious to hear your thoughts on this, is like, I can have a massive breakfast, like, totally go outside the norm of my normal calorie controlled smoothie and, you know, take my sons out for waffles and eggs or whatever, like 10am for, like, a late, big 2,000 calorie breakfast. But, like clockwork, I'll get hungry at, like, about 1:30, my normal eating time, no matter whether or not I've had a big breakfast, small breakfast, fasted, whatever, just like, hungry at 1:30. That makes me think that the incretin hormones in the gut and the pancreatic enzyme output and all that isn't necessarily in charge. And that there's, there's something going on with like insulin in the, in the brain or some of these, some of these, you know, ghrelin or leptin hormones or something like that. Is, is there something to that idea?

100. Whether it's the chicken or the egg scenario that we see people that are obese over hypothalamic signaling issues or hypothalamic signaling issues cause you to be, you know, more easily obese, we know for sure that it's hypothalamic signaling that is responsible for the amount of insulin you anticipatory secrete. And if you can do so or not so, if you could follow that quick sentence or two, that also tells us it's trainable. You've trained yourself at 130 through your discipline over time to have that hypothalamic response. And the sensitivity of your hypothalamus can directly be correlated to the metabolic flexibility you have.

Okay, got it. Yeah, that. That makes sense. And by the way, this just makes me think, I gotta ask you about this. What do you think about people who say like, you only use 10% of your brain.

Or not the people, but the theory.

Yeah, yeah. So it's funny, like if you wanted to be like a con artist, you could kind of potentially sway something saying like, oh, well, so much of this automatically happens, blah, blah, blah, blah. But in fact, it's just still wrong. The brain is the most efficient organ on earth, period. It's not even close. Our liver is quite amazing, especially when we look at what happens to your liver with exogenous growth hormone. On research studies, when they correlate the liver changes. Even with PED studies and research, it's always muscle cell, hepatic or prostate and the brain and they measure all this stuff together. The liver is an amazing organ. Amazing. It is not even a of as miraculous as what the brain can do. So in fact, we use 300% of our brain. The mass and the neurons in our brain alone is not enough to describe how cool and how advanced the things that actually go on up there are.

Yeah, I love the idea and I came across this a few months ago about the actual increase in metabolic rate, calorie burn and glucose burn. Even you're engaged in high intensity mental activities such as chess or working hard on a project, you actually upregulate brain metabolism pretty significantly in terms of either glucose or ketone utilization. So it just goes to show like that that organ is definitely using a lot, right?

100 it's funny you know I used to be quite competitive and strong man and I'm hoping the next year or two I can have a couple of one or two more fun stabs at the high level. But I, you know, just like you, I always have my nutrition in check. I keep tabs. I like to know what's going on and the days where I'm coaching in person, whether it's for golf or whatever professional sport, I'm not eating much less to recover from it. You know, maybe less than 5, 10% than I was recovering from strongman competitions and stuff. It's pretty crazy the amount of food I need to eat after being emotionally invested in watching and obviously walking a ton is the same as putting my body through the wringer in a competition for the most part.