4 Experts Share Tips to Boost Brain Health, Focus, and Thinking : 1183

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Dr. Amen. Why did you write this book now?

So change your brain every day. I, I came to believe, I believe that brain and mental health are daily practices. So just like spiritual health, physical health, you have to do this stuff every day. And every day you are making your brain better by the behaviors you engage in, the air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat, the thoughts you think when you decide to go to bed. And every day you're making your brain worse. And people don't know that, but after having looked at almost 250,000 scans now it's just really clear that if you get drunk tonight, your brain's going to work worse tomorrow. If you decide to play video games and not get good sleep, your brain is going to be impaired tomorrow. And you know I turned 69 in a couple of months and I've seen thousands of 69, 70 year old brains and it's not good news but it's not for everybody that there's, I have this whole group of people that have great looking, you know, more senior brains and I want mine be one of them. And so you know, a lot of people go, I've written 40 books which is, just means I'm older and I'm, and I'm consistent.

That's one per year for your entire career. It doesn't just mean you're older, it means that you're prolific and but people.

Always ask me which one should I start with? And you should start with this one because I took what I believe is the wisdom from my 40 year career and I put it in 366 short essays with a little action step at the end. And it's really the daily habits of brain and mental health. And I say brain and mental health because I hate the word mental. It shames people, stigmatizing, it's wrong their brain health issues. I think you and I would agree when someone's brain and body are healthy, their mind is so much better.

It's true. But why? This is what kind of drives me nuts. The idea that the meat operating system in my book it feels like the body does something before the brain gets the signal. And you know you're talking about these, these specific daily practices which by the way is a great format for a book. Like talking about actionable, which is always the challenge. But how do we know if it's like a body trauma thing that then got reflected in the brain versus a brain health thing? Like, like how do you even know that?

Well, you know, when. When I look at scans, you know, one of the things I learned recently is Spocked. The study we do at Amen Clinics is actually measuring mitochondrial function. 49 of the tracer is actually taken up in the mitochondria. And so we're really getting a good look, not just of blood flow, but of how healthy your mitochondria are. And you remember when we scanned you, which is, what, 15 years ago.

Your.

Brain was not healthy, which meant your mitochondria were being poisoned by mold.

Yeah.

So it was really hard for you to think, even though you're super bright, which is that disconnection between who I think I am and what I'm actually able to do. And I've just come to believe your brain is an organ. So Justin Bieber told me this, and I love him. And, you know, like many of my celebrities, he'd come, he'd not come. He'd do what I say. Mostly not, but when he went through a hard time, he came into my office and he said, I think I get it. My brain is an organ, just like my heart is an organ. And if you told me I had art problems, I'd do everything you said, and I'm going to do what you say. And then he got, like, way better. And I think we have to think like that is the physical functioning of my body is critical to how my mind works. And if I get my vessels right, if I get my microbiome right, if I get my detoxification pathways right, well, I'm going to think better. And I have to tell you, Dave, there are very few psychiatrists that think like this.

It drives me nuts because until. Until I got the message from you, it was actually. I was going to business school, so it was like 2002 or something. When I got my. My spec scan, that was when I recognized I had a hardware problem instead of a moral problem, like I'm just dumb or I'm failing or not trying hard enough and all that. It's interesting that you're tying it back to mitochondria. And for. For listeners, the spec scan, you inject a radioactive tracer that goes away quickly. Right. Tell me if I'm. If I'm going too high of a level and then it gets taken up. Right. Or is it radioactive? Or is it. Yeah, it's radioactive, but not in a way that's going to harm you. Yeah. And then it's taken up by mitochondria.

Single photon emission, computed tomography. It's a nuclear medicine study that uses an isotope technicium that I often say has self esteem problems because it changes shape and you do get a little bit of radiation, about the same as a head ct. It's gone the next day. And it allows us to see living brain tissue. I mean it's really cool. And it basically tells us three things. Good activity, too little or too much. And then we can target our treatment to either calm your brain if it's working too hard, which it often does in things like post traumatic stress disorder, OCD or Covid. I mean we spend a whole hour talking about COVID brain and. Or if it's too low in activity because the mitochondria have been poisoned either from a toxin or. You know, one thing that most people never think about is general anesthesia. I had a patient who had a hip surgery for six hours and she just couldn't think afterwards. But when you see her scan afterwards, it just like she got addicted to Xanax. It was, you know, low overall in activity. And you know, when you see enough of these, you like go, oh, I love my brain, I want to love my brain. So what are the things I should do?

Well, let's talk about anesthesia. I've always been concerned about that. I always liked xenon anesthesia because it helps mitochondria instead of harming them. But most anesthesiologists don't either don't know about it or don't do it because it's expensive. But if you're using something like propofol, is there something you can do ahead of time or afterwards to protect yourself? Because sometimes you do need to do it.

So propofol, probably, unless you're doing it.

A lot.

Probably that short term anesthetic like Versed is not bad for you. It's more when they're doing general anesthesia and putting you out for a longer time. In fact, children get this. Children who have general anesthesia have a significantly higher incidence of ADHD and learning problems. Adults who have general anesthesia, especially vascular procedures like bypass surgery, have a higher incidence of dementia. And they never tell you about that. They don't put it on the forms and they'll go, oh, it's controversial. Well then they should put it on the forums.

Only non controversial things that increase profit margins belong on farms. I mean, come on.

So you know, I have a mnemonic, I like Latin. Talk about it in multiple days in the book Bright Minds. You want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it. You have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind and anesthesia would fall under t in bright minds for toxins and there are just so many toxic things and our society.

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Tell me about your exercise stuff because you have like a section in the Book on exercises for the brain specifically. I want to go into that.

Yeah, I mean physical exercise is also part of it. And so I've been, I mentioned I've been more physical this past year and for the exercises that I prefer, I mean I've done a lot of table tennis with Dr. Daniel. Amen.

Amen. Yeah, I bought, I bought a table because of him as well. Okay.

I love.

Do you still do that now?

I do. We have it, we have, we have a table and just kind of, it's just, it's, it's fun activity. Hand eye coordination, reaction time. I get a little bit bored, you know, using my dominant hand. So I'll switch off, you know, left and right hand. I feel like it's a, it's a great workout. Also it's a nice brain break in between of meetings. If I have like 10, 15 minutes and I want to just do something physical. We just know as your body moves, your brain grooves. The number one reason why we have a brain is to control our movement. And it's not just a mind body connection. There's certainly a body mind connection in terms of helping development. I'm seeing this with our 10 month old, you know, when he started to crawl, you know, and do those kind of cross laterals and get his, you know, his somatic awareness and his balance. Dance is something that is interesting. I, I like things like martial arts where I take my mind and I have to kind of put it into my body. It's because of you though that I have a lot of the, the cheat machines and the, you know, the fancy thing because time is of the essence. So I, I really don't want to spend you know, hours upon hours in, in the gym every single week.

You're an upgrade labs fan?

Oh yeah. I think I was your first client in Santa Monica. I think you were tested everything for three months with your amazing expert staff. But yeah, it's just the physicality of it. I've done martial arts my whole life so that's some part that feels very good for me. But resistance training, whether it's the Rx achievements to any the things that you have at upgrade, it's important. I mean it helps with your neurotransmitter. Dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, reduce bdnf. Your brain derived neurotropic factors could help lower systemic inflammation. I mean there's so many benefits that come from physical action. Exercise, exercise for the brain. I'm still a big fan of reading and I know it's so old school. But if people seen pictures of me with Elon and the Oprahs, it's just we bonded. People always ask we bonded over books, no joke. Because you read to succeed. Even Warren Buffett, I mean, there's this one time at his annual meeting that he was at the mall just playing bridge with people. And I'm not a big bridge player, but I went through the rotation, I got to talk to him, and he validated. He really does read 500 pages a day. I don't know what does now, but it just, it interests me. So I think reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. If you want to grow your muscles, you give it two things. You give it novelty and you give it nutrition. Right. And same thing with your mental muscles. I feel like novelty through. I like reading. I'm not a big fan of a lot of the brain games and I think a lot of them been debunked. You know, matching shapes or color, it doesn't really translate into every day. That's why we focus on things that are very measurable, like, and very relevant. You need to remember names and faces or client information, product information. You can measure reading speed, reading comprehension, giving speeches or language learning, whatever. You could just come back to that. You can measure focus. But I love reading. The only caveat is, I would say is I read fiction and nonfiction. I never used to read fiction ever, but I started seeing results just I saw studies that fiction reading. I think when you read nonfiction, you learn through information and when you read fiction, you learn through imagination. Fiction reading has been shown to have a positive effect on your eq wow. Quotient the narrative, be able to see things from different points of view and high levels of empathy through the storytelling. The only thing is, I do read my fiction at night exclusively because I don't want to read a book on neuroscience or biohacking. And again, my kind of executive brain before I go to sleep. That's still I'm looking to clear, right. You know, that parasympathetic rest and digest.

Is it stressful or invigorating to read.

A book on neuroscience?

Well, no, it's not stressful, but it just puts me in this state where I start thinking a lot and I don't want to ruminate over all these different ideas. And so that's why I kind of, kind of keep it in in the afternoon for my afternoon reading. I can take a little brain break and. And read some read and study and research. But I've also train my Nervous system. So first thing in the morning I'm just creative. Afternoon I'm just consuming. But I will, the only thing I will consume in the evening would be more. I'm not a big binge watcher, a lot of television, but I will read a good fiction book or a comic book, even people know that. I mean, I wanted to get into comics and draw comics and write comic books and I learned how to read by reading comic books. And so it's something that just kind of brings me joy. And that's a big part of, you know, my fifth, you know, this is a big year, you know, brand new book, you know, our first child getting into my 50s. I'm also want to bring joy into the things that I do. And I think that's. Yeah, it's something that I feel like if you, if you do the things that you love and you could add five days, you know, to every week because most people look forward to the weekends. Right. But also if you're not doing what you love, I think it's. We can have the mindset where we could discover or find the love in what we do because there's so many people that, let's just say doing anything that they're really passionate about, but they find joy in the process of doing whatever it is they're doing. But there's a quote in Limitless from a French philosopher that sums it up saying life is the letter C between B and D. Life is C between B and D where B is birth, D is death, life, C is choice. And I just saying this to remind everyone that our lives are the sum total of all the choices we made up to this point. Who are we going to spend time with? What are we going to do? Are we going to live? What are we going to eat? What are we going to feed our minds? All those different things. And I truly believe that these difficult times, they could either distract you and people have a real agenda for that, or they could diminish you or these difficult times, they could develop you. We decide. And I think that a lot of your listeners share have this similar, different but similar stories as us that, you know, we went through this and we decided what these things mean and we started looking for the gift in all this. Like my two biggest challenges were, were learning in public speaking for the longest time and you know, life has a sense of humor because all I do is public speak on this thing called learning. Right. You know, and even with my sleep deficiency, you know, sleeping 90 minutes a night for five years and you know, and then learning to be able to hack that, being exposed to your work and other, you know, sleep experts and having this very painful UPP surgery where they took out my ed, ucla, took out my soft palate, my ula, my tonsils to just create airflow. And then my sleep jumped up to four years. But in order to deal with it, you know, think about all the angst you have when most people just excited to go to sleep or just relax and look forward to it. For me, it was just. I stopped breathing 250 times a night. Each time was an episode, counts as an episode if it's more than 10 seconds. So it's like somebody putting a pillow over your face 250 times a night. But even that, I had to say, like, where's the gift in this? And I found two things. I was like, okay, it forced me to double down on everything I teach because I wouldn't be able to be productive or perform like I can if I didn't. And then the other thing is, is I got really conscious of my time because so many people, I think, are a little drained because they're saying yes too much. And I just want to remind people when you say yes to somebody or something, you're not saying no to yourself.

And.

And so for everything in my life is hell yes or hell no. It's always been that, like when I'm on your stage or, or I'm like, with you, or we're, you know, cutting a good steak and just like, that's where I want to be. Because. Because when you're sleep deprived, you can't commit to a lot of things. And so it's always like, it's that binary for me, but that's how I find the gift in it. And then I could, you know, resolve it. And then, you know, hopefully it serves. It served me because now my sleep is, you know, it's. It's not where I want it to be, but it's still because, thinking in mind, I also, lifestyle wise, I would pull these all night as a kid because I had learning difficulties. I worked three times harder than everybody else. I built very bad habits and my career. I've spent. I've been three continents in one week. So it just really messed with my sleep.

It really does. By the way, I. I flew from Austin to Toronto and back in the last two days.

Wow.

I'm. I'm with you on the, you know, the crazy stuff. But you can handle it now better than you could back then, can you?

So much better.

Yeah, because you mastered your brain.

And I think this is how these things show up. Because I believe the life we live, a lot of the lessons we teach. Right. And you're sharing the things and certainly do your research, but you're sharing things that work for you. And shame on us. I'm talking whoever's listening to this that needs a little push. Going back to serving the person you once were. I almost feel a moral responsibility. That's how I got over my stage flight. Right. Where I'd be not just scared, I'd be. I couldn't breathe, I would pass out. You know, just thinking about being on in front of like even like second grade students when I started out, like when in my career. But what got me over it was focusing on the person that could benefit because you have a moral obligation that I feel almost help people that are struggling because shame on me if somebody's struggling the way I did and I didn't. What, you know, I didn't help them. And I just feel like that's my kind of take on it. But that's what gets me over my, you know, the challenges that I have and why we're having this conversation now. And so this, I think it's just I'm so passionate no matter how much lack of sleep I had and so much that I just show up for the person who needs to hear something that I've learned along the way.

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What's your brain animal?

So, okay, can I give, before I tell people, can I give them like a little context?

Sure.

So the new book, the updated version not only has case studies of like readers and we've sold a million copies in three years of the original book and very proud of it, donated a lot to build schools in Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya, like again, education for kids. And the first one was about mastering your mindset, your motivation and the methods for accelerated learning. The fourth pillar we added was momentum. And so how do you use AI to enhance your hi, your human intelligence? Right. I look at it more as augmented intelligence to be able to support like any technology or tool to accelerate your learning and performance. Another was nootropics because you know, once you get out of this gravity, we could also, you know, there's certain, certain supplements that you could take to help give you greater momentum. There's a whole chapter on something called your cognitive types. And and again, it's an assessment that was inspired by personality types like Myers Briggs. Left brain, right brain, lateralization, learning styles, consuming visual, auditory, kinesthetic, lear learning, introvert, extrovert, multiple intelligence theory. So it was inspired by a lot of various science and psychologies, but really as we know, the menu is not the meal. Right. We've heard that, that the map is not the territory, but it's to give you distinctions and a lens to look things through. So if you think about code cod, your brain code, these are the four animals and maybe as I say, this one will resonate with those who are listening. So the C, because I make everything an acronym, is the cheetah. And the Cheetah, the defining trait is action. There's an idea, they learn something, they put it into action right away. They have very strong intuition, they adapt very quickly, they thrive in fast paced environments. The O and code are your owls. And by the way, we're not any one of these, we're a composite. But there's usually one that's more primary and then secondary. It's like if you're right handed, doesn't mean you don't use your left hand. It hasn't developed as much as where your strength is. The O is is defined as an owl and it's defined by owl. Very logical. So these are people of data. They love facts and figures and the information. They do their research. And again we are a combination of this. The D and code are your dolphins and these are your creatives. They can maybe even see a future that other people can't yet see or their business like a Disney kind of thing or JK Rowlings where they have this vision. They're very creative, they're strong with pattern recognition. And then finally the E are your elephants and their defining trait is empathy. And these are your community builders. These are your people who have high levels of empathy and compassion, strong interpersonal skills. And just as an example, we had our team take this and 100% of our customer service team, 10 plus people, they're all elephants and we didn't hire for them. But it's interesting how we naturally will gravitate towards jobs or positions that allow us to be in our element where we get to highlight and live in our zone of strengths and traits. Our CFO is very strong. Owl, very numbers. Yeah. My business partner is our CEO is a dolphin, has this vision of billion brains. And it's just been extremely, extremely creative. So it's interesting you could see this. Every day we take this quiz that's in the book or people could do it@mybrainanimal.com and it's just like you know how there's personalized medicine based on your genetic, you take an assess like your genetics or personalized nutrition based on your nutrient profile or microbiome or something. This is like personalized learning because it's like once you take the quiz we give you, it informs how you could read better, how you could remember better, even how you could hire, how you can manage, how you could parent based on your brain type. It's kind of like love Languages, right? Where somebody has like words of affirmation. Other people as acts of kindness and it's, they communicate in different language. It's less like if you're brain type is one and something. Your teacher's brain type is a different one. It's like you're, you're not getting it because it's like two ships passing in the night and you don't have, you don't even realize the other one's there. Because these. A cheetah invest differently than an owl, right? They parent differently. They communicate differently also as well. So an example, if you take, let's give a reference point for everybody. If you take something like Friends, right? In the sitcom Ross would be an owl. You know, the professor, the scientist, does a lot of research. Phoebe would be the creative dolphin, expresses through music and you know, very passionate about her arts. Joey would be the cheetah because in the moment he goes into it and he acts and he goes on his intuition and he just adapts. I would think Monica would be the community builder, always wants to host everything in her apartment. She's the elephant, right? And so you can see this in Star Trek and Star wars and Game of Thrones and all Harry Potter. You could put everybody in these categories. And again, the menu is not the meal. It just gives you some distinctions because even when you're communicating, people would fall in their jobs. Like the cheetahs would be the entrepreneurs, right? They would, they could be EMTs, they could be professional athletes like Serena Williams or something. The owls would fall into, you know, data analysts or engineers or accountants or research scientists or coders. Or dolphins would be the graphic designers or the writers or the marketing specialists. And your elephants could be HR people or social workers or public relations or teachers or project managers. But you could just even think about famous individuals. Einstein could have been an owl. Marie Curie could have been an owl. Isaac Newton, an owl. Cheetahs could be your Richard Branson, your Steve Jobs. Dolphins could be your Leonardo da Vinci's or your Picassos. And so it's elephants could be your Mahatma Gandhi or your Martin Luther Kings. But it kind of informs like you're learning the way you lead even higher manage because they also communicate differently also as well. Like a cheetah is direct to the point because they don't beat around the bush because it's their, it's their time, right? Owls take a little bit more time. Get the facts, get all the little. The details would speak more analytically and more methodically. They're willing to listen a little bit more because they want to reflect on and compare it to what they already know. Dolphins would speak about the bigger picture, about future plans, about innovative ideas. They'd be very enthusiastic around it. Elephants would be very keen on understanding and validating the other person's point of view. They want people to feel seen, they want people to feel valued and heard. They would look to create a consensus among people. They would even use words. They wouldn't use so much I and my. They would use words like we and us, you know, emphasizing group unity. And so I think, you know, understanding your dominant, you know, cognitive type. We would just be very informative of how you would parent of how you would hire for different roles and responsibilities and how you would communicate, negotiate, even selling, you know, like a cheetah would naturally be more agile and adapt to the pace of a client. They would, they would. If you're selling to a cheetah, right, because everyone speaks their, their language, their brain language or love language in the other way. But they would, you know, if you're selling to a cheetah, they would appreciate direct value, efficiency. Skip the small talk, right? Demonstrate, you know, and owls would, you know, if you're an owl salesperson, you're very detail oriented and that could work for some people in depth. You know, foresee clients needs and present to tailored solutions. But if you're selling to an owl, they appreciate well researched presentations and statistics and case studies, whereas a dolphin could care probably less. They want to see the big picture of the future and leverage their natural charisma for storytelling. You know, so you want to speak to their vision and how this offering fits them into a larger picture of innovation or whatever it is you have to offer. And elephants is forget all that. It's all about the relationship, right? Deep relationship. Focus on building trust and rapport. If you're selling to an elephant, you know, spend time understanding their needs. Demonstrate you generally care about their success, especially, you know, post sale. And so I feel like you know them just kind of stream of consciousness. But when people take the quiz and then the book or we put it online for the first time for free, it's my brain animal. There's nothing to buy.com and you'll get a personalized report because a cheetah would read things, they would skim and scan speed, right? And how we'll be looking for the details. A dolphin who's creative, when they're reading, they'll visualize a lot of what they're reading because picture is worth a Thousand words. An elephant reading something would read from empathetic. They want to know where the author is coming from and see the different perspectives. And so I think it informs every area because our brain is involved in everything. So the thing I'm most excited about with that and understanding, you're going back to momentum. Understanding your brain animal and the animals around you could greatly accelerate the velocity with less friction and conflict. Because it's not how smart you are, it's how are you smart. It's not how smart your kids are, it's how are they smart. And just because of different perspectives on in terms of like there's a scene in Matrix where Neo goes to see the Oracle for the very first time in her kitchen. And I think most people miss this, but there's a sign above the door that Neo walked into the kitchen. It says know yourself. And I feel like that's why people do things like they go to therapy or they do, they go to four years of Zen or they do plant medicine or they get to know themselves. Right. To meditate or whatever. They're introspection that they do. And I think we need the curiosity to know yourself because self awareness is a superpower. And then I think on the other side you need, once you have the curiosity to know yourself, you need the courage to be yourself in a world full of other people's opinions and their expectations. Like, you know, because who, who cares? Because we're fueling, you know, if that's the fuel of our life, we're going to certainly run out of gas. Right. But it takes, it's a different skill set to be, to be that person. Once you get to kind of know yourself and what you stand for and who you are and your identity and all that.

In your work. And I think this is really helpful for listeners to understand how their brain works, how focus works. You talk about top down and bottom up thinking and how it relates to paying attention. Talk to me about those kinds of thinking and what they do for your attention.

Sure. So bottom up is the more ancient version, more ancient, ancient type of attention. So if you pretty much look across any animal, even animals that have not very well developed brains, they have this bottom up attention. And what bottom up attention is, it's sensitivity to the environment that automatically reflexively triggers you to direct your resources, whatever they may be at. And you could imagine the survival advantage and why it was evolutionarily selected for in that you need to find food, you need to avoid toxins. If you're evolved enough, you need to Find mates and have babies. And so it's fundamental to the nervous system is this type of attention. Right. Like a flash of light, a loud sound, you're orienting to it. Even if you didn't have the goals, that's bottom up. It's still part of our system.

Right.

You go across the street, someone who's on drugs or on toxins will have a, much like someone who smoked a lot of potential. It's going to be slower, right?

Yeah.

There's so many things that alter this from lack of sleep, it varies. It's a state like effect but you know, you know it. When you're crossing a street, you're, you're looking at your phone, you're engaged in thought. Someone hits the horn, you activate, right.

Hopefully.

And that's bottom up. That's bottom up. Top down is looking in your phone, being lost in thought. It is goal directed attention. It's not necessarily related to survival. It's not necessarily directed at the things that are most important or most salient in the world. It's how you direct your attention based on choice and decisions. And that's what humans pretty much do very uniquely is that type of attention. And also top down attention can be switched and moved and navigated and in all sorts of ways. And a lot of our challenges with technology and the modern world in general is a collision of top down and bottom up. Because technology companies, you know, and the people that design for them are smart people and they, whether or not they were aware of bottom up and top down, are certainly aware of tools that they have that can create bottom up sources that pull your attention. Whether it's notifications from buzzes to vibrations to lights to sounds, these are still very powerful sinks for us and they're used very effectively that way. And we actually, we have to combat against them if we're going to maintain our top down attention.

Okay, is it more helpful to train top down attention or bottoms up attention?

I think that there's value for both. Most people when they feel that their attention abilities are not as good as they should be when they're struggling with it. What they're largely talking about is their top down attention. They feel they might be highly sensitive to the environment, but what is getting them in trouble at school or work or in their relationships is they're not holding their top down attention at the level that they want to for as long as they want to. So that's usually what people with ADHD are suffering from is the top down attentional deficits. And that's what the type of, of things that I've worked on, especially in our video game that's out there now as a ADHD treatment is really targeting that specific type of attention.

It's kind of scary. I've seen those videos of classes in China where young kids, I'm guessing seven or eight, all have, it looks like h E G devices on monitoring whether they're bringing blood to their prefrontal cortex and notifying their parents if they're not paying attention enough so they can get yelled at later. Notifying the teacher. I've often thought as a teacher, I was at the University of California, Santa Cruz for five years. I taught like working engineers how to build the first version of the web. And so I was like, I would love to know if I'm losing track of my class so I could throw something at them or talk differently or do something like the feedback loop would be great. But it seems like that could be toxic. I mean, can you over train attention in kids so that they lose their ability to play or, or experience joy?

It's a good question. I would say that is probably unlikely with just training approaches itself. Can you do it with drugs? Sure. And we probably do already accomplish that sometimes. What's the best one for that by over medicating? There are certainly reports of kids on Adderall that feel that they do that. It does impact their joy or their personality in the goal of improving their attention. The powerful thing about training attention, whether it's through a video game or another approach like the video game is something I know well because we've been studying it for 15 years, is that when you play it for long enough, you feel a certain percentage of people, around 70% in adults, feel that they are better able to focus their attention. That's after like a month or six weeks. It certainly does not happen as quick as like a single dose of playing any. You're saying playing this game, playing our game, Endeavor.

This is a game called Endeavor specifically.

Exactly, exactly.

And what platforms is Endeavor on?

So maybe I'll just slide back for one second and tell you a little bit about the Endeavor story. When we met all those years ago, I had a game that we had published in Nature showing that we can improve attention in older adults. That game was called Neuro Racer and that's what I was there speaking about.

I played it.

Yeah.

Yeah. So since then, Akili, the company that I co founded, licensed the technology, the patent essentially behind Neuracer, and built a game called Endeavor. And it's been a Decade now. And over those years, dozens of research studies have been done in different populations that kept replicating the original finding in nature that playing the game improves your ability to sustain attention outside of the game. So your TOVA gets better. And also now what we've shown in ADHD studies is even your real life focus as subjectively measured by how well you're able to engage in tasks of daily life, also improve as well. And so that game, after many, many years of clinical trials, including a phase three trial, so a double blind, placebo controlled, randomized, multi site trial in children presented to the FDA was approved during COVID as a Class 2 medical device. So this was first video game ever approved by the FDA for any medical condition. And in this case it was for children, specifically 8 to 12 year olds with attention deficit disorder.

Hold on a second though. If the FDA approved it, doesn't that mean that it doesn't work and has massive side effects?

This is an exception to that.

Okay, got it. Just check in.

I could tell you that taking a video game to the FDA was a unique experience for myself as well. Because you're right, they don't tend to look at what I define as like experiential treatments. This is a very, very new submission for them and it actually went into a category called de novo submissions, meaning that there's no predicate to fall on. It's a completely new category and thus it spent two years in the review process of going through the data and understanding from hundreds of children that have played it and it was eventually approved. So now a doctor can prescribe it. So that game is called Endeavor Rx. It's a prescription game, it's for children, it is only available via prescription and they can play this with Adderall or as an alternative to it.

So you can actually now get insurance to pay for video games, which is why you went to the fda, which is brilliant by the way. Insurance companies should do something useful. Maybe this is one of the few things that they'll do.

You just really hit a very triggering point to me in a good way. Let me tell you about that. So I spent over a decade designing this game and then dozens of research studies published in great journals. Two years at the FDA to get that approval and then we bring it to the world and what do we find? Insurance companies really don't want to reimburse for it.

Insurance companies don't want to reimburse for anything. I mean, let's face it.

Exactly. And there is nothing about FDA approvals that makes an insurance company have to approve for it. It's a big problem. And so we've struggled there. We have I think over 15,000 prescriptions written by doctors for children and we have lots of success. Every month more and more children are playing their medicine essentially. But we still struggle with widespread insurance reimbursement. And that is a real burden for any company. A giant drug company can push through this phase, this sort of valley of death between regulatory approval and insurance reimbursement. But for small companies it's very hard to do that. And so that's been an area of struggle. One that we continue to try to push on is the need for insurance companies to say, hey, we have children in need. We have a game that's been through a lot of research, that's FDA approved, that has essentially no side effects. This should be something that's reimbursed. And that's something that we are still pushing on, guys.

It's called Endeavor OTC and I'm actually installing it right now on my phone. And I actually knew about Neuro Racer, but I didn't understand that was the tech in Endeavor otc. So I'm installing it right now to see if I notice a difference because my intentions are very well trained at this point, but I'd be willing to spend.

Yeah, that's great. It is exactly the same as no eraser from the mechanics point of view. That has a much better game envelope around it. But I want to point out a difference there. So what you're downloading now is called Endeavor otc, which stands for Endeavor over the counter. And so what happened several months ago is that given the slow adoption of the prescription treatment for children because of the insurance reimbursement delays and the Dr. Gateway, we, we did a study on adults and found that it actually improved their attention seven times the level of what we saw in children. And it also has 70% reporting some improvements in a well validated metric of quality of life. And we also know that the number of adults with ADHD has continued to increase, especially through Covid. And so what we released there that you're downloading is the same game as Endeavor rx, but does not require a prescription and is targeted for adults. So it has the same core mechanics, but it doesn't have all the connections with the parents and the doctor and all the other elements that go into the prescription version of it. But the core ingredients, the active sort of the engine of the game is all there in Endeavor otc. So we just released that. We're really Excited. We're getting great traction on that and I'm happy that after a decade of writing back to people from their emails and saying how do I get neuraser? I'm like, well, here it is, it's now available.

Thank you. I consider it unethical when the trade union of physicians and drug companies requires you to get a permission slip to buy something you want to buy. Like I didn't sign up for having my daddy or my mommy be my government or my doctor telling me what I can and can't do with my own biology. I am a biohacker and I, you know, if I want help or consulting, then I hire the right experts. Sometimes they're world class doctors and sometimes they're not. And that's up to me. So thank you for, for breaking through that people asking what the price is. It is 25 bucks a month or it looks like 1083amonth if you do a year subscription. So not crazy expensive. I am going to do the year version. And guys, this isn't like prearranged or anything. I, I didn't realize this was Neuro Racer because I liked it. It was just too much of a pain in the ass. And we don't have a license for 40 years of Zen, which is my neuroscience company. And I have, I don't know, a hundred thousand dollars worth of neuroscience gear in my house. So this is cool because it's an affordable way to train your attention. What do you don't have ADHD though? Does it still help your attention if you're already normal or you think you're normal?

It's a great question. So we have lots of data showing that that convinces me that this is a tool that improves attention pretty much across board. And it just so happens that people with ADD as the name would imply in ADHD have a lot of attention problems. But we have data from all sorts of healthy populations. Our nature paper was healthy older adults that were in that study. We've had data from depression and Ms. And many different clinical indications. So we took one through the fda. But yes, I would think of this as a way of improving attention abilities. And, and I'm really curious what your listeners think about it when they play it. I do want to note that you might not feel the effects immediately. It's not a drug that's just dumping and changing neurochemistry dramatically. Picture training for a marathon. You got to do a little bit of work here. I could also tell you that game is hard. It's a game you'll see, you'll tell. It's a game, it's cool looking, it's lots of rewards and characters, but it uses a closed loop system. So it's constantly adapting the level of challenge based upon your abilities in real time. It's like the ultimate personal trainer and it's going to kick your butt like a personal trainer would. So be bear with that. One other little tidbit. I'll tell you, it's funny, Dave, I expected you to say what you did about sort of the firewall of someone else making a decision and I actually didn't want to have this conversation with you until we had the occ.

By the way, that's the beginning of the game. So installed. I'll figure out to turn it off now. Didn't mean to interrupt you, it just started.

No, I loved it. Yeah, no, I wanted to have this conversation with you because I knew that this is the direction we're going as we released it from that prescription firewall. Because I remember our discussions, I remember meeting you, I know what you do and I wanted to talk about it when it was available. This would have been a really frustrating conversation for me, probably for you a year ago. And so that's out there. The other thing that I wanted to us to include that wasn't there until like a month ago that I also wanted to do before talking to you was that we now have embedded in the game a Focus Score.

Oh cool.

Yes. See I do like that. That uses gameplay data on your first visit to give you a baseline and then it uses data to predict where you'll be in six weeks from now. And I can tell you that that Focus score, although it is an engagement feature, is not just an engagement feature like update your high score or anything like that. We worked a year for that to find a metric that we could pull from game data that predicts the clinical outcomes in our research studies. So that score, the change in that score correlates with the change in TOVA in our trials and the change in reports of improvements in functions. So it's a meaningful measure, not just like a cool thing to see change over time. And you will get reports in the game now about how that's changing. So if you happen to be someone that likes to quantify and not just hack and not just improve yourself, we now have both of them in there. So that's very recent.

You want to know if your hacks work. So doing a hack without a measure of success isn't much of a hack. And the good news Is today things like heart rate variability. Well, if you woke up in the morning and you were better recovered, you could probably say that something you did, worked or didn't. But when you have really precise measures of your focus and your attention, you can just more easily hack. And if you have a closed loop biofeedback system. So the original days of quantified self, these are kind of like stamp collectors. Like, oh, look, I have all these stamps. Well, you ever going to send a letter? No, I just like them. They're pretty. And gathering data about yourself that isn't actionable, whatever. But if you have a week's worth of data at the end of the week, you could say, I noticed a pattern. But if you're getting feedback in under 350 milliseconds for the average brain, or maybe 240 milliseconds for my brain, then all of a sudden the brain changes and you can change your body really, really quickly.

What happens if someone had a brain injury a long time ago when they start brain tapping?

Well, the nice thing is it's called neurogenesis, which means our, our cells can actually, we can't bring those back to life. Like that's the, the scientists were saying 10 years ago, we have this many brain cells, that's all we have. That's not true. We can. With the right nutrition, with the right movement, with the right everything we're talking about here, your brain will create neurogenesis. It does it with exercise, it does it with proper nutrition. And then you can amplify that by doing brain fitness. You know, that's what we're saying.

In fact, most of the neurogenesis that we've seen is in the hippocampus, which is one of the structures in the brain. And BDNF and all those things really work on the hippocampus, which is great. But Paul Stamets, who's been on the show, who's a friend and actually I'm an investor in his newest company that's using microdose psilocybin and lion's mane and some B vitamins, a very specific combination that's causing whole brain neurogenesis. The thing is, if you're doing anything, including intermittent fasting, that raises neurogenesis, neurogenesis, Coffee even has some evidence for it. So there's all these things. But what do you train the brain to do once you turn on neurogenesis?

What you were just talking about. I'm here in la, but on Sunday I'm going to meet. We have a Big study going on here with one of the largest rehabilitation centers. They're doing the same thing with a psilocybin in brain tap. What's happening is that will activate the receptors in the brain. Now when those receptors are gone, the old saying, Hebb's law, you know, those neurons that fire together, wire together. So now the, the lion's mane and all the psilocybin is activating the brain. Now we're exercising it. So, so, so when you're, you're moving those electrons now, the brain goes, this feels good. Wow, look how creative I am. Look at, there's a region in my brain I haven't used in a while. I. Now I got blood pumping over there. Now I got oxygen, nutrients. While the brain lights up and the people go, you're totally different person. No, you're just more of who you were. You were, your, your energy was dampened and those kind of things, just doing those lights up the brain. When I did our gamma sessions, we did a study in Dallas with Dr. Rosenthal and we had people that did not want to do a psilocybin because they were vets and they were afraid they'd get addicted, even though there's no science that shows that. So we mapped out the brain and I did the gamma series. People were having psilocybin trips without a psilocybin.

Oh, yeah, you can induce it with the brain tap. You can induce it with neurofeedback or with just breath work, you can trip. So you don't necessarily need psilocybin to have those experiences. But what I'm thinking is what would happen if you took a pre workout drink and then you just sat on the couch.

Exactly.

Not that much is going to happen. Right. So the idea is you prime the body for growth and then you give it the signal to grow. And with the brain, you can prime the brain with breathing exercises or the stamet stack, or there's many other things, by the way, because I'm not saying go out and do a bunch of mushrooms and brain tap. These are very specific microdose combinations of things. But what you would do then though is you're priming your brain for growth, like a pre workout and then for the growth signal. That's the brain tap. And you're saying, okay, I want to do a work on this. So then you turn on the app, you put it on and you listen to the sounds, and then the brain is, oh, I'm now in a change seeking mode. Where do you want to put it? You could also go into a change seeking mode and then just scroll on Instagram and let an AI algorithm program your brain. And that's a bad idea. So what I'm suggesting is do Braintap. But if you want to do anything else that's going to improve cognition and improve neurological neuroplasticity, do that and then do Braintap and let Braintap be your tool. So you choose the signal. Braintap's not in charge. You're in charge because you got to program the brain tap and then you play it and you're just going to get more results than you will in any other way on a daily practice. I just, I don't think you can do a stronger thing.

Even as an example for those wondering, I don't have those issues. If they want to increase their learning because there's something in the brain. In science, they call it hypernisia. Super memory states. We all have these super memory states. It's the alpha theta rhythm that does that, and that's the hippocampus, that they know that, that engages that. So if we. If they do their study, if they read a book or they do some kind of work. If you have a student, then you do brain tap. You've just taken. You've accelerated, you've brain hacked all that knowledge into your hippocampus, into long term memory that now you have. You have a. It's not about our memory, it's about our recall. So we have to exercise that recall system. If we don't exercise that recall system, like they say, if you use a person's name within three seconds of hearing it, your chances of remembering just went up 70%. That's because you've recalled that neural circuitry.

That works really well. Robert.

You know, that's weird. Everybody, they do mess up my name. They do call me Robert. So you picked up on that. It's weird. I don't know if they're just. If that's short for a different. Something different.

I wonder why Porter. Anyway, I'm just messing with you guys. Dr. Patrick Porter, just for the record. But it's funny, the learning thing is an issue here at the conference. Jim Kwik will be here. I was a dear friend who teaches people how to remember. And I had. Back when I had chemically induced brain injuries from toxic mold, as well as some TBIs and mercury poisoning and fibromyalgia and all the other crap that messes with your brain, I couldn't remember words. I'd sit there, what was I Going to say, there's a word for that. And it was 20 times a day. It was just common. And when I got my brain health back, all of a sudden, I don't forget words. I can just remember words all the time. I'm still not great at names, but I used to actually have a panic anxiety thing because I would only know the names of five people that I worked very closely with at work. But if I would be at the grocery store and one of them walked up, I wouldn't know who they were because my brain was so slow and foggy. I didn't have context. And fortunately, I've gotten past that for the most part. And I know a huge number of people, so I'm still not great. But many people have some kind of anxiety there. And some of it, I think, is because their brain is untrained, and some of it's because their brain is unhealthy. So what I'm teaching is, here's what to do to get your brain healthy, and then you can choose your own training. There's techniques that Jim might teach you, but there's raw programming available with BrainTap that says, okay, I'm going to do this. My brain's health will improve and my memory capability will improve. So this is really cool.

We were talking about the aging things earlier. We did the one study we did with the aging population. 55, 65, all diagnosed with dementia. Within six weeks, their neuroplasticity changed. 49%. All of them were taken off. All of them, 100% were taken off the dementia scale. That study's in a bigger study now with Florida Atlantic University. But we showed that when you get blood flow to the brain, circulation improves. And then we started them exercising afterwards, not for the original study because we needed to show Brain Tap, but then we started giving them nutritional supplements. We can reverse this aging thing because the brain is like the liver. It will rebuild itself. But if not, if you're eating Fritos and drinking Coca Colas on this on.

The couch retirement home.

Yeah. Yes. I mean, when you go to the hospital and they go, you need some fluids and they give you a soda, I'm going, that's the worst.

You know, I just like to drink gasoline because it's less harmful at the hospital. That usually works better.

Yeah.

Yeah. I am kind of horrified because I understand that young brains for kids and older brains, you know, when you're 80 plus, they need the best nutrition in order to function the way that they're capable of. And school, school Lunches and retirement home food. Holy crap. It's, it's just, it's horrible. So let's say that in those two populations, even if they're eating less, you know, they're eating the McNugget diet. What happens if they brain tab, Are they still going to get benefits?

Well, they will because they're going to open up their, they're going to breathe because we're teaching them breathing exercise, they're getting more oxygen. And light is one of the most important nutrients we don't get, especially in the old folks homes, in schools where they're not getting them out on the playground. I mean when they took away phys ed, that's the worst thing you can do for the brain.

For kids.

For kids. So all this fitness comes in and then they got them so stressed out they line them up in their wheelchairs and they watch the news. Now they're stressing them out before they go to bed. They're not even getting the deep sleep that they need to replenish. So Braintap, we'd say, hey, turn that off, turn this on. And you now have a transformation in your life that's going to help with everything. And they're not going to crave negative foods. People listening probably know that. We all know people that go to the gym, they get physically fit, then they start thinking better. And we know people that start thinking better, then they go, I'm going to start going to the gym. It's kind of like 1, 2. We know that we need to do those together.

Awesome. If they can escape from the school campus or get some real food already. Okay, talk to me more about the app because you have the Braintap Pro app and that's evolved a lot since I first started using the Braintap. There's just an enormous number of different types of sessions. What are the big buckets that you guys are thinking about when you're making these different lessons?

Well, let's use the newest bucket, which is the upgrade kind of the biohacking bucket that we have is people want to know, where can I go get these? We could have put them all over the app, but we said let's put them all in one bundle. So hey, these are all the experts. Let's hear their information and let's mainline that information into the subconscious so it plays back as behaviors and changes in their life. And so not only are you listening to it, because once you listen to somebody on stage, wow, that's incredible. How do you apply that knowledge? You rehearse it because we get what we rehearse in life, not what we intend. So they take that information out. So that's one way. But let's say that you're having issues with stress. We have a series, so it's not just one thing. We need to wake them up in the morning, get their smr, which is we call digital coffee, so they can wake up their brain. That's the one that really exercises the.

How long does that take?

About 10 minutes.

Okay, so you wake up, you say whatever intentions you want or something and then you put on your brain top. It's sitting next to your bed and it takes 10 minutes.

All right.

And do you need to set another alarm? Are they going to be awake after that?

Oh, no, they'll be awake after that. What will happen is if you start the day off right, your brain will stay regulated. But if you got poor sleep, you're going to have that dysregulated brain we were talking about earlier. And so we need to get that brain balanced right in the morning. Now, in the middle of the day for everyone on earth, at about 2 o', clock, your temperature is going to drop. This is just a natural phenomena. Two to three o', clock, most people. And most people run off and they do things that are damaging to the body. They eat a lot of sugar, do something that stimulates.

But we're saying, hey, what's wrong with some coffee at 2? As long as, right before 2, as.

Long as they have enough time for that to die off. Right. If it's danger coffee, that's fine. That's perfect.

You know, literally you can have your coffee after lunch, but after two, don't do coffee because it hurts your sleep.

Yeah, some people, some people will have an issue.

Oh yeah, of course, some people have to stop at noon or even 10:00am yeah.

So you can watch that. But one thing we found, we had a person come in that actually her heart rate was 130. What did you do? She said, well, my friend just had three shots, espresso shots. So I did it. She wasn't used to drinking coffee.

Oh my God.

She did brain tap. We were able to bring it back down to 78 within 10 minutes.

Wow.

So we. You can.

So you're actually telling me braintap can undo coffee? Did you just killed your sales repeat? What are you doing, man?

Hopefully they don't want to fly at 130, you know, 30s, way too fast. I mean, that's like taking a jet pilot to get across town.

You re regulated her nervous system. I was dysregulated.

I mean, I like coffee, so I'm not, people will know. I'm not against coffee. The. I just think some people, they live on it, you know, it's not good.

For you first person to say it, right.

But, but in the middle of the afternoon, if you do that reboot, that's a 20 minute reboot.

20 minutes. That's a long time though.

It is. But, but what they, they can do a 10 minute if they need to. We had 10, 15 and 20 minute. If they can do the 20, they get the maximum result. Because we proved with like Kansas City Sport, which is a soccer team, we showed them after practice we could get them better recovery than they got four hours later. Because that's usually the standard after a workout in 20 minutes.

You've got some other pretty impressive athletes doing this. Tell me about some of the elite athletes who were doing, doing Brain tap.

Well, the coolest story is a Corey Anderson, he was being interviewed on ESPN after he won the light heavyweight championship and they said, you knocked the guy out in 42 seconds. How did you know to do that? He said, I knew I was going to do that. I said I was in the locker room listening to my brain cap and I visualized myself knocking him out at 42 seconds. I was listening to the sessions tap into the spotlight. We're also, we're in the middle of an elite sports study right now. And some of the guys, they're all starters in the NFL or NBA or NHL. And the, the one guy, he could not, they do these tests, of course with eye, there's a lot of different neurological tests with your eyes. And the guy, he was a lineman, but you have to look at a lot of things. And he was saying that after about 20, 20 to 30 days, he said he was like, he's back in college again. Everything was sharper, it was better. So it made a big deal for the, for the NFL and that. And so we're doing a bigger study.

Those football players are cognitive athletes. No one really talks about that. I didn't really understand it until I got to be friends with Nick Foles. And he just shared the amount of thinking and planning that you're doing while there's large people flinging their bodies at you like holy crap. So cognitive function there right when you're going to take a hit to the head. So you're finding big results there.

Results. We have people that breaking their own personal best, like Kathy Smith's daughter, who she was an 800 meter runner, first. First US Olympian to make the finals in over 30 years.

Wow.

Brain tap. She associated with it because she could run those times if it wasn't a race. So she had the potential. But when she was in those Olympic races, she would underperform. So she was able. Now she still didn't win, but what she did was phenomenal for her. Well, peak performers, we're talking about that. We did a peak performance study with Juilliard. We took the top performers at tech companies because there's this great exodus, right? People are working at home, then they got put back into the pressure cooker. They're saying, hey, I'm not going to do this anymore. So we're trying to figure out why they're getting burnout. What we found out, we didn't tell them. We had them take all these assessments because during the study, one of them was a depression scale. They would have all been clinically depressed. These were the top performers.

Oh, these are people who were locked in houses for two years. Gee, who would have thought they'd get depressed?

So the whole point I was trying to tell them was when your identity is all linked to your success in your business and you don't have an identity outside of that, you get some trouble. So what meditation does, or brain tapping does, or brain fitness will accomplish is help you to realize that you have an intrinsic value that is beyond what somebody's paying you for. Exchange for your time. That you have a necessary need in the universe. You're here for a purpose. And if you're so self contained that you don't realize that you have a gift to share with the world, everyone needs to do that. Everyone has that capacity.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

The Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curious, curing or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own. And this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.

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