Biohacking Doctor: Unlock THIS Secret Brain Region For Peak Focus!

The brain is a complex system. Astrocytes allowed Einstein's neurons to perform exceptionally well. There is this one tiny, tiny region in the brain called the blue dot. But it has influence over the entire state of the brain. The eyeballs are really a representation of what is taking place inside the brain.

Maybe one day your webcam will be able to tell you what's going on in your brain just by looking in your eyes. How far off from that are we? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is going to be a ton of fun because we're going to talk about hyper efficiency and what you can do to change your brain, to change how you work. And as you might have noticed, this is kind of a big deal for me because this has been a theme for most of my life. Partly from having a brain that wasn't very functional, from chronic fatigue syndrome, Asperger's syndrome, oppositional defiant disorder. I think I might have kept some of that, at least whenever they try to tell me I'm supposed to eat garbage. But all the other stuff, OCD that I used to have and to go from there to a brain that can focus the way I want, this is a something that I want to teach you and something that is just very central to biohacking. So this episode is for you to learn how to boost your cognitive efficiency, even if there's a bunch of weird stuff going on in the world around you, which there is because, well, it's the world and there's always weird stuff going on. You're just probably more aware of it, and there might be some forces out there amplifying the amount of weirdness that you see. We call those algorithms and evil corporate overlords and things like that. Our guest today is Dr. Meus Deroni, who's a physician trained at this little school called the University of Cambridge. She's a neuroscientist and she wrote a book called Hyper Efficient Optimize your brain to transform the way you work. This is exactly what I have done. At this point, I have 13 companies, believe it or not. You know about danger coffee and upgrade labs in 40 years of Zen, but there's some other ones in there. And I'm constantly innovating because my brain works and it is the biggest gift I've ever had. So in this episode, we're going to talk about mental performance, clarity, how you can make your brain last way longer so that you can get all the stuff done in a day, including taking care of yourself and your family and Your community, all that kind of stuff. So this will be a really fun episode. We're going to go into all the different aspects of hacking your brain. Dr. Stone, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure.

I'm a systems guy. I started out as a. A computer hacker, and I built and taught engineers how to build distributed systems. And the brain's a distributed system. The mitochondria is a distributed system. And I'm always looking at efficiency and emergent behaviors. And there's small parts of the brain that have an outsized impact on what it does, and there's reasons for that. We don't necessarily know what all the reasons are, but they're definitely measurable with eeg, they're trackable, and things like that. So do you see parallels between the way we organize the broader world around us and what happens inside our brains?

This is such a great question. Yes. In fact, you said you're a system, Sky. And the brain is a complex system. It does have a distributed way of processing. And in many ways, as we have specialized, reduced the world around us to single pathways, to being more understandable, more controllable, reduced its distributed nature to more kind of single nodes. We try to understand the brain that way, but in fact, the brain is much like the world. It is distributed. And the more we learn, the more we realize how it is such a complex system that reducing it to single pathways is not the answer to many of the illnesses, many of the problems that we encounter about the brain. So looking at the brain as a wider part of the ecosystem we live in is actually a great way to understand it.

The ecosystem in the world around us has been heavily modified by people. It seems like our brains have also been heavily modified, maybe without our. We'll say without strategic planning. Do you think it's a good idea to put our brains back to the way they were before we modified them?

So the brain is, as you know, is highly, highly adaptable, but you have functional connectivity on top of the actual hard wiring. We know there's a degree of neuroplasticity, and survival has really meant adaptation above everything else. So as we continue to engineer the world around us, we are adapting. We are trying to adapt, but especially in this time, this day and age, we are discovering that many of the problems that we are perhaps seeing is a result of not adapting simply because we are engineering our environment too drastically to be able to adapt to it well enough to function as we ought to. And to your point, certainly many of the solutions we are finding in the world today, Whether it's something as, you know, as common sense. As common sense, a solution, as adding movement back to your life, adding daylight back to your life, aligning yourself with your circadian rhythm, which I know you're a great advocate of. Really, all of those things were part of our system. We were. Those are hardwired into us because we adapted to the environment we evolved in. And we have now, really, for the sake of efficiency, ironically changed our environment to. And we have quite, you know, with a profound lack of wisdom, modified these essential characteristics of the environment in order to make our world perhaps more to our predictions or to our volition. But in so doing, we cannot change the way we have been hardwired to it. So, you know, all of these things exercise circadian rhythm. We're now talking about photobiomodulation. All of these things are really reverting to how we used to be. They're not really sudden solutions, sudden, you know, miraculous kind of drugs or potions that. That cure all ills. What we're really doing is returning to how things were. So, yes, in answer to your question.

That makes me pretty happy to hear. I look at biohacking as recreating the signals we were supposed to get from the environment that drive our ourselves in the directions we want. But if you're in the environment and the environment just does what it does, your body's kind of responding to the environment. But if you program your environment using all these technologies, and I stack all the ones I can think of at Upgrade Labs, which is one of the companies I mentioned earlier, the idea is, well, I can use the environment to direct the brain, to direct the biology, to do what I want it to do, instead of like going out into nature, which I'm a huge fan of and I think is necessary. But. But if you only did that, you actually have less control than if you spend time in nature and then you send a specific signal in. Are you aligned with that perspective?

I think we need to have a balance. Progress is a little bit like the area of time. We can't reverse things. We can't go back to how things were. And the best we can do is create some kind of compromise between the signals, the information, the data that our bodies, our brains rely on and are missing from the world around us and the current world as we have created it. So certainly doing as much as you can to add those things back in within the limits of where we are. If we revert progress, we lose many of its benefits. So it's really a question of working with what you've got. And the brain actually being so remarkably adaptable, if you do very little, it goes a long way.

Which is better, a powerful brain or an efficient brain?

I would argue they're the same.

I knew you were going to say that.

They are exactly the same.

I don't agree with you, though. You can have an inefficient brain that's really powerful. You can also have a brain that's low power and efficient. And the place you'd want to end up would be a brain that's very powerful and very efficient. And I've gone to great lengths on both of those sides of the spectrum. And it seems like Einstein didn't have a bigger brain necessarily. He had a more efficient brain, from what I understand. But if we could have doubled the amount of voltage his brain made, it would have taken better advantage of his efficient networks.

So my point is, you can increase the power by improving efficiency.

That doesn't increase power, that increases output, but does increase power going into the system.

It improves the quality of output. Oh, yeah, it improves the quality of output. So I guess if you're really defining power in terms of the physics. Energy over.

Yeah, the energy going in and the amount of energy the brain can create.

Right, right. So in that sense, yes, of course you can have inefficiency while having energy usage, and hence you have a huge amount of energy waste, which, of course, as you know, is where the mitochondria conversation comes in and oxidative stress and all of that. But if you maintain efficiency in the larger sense, which is the broad thesis of my stance, you can optimize the way your brain performs when you need it to perform at highest intensities. And to your point, I might be wrong here, but the data I've seen is what Einstein had more of is astrocytes in the brain. So he had as many neurons as anyone else, but he actually had more astrocytes as pain, especially in the area, I think, of his prefrontal cortex, some parts of his prefrontal cortex. And astrocytes are really housekeepers within the brain. They mop up extra glutamate, they are involved in giving neurons ketones. And for the. Also for passing on lactate, the lactate shuttle is involved in astrocytic performance. So astrocytes allowed, we could conjecture, allowed Einstein's neurons to perform exceptionally well by maintaining efficiency to a degree. This is conjecture, pure conjecture. There's no paper. There's paper on astrocytes, but there's no paper on this particular theory, of course.

I love that you're talking about this. Neurons are the rock stars of the brain. Everyone talks about neurons, including me, and no one talks about glial cells. And astrocytes are a type of glial cells, but glial cells are the roadies and the stage manager and the lighting manager for the rock stars. And rock stars are going to sit in a bar playing an acoustic guitar with 12 people in the bar if they don't have all of that infrastructure. And as a CEO, I know damn well that my efficiency comes from the team that supports me and all the work that I'm doing. The neurons are the same way, and I don't want to say they're the CEOs of the brain, because that's a little bit dumb, but they require so much repair and maintenance because they're so high power that most of what you see in the world of biohacking is people talking about neurons, neurons, neurons, and maybe inflammation from glial cells, but it's actually the ordering of the brain, the maintenance of the brain, not just inflammation. So, all right, what do I do to have better glial cells or astrocytes, not just neurons.

So again, I return to my first argument, first point, which is that if I were to really give you a truthful answer to that question, I would have to say think of the brain, again, as a complex system. So in order to have, as you say, well, functioning astrocytes, you would have to treat the whole system and let it respond to its environment. I mean, one of the. Professor, Mary, the late Professor Marion diamond, who studied Einstein's brain, she did a lot of work with mice, and she found that actually stroking the mice and. And these were lab mice, so they were not really very loved mice, but. But showing them some kind of human love and human affection, and she spoke a lot about this, seem to actually increase the levels of their astrocytes. Now, of course, that's not the only way, and we don't know if that same would work in humans, but it shows you how the brain is really in constant dialogue with the world around you. And the best we can do is modify your dialogue, that particular conversation with the world in order to optimize what's actually taking place at the level, at the molecular level in the brain.

Can I be a little politically incorrect with you?

Sure, go ahead.

So that professor, what was her name? Marie or Maria?

Marion Diamond.

Marion. Thank you. I knew I didn't quite have read Marian Diamond. I've definitely read the paper but she stroked the mice and she's a woman. Now you might say, where is Dave going with this? Well, there is very interesting data that says if male lab assistants feed mice, their stress response goes up, and if female lab assistants feed mice, it goes down. And so every time they're doing mouse studies, they say we controlled for all variables. They never control for the gender of the person feeding the mice. And I think there's something going on at an unseen level. It doesn't mean it's not real or measurable. It just means that our biology isn't wired to see it. Between the masculine and the feminine. And what's going on in the brain, what do you think?

I mean, in science, everything is possible. So I don't have enough knowledge on that. I don't know if Marianne, professor diamond, carried out a, you know, comparison between herself stroking the mouse or the mice or not. But certainly in science everything is possible. And we don't know the. I certainly don't know the answer to that.

I don't think that. That we have an answer in modern science. I think we probably do have an answer. If you look at, you know, historical accounts or you look at yoga or tantra or traditional Chinese, think it might have something to do with the brain. In my work, one of the sources of nourishment is your intimate relationship and your community around you. Like, actually, that's one, that's two. But there's two of these big sources, after safety and after food and stuff like that. And it feels like making the brain feel safe is necessary for the glial cells to go do their maintenance. Just like in the rest of the body, you don't put on muscle if after you work out, your body isn't nourished and safe because you're stressed. But if you're unstressed, and we've seen at upgrade labs, if we can just make people recover so the body feels safe, they'll put on muscle or change VO2 max quickly. But if they're overstressed, they don't do that very much. And the. The astrocytes and other immune cells in the body seems like they follow the same rules. And we're still figuring it out at the very highest data levels, looking at things like oxytocin or things like inflammatory markers. But I think that that old hermetic thing, as above, so below, it seems like, is happening inside the brain.

Well, you know, it's. It's very interesting because there is certainly a lot of data now about how loneliness affects the brain. So at a very, very macroscopic societal level, we used to, you know, it used to be very kind of fluffy stuff 20 years ago or even 10 years ago, but now there is data about it to support it. MARIANNE Professor Diamond's mouse stroking was quite fluffy, but clearly it showed results. I think, to your point, safety is our ultimate or ultimate priority. You know, as you know, we now see the brain as a sort of, it's a way to see it. It's not everything it does, but it's a prediction machine. So it needs to be able to predict what happens next because it uses sort of Bayesian statistics to always be ready for any sort of uncertainty or danger lurking behind uncertainty. And it's only when it knows that, that there is no uncertainty that it can use its resources for its own benefit. Whereas if there is uncertainty, then of course it has to save its resources and have a completely different approach. And you kind of see the same with the history of humanity. When humans were, and I'm not talking about any one particular era, but through ancient history, Middle Ages, whenever people were warring, whenever people were living in constant uncertainty, that's when ideas didn't really emerge. Creative ideas and the best of civilizations really emerged once people had some kind of stability within the uncertainty. So again, this relates to your first point about how we reflect the ecosystem and the world we are in.

You mentioned the brain as predicting the future. And there's two people whose work I'm familiar with who have the best models for consciousness that I've come up, I've seen anyone come up with. One of them is Jeff Hawkins, the guy who was a founder of Palm Pilot, like the very first handheld personal organizer. The great, great, great, great great grandfather of your iPhone. And his book on intelligence talks about how the brain predicts the future a microsecond, in, out, and only notices things that don't match predictions, right? So you're vaguely aware of stuff, but if something doesn't match, like you, you, you look at it. And then the other book is Donald Hoffman, who writes the Case Against Reality. And he says, well, the brain is a user interface on reality for all life. Like that's what life does. So that we exist in a world we can't see. And your consciousness job is to throw out all the stuff you don't need to stay alive. Which of those models is the best one based on your experience?

I think I would be very naive to commit to one. I think ultimately the answer is going to be it's a combination of many of these things. I mean, if you look at the research on consciousness at the moment, the span is so incredibly wide and you know, ultimately you can. I'm sure there will be a theory of everything at some point, although I would, I would guess there probably won't be because again, our brains will limit how much we can learn about our brain's own function. But if you look at the current data, I think the evolution of AI and intelligent machines is really making use of Bayesian prediction mechanisms. And this is why the predictive nature of the brain has really come into the spotlight recently. Incidentally, so have astrocytes because they have been using astrocytes to change the weighting of some of the connections in their neural networks. So at this moment there is a lot of research on the brain being a predictive machine and using Bayesian prediction. And there is a lot of data which we can now replicate some aspects of the brain, brain's performance in AI using intelligent machines, using neural networks. And so that has a lot of credibility. I have heard many theories at the moment. I don't know enough, I haven't read enough in those areas to be able to comment on whether they're better or worse. But definitely the more theories we have, the more avenues we have to pursue to actually get to the truth.

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No, I'm of course familiar with Brian Johnson, but not with Col. No.

So Brian made a fortune at Braintree, which was a payment processing company, and he put $80 million of his own money into building is probably the world's most advanced brain scanning technology. And before he entered the longevity space, I reached out and was like, I want to play with one of these for teaching human brains. And he just said, no, I built it so I could understand the brain. So we can make AI better, right? I'm like, no, I just need to see what's going on in there so I can make my own AI better. And maybe someday that that'll happen. But there's, there's so much going on where we're looking at the system of the brain from all these different lenses, and I'm pretty convinced that we still don't really know what's going on in there. Are you of the same opinion if we know 1%?

Entirely. Entirely. In fact, at the start of my learning, I was much more confident about the brain than I am now and today also with research on psilocybin and the way neural oscillations are altered, the way the functional connectivity of the brain is being altered through anesthesia. There's so many unknowns in our conversation. And I suppose, you know, ultimately the quest for the brain will be a little bit like physics. So you have a quantum level of theory, which in many ways are at odds with Newtonian physics, Newtonian mechanics. So I'm sure we will have, and we actually already do have that sort of interplay at the moment. But again, I think it's all good because, you know, the more avenues we pursue, the more likely we are to get there.

If you had to pick one and your goal was creating A hyper efficient brain. Would it be psilocybin or ketamine?

Oh gosh, neither. Because my point is with hyper efficient, being hyper efficient is you're changing your dialogue with your environment. So in a perfect world, I'm going to say neither.

Don't you want to increase BDNF and nerve growth factor and neuroplasticity in order to become better at your environment?

You do, but you can do that through your environment. You don't necessarily need to do that. Of course there are, there is wonderful data on psilocybin and its benefits at the moment, but in the general context of day to day life, I would rather go by the dialogue route with the environment.

Have you tried either one?

No.

Why not?

I'm sort of happy where I am. But no, I haven't tried. However, I think the research is phenomenal and I 100% support it.

It's funny, a few years ago I interviewed Dr. Nicotine from Vanderbilt University who spent 30 years studying the effects of pharmaceutical nicotine on the brain and has written paper after paper showing that it reduces the risk and the severity of Alzheimer's disease. And at the end of the interview I said, well, what's, what form of nicotine do you use? And he said, oh, I've never tried it. I don't want to bias my research. And I'm like, no, like how do you research something without doing it well?

Okay, so I, I'm going to come back to you with an argument. So I have written, co written two papers on the ketogenic diet and I have tried that. So I'm, I'm not completely, you know, distant from my research.

What did you learn about the keto diet in your papers?

So I wrote it actually, right at the time when you were, when your bulletproof coffee was incredibly popular. Um, I was living in Hong Kong and this is back in 20, I think it was 2013, 2014, that sort of time. And the scientific literature on ketosis was really emerging. So we wrote two. So we wrote one hypothetical paper on using the ketogenic diet to treat or potentially control the symptoms of multiple sclerosis. And we wrote a follow up on a condition called Leber's Hereditary Optic Neuroscience Neuropathy. Again, both of them involve mitochondria. And while writing those papers, I thought, this is such an extraordinary way of changing the way you're eating. And of course, bulletproof coffee was everywhere at the time in Hong Kong. All the cafes had it. And I thought, I'm going to try. If I recommend this to my patients. I'm going to try this for myself. And I did. I was on it for a pretty long time. And you know, there is now, this was a while ago, and there is now much, you know, lots more data on the benefits and on the potential mechanisms of how and, and why it could work and its pitfalls. So we now know how it may be more beneficial. Of course, we do know it's more beneficial for certain brain conditions, but, you know, ultimately for, for day to day life, that's a, that's a different factor. You can think of metabolic flexibility and all those other things, but it was a very, it was very important to try it if you're recommending it to your patients, for sure.

One of the reasons I wrote the bulletproof diet is that unending ketosis is bad for glial cells. And because the glial cells, these astrocytes we were talking about earlier, they thrive on glucose. That's their preferred fuel source. But neurons thrive on ketones. Which means that the whole point of the bulletproof diet wasn't do keto, because Dr. Atkins did that. The year I was born, his big book came out about ketosis. The problem was when I went into unending ketosis, I could only lose 50 of my hundred pounds. And it's not great for the brain. And people say, but I thought ketones were good for the brain. They are, but come out of ketosis at least once a week so that your astrocytes get their dose of glucose and so the body has metabolic flexibility and then pay attention to the type of fats you're eating and the type of carbs, and then you get very different results than just ketosis. But a lot of that just got simplified in the world of, of, you know, nutritional trolling online saying you have to be in ketosis all the time and run the Kona Iron Man. I'm like, that's going to metabolically destroy you. Because glucose isn't always bad, just excessive glucose is bad. Is there an optimum level of glucose and ketones for astrocytes and neurons to have a hyper efficient brain?

I think from what we know of the data so far, if we're talking about a healthy individual with a healthy, relatively healthy brain, so someone with not a diagnosis of a disease, it does seem that metabolic flexibility, just as you described, is an optimal way to exist simply because your ketone levels are not going ridiculously high and at the same time you're getting glucose exposure. So the way in which I know there, there is something called a fasting mimicking ketogenic diet, which is now being used in therapy. But you know, on a day to day basis. Again, coming back to how we evolved and how we exist. And if you look at, you know, many communities, long living communities now around the world, again, it's this dialogue with the world around us. We rarely woke up at three in the morning to speak to someone on the opposite side of the world with lots of blue light and having a couple of Mars bars or burgers, you know, three, we never did that. We usually would have eaten and then we would have fasted and then we would have moved and then we would have eaten and we would have fasted. And most data now suggests, and again, I'm not a nutrition expert, I know about ketogenic diets only in the realm of the brain. I'm not an expert on obesity at all. But we do know that generally for health purposes, this kind of metabolic flexibility puts you in just the right levels of both at regular intervals.

If someone is under chronic stress, should they be in ketosis or not be in ketosis?

It's interesting because if you are following a normal diet and then you go into ketosis or you start a ketogenic diet or you fast, however you enter ketosis during the initial phase, your body actually triggers a stress response because it summons more glucose release. So your glucocorticoid response is going to rise. So if you're very, very hungry, you rely on the sugar response to carry you through, because that's how we've evolved in a stress response. And I think the data suggests that you have to wait several days before you reach levels of ketones that bring your stress response down. But then other factors come into play because you are trying to reduce your metabolic rate. So there's a, there's a whole interplay. But if you're under chronic stress, what is true is reducing anything that increases your inflammation level is a good idea. And so if what you're eating is inflammatory, then eating less of that will help. And the way you're eating, so aligning yourself with your circadian rhythm and kind of changing all the variables around what you're eating. And in terms of stress itself, if you look at ibs, which is a stress related disorder, again, there's certain types of food that seem to be more aggravating. If you're susceptible to ibs.

You mean like whole food plant diets?

Why did I know you're going to ask?

You mean kale is what you're saying?

So every, there's no, again, I'm not a nutrition expert by any means, but it is true that with irritable bowel syndrome, there is work done from Monash University who have come up with an acronym of fodmaps, which is a group of sugars essentially, which are highly fermentable. And eating less of those seem to reduce symptoms of ibs. And you could still follow, you could still eat plants should you choose to. It's a personal choice.

I'm not anti plants. I believe you want some carbs. I'm not a all keto, all the time kind of guy. Not by a long. Just to be clear, for people who think I only eat meat or something, that's not true. So should you choose to eat plants.

Then you can go low on these FODMAPs and these, this does seem to help symptoms. And I know that different centers use slightly different approaches. So some of them say, use a trial period where you have very little and then you start reintroducing them bit by bit. But, you know, it all depends on, on your personal progress and your personal symptoms.

One of the things that's confused me a lot because I had massive brain fog. I've had serious memory issues when I was younger and just a lot of brain dysregulation. And Also I had 15 years of antibiotics, so my gut was messed up. And if I ate the fodmaps, the fermentable carbs, I would clear the room with my. Well, just say you didn't want to be around me. And my brain would get really foggy if I ate those kind of foods. But when I wrote my longevity book and I'd fixed my gut and I increased the amount of fermentable carbs that I ate that were compatible with my system, I quadrupled the number of types of species of bacteria in my gut, which is a hallmark of a younger person. So our body wants fermentable carbs if we can handle them, because we fix the gut. And those fermentable carbs make butyric acid and propionic acid, which are ketogenic fatty acids made from fermentable carbs that help the brain. So it's really confusing. It seems like it might be the gut, not the brain. How the heck do you solve this in research?

You're completely right. It's incredibly difficult to do, which is why we haven't solved it for a long time. I mean, if 25 years ago you told me that, or you went to a medical conference and you said, you know, Multiple sclerosis. We propose that there is a link with a certain fingerprint of gut bacteria. I think you wouldn't have got your poster or paper accepted at the conference at all because it would be so ludicrous. But I think now we are getting to a point where we're having a dialogue between different departments, different medical departments, and we're realizing that, you know, there's such a connection between everything. I mean, if you focus on the eye, for instance, you know, the eye is a really small organ. But if you go to an eye hospital, the cornea specialists have never spoken to the retinal specialists, who have never spoken to the glaucoma specialists. We all have. We each have our separate conferences. But of course, now we're discovering that there is so much overlap between all of them. You know, some of the latest incredible data suggested link between glymphatic circulation and glaucoma. And there's great lines of research. A paper came out just a couple of weeks ago by Andrew Lee, who's a great, great neuro ophthalmologist in the US and he's studying the visual system of astronauts about how red light therapy could potentially be one way to ameliorate certain conditions of the cor cornea. So there's now so much, you know, conversation between the different departments. And I think this is. This is the point, because the gut and the brain are so far away, much further away than the retina and the cornea. And so we've never had a conversation between them.

I saw a vision specialist right before the pandemic, and a woman who really goes deep on aging of the eyes. And she looked at my cornea and said, you don't have the yellowing and stiffening of the cornea that should be happening with the number of years you've been alive. I don't know what's causing that, but you should keep doing it. And I have a practice of blocking toxic blue light under 490 nanometers. That's why you always see me wearing the true dark glasses. They're not blue blockers. They allow blue through. They just block toxic blue. And I read under a red light. And there are studies showing that reading under a red light improves vision. And there's reasons I do this. And it seems like it works. And if you flip over to Satchin Panda's lab, where they're looking at melanopsin sensors in retinal cells, and you realize they're studded with mitochondria, and those are the things that control circadian biology, they're also light sensitive and they like red light. So there's an argument for having, you know, a true light red light, or just using red light at night as part of circadian stuff. For the eyes, and this is a question for you, because you've studied the brain. I look at the eyes as an extension of the brain, almost like they're not really separate organs, although they are. Do you think eye health is a great proxy for brain health?

A hundred percent. The eyes are an extension of the brain because they're the only bit of the brain you can see from the outside. Because when a doctor looks into your eyes, an ophthalmologist looks into your eyes, your eyes with an ophthalmoscope, and they see this little yellow disc at the back of the eye. That's your brain, that's your cranial nerve. So it's the only visible cranial nerve from the outside. And yes. So for a long time, we assumed the answer was no or unknown. But now, over the last, I'd say maybe 25 years, we are increasingly seeing more and more data to confirm that the eyeballs are really a representation of what is taking place inside the brain that you cannot see. So, for instance, retinal nerve fiber layer thinning, so thinning of the matter of the retina, if you like, that is correlated.