Dial in Your Neuroplasticity to Get Smarter – Brett Wingeier, Ph D – #638

But the fact is everybody at the end of the day wants their brains to work better. And everybody has points in their life where they need to get, to get more from. Get more from the limited time that they have to learn or to train or whatever. And we're learning so fast so much about how this works that five years from now, we're gonna know exactly the waveform to deliver that is best for whatever category of stuff you want to lear.

Bulletproof radio.

A state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that clumps of cells in laboratory petri dishes just spontaneously formed brainwaves. These little lentil sized clusters, by the way, these are lentils without lectins, apparently of nerve cells. That was a super geeky diet joke. If you didn't get that, you'd have to read the Bulletproof Diet, so sorry. Anyway, these nerve cells are about the size of dumb little beans grow in a lab dish. And they start firing off rhythmic electrical signals. And those oscillations have some of the same features that we have in our own developing human brains as babies. These are little three dimensional spheres of human brain cells. They're called cerebral organoids and they're super simplistic models of the human brain. And in the study, researchers at UC San Diego coaxed stem cells into forming some of the neurons that make up the outer layer of the brain. And that's pretty fascinating neuroscience, but it makes you wonder, at what point does your brain become your brain? In this case, each of these organoids is about a million times smaller than a human brain. It lacks the complex combination of cells that help shape neural waves in people. They're not miniature brains, but just a model for a brain. But no one can tell you why they started doing that. So there's some questions at the very fundamental nature of consciousness, neuroscience and human existence. Where do you draw the line? I don't really know. But I also know plants are smart too, and that's why I eat them. Today's episode is a special episode recorded live in San Francisco at the headquarters of Halo Neuro. Because we're going to talk about electrical stimulation of the brain, I figured what better place to do that? And if you're interested in brains and performing well and things like that, you definitely want to check out Superhuman, my new book. It is just, just out there as we're recording the show, and you'll find really, really good value for you, especially if you realize that 1 in 10 people are likely to die of Alzheimer's. And what if there are ways to take care of your brain? What if there are ways to exercise your brain? Well, we're going to talk about some of the things you can do to make your brain stay young. And on my website, daveasprey.com, you can actually see a picture of my brain response time that says I'm responding with a 20 year old's speed, even though I'm 46. Maybe some of the neurostimulation that we're going to talk about today is part of how I do that. Maybe it's just ping pong, maybe it's mitochondrial enhancement, I don't really know. But you're going to learn a lot of cool stuff in today's episode and it's really cool to be able to pick the brain of someone who's really looked at engineering and neuroscience where they come together. So I'm going to be interviewing the co creator of Halo Sport, which is the world's first convenient wearable neurostimulator for athletes. Specifically, you might have seen videos of me doing a ladder training, which I'm super not experienced in, with a halo on my head. And I actually use this thing at home all the time. So with no further ado, I'm going to introduce you to Brett Wingeier, a PhD, CTO, co founder of Halo, and a guy who's going to blow your mind.

Thanks, Dave, and thanks for coming to Halo. It's really awesome to have you here.

I was hoping you would completely freak out when I said you're going to blow my mind because you're actually running electricity across it.

That's what we're all about.

We didn't push any buttons for.

You didn't push any. No triggers here, no trigger. So, Dave, what we're going to talk about today is we're going to talk about making brains better. And as you know, that's just about one of the most important things that we could possibly talk about.

So we're going to talk about coffee pretty much, because that's what it makes.

So I love coffee. Let's just get that out there. I love coffee. So we could talk about coffee for an hour and that'd be fantastic.

That would be my frontline technology for making the brain better. But the reason I wanted to pick your brain today was, you know, something about learning. And I know that people listening to bulletproof radio are interested in learning faster and just spending less time and energy getting stuff done. And since learning is a fact of life, we're all doing it all the time. What if you can acquire skills faster than normal? So explain to me some of the history of what we know about how we learn and why you got interested in this in the first place.

Yeah, yeah. Well, so brains love to learn. And that's one of these fundamental things. It's neuroplasticity. That's what a brain does, is it optimizes itself to get the job done. And the way that's happening under the hood is your brain cells are firing. That's what they do. They fire together. And they're constantly forming stronger and weaker connections that help them work together in exactly the right networks for exactly the right output. And what do we mean by output? That could mean the perfect backhand, it could mean the perfect ping pong, overhand spin shot, or it could mean learning a language. It's all about your brain optimizing itself to get the job done.

I had a conversation with my son. He's 10. And he said, daddy, what is the fastest way to learn something? Or what is the best teacher? And I thought about it and I said, gravity. And he said what? I said, because if you fall down, it hurts and you won't do it again. So the point that I was teaching was avoiding pain is something that we're wired into. So it seems like the first thing we learn is don't do things that hurt. And is that different than learn the perfect backhand, forehand, something else? What's going on there?

No. So it's exactly the same mechanism. And I hear you, because, you know, in raising kids, you know, the guideline is if you're looking at something they're doing, you want it to be, you want to evaluate. That is going to be just painful enough to be a life lesson, but not bad enough to actually hurt you. So when your brain does something that has a good result, then it activates mechanisms that reinforce those connections. When your brain does something that leads to pain, then it activates mechanisms that. That make those networks less likely to fire together in the future. So it's the same effect. It's all neuroplasticity.

All right, I'm getting the neuroplasticity angle. It's a huge part of Headstrong. My book was about how do I increase my own neuroplasticity. And certainly one of the technologies is electrical stimulation. But it seems like the ability to acquire a new language, let's say, is such a far cry from learning how to walk or Learning how to not. Not fall on sharp things and things like that. At what point does learning stop being about pain avoidance and start becoming something that's more about skill acquisition? And what motivates those neurons to do that? How do we take control of that?

Well, so the cool thing here is that doing something well is so deeply satisfying, and it's wired into us. You know that feeling you have when you execute on that perfect tennis stroke? And that feeling you have if you're. If you're learning a language and you get out there and you say something, right? And you're out there, and it's this enormously pleasurable feeling. And so that sensation of learning and doing something well, that's the reward that causes that feedback, that reinforces the connections that led to that great outcome.

I'm going to go back to pretty much my entire experience in school, and people appeared to want me to learn stuff that I just didn't really care about, and it had no usefulness to me whatsoever. And by the way, if you're one of my teachers back then, I'm sorry, but I'm actually right. Most of what you were teaching me wasn't that useful. Although I appreciate all of your service in putting up with my crap. But in all seriousness, I don't really care what year someone did something 500 years ago. All I care about is why they did it. But they never taught me the why. They just wanted me to memorize crap. So how do you make yourself in your career as an adult or as a teenager? How do you make yourself learn stuff you don't want to learn?

Yeah, and it's hard, and it's focus. And one of the brain mechanisms that comes into this is what's called cognitive control. And that is something that we are absolutely better at right now than we were when we were kids. In a lot of ways, our brains are. In a lot of ways, our brains are. It's getting harder to have them do what we want. Neuroplasticity goes down over time, reaction time, all these things. But one thing that we do tend to get better at is cognitive control, because our frontal lobes, they spent the first 25 years of our lives developing. And cognitive control is your brain's ability to focus on what you want it to focus on instead of necessarily what it wants to focus on or the view out the window or whatever.

So is this part of that? With age comes wisdom?

Yeah, with age comes wisdom. If you. And again, there's plenty of stuff that does tend to go down as time goes by. But if you look at the plots, working memory decreases, reaction time decreases, ability to pack stuff into short term memory decreases. The one thing that stays constant is knowledge of the world. And that's what we call wisdom. And that's why you picture the old silverback gorilla who's still able to keep up and know some sneaky tricks to keep, to keep the dominance. That's the silverback gorilla. We're the silverback gorillas here having this life world knowledge.

All right, so our brain performance goes down over time at least if you don't do something about it. My experience, just from my own measurements, I have, let's see, my hippocampal volume is 87th percentile, so it's not shrinking the way it's supposed to shrink as I age. My reaction time on EEG to audio and video or visual stimuli is exactly that of a 20 year old. I get more sleep in, well last night, 5 1/2 hours than the average 20 year old gets in 8 hours. My working memory, I've trained that so it's highly functional, probably better functioning than most 20 year olds as well. So all of these things are exercisable. They're things you can make the brain do if you have, is it cognitive control you have to have in order to do that or is it willpower? Some of this training is annoying or it takes time. But what enables people to decide that they're going to push themselves whether it's physically or mentally, in order to do training on things like that?

Right, right. So part of it is cognitive control, which I think is just kind of another name for willpower and the ability to focus. Part of it is relevance. It's always easier to learn something or train or practice anything if you feel like it's relevant to, to relevant to what you're doing every day. Relevant to some goal that you actually care about.

All right, let's talk about relevance then. You have more than 50 patents in your name, so you've been pretty successful in biomedical engineering, but you're also a singer songwriter.

That's right.

Where's the relevance here? Why do you do both of those things?

I guess there's a couple answers to that. You know, it's communication and communication is fun. And one thing I realized about myself is to bring this back to learning. I'm what's called a, what I call a performing introvert, meaning everything about how to kind of get out there and communicate. There's people that, that comes naturally for. And again, I look at my 9 year old. And that comes naturally to her. It comes naturally to my wife. For me, it was more of a learned skill. And part of that was just the enjoyment of the more you get out there, the more you use this.