Mini-Episode: Cool Facts Friday #2

This is a special mini episode that I hope you really enjoy. I retired the Cool Fact of the Day from Bulletproof radio after about 700 episodes and I miss it. And some listeners just were skipping through it and I don't want to waste your time, but as soon as I turned it off, a whole bunch of people said, dave, what's going on? I miss this. So if you're one of those people who likes quick, funny and interesting little tidbits, I put together just a short episode for you here. So this is something I'll do on occasion for you when there's just cool stuff that's worth talking about. So once a month on Fridays, the cool stuff is still happening. And if you subscribe to Bulletproof Radio on your favorite podcast platform, you'll get all the other cool knowledge in all the episodes. I've been getting more of the legends, more of the masters, people who've spent decades in their field toiling largely in obscurity, who are now bringing crazy levels of knowledge out here. I've never felt like I'm learning as much as I am now, but I'm still gonna do cool facts for you because hey, I'm a dork. Enjoy this cool fact is About EMF Exposure in Kids Brains Results of a new study surprised scientists. The Barcelona Institute for Global Health studied about 2,500 Dutch kids in ages 9 to 12 to find out if mobile devices affected their brain volume. You're not going to like this one. They explored the relationship between brain volume and different doses of radio frequency electromagnetic fields. Well, they did not find associations between alterations in total or lobe specific brain volume and overall radio frequencies or electromagnetic frequency doses. They didn't find any associations between brain volume and the use of mobile devices for making calls either. And that's funny, because mobile devices are usually the things we think of as the primary contributors of radio frequency exposure to the brain. But what they did find is that the brain is a very complex instrument because there was a link between a smaller volume of the caudate nucleus, a brain structure that's part of memory and coordination of movements and radio frequencies and electromagnetic frequency dose from the use of devices with screens, mobile phones, tablets and laptops with a wireless Internet connection. What that means is that the overall volume of your kid's brain probably won't change from rf, but memory and coordination of movements, yeah, that part of the brain that does shrink. That means you really want to measure screen time and especially wifi use to protect your kids from EMFs. There are some companies Developing cool devices that work to intercept EMFs. You can look at biohacking.comosystems.com for example, that's C O M O systems.com and I'll tell you, I turn off my wifi at night. I tell my kids, don't use wifi on that. Plug it in to get Internet whenever possible. And if they get some occasional wifi, they'll be okay, but minimize. You don't have to be crazy about it, but you don't want to just use it with wanton. This is a really important study because it shows there is an effect. It is not the only one like it. Cool fact of the day has to do with Legos. It turns out a single piece of LEGO takes hundreds of years to break apart in the ocean. And recent researchers found easy to identify LEGO pieces on beaches around the world. And they wanted clues on how old they were. And they figured out there's cadmium in some pieces of LEGO from the early 70s and the 80s, so they could actually date LEGO pieces kind of like they do dinosaurs. And they said if a piece had been in the sea for 30 to 40 years, it had 3 to 40% less mass than the original LEGO blocks. So based on those measures, it takes between 100 and 1300 years to break down completely. Now, when it breaks down, it doesn't mean that they're actually going back to mother Nature. That just means they broke down enough to be absorbed into fish and plankton for us to eat them. So yummy Legos for breakfast. Yikes. We gotta do something about that now. What does that mean for you? Well, it means that we are actually clearing up the oceans. We're clearing up the canals in Venice where there are dolphins swimming in them. Now, it's actually one of the quietest periods for studying seismic activity, bird songs and things like that. When things get back to a little bit more normal, maybe we can just realize we're all going to live way longer than we think, and we don't want to pollute our own sandbox too badly here. So let's just be a little extra conscious of, do you really have to have that extra piece of plastic crap? And if you don't, maybe you don't. That said, Legos rock. Just give them to a kid when you're done with them. All right, today's cool fact of the day, it's actually about kids with learning difficulties. But it's really cool because researchers just figured out at the University of Cambridge that learning difficulties, which are affecting about 14 to 30% of kids. Kids are not localized in specific regions of the brain a lot of the time. In fact, they looked at 500 kids and they found that they could not associate specific regions of the brain with specific cognitive difficulties. They were just mapping out brain differences and they didn't see anything. But they did find that the kids brains have hubs. And poor connectivity between these hub areas causes learning difficulties. And that hub connectivity isn't just about learning. It's also about adolescent mental health disorders like schizophrenia that come on as those hubs develop connections in adolescence. Now, I've believed in this connectivity, this network map the systems behavior in the brain for a long time. And it's one of the core things that we train at The Neuroscience Institute, 40 years of Zen, where I do my own training. The company that I started and training hub connectivity, I believe, could change the world. But this is one of those very interesting things where. Wait a minute. Maybe it's not that this part of the brain is a problem. Maybe it's the way that all the different areas talk to all the other ones at the same time. And this is why artificial intelligence and machine learning is so good at looking at brain signals to tease out that really complex information. It seems like lately we've been looking at this idea of there must be a single cause for something. So it's a single part of the brain that's causing this. And it turns out that mother nature, it's usually not a single cause because we're a complex system, and everything changes everything else. And it's the same whether you're looking at things like the pandemic. What's the cause of it? Okay, Is it caused by a virus? Yeah. Is it caused by immune systems that can't handle the virus? Yeah. What's the cause of that? Is it one thing? Well, no, it's many things. So you end up with this complex system that you're juggling and managing. And now we have some pretty darn strong proof that inside the brain of kids, kids, and I would say also adults, we have the same bit of evidence that it's not just one thing. So we can start taking a deep breath and saying, maybe it's not a single pill, maybe it's not a single procedure. Maybe it's a lifestyle. Cool fact of the day. Squid brains. MRI technology is helping us understand squid brains. Now, you could be asking yourself, what the hell, Dave? Why do I care about squid brains? And the reason is that squids aren't that different from you and me, except for that squids are made out of this really amazing deliciousness when they're cooked properly and humans aren't. Aside from that, they're a really good model for letting us see what's going on inside of brains because they don't have much of one. And in Australia we've, we as in the species of humanity and researchers specifically have been completing the first MRI based mapping of the squid brain that's happened in the last 50 years. They found 145 new connections and pathways tied to vision and motor systems. And they figured out that this is probably why squid are so good at evading predators and communicating with each other. And brain mapping can let us develop an atlas of neural connections which lets us understand their complex brains. So we can understand our complex brains. And some members of the cephalopod categories have more than 500 million neurons in their brains. Rats only have 200 million and mollusks only have 20,000. So it's kind of an interesting thing that we're going to these, these creatures that have relatively simple nervous systems, except in some areas where they have superpowers. And I want to know how can I get a squid brain for my movement systems and my predator evasion? So I would probably finally be able to beat my 10 year old Alan at ping pong, if only I could just get a squid neural set up for my movement system. So if any of you listening are working on this research and you can genetically engineer a virus to give me a squid brain, I'm down. But this kind of stuff is increasingly becoming a part of our knowledge base for biology and we are biological creatures. So you want to give yourself a serious upgrade? No, I don't really think I want a genetically engineered bios right now. But, but will I end five years when we've gotten safety and things like that? Maybe, maybe we all will. Especially if we figure out that it has a very high safety profile and it makes you live longer and feel better. So anytime there's a breakthrough in brains, I get all excited about it. Today's cool fact of the day is that immune cells in your brain chew up memories. And that's because forgetting allows your brain to just, just drop stuff that doesn't matter, trivial memories. And it lets you gather the stuff that matters, the beneficial information that probably is going to either keep you from dying, make sure you eat, or make sure that you get some. Those are the three things that your brain really likes to hold on to information for. And we didn't really, or we still don't fully understand how the brain stores memories, but we think that forgetting involves destroying or at least changing these big webs of precise connections, also known as synapses. And new research just came out in Science magazine that says immune cells in the brain, called microglia, are like gardeners, and they prune extra synapses and clear debris from the brain. And neuroscientists in China performed experiments on mice to see what these microglia were doing for forgetting. And they put mice in a cage where they got mild, tingly electric shocks. Not real pain, but just like, like, like a static electricity kind of thing on their foot. So they'd get an unpleasant memory. And then every time the mice were put in the same cage for the next five days, they'd freeze, expecting the little tingle on their foot. But after about three, four weeks, they forgot the experience and they wouldn't freeze as much. But then some mice got a drug to kill those microglial cells, and those mice froze more often, which means they held onto the unpleasant memory. In other words, they couldn't forget. Now, what does that mean for you? Well, it turns out that this same process of microglia culling your synapses is linked to early stages of Alzheimer's. So understanding how these little immune pruners in the brain work is really important for curing Alzheimer's. And it's also important to understand that these parts of the brain can. They don't like ketones as much as they like glucose. What does that mean for you? It means that maybe even though we know that the ketogenic diet and some of the things that raise ketones are good for Alzheimer's, maybe you don't want to only burn ketones. Maybe you don't want to only burn sugar. Maybe if you're on something, oh, I don't know, like the bulletproof diet where you sometimes eat some carbs and you do a cyclical thing like that, sometimes you fast, sometimes you eat where you're able to metabolize some carbohydrates and feed your good gut bacteria. Maybe that's a good strategy, because it turns out these little cells that we didn't know so about, they can live on ketones. They just don't live as well. This is why cycling the way nature intended probably works better. This is one more little data point that says, hey, don't go dirty keto. Don't go, oh, I only eat plants, because, well, that doesn't work either. So I kind of like to say being in the middle of the road is good, except that sucks too. Cycling in and out of the middle of the road. That's what seems to work for almost everything, including sleep, exercise, food, sex, whatever you name it. Don't stay in the middle, don't stay on any extreme. Move around.

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