Unlock Your Smarter Brain

Welcome to the Mind Body Space Podcast, where you can boost your resilience just by listening. You'll get research-backed tools to stress less, be happier and healthier while you work toward your highest potential.

Hi, I'm Dr. Juna Bobby MD. I'm a board-certified physician and a mom of two amazing kids. Over 10 years ago, I left one of the most prestigious medical practices in New York City to specialize in mind-body medicine. Since then, I've had the privilege of teaching my Science of Resilience program to students who are curious and motivated to learn how to thrive in an increasingly complex world. I created this podcast to reach all the people who could benefit from the conversations that I have with experts in performance psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and lifestyle medicine. I also share tips on some of my favorite topics, like how to train our brains to focus better, and how to get organized for extreme productivity. In my special RxChillPill episodes, I guide you through relaxation response exercises using my extra calm voice to counteract your daily stress. I do all this because I love sharing science-backed self-help tools that changed my life and so many others. I do know that there's way too much information out there, So I work hard to curate and share trustworthy sources for free. By subscribing, rating, and sharing this podcast, you are supporting this effort, and I am so grateful to you.

Today, we're going to talk about how to unlock your smarter brain, what neuroscientists call top-down processing. We all have good days and bad days, and there are times when we feel more focused and smarter. Like so many of my students, I am unfortunately quite familiar with this feeling of being overwhelmed by too many important things demanding my attention, seemingly all at once. And I'm obsessed with trying to do more of the important things more effectively and really dropping all the things that are not going to give me the results that I want in my life. Some people seem to do this a lot better, even when we all have the same 24 hours in a day. But I also know that this feeling of being overwhelmed is too common for many of us, and it doesn't spare high achievers either. The good news is that there are science-backed, non-pharmacological tools that we can use in our day-to-day lives to access the smarter, wiser part of our brains so that we can take actions that nudge us toward the moment-to-moment decisions that we know will make us happy in the long run. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. Like focusing our attention on what's important and having clarity of our minds so we can prioritize things in a way that makes sense for our goals. Or even knowing what our goals are, right? Sometimes we're not even clear on that. Like knowing what to work on or what to study. Then of course, turning off our distractions like the phone, social media, YouTube, and even putting aside our own internal distractions like thoughts about what else we need to get done or thinking about the past or worrying about the uncertainty of the future so that we can actually focus on what we need to be working on in the present moment. In today's podcast, I'm going to briefly explain what our smarter brain is, where it is, what it does, and describe a researcher team's findings on how to access it when you need to focus your attention and get productive. Like I said before, neuroscientists call the smarter and wiser part of our brain top-down processing. Some of this may seem very basic, but I think it's really important to talk about complex topics in a simple way. I know it helps my students, and it even helps me when I break it down. However, I'm going to expose you to scientific terms because even kids can learn how to say neuro-science if you teach them, and there's no reason why we should shy away from long or scientific words. But stick with me because at the end, there's a key summary and takeaway that you can apply to your daily life. Let's start with a brief tour of our brains. The brain has two sides, the right and left hemispheres. These are connected by about 200 million nerve fibers or axons. The axons are the part of a neuron, the cell, that carries signal from nerve cell to nerve cell. This collection of axons is called the corpus callosum. It's like an information highway between the hemispheres. Each of the two hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum are divided into four lobes or sections. The front lobe of our brain is called, not surprisingly, the frontal lobes, of which there's a left and right side. The area of our brain actively involved in the top-down processing for higher-level thinking, what I'm going to call the smarter brain, is called the prefrontal cortex. It's located just behind our forehead, protected by our thick skull. Thank goodness, because this area is really important. It controls our impulses, regulates our emotions, and knows when to say, "Take a chill pill," and makes wiser decisions about basically everything from what to do, how to plan, what to pay attention to, and this area even considers our morals when we make these decisions. It's the executive functioning brain. Think of it like the boss of a company or a really awesome mom. So how do we access this area more often? Surprisingly, or actually not surprisingly since you're listening to this podcast and you know that the chill pill refers to meditations, The answer is by practicing meditation. In a study conducted by neuroscientist Mika Allen of MindLab at Aarhus University in Denmark, I think I'm saying that right, Aarhus, and his international team of mental health and cognitive neuroscientists from 6 different institutions, which included the NIH, they found that 6 weeks of mindfulness training, quote unquote, displayed greater dorsolateral prefrontal cortex responses, during executive processing, consistent with increased recruitment of top-down mechanisms to resolve conflict. Translation: the subjects were more accurate at problem solving, decision making, and working memory. The researchers also found increased blood oxygenation level dependent signals, otherwise known as BOLD. That sounds much cooler, right? In the top-down brain, on functional MRI images of the research subjects' brains. Maybe some of you have had an MRI before. It stands for magnetic resonance imaging. It's an incredibly complex machine that makes pictures of the inside of our bodies. So interestingly enough, the researchers found that all subjects improved in the cognitive or mental ability to focus and complete a task. Even in the control subjects who did not meditate. Yes, the subjects who did not meditate, called the control subjects, learned a different technique. It was a literary technique called close reading. It emphasizes sustained, careful evaluation of a text requiring focused attention. Instead of meditating, their homework was 20 minutes of paying attention to excerpts from an audiobook. So that's super interesting. You can spend 20 minutes meditating or 20 minutes using close reading technique or other kind of focused attention technique, and you can improve your cognitive or mental ability to focus and complete a task. So those are both equal. However, another incredibly interesting finding was that people who put in the most time meditating not the close reading, but meditating, which were the students who spent more than 20 minutes a day, which was the recommended amount of time, and up to even 60 minutes a day for 6 weeks, they not only showed improvement in task performance, but they showed improvement in performance even when they were shown emotionally distressing images. Like a snake hissing and baring its fangs in between the problems that they were trying to solve. So what does this mean? Translation: short, less than 20 minutes a day of meditation or 20 minutes a day of learning how to closely pay attention both helped everyone improve their focus and problem-solving skills. But if people spent more time meditating, 20 to 60 minutes a day in this study, they had the additional positive change of being able to stay on task and ignoring a non-threatening negative emotional stimulus. In this case, images like a frightening snake. The functional MRI studies in this research paper showed increased recruitment of the brain areas involved in top-down processing in those who were able to control the reactive fear center faster. To put it another way, they were able to inhibit an automatic fear reaction, the automatic tendency for our human brains to focus on any kind of perceived threat or danger, and to distinguish whether they were actually in real danger or not. That automatic reaction to fear, guess what it's known as? Bottom-up processing. So the takeaway here is that if you want to get better at focus and problem solving, you can do short meditations under 20 minutes or learn an attention skill like Close Reading Technique. If you want to get better at focus and problem solving and not be distracted by your emotions like fear of performing under pressure, or if you want to better control your impulses to watch YouTube because someone just yelled at you or you're stressed out, Then meditate 20 minutes twice a day, or up to 60 minutes a day. To help you get started, the next episode will have a guided focus breath awareness exercise, and coming up after that, we'll explore the close reading technique. Thank you so much for listening.

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Until next time, this is Dr.

Juna wishing you and your family Wellness.