EP 139 : Maximizing resileince through brain health | Lara Boyd

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and.

Shame, where we explore the issues you.

Care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Ball. And I'm really excited today to share with you a conversation I had with Dr. Laura Boyd. She's a physical therapist and neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia. And she has a TED talk that has been seen by more than 30 million people. Can you imagine that? A TEDx talk that has over 30 million views. She's an incredible teacher of the cutting edge science that we know from neuroscience, from brain science, and how we can bring that into our lives to sort of unlearn the things that are getting away in our life and really re sculpt our brains, rewire our own brains to operate, optimize our health and well being, our life performance and our overall happiness in life. And she's an incredible authority on this and she speaks, you know, globally and really a global expert on neuroscience and on neuroplasticity and how we can all sort of re sculpt our brains in order to really be our best selves and have our best lives. So give it a listen.

Dr. Laura Boyd, welcome.

Thank you. Thanks so much.

Thank you so much for being here and being part of the summit. So I'm going to share a little of your bio with folks if they're not already familiar with you and your work, and then we'll jump right into the conversation.

Okay, sounds Great.

Great. Dr. Lar Boyd is a physical therapist and neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia where she is a professor and wall scholar. She is an expert in the neurobiology of learning and uses advanced brain imaging approaches to look into the brain. Dr. Boyd's research is centered on understanding how behavior shapes learning, unlearning and relearning. She has published more than 180 scientific papers. And her TED talk or TEDx talk called after this your Brain will not be the Same has amazingly reached over 30 million views. I think it's something like 34 million at this point, which I think is just phenomenal to be able to reach that many people. And I watched the TED talk, it's amazing and I can see why it's attracted so much attention. And I understand you. You've done a new TED Talk where you're talking on some themes really related to what we're going to be talking about today.

Yeah, that's true. And so, yeah, it's not quite up yet, but I'm sure it'll be easy to find when it is online.

Great. Okay. So the theme of the summit has to do with how we can develop the individual, collective, even systemic resilience. We need to come together and really deal with the very daunting challenges faced by humanity today. We're all well aware that we're going through this incredibly challenging experience of the global pandemic, that we're already faced with the realities of serious climate change disruptions and increase the divisiveness and polarization in our world. And of course, we're all very concerned about what's going on in Ukraine right now. So today we're focused on individual resilience. And I'm wondering.

From your perspective as a neuroscientist and physical therapist, what does resilience mean to you? How would you define resilience?

Yeah, so it's a really interesting question. I. I think you. You think of it as rippling out of levels. So at, like, a basic biological level, I think about resilience as having health and integrity in your nervous system so that you can take in inputs from this crazy barrage of the world that we live in right now, make sense of them, and then, you know, respond appropriately. You also have then just, you know, your. Your mental and emotional resilience as well, in terms of being able to take in. I mean, it's a. It's a pretty complicated, stressful world we're in at the moment. But to be able to take that in and yet not let it consume you, that's another level of resistance, resilience. Right. You have that information. How you respond to it is where we can control. Right. And so that's, to me, a big part of being resilient. And the craziness around, you know, me and my own life, we're all in this together. We're all feeling the same ways. So that would be the next level of what? How do we work with that information? And what do we do so that we can manage it without being overwhelmed by it?

So clearly that at the most basic level, that has a lot to do with our brain health, the overall health of our body and nervous system and brain. And it's all one holistic enterprise. Although we can talk specifically about the brain, and we know that the healthy functioning of our brain is just critical to the quality of our life at every level, every dimension. And we know when people experience brain injuries, brain traumas, various forms of dementia, that their quality of life can just drop like a rock really quickly and have a really. I mean, probably all of us know someone, you know, maybe a family member or a friend's family member who's been affected by Alzheimer's or dementia or who suffered some kind of brain trauma. My son suffered a very serious brain trauma. Um, we see it in major sports today how much brain trauma there is. And it, and it just. So I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about what you've learned about healthy brain function. A lot of your research has had to do with stroke recovery. I know, but what the relationship between a healthy, optimally functioning brain and our overall quality of life. If you could just talk about that a bit.

Happy to. So in my lab we kind of do two lines of research and they really are compatible. So we have work just understanding how the brain functions normally. How do we make it, how do you make a normal brain even better? And then we have work. We try to apply that learning into helping people who've hurt their brain, usually through stroke, in my particular work, but we looked at other conditions as well. You know, we think about the brain. Really the most important thing to remember is that it's just massively changeable. So.

Everyone in your summit right now, you're actually becoming more resilient right at this exact moment because you're changing your brain. I think it's really an optimistic outlook. Knowing about this enormous capacity for what we call neuroplasticity, which happens at lots of levels in the brain, allows us to choose to engage in things that, you know, can then shape that brain that we have. So, you know, we know that our brain can change in its chemistry and that's a mechanism that supports short term learning. We know it can change its structure, we can thicken and thin brain regions. We can change the speed at which.

Information transits across our brain. That also induces a structural change. And then of course, we, those together help change function. And so when you think about a normal brain and you want to kind of optimally align that capacity for change, there's a number of different ways to do that. So exercise is really. I just can't beat that drum hard enough. So forgive me if everyone's sick of hearing it, but, you know, exercise is good for your heart, it's great for your muscles. It does amazing things in the brain. It makes our brains have a better capacity for neuroplastic change. You want to learn something? Work for my lab actually in healthy people. Has Shown if you pair a session of intense exercise with the practice or study, you really facilitate the development of a long term memory. These effects are not immediate. What we see, and this is so interesting as a neuroscientist, to me, you don't see it in the short term. There's no effect of that exercise session. We bring those people back the next day and we control this. With groups who haven't exercised, you see this huge jump up in what people have learned compared to the non exercise, what we call the rest group. We think that what that exercise is doing is it's helping our brain, what we call consolidate the memory. You have a fragile memory, you just made it, don't really have a hold of it yet. You come back after that exercise and sleep, those two together seem to be a key kind of pairing. And then we see this huge advantage in learning. So that's one of the things that makes our brain more resilient most certainly, and helps us to learn. Another part of that exercise story is the other thing exercise does is in the long run, it reduces the magnitude of our stress hormones, the stress hormone cortisol. Feeling really anxious about the world or your life or just in general, one of the key things you can do is exercise because it's going to push that cortisol down and you'll feel that cortisol can also impede learning. So these things are all, they're all tied together. So you push the cortisol down, you have your exercise. And we see facilitatory effects in learning and in mood. Right. Feel better afterwards. So that's some of the ways that your brain is interacting with your environment to become more resilient. We also see evidence that people, when they do damage their brain, if they have been healthier to start, either by having been exercisers.

Engaged in other health behaviors, a big one like never smoking, is huge.

Then we see much better outcomes as well because it seems their brain just has more resilience, if you will, both neurobiologically and also in these chemical neurotransmitters. So then it's able to kind of respond to this damage and invoke different mechanisms to help itself heal. So this is one of the big ways that I think about it, that's one of those major behaviors that you can engage in that's gonna make your brain more resilient, make you feel more resilient as you go about your daily life as well.

Yeah, I wanna circle back to this reality of neuroplasticity in a moment. You know, you mentioned part of resilience, our ability to kind of, you know, work with what we're confronted with in life, what's, you know, in our immediate surroundings, with our family, our relationships at work, but also what's happening in a greater world and how that can be very anxiety provoking and, and you know, are we able to be with it in a way that's.

That we can process it in healthy ways and reasonable ways so that we don't move into overwhelm. And it would seem that has something to do with self regulation, our ability to. Maybe there's ways that we unconsciously sort of self regulate in healthy ways that can be disrupted when there's problems. But then we can also learn conscious means of self regulation, of balancing of the autonomic nervous system as sympathetic and parasympathetic branches. So I wonder if you could talk about again, about brain health and our ability to self regulate, some correlation between healthy brain function and our ability to self regulate and then thus resilience.

Yeah, certainly, I'm happy to. And you know, the work here is.

Somewhat tangential because it's hard to get at these things in an experimental fashion. But I can tell you there's kind of two lines of work here that suggest that there are ways that we can engage in behaviors that both help us self regulate, promote brain health, and also make us resilient. The work in this area actually came. I became aware of it through a great colleague of mine who's now at the University of Chicago. Her name is Dr. Kimberly Schoner Reichel. She is an education researcher and was working to try to think about these ideas of resilience. How do children adapt to adverse childhood events? How do you work through that and create a child who can thrive afterwards? So she became quite interested in some of the work around mindfulness. We have a program, and I'm not sure if everyone's aware of it. It's called MindUp, and it's actually in the school curriculum here in British Columbia. We actually, in our provincial curriculum, have a social and emotional criterion that students are educated around, which is pretty neat. It's only been in place for maybe five or six years now. And Dr. Shona Reichel actually wrote this part of the curriculum and it came out of her work with this MindUP program. So this is a program where kids in the school, starting in kindergarten, they will engage in three three minute bouts of just mindfulness through the day. And it's a guided curriculum and it's really just giving the kids A moment to rest, reflect. They can close their eyes or not, they can look down. They go through different exercises of just focusing on how they feel, what's in the environment. They might do some tasting, they might have an apple or something they're eating, they're thinking about that. This continues up through primary school. The outcomes of these data were amazing because what Kim found was that in these kids, they showed after a year of this mindfulness program, lower cortisol levels, higher, better performance in school, they had a better sense of their school, so they would more positively rate their school experience. Their peers rated them as being kinder then as an adjunct. They also saw these kids doing really interesting things, so that they were also engaging in what we call random acts of kindness. Just holding the door for someone saying thank you when you get off the bus or to a teacher at the end of the day. Really small things, but things we know, these acts of micro kindness are cumulative. So that was kind of one line of evidence that we were thinking about and playing with. And then we actually engaged in a study where we studied people who practice yoga recreationally and we compared them to runners. And I love to tell the story because I'm a runner, I love to run. And it's really. It's my release, it's how I get, you know, myself in a space where I can function. And so when we started this study, I recruited a bunch of my friends as the control group. I'm like, well, the runners compared to the yoga people, you know, the runners are definitely going to be better and healthier. And we tested physical fitness, we tested levels of stress. And then we did this cool thing where we put people into the MRI machine and we put them into really stress. We had them watch, like really stressful videos. So just as an example, we had a clip from Schindler's List, which is just. It's one of those gut punch moments in that movie and other ones like that. We recorded their heart rates and we also recorded patterns of brain activity. We look at all this data and we compare these recreational runners, recreational yoga practitioners. The runners had higher physical fitness. That's not shocking. But the people who practice yoga, much lower levels of stress. And a really different pattern of brain activity when we mapped it, and of heart activity as well. The data from the brain and the heart were showing us that the people who practice yoga were able to be in that stressful situation as an observer, but it didn't induce significant stress in them. They were able to engage with it, but it was more that it came through them and over them rather than just gut punch. The runners showed the opposite. They were highly stressed and they showed a much less adaptive heart response to the stress and a much less adaptive brain response. There's something in there and our guess on it. It's hard to know what happens in the practice of yoga, but our guess is that it circles back and it's the mindfulness that comes with the practice of yoga. There may be something in that, trying to work towards it, trying to understand what is it about just brain training to.

Take a moment, focus on how you feel. I really think part of it is also giving the brain a moment to breast. I don't think we do that enough. I think we do it even less than we used to. And this is why I'm reaching to poor my evil cell phone. Like we never just sit still anymore. If there's just a moment, you know, I'm waiting for my kids, I pull out my phone, I'm reading the newspaper, which is, you know, not fun today or really any other day. And so we don't give ourselves these opportunities to just be, to let our brain rest, let our mind wander. There's other work suggesting that perhaps it's when our mind's wandering that we have sudden bouts of creativity. Don't let your mind wander. You can't have that. And our brain may just need these breaks and this may be part of what we're not allowing in these kind of intense, very technology driven, over scheduled lives. So those are a few things. If you take out of that data, you think, well.

There'S some easy changes you might be able to make. They're hard even knowing that I still pull this darn thing out when I shouldn't. So I don't want to pretend like I have this figured out because I by no means do. But it's the thought of a way that you can allow yourself to kind of take advantage of these brain breaks, perhaps be better able to cope with these, you know, the craziness around us. And my bet is, and I haven't done the study, though I'd love to, is in the long term allowing that we may then indeed see differences in neurobiology down the line in terms of brain chemistry, brain structure, levels of cortisol and also levels of what we call neurotrophic factors. So growth factors that make it easier for our brain to change.

One of those is an acronym, is it bdhp? Something like so, yeah.

So it's bdnf.

So Brain Direct BDNF right? Exactly.

Yeah. So what? These are growth factors. They're released throughout our body. So actually when we exercise, our muscles release growth factor. It's not clear whether or not the growth factor released by our muscles can get into our brains. Our brains are covered in, they're encased in a sheath. And then there's also something called the blood brain barrier. And it's a way of protecting the brain, but it also means it's hard for things to get into the brain. That's good, but it's also not good if you want to get a certain drug or something in there. As an aside, this is why coronavirus is so interesting. Because it may be one of the only viruses that can actually get into the brain. We're not totally sure. It's kind of an active area of debate right now. But we do find sometimes virus in the brain and we're actually not entirely sure how it's getting in there. But that's an aside. Something else for all of us to worry about tonight, huh? Didn't mean to do that, but. So I'm coming back to bdnf. So our brain may also release it, but what it does is it allows and it makes it easier for our neurons to change their contacts with other neurons. When our neurons do that, when our brain cells do that, they add and remove contacts. That's a basic mechanism of neuroplasticity. This added addition and deletion of contacts is facilitated by brain derived neurotrophic factor. It's one of these things we want to have in our brain. Very interestingly, cortisol, our stress hormone and brain derived neurotrophic factor compete with one another in the brain. So if you have high levels of cortisol, it's hard to have high levels of growth factor. That's another reason we want to pull that cortisol down so that we can let that growth factor be more easily expressed.

Well, it's wonderful news from my perspective certainly that both mindfulness or mind training and social emotional learning is making its way into K12 education in our societies. And they really, once you look into the research, it's kind of a no brainer and other sectors of society for adults as well, and there's a lot of research showing that if I'm correct on this, that two things that we know most increase brain plasticity, which means our capacity to learn and change and evolve and grow, are exercise and mindfulness, mind training. And the good thing about mindfulness is that not only does it help the brain Become more changeable or plastic. It actually kind of nudges it in the right direction. Mind training has been shown to increase our capacity for emotional balance, for cognitive control. It really creates more robust neural pathways that support well being and self regulation and all of these kind of things. And resilience ultimately.

Absolutely. I mean, that is a path that we've known about for a long time, haven't we? But for some reason it's not been well incorporated. And so it's exciting to see it be in the school systems. Actually. My kids have taught me a lot about being mindful because they've been through these, these programs in their school and they've taken it in different ways. But it is, it's neat and it's. I think it's incredible too, to look at the curricula around social and emotional learning and what an influence that has it. Just health, actually. Brain health, absolutely. Resilience, absolutely. But just health in general seems to be a real critical, critical factor.

So I'd like to circle back to neuroplasticity for a moment.

Neuroplasticity in some ways is both good and bad news in that our brain is always changing. And I think in your work you've identified, like, how much repetition of certain behaviors it takes to affect change and repair, heal the brain in case of stroke and things like that. So what is the effect of dosage? How much practice does it take? And we're always practicing something consciously or unconsciously. And if we're continually exposing ourselves to negativity, and of course the negativity bias plays a role in that, and, and you know, then that's impacting our brain. I sometimes have brought up in some workshops I lead with first responders. You know, like we might, you know, go to the gym and we get on those, the treadmills or the elliptical machines. Then I got the bank of TVs up there, right? So we're getting our heart rate way up, right? We're getting our brain to be more fluid and then we're watching like reality TV or something. Probably not a good idea, right? All the drama and negativity probably better put on the nature channel or something. Something. Something nurturing, something soothing, right? Yeah, yeah. So. So I think it is important for us to realize that our brain is a learning machine. It's always changing. And so, you know, taking some ownership responsibility for being guardians of our own brain and what we. I mean, we can't live in a bubble, right? But, but again, constant exposure to negativity has an impact and so we need to balance it out with something.

Absolutely. And even just there's some really nice data suggesting that having just a more positive outlook on life in general, optimism is good for brain health. And that's feeding exactly into what you were just saying. I wanted to circle back a little on your comments about how much practice. There's this idea it's Malcolm Gladwell's fault, right. 10,000 hours. It's not exactly wrong. It's just, it's not, you know, we're not always going to need the same amount of practice. And in our work we've actually developed some mathematical models that allow us to have someone start to practice something that we can calculate. How much are you going to need before you have this task entirely mastered and you're ready to go to the next task? And, and it's really impressive to do these calculations because it's incredibly variable from person to person. And that's really been the takeaway message is it takes a lot of practice to change the brain. But how much depends on you and kind of what your background is, what your expertises are, what you're bringing to it. And so we need to kind of be cognizant that some of us may need a lot more practice and some of us may need a bit less. And you know, I laugh at myself with this all the time and some of us may never actually accomplish the learning that they want. So I will never be fluent in French. I've come to accept this. I would love to be. My daughters are. It's very jealous I am of them and their capacity, but I'm not sure why. But I could practice 10,000 hours and then another 10 and another 10 and I would still maybe not quite have it. So that's, you know, that, that's part of that as well. Whereas I might be able to learn something else much more quickly. And, and that just has to do with the individuality of my brain compared to other people's.

So our strategies then need to be individualized. And you know, we're hearing a lot today kind of at the intersection of.

Positive psychology, neuroscience. We hear terms like positive neuroplasticity, self directed neuroplasticity, even terms like biohacking and brain hacking, which I realized is probably not squarely in the academic discipline area, but it's out in the popular culture certainly. And people who are very focused on wanting to optimize brain performance and be high performers kind of talk in that way. But so from what you're saying, I mean, do Terms like self directed neuroplasticity, does that resonate with you? And then if we're thinking about that, it does have to be kind of individualized. But then are there certain kind of universal principles that we could rely on?

So when I hear, you know, self directed neuroplasticity, I mean, it's, it's, it's a little bit of a misnomer. We're neuroplastic. Whether or not you're directing it or not, your brain's changing. It's just constantly changing. And so what you can do then is if you, if there is something you really are working on, focused on driving towards, you certainly can then shape your brain around that. Right. The self directed part, I think it's also important and the piece that from a research standpoint is a real kind of bedeviling thing is there are other parts that will cause people to learn at different rates that are really hard to understand. So motivation. So someone maybe just driven, you know, to understand how an airplane engine works. Right. Or to have a better golf swing, whatever you're really motivated on. And that kind of motive and focus can really drive plasticity faster and to a different extent than you might see in someone who wants to learn it, but isn't quite as driven. And so this kind of comes back to the. I think about this a lot around coaching, right? It's a little bit of an art of coaching. Like how do you motivate someone to be driven towards that goal? And.

That will then really in turn enhance how they're able to learn and how much they will learn and how much they're able to change their behavior. So you can adopt strategies externally to try to help shape these learning things, but you always have those intangibles of like, do they really want to change? Do people really want to learn? That's something that each individual has to answer for themselves because that's going to be a driver as well. Right. I can sit next to my kids and force them to do math homework, but they'll learn a lot more if they're really engaged in and enjoy it and doing it on their own.

Yeah, absolutely. So if we are motivated, right. And if we're more in, you know, kind of whatever way, and I think in our world today, maybe, you know, some of us are blessed with a very positive attitude. We're very highly motivated. Others of us may be experiencing a lot of anxiety given everything that's going on in the world. There's a lot of us, given the information we're Getting about climate change, the climate emergency and you know, the existential threats were. So a lot of people experience a lot of grief, even despair and depression. And we know depression is very widespread and it's affecting young people more than ever. And so. But if someone is motivated to change, what is the, what is it about the brain that. And I realize we're talking about something very complex here, but you know, that our brain health that is kind of giving us maybe a predilection towards motivation and a positive attitude versus succumbing to despair, anxiety or depression. What's kind of going on in the brain? Do we know? What do we know about that?

Yeah, so we know a couple things. We do know that part of what's happening with anxiety and depression, we're looking at chemical changes in the brain. Right.

It's a behavior that's very grounded in neurobiology. And so part of what happens too is it's also very reinforcing. So you know, for example, depressed people have a much harder time telling you a happy memory. That's actually a challenge for them to access that those memory systems that are positive memories because they're, but they're really good at, you know, unhappy because that, that's this being in the cycle of their, their neurotransmitter. So you know, when you're thinking about how do we work out of that, working back towards having positive. It, it, it's hard, it's unlearning that behavior. It may not be fully under people's control. They, you know, we, we may also.

Need to do something around neurotransmitters and that's, that's what drugs do. Or we have brain stimulation approaches now too that alter this basic biology of the brain and kind of provide a platform to change and learn and kind of pull brain activity back the other way. But when you do studies, you know, in folks who are depressed, for example, you see a wholesale different pattern of brain activity, brain excitability, brain chemistry, depending on how you image them. And so that's kind of what you're, what you're confronting and, and working back again. So it's not, it's a, it's a complicated process and it makes me really nervous honestly, to see how much depression and anxiety it is because it's so, in the world, just in general, so many people, especially young people, the rates are just the highest they've ever been kids, teenagers, our school age students, it's a lot of work to pull back out of that, honestly. And I think we As a society are going to be confronting a lot of work to kind of recover, if you will. So, you know, we have a daunting task ahead of us in terms of reversing some of those. Those issues. It can be done. The brain is crazy neuroplastic, you know, but it's. It's gonna. It's gonna take time, it's gonna take support, and it's gonna take all of us supporting everyone else. I would suspect there are very few of us who are, you know, who would be. Have been unaffected by all of the last few years of the pandemic, let alone, you know, we were already super anxious about climate change. You know, here in. In British Columbia, it didn't just knock on order this year, it pretty much kicked it in. We had the hottest day on record and the coldest day on record within six months of each other and a massive flood up the middle. It was really something else. And we're up here in the temperate north that, you know, we should. You would think we wouldn't have that. So it's really become evident and scary.

However, shift the focus. Okay, what's the positive? What can we learn? What can we change? What technologies exist that are going to help us recover? How do you take agency and ownership? That's huge as well. That's also learned, and that is, I think, the path towards healthier brains in this complicated environment we're in right now.

Just to understand the landscape a little more before we go further into kind of what we can do and kind of understand both what we're up against, maybe where the opportunities lie. Safe to say that when we're in an emotional state, whether it's elation or just contentment, positive outlook or anger, anxiety, depression, various emotional states, that there's a particular neurochemical mix dominating in the brain. Mixes of cortisol, adrenaline, testosterone, different neurotransmitters. And if those are there a lot of the time, we tend to adapt to that almost. You could almost say, become addicted to it in a sense. So we all know that some people are kind of tend to be kind of angry folks. Some people deal with depression. Some people seem to mostly have a positive outlook and that act. There is a kind of neurochemical footprint in the brain or something that the brain adapts to. And so sometime we have to unadapt in some way if we want to shift that. There's got to be some process of change, and maybe there's lots of strategies that will cause that to happen. But in the end, there is a change in, in the neurochemical landscape that the brain is accustomed to. Is that fair to say?

That's. That's exactly right. And the tricky part is, is that there's so many different neurochemicals and they're all interacting and balancing off of one another. So, you know, we get to these states and then if you try to alter them, you know, it's tricky. Even if you change one thing, you're altering kind of those relationships back across. So it's a very complicated milieu. I don't think we understand honestly from a neuroscientific standpoint how all of these are interacting and then they're interacting in very different ways and very in different individuals. So it's a great example why we don't just have one drug for depression. It acts totally differently in every brain. It acts differently based on age. That's the other thing to layer in here is these chemicals, these kind of patterns are shifting as we age. And so.

It'S a really, really complicated thing. The last complication thrown in there is if you're trying to take a drug, for example, for. I'm just going to stay on depression. We've been talking about it. How do you remember I talked about the blood brain barrier? How do you get it to the brain? It's a trick. And so basically what we do is we take a dose and we hope some of it gets in there to the brain. So it's easy to under overdose. It's difficult to get that titration and you don't really know until you see a net effect on behavior. It's a very, very complicated arena. And that's why the conventional therapy again on sound depression would be a drug plus a behavioral therapy, plus maybe exercise and then making sure people are sleeping and kind of putting all of that together into a package because all of those things are going to be affecting these different neurotransmitter systems in the brain.

Yeah, the more, much more holistic whole person approach seems very important. And antidepressants do help some people.

Not everyone in fact, maybe it's a smaller number actually. But I've had friends that have been working with antidepressants and it took them a long time working with their physician to get on the right antidepressant with the right dosage. And then finally it was really helping them. But it was a long journey to get there. So it's very individualized, as you're saying.

And you know, it seems like with any kind of change, whether we're looking at it behaviorally or from a psychological perspective, from a neuroscientific perspective, there seems to be many different factors that maybe lead to a tipping point that then really shifts us into a higher state of wellness or recovery from something. And so kind of the more strategies we're working with, the better in some sense as long as it's a constellation of things that not overwhelming us. But what are some of the other. I know your work in helping people recover from stroke.

I know that you work with certain types of brain stimulation. I think there are other things that you found effective to, to over time and, and behaviors that can be practiced that over time will create change and heal the brain. So I'm wondering what some of those are and if any of them might be applicable also to just optimizing brain health or being preventative, you know, kind of a prophylactic approach. Because we all know we're going to be challenge in our lives.

Yeah. So there are a number of different things we've been investigating. All of the things I said about exercise apply in the stroke damaged brain, very helpful for the stroke, for stroke recovery. And so that, that's one part of that mindset. After stroke, all these things they apply directly across, you know, mindset, community support, those kind of holistic things. The other thing that we have looked at that you mentioned is brain stimulation. We've done quite a bit of this work and we have a few more studies going right now. The idea here is after stroke we seem to see that the patterns of brain activity are asymmetrical on the stroke affected side. The just baseline excitability of the brain and our brains are really electrical organs, it's suppressed. So the brain's not very excitable. And in addition to the area of damage, this poor excitability may be an extra reason why it's hard to move, to think, to speak plan. And so one of the ways that we can counter that is by using something called transcranial magnetic stimulation. So non invasively applying electromagnetic currents over the brain to try to more balance the two sides. And so this has been a therapy that's been looked at in a number of different studies over the years. And what we're doing with it right now is again trying to figure out for whom it works. So we have had a study we finished a few years ago and we found a really great response in about 60, 65% of our patients. We had this 35% that we called non responders. They really didn't benefit from this therapy. And so the challenge for us right now is to decide who are the right people who are really going to benefit. So you come in and maybe had a stroke and you're perfect. You go into this therapy and then in this other group now what's the right therapy for them so that we don't waste people's time and we're able to continue to move them out into the community. Other things we're working on right now, and this really became clear to me over the pandemic is ways that we can incorporate therapy into people's daily lives in their home. So you can't always be coming to the hospital or to the, even your physio's office. And you know, we had people just not get therapy in the first year of the pandemic in particular before we were able to get a lot of people vaccinated. The idea is to, we're developing really their games, their computer games, but they're arm rehab. And the idea is you take this home with you and you are responsible for continuing your therapy at home with just check in sessions through the week and trying to really get that bigger dose of practice. That's a huge problem after stroke because we just, I don't think that our medical system is set up to give the dose of intervention that's necessary to drive the magnitude of brain change we need. All these ideas are around dosing. Can I make you healthier so you can, sorry, more physically fit so you can do more. Can I incorporate it into your home? Can your family help you do more outside of the therapy environment? And then you're checking back in with your physio, your rehab team intermittently to adjust those programs. That brain stimulation, by the way, just because we've been talking about it, it's actually sort of a therapy for depression. We see the same asymmetry just in a different part of the brain, in the prefrontal part of the brain. And that is one of the mechanisms of depression. And so it actually has FDA and Health Canada approval as an intervention. It seems to be fairly effective for people who don't respond to drugs. There's that section of people as well. They tried every antidepressant medication. It's really not offered them relief. And so this is a newer line of therapies. It tends to be quite effective again for a certain segment of population. Why brains are so different, we don't really know, by the way, I couldn't tell you.

Well, it's the most complex system in the known universe. Basically the human Brain. So it's obviously a lot we don't know. I wonder if you're familiar with any of the research done with various forms of neurofeedback that you know, basically we get a visual representation of our brain waves and somehow learning to in a self directed way work with that.

Yeah, I have, I have seen that work. We haven't done it in my lab.

The trick is that from like a re. From a research perspective, I'm not sure that the brainwave input we're seeing is.

Terribly accurate. However, the idea of neurofeedback is very effective and so it may be just a way of helping people access into that system of learning and practicing self regulations and practice it and you're better at it. It's more a better, effective, more effective tool for you to use then.

So you're talking about learning all together. And.

It's safe to say that it's healthy for the brain to challenge it, to stimulate the brain to keep learning new things. And you know, we've all heard that, you know, and a lot of people as they get older as a prophylactic against dementia and to retain good cognitive health and so forth, do things like crossword puzzles. And we're learning a new language, especially one that has a radical different, radically different grammatical structure than our own, you know, would cause the brain to have to grow and thrive. And, and so I'm just curious about you mentioned, you know, I think I don't want to, there's some online brain games, I won't message mention specific companies or so forth, but there was a lot of interest in that. And then I read some research. The research wasn't so conclusive and, but you mentioned using some of that in your research. So are there, do we know enough about, you know, kind of brain games and brain ways to challenge the brain that really do have an impact.

Yeah. So my sense is there's nothing special about any particular game including the one that we've designed and are having people practice. It's the practice that's important. How you get there doesn't matter. You love sudoku, you love Wordle.

Crossword puzzle, read Anna Karena, you know, play a video game if your, your arm motor function is disrupted. You could play our video game. You could probably play something on the Xbox with your grandkids if you've had a stroke and achieve a similar benefit. So that the key principles here are that you need a high dose. It should be challenging if it's easy. You're not changing your brain because Your brain can accommodate it. So easy is you're not going to induce neuroplasticity. And we have very good evidence showing that you see no change. When your brain is changing is when you're struggling, when you're right at the edge of your capacity. And actually it's great to make errors. So this idea that you should never make a mistake is terrible for learning, actually learning. You learn when you make a mistake because you learn. Okay, that was wrong. Note to self, don't do that again. And that can sometimes be the most instructive point. And that's where we do see when we're watching people practice and making mistakes, it's kind of a phase where we're seeing lots of neuroplastic change. So don't be afraid to fail. Right? That's when we're really achieving.

My Zen teacher, who we lost a couple years ago, he had a pretty massive stroke a few years before he passed. And fortunately they got him to the hospital very quickly and he did have all his cognitive function. He was partially paralyzed on one side and. And had issues of being able to find the words he wanted to use a bit. But he was going to some clinic down in Georgia that. Doing some really interesting things. And. And he gradually did. He never got, you know, full use on his left and right, but he got great improvements. But they were having him practice these little micro movements with his arm and his hand just again and again. And fortunately he had the. He had to will to do it, and he really got some. But it really took a lot of practice. And it was, you know, it made me think there's a. There's a book called the Talent Code. I can't remember the author. And they've discovered some things about learning and why some how some.

Kind of prodigies. Right. Learn and musical prodigies and so on. But they actually have ways that they've broken down the mechanics of playing an instrument into these micro movements. And they practice them and they practice and they. And they get, you know, much more accelerated results. So again, it's what you're talking about, the practice and the practice, but also identifying what to practice. Right?

Yep, exactly. Exactly. Right. And. And so it's also important not to practice the wrong movement in the case of your. Your friend.

Or to practice the wrong thing. But if you can have, you know, practice of whatever it is you're trying to achieve and in a high dose of it, especially if you have brain damage and you're trying to work through that, because what you're really teaching your brain to do is you're teaching remaining neurons to take over lost functions of neurons that were damaged or have died. And that's really hard for those neurons. They can do it, but it takes a lot to change their base function. And so that's the actual process that's taking place.

Yeah.

And I think one of the things about mind training and not that it's a silver bullet or mindfulness, but I'm thinking of the work of Amisha Jah, who's done a lot of work with first responders. She's down at a University of Miami, I think, and, or it's a university in Florida where she's based, I believe. And, and.

They developed, based on her research, that the minimally effective dosage to get real positive change for these first soldiers and first responders was 12 minutes of focused mindfulness training a day. More is better. A lot. The more the better. But 12 minutes consistently had a market impact, a significant beneficial impact. So it was interesting that that's possible.

Right? That's remarkable. Actually, I haven't seen those data, but that's. You can do anything for 12 minutes, right?

Yeah. Well, I think she has a new book out, something about, something about getting your focus or the word focus is in it. And the idea that with this, you know, a certain. It takes practice obviously, but with a dedicated amount of practice, but it's amount of time that we would all have. Right. You can really start to improve your focus dramatically. Right. So yeah, I think, you know, just everything anyone has ever read about people like Michael Jordan and so forth and other great athletes, not only do they practice the 10,000 plus or 20,000, right. You know, just taking free shot after free shot, but, but they, but they really, they practice effectively strategically. Right. And right, yeah, yeah. So. But fortunately there are some things that are pretty easy to learn. Like, you know, basic mindfulness technique is not that hard to learn and how to do it with a good instruction, a good basic instruction and then being able to repeat it. So I'm curious about.

Apart from very specific interventions especially that may be necessary when someone's experienced a brain injury and the actual, you know, dosage and hours of practice that it would take to really affect significant change when there has been a brain injury, I'm wondering about the impact of just overall self care, both to optimize our brain health and as a prophylactic as we age against various forms of dementia and so forth, or cognitive decline. So all the things we can do to take care of ourselves physically I mean, you mentioned exercise, but there's everything we do with nutrition and getting enough rest and avoiding the things that are hard on the body and, and proper hydration. So all that and then emotional self care, you know, the quality of our relationships, journaling, gratitude practices, you know, spiritual self care and the mental. We were talking about brain, the things you can do mentally. Right. Challenging the brain. So I'm wondering if the power of the constellation of those things has. On really supporting brain health, especially as we age or, or because I think some of us are, we're not just genetics. And if you're, you know, if you're, if you're genetically predisposed, you're going to end up with dementia no matter what you do. And if you're not, then you can be unhealthy as you want. You're still probably going to have a good brain. There's so much different information out there, and I think it's helpful to know what's real in terms of what agency do I have in terms of supporting my brain health over my lifespan.

So I would suggest we have a lot of agency. So there are very, very few diseases where your genetics are predictive. In fact, there's only one, it's called Huntington's disease. If you have the Huntington gene, you will get Huntington's. All of our other diseases out there seem to be a constellation of genetics plus environment. And so this is the field, and I'm by no means an expert here, but this is the field we call epigenetics, where we think about our genes as you think about them as being on a dimmer switch. You can turn them up or down. So what turns them up and down? All the things we just discussed. So you can turn your genes up and down based on your environment, your exposure. Do you smoke? What's your diet, do you sleep, do you exercise? Practice mindfulness, gratitude? Have a community. We know that these things are massively influential on overall brain health and on longevity. There are areas of the world, I don't know if you're familiar with them, called blue zones, where people all live to be over 100.

Their longevity, right?

So this incredible longevity. And you can kind of look like, what are these folks doing that's changing these dimmer switches on their genes. And there's some key pieces there. They have almost constant, moderate physical activity. They live in very important social groups. They're semi vegetarian. They never smoke, and you would say they limit alcohol except for. Then there's a group of Italians in there and they do drink their red wine. So that makes me happy, frankly. But so, you know, it's in moderation. Right. And so you look across, you know, what's, what are these, what's the, what's the recipe? And there's four areas in the world that are these blue zones that have been identified and you see real different rates of aging. It's not just time, but you can also look at diseases. You can actually calculate a genetic clock, if you will, in terms of aging. And theirs is quite different. So it does suggest that we have a lot of agency here. There's always going to be that one outlier that smokes and drinks and never exercises and lives to be 110. Most of us are not that person.

Right? Yeah, no, that, that, that research around these blue zones is really interesting. And the extraordinary number of centenarians in these areas and the way it' concentrated in certain areas where there's a shared lifestyle, shared culture of some kind. And you know, I, I recently had the, the pleasure of interviewing Robert Waldinger, who's the current director of the Adult Longitudinal Adult Development Study at Harvard. That's been going on for something like 87 years. And you know, bar none, what they've seen there, what's most correlated with long overall health, well being and over the lifespan and longevity is the quality of relationship, consistent quality, human relationships of one kind or another. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And really. And quite a diversity of outcomes. I mean it's not just a minor difference, it's like big difference in outcomes in terms of quality of relationship.

Yeah.

In our support systems. Yeah, yeah. So.

I think the last question I have, and you, you referenced this right at the beginning of our conversation, but I want to circle back to this because I know you mentioned this TED Talk and I think TED talks are what, 17, 18 minutes or something like that in length. Right.

11 to 14. You go to 17.

11 to 14.

Okay. They're even shorter than I thought. So. Yeah.

You made the statement that the people watching that TED Talk will have a different brain at the end of it. Right. And you made a statement early on that our audience here on the summit is going to be different, their brain is going to be different by participating in a summit. I was supposed the more they participated in a summit. So a little encouragement here. Hang in there for all six days. Watch all the videos you can because we're having all these incredible presenters offering all this transformative knowledge and wisdom, but that literally is going to change our brain.

Yes.

Could you talk about that even in the short term.

Yeah. So you have kind of, I think, hope. Two things that will happen here. One, everyone I hoped learned something and that changed your brain. You just, in the short term have changed the chemistry of your brain and encoding that memory and then it's going to be stored somewhere and that's going to induce a structural change in your brain. And so right there you've made a neurobiological change by learning something new. Then very hopefully leverage that information to make a change in your life and you make a bigger change in your brain because now you're utilizing this information and the information you've gained from all these sessions to change your environment, to change your being, to change your overall behavior. And then you can see it just, it just ripples out. So we call a positive feedback loop. That changes your neurobiology and you change your behavior again and it goes and goes. That's exciting. I'm sorry. This is why I love, I love my job in the area that I. It's a real privilege to get to learn these things and then share them because I think it's a real vehicle for well being and health and hopefully also longevity, but just not in years, in quality of all of our lives.

Yeah, you also, when we were speaking earlier about the kind of neurochemistry and the neurochemistry landscape of the brain.

I'm.

Curious, I'm thinking about the impact somebody could have from just watching a TED talk or participating in this summit, which is like a lot of longer TED talks.

You know, we are going to, we'll experience ourselves perhaps in a different state. Right. A different brain state with a different neurochemical mix. And you know that. So I'm curious, you know, by, by having a state experiences what states tend to be very temporary. Right. And very changeable and fluid like a psychological state, an emotional state, a mental state, a brainwave configuration of state. And we know if we repeat them with practice, states can become traits. So I'm wondering if even just having that, like as someone, you know, if, if we're experiencing, you know, a kind of a bit of hopelessness or despair, but then we have a moment of really experiencing a sense of possibility. And so for that moment anyway, our brain is a completely different configuration neurochemically and perhaps in terms of responsivity, excitability or, you know, that.

Does that have a particularly leveraged power to maybe then inspire us to want to repeat that? And if we do, then that new state might become more of a trade and help replace what previously had Become a kind of a dominant trait.

That's the hope. Right. And that's, and I do think that that happens and that we then can leverage it to be better about being hopeful, being optimistic, being curious.

And then I mean that's, that then hopefully will spins out from there. But certainly yes, that's, that's the kind of change and positive plasticity that we would hope to see, that you would hope to be able to engender in yourself from engaging in something like this, watching a TED talk, asking lots of questions and honestly, you know, in my bigger view of the world, that's how we get out of the, that's how we get out of this place we're in right now. Learning, taking that learning and seeing what's, what's the optimistic things that came out of this. What can we do differently next time? What do we learn to leverage as we move forward in a positive way to affect climate, to affect medicine? We've learned a lot from the COVID pandemic about medicine and immune systems and that might be really important later. That could be a real silver lining in what we've all gone through. I think it will be, honestly. And so if we can kind of remember these good parts in there and start to push out on them, I think we can make real change.

Just being open to new experiences. Right. I think, and this has been really rich and incredibly helpful. Dr. Boyd and I, I just really encourage the audience. You know, we have six days here. We're going to be offering lots of actual resilience practices. A lot of our speaker will be offering practices, we're going to be offering daily practices for everyone. And you know, if you just take the six days to kind of focus on self care and expose ourselves to a lot of this new information and new ideas and I think what we've heard in our conversation today is that we do have a lot of agency. There are a lot of things we can do to contribute to our own overall health and our brain health and you know, quality of life over our lifespan. So just that sense of possibility and.

You know, mixed with some kind of self agency that I can make a difference. It's so positive. And I think you've gotten us off to a great start here on day one of the summit. So I really appreciate it a lot and because I know your work is grounded and you know, you're a fairly hard nosed neuroscientist, you're in the world of data and actual research. So I know what you're sharing with us is coming out of that context. It's not just wishful thinking. I'm sure you are. You have hopeful attitudes about what's possible, but you're a researcher, and so this conversation has been grounded in the data. And so I think it's just really helpful for us to, I think, to hear this and know what might be possible.

You're very welcome. Thank you so much for letting me share a little bit of it with you.

Well, thank you so much and be well. Thank you for being part of the summit.

Limu game.

And, Doug, here we have the limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.

Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com Liberty Liberty.

Liberty.

Liberty Savings Ferry unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance company Affiliates Excludes Massachusetts.

Step into the world of power, loyalty and luck. I'm gonna make it him an offer he can't refuse with family. Canolies and spins mean everything. Now you want to get mixed up in the family business? Introducing the godfather@champacasino.com test your luck in the shadowy world of the Godfather slots. Someday I will call upon you to do a service for me. Play the Godfather now@Champacasino.com Welcome to the family.

No purchase necessary.

VGW Group void. We're prohibited by law. 21 + terms and conditions apply.