EP 155: Brain Health as Depression Prevention | Dr. Kelly Lambert

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. My name is Pete Maul, your host and Today I'm with Dr. Kelly Lambert. Kelly Lambert, Ph.D. an extraordinary neuroscientist with who does really incredible research in the laboratory to really understand how our brain functions, how trauma functions, how we heal from trauma, how we heal from anxiety and depression, how we can better manage stress and then how we can optimize our brain health and optimize our health and well being, longevity, life, performance and happiness through positive lifestyle practices. Kelly Lambert, an incredible expert and I'm really excited to be here today with Dr. Kelly Lambert. Welcome Kelly.

Thank you. Great to be here.

Oh, it's really great to have you. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Dr. Kelly Lambert is the Trawic professor of Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Richmond where she investigates experience based neuroplasticity using rodents, raccoons and non human primates. She has written two neuroscience textbooks and three mainstream books including Lifting Depression, the Lab Rat Chronicles and well Grounded the Neurobiology of Rational Decisions. Additionally, she is the author of approximately 75 scholarly articles and has been interviewed on several podcasts including Escaped Sapiens and the Big Picture Science. In 2018, Dr. Lammert was the recipient of the Outstanding Achievement Award given by the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society. Recently her research targeting connections between physical effort and emotional resilience was featured on CBS Sunday Morning and her rat driving research was Featured in over 1500 news stories across the world. In 2019, Dr. Lambert described her behavioralceuticals research in a TEDx talk in Bermuda. Again, welcome Kelly and we'll get right into the conversation.

Great. Looking forward to it.

How we can cultivate deep and sustain our the individual collective systemic resilience. We need to really face the really daunting problems facing humanity today. The increasingly obvious climate emergency is creating disruptions around the world impacting the most vulnerable and marginalized among us. Sadly, to begin with, as things usually do.

We currently, you know, we've had, we continue to have war and conflict around the world. Now we have a land war in Europe and a refugee crisis, another refugee crisis. And.

We'Re, we're not out of the pandemic yet. The COVID 19 pandemic. There's just so much going on and things are so uncertain. It seems like even you know, we've always had uncertainty, but it's like even tomorrow is uncertain, next week is uncertain. And so it's a challenging time for all of us. And.

Today on day one of the summit, it's really the inquiries about individual resilience. How can we, how can we deepen and sustain our own individual resilience? Whether that's physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually? Of course, those are all interdependent on some level. And so your work, I think, points to some really powerful tools and strategies we can do to deepen our own resilience. So again, that's really the reason why we're here having this conversation. I'm really excited about it. So to begin with, I'm just wondering from your perspective as a neuroscientist, a behavioral neuroscientist and a researcher, what does the term resilience mean to you?

It's a very important term and this theme is so important for our overall well being. So stress and resilience are kind of two topics that we are very interested in in my laboratory. And when stress happens, as you just mentioned, we're getting extra doses of it these days and we just cannot live without it. And we want to be able to respond to stress with a stressful response. But resilience comes in and we view that as how well we can adapt to this stress and recover from it. Sometimes with my students, I talk about a slinky. If you think about that childhood toy that you would spread apart, then when you would let go, it would come back to its original form. And if it was kind of stretched out of shape, maybe it didn't. But how we can keep our brains healthy and our coping and emotions and bodies healthy so that we can recognize stress, because that's important, but then adapt and change so that we can function better and come back to maybe a baseline where we can respond to the world in a more efficient and healthy way. So it's very complicated and there are many layers to it, but essentially being able to adapt to adversity.

Yeah, we're going to explore that in some depth today. I'm curious, this idea of being able to kind of bounce back is very common definition of resilience. And some of us today also like to talk about the idea of maybe bouncing forward, that the idea of post traumatic growth, that actually stress and challenge or even trauma, if we have tools to work with it, heal it, process it, work with it, can actually leverage personal growth, personal evolution. I'm curious about your thoughts about that. Not just bouncing back but maybe the idea of bouncing forward, right.

And we talk. I'm interested in just optimal neural health and that is looking forward. So our ability to bounce back is based on how healthy our brains are in the moment when we experience that adverse situation. So there's a long list about and it's understanding about the brain. And I wish that we could all had to issued a user's manual for our brains because we just kind of think, oh, the brain is involved in thinking and feeling and the body is involved in maybe carrying our brains around to meetings or something. But it's all interconnected. So understanding about the nature of the brain and how it needs oxygen and glucose and how exercise gets that to it. And a lot of our neurochemicals are produced from nutrients that we put into our body. But then in my book well Grounded, I did a lot of thinking about why do we need a brain. We know that it controls our glandular functions and muscular control and allows our bodies to kind of exist in this world. But when you look at the human brain and you mentioned I work with rodents and I do a lot, and a lot of people ask me.

We'Re not big rodents and rodents are little humans, what are we going to learn from that? And my kind of set answer is, well, we have all the same brain parts and the neurons, the cells look the same, the neurochemicals are similar. So it's a very good starting point. And it is. But humans, although we're on the continuum with these other mammals, our brains are qualitatively different in the sense that in this outer area called the cortex, even animals like elephants and dolphins that have much larger brains, we have more cells in this outer area, the cortex. And this is what is involved in executive functioning, top down kinds of thinking. And the more we can. Why do we have this and what is the function? Well, it allows us to engage in effective decision making. And the more information we put into our brains, I call it contingency capital. Because this rational part of our brain, it's always calculating these contingency outcomes. If I do this, this will happen. If I do this, this will happen. But our most informed decisions can only be made if we have a lot of experience from which to put on the table. So our brains are constantly taking in this information, processing it, storing it, so that when situation, a stressful situation or a good situation, just a situation arises where we need to make a decision, we can make the most informed decision for our health or well being. So we need to pack good stuff into Our brain through experience, sensory experiences, movement knowledge, social interactions. And going forward, it's really important. Some of the most profound research in this kind of area. I'm a neuroscience nerd, but in this area, a certain area of our brain is called the nucleus accumbens, and it's often associated with positive outcomes. Drugs of abuse, we hear they hit the dopamine and the nucleus accumbens. But pleasure, joy is also associated with this area. I'm being overly simplistic. It's also. It's more probably more accurately involved in telling us when something's important. But as we develop and throughout our lives.

If we have good things happen.

To us.

Researchers talk about prediction errors. So when something good happens we didn't expect or happens that even that we planned on, it kind of builds some circuits about maybe it's related to positive or optimism. But if we have a life, and fortunately we certainly do, where children are constantly, the prediction errors are in the negative way, disappointment. It didn't happen. It didn't happen. It didn't happen. It actually sculpts kind of the terrain of this area so that it doesn't have as much surface area that can respond to the positive outcomes, and it's more likely to interpret as negative outcomes. So our experiences, not to get too far in the weeds there, our experiences sculpt our brains for even these positive outlooks and negative outlooks. And we don't want to be unrealistic and say that, oh, we should just ignore this. It's not important. But there are lots of ambiguous situations that we can shine, have a more positive spin or energy to make it more likely to have a positive outcome. So all that really shapes our physical brains that are part of our qualitative emotional experience. I could go on and on.

Well, you know that you're talking about the human brain and nervous system, which is the most complex system in the known universe. And a lot of workshops, I sometimes ask people at the beginning, when I'm offering some educational modules around the brain and so forth, did anybody remember getting the operating manual for this most complex system in the known universe when you were growing up? You know, and none of us did, but actually today we're closer to having it. You know, it's kind of an integration of several thousand years of introspective contemplative science from the East End, a bit from the west, and then. And then modern neuroscience, and a lot of which is mutually confirming, and we know so much more. I mean, it's still a great mystery. There's so much more to know, as I'm sure you would say. But we do know a lot more and.

We can exercise a bit more self agency around that. That's kind of what I'd like to explore today. But to begin with, just as background, I wonder if you could connect the healthy functioning of our brain.

With our quality of life. We all probably have a family member or know someone has a family member that's suffered a stroke or some form of dementia or Alzheimer's. And we know that when there's that kind of brain injury or brain deterioration, like in dementia, the quality of life just literally drops like a rock. And so it would seem that the healthy functioning of our brain is critical to our quality of life and every dimension of life. So I wonder if you could talk about that relationship between what you're calling neural health or brain health, healthy functioning and quality of life.

Right. So integrated. And what you're suggesting, it makes me think of something that's so important with other illnesses like cardiovascular illness.

We talk about preventative measures. So eat right and exercise and maybe there's some medication, there's biomarkers to make sure that you're still in this healthy zone. And so often when we're thinking about, we don't think about preventative brain health. The stroke happens or Alzheimer's is diagnosed and then we're in a kind of a downfall. But the more we understand about brain health and can prevent, either prevent or provide a buffer. So for example, as we age and we're living longer, a large percentage of us, not to be too depressing.

Will.

Be diagnosed with Alzheimer's. And this is a big concern. What can we do about this? Well, even if we're going to be diagnosed, if we have had healthy brain functions, we can build up something called cognitive reserve that will create a buffer. And it may be, even though that you have the disease is ongoing, it may give you five years before you actually show that dementia or it becomes dysfunctional. So having a healthy brain with, again, I'm going to say exercise and another reason I mentioned glucose and oxygen getting to the brain with exercise. But something else that's different about.

Exercise and why it's so important or just movement is if you look at the real estate of the brain, a large portion of the brain is devoted to movement. So as I mentioned, we think about the brain being all cerebral thinking. The huge, the big cerebellum in the back of our brain has nearly 80% of all of our neurons. And it's involved simplistically in motor coordination, we've got this motor strip that's regulating moving our specific muscles. We have this big center area of the brain that is affected in neurological diseases such as Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease, that's involved in movement. So when we stop moving, we're downsizing our brain and a lot of our worlds like what we're doing right now, we're sitting in front of streams, not being very active. I'm waving my hands around here. So by moving we're keeping those brain areas active, but then those cognitive reserves reading. I love all the books behind you, Fleet. Adding information to the brain and through our sensory experiences, all of that is going to keep the brain as healthy as possible. So if it does get a hit with a stroke or dementia or disease, it's going to have some cognitive reserve to kind of provide a buffer or bypass, give you alternate strategies there. So that's one thing and also one aspect. As we add knowledge to our brains, it does make us better decision makers about how to respond to the potential treatments and interventions and adopting certain lifestyle practices at certain points in our lives and reading through the literature and talking to people and trying to. I'm all about evidence based therapies and we can. That's not perfect either, but it's a closer way to arriving at some of the central truths about brain function. So we need to think about. You're absolutely right, preventative before that happens. And I haven't talked about the psychiatric illnesses before the depression episode happens or the schizophrenia episode happens. What can we do to prevent that? We need better biomarkers. We do have those biomarkers for diseases like cardiovascular disease.

So there's a lot to do, but we know a lot more than ever before in monitoring and such. So that's a couple of ways to think about maintaining a healthy brain so that when it is compromised as we age or through some accident, we'll be able to recover in the best way possible.

Well, I want to explore all the things we can do proactively do in a moment, but just to really kind of dig in and kind of understand where we are contextually with the brain. Your work I know is focused a lot on the efforts driven reward system in the brain. And again, that's connecting with what you're talking about, movement, how much of the brain is actually involved in movement and the relationship between not only what we can do cognitively but what we can do physically. So could you talk a little bit more about that efforts driven reward system in the brain and its relation to healthy brain function.

Right. And so this is, this is something that I arrived at out of frustration. I was writing a textbook, as you mentioned, on clinical neuroscience and looking specifically at depression and getting frustrated. I'm not going to say our pharmaceutical interventions are not effective. They are to some degree, but it just seemed like we could do better. And so I went to the drawing board, okay, what are the symptoms of depression? So this was in the context of depression, you know, a signature characteristic is this lack of pleasure. And so when I went back and started tracing and learning more about that area, I was talking about the nucleus accumbens and what it's connecting to, that pleasure center, if you will. And it has strong connections to this motor area, the striatum that I mentioned. And I. And with depression we think about emotions and thoughts, but I'd never thought about movement with depression. And this was theoretically, you know, a brain path from reward or pleasure or satisfaction to movement. And I just started reading about, you know, when depression started, become more, more noticeable. And it's interesting around the middle of the last century where it became more of a thing to have.

Appliances do things for us and to our idea of prosperity is to hire someone to do absolutely everything for us, to bring our groceries to us, to cook our dinners, to shop for us. It's getting even worse. One thing that reduced, and it's just correlational that changed as depression was going up was the amount of physical effort that went into our.

Lifestyle or our rewards. Now it's different than exercise. It probably has some overlap. But what I was thinking about with effort based rewards is that something that's meaningful to us, that we have some skin in the game, we actually have made some effort to do it. I use the example the early cake mixes, you just had to add water. But the very strategic marketers or developers realized that people owned it more. They had more of a sense of pride if they just cracked an egg and put it in there. So they took the egg out so that people would add it in and this. So I'm talking about minimal kind of effort and contributions. So that what I'm trying to do, even with a rat model, is build something like a model of self efficacy or agency so that you feel like you have some control in the world around you, in this uncertain world around us. And I read about doctors used to prescribe knitting to women who had anxiety. And they weren't sure why it helped, but it seemed to calm their nerves. So I kind of got on with this physical and wanted to explore the physical effort idea.

We have a model where rats, instead of just giving them their fruit loop rewards, they have to dig them up and it's just five minutes a day, very minimal effort. And then we can have to have a proper control group and our research. And so the control group, we call them the trust fundraise, we just give them the same number of rewards that their buddy who dug them up received. So the amount of rewards are the same. Going into the task area is the same. The only difference is that they didn't actually earn it by digging that up. And so we found that this has a very, it has a positive, seemingly positive, healthy impact on the stress response. And stress is a big area that as we talked about with resilience. So anything we can do to tame and rein in the stress response by I don't want to be anthropomorphic and put thoughts into the rats heads, but my daughters, sometimes when there's a challenge they'll say, mom, you've got this or you've got got this. I want to kind of put that idea into the rat's little brain. I've got this. So that when we expose them to a new challenge where they can't get their fruit loop, they persist a little bit longer and they have higher our stress hormone cortisol you probably heard a lot about. The rats have a version of that, corticosterone. And we also look at another adrenal steroid called dhea. It has a longer name, but you may get this in a health food store. I'm not recommending that because our bodies create it, but if we create more dhea, it kind of buffers the toxicity of chronically high stress hormone levels. So special operations soldiers who have gone through this tactical training and they're very effective, have higher DHEA levels, kind of a hormone of resilience.

And so it increases their DHEA to core ratios. It increases their problem solving. So learned helplessness that psychologists have talked about, I call it learned persistence.

And I think that in a way I'm giving them enhancing a sense of rat agency. We may not want to do that in the wild. They're pretty resourceful.

So I'm taking that to that level. So instead of just rewards, it's effort based rewards that complements exercise. It's not.

A workout, it's just making these connections.

Yeah, I'd like to follow up on a couple of things there. I love that you talked about, I mean, not take anything away from exercise has huge benefits across our whole health Plan including the brain. But this idea of kind of purpose driven effort, effort that actually increases our sense of self efficacy and has natural rewards built into it. You know, I think it just, you know, my wife and I have started growing a good portion of our own food in the summer with gardening. Right. And so you know, you get out as physical activity, it has a purpose as a reward for you. You get down to eat that nice fresh salad just right out of your garden that day. So there's a, there's kind of a win, win, win thing there. And we know that self efficacy, that sense of self competency that. I got this right, as you were saying, your daughter says your mom. You got that right.

Yeah.

That it's a major part of well being and what's called adamic well being or psychological well being is that sense of self efficacy and self competency. So, so that, that makes an awful lot of sense.

And I didn't mention if I could, you mentioned behavior suitables. And just to kind of follow up on that.

Yeah, want to talk about that.

And again, full disclosure, I'm not a clinician, nor am I an md.

Clinical psychologist or an md. So I'm not making any taking or giving any advice about pharmaceutical interventions. But we do know that pharmaceutical interventions are taken antidepressants because they change the neurochemistry in our brain in ways we think or helpful for depression. We talk a lot about serotonin. It's not clear that we have. You don't go to a doctor and find out that you have a serotonin deficit before you're prescribed antidepressants. But it's been correlated with that. But I just wanted to make the point by making up this term behaviorceuticals to elevate it some, to make it sound like a pharmaceutical or something medical that through our behavior, as I mentioned, with the effort based rewards, we can also change our neurochemistry. So when you're digging for that reward, I've also often use the example of knitting like the doctors used to prescribe. So when you're, you're knitting, we know that.

Repetitive use of or movement of hands or muscles like pacing back and forth can release serotonin. And that's what the antidepressants are targeting. You know, it's involved in emotional kind of well being as you anticipate whatever you're knitting, the hat, the scarf, looking forward to it. Dopamine, that feel good kind of neurochemical can be secreted as you're doing something you enjoy. Maybe Counting the stitches. It may get your mind off of.

Everything that's going on in the world at that moment.

As you maybe you're with a group of people that you enjoy doing that with, maybe this neuropeptide oxytocin could be secreted.

That may have some bonding positive qualitative experiences and also reduced stress. And all of that could reduce stress. And I've already talked about how that is a big instigator and so much that goes wrong with the brain, not when it's just temporary to tell us something's wrong, it's when it persists for long periods of time and we can't get rid of it. So just taking that knitting example as an example, that's what I mean by behavior suitable. So if we could start by trying to do behavioral entry interventions, even added to what is prescribed by the clinician.

We can change neurochemistry as well. And I love the idea of changing in our own real time. So the neurochemistry is changing in response to what's really going on in the world around us. Instead of because I'm taking this pill, it's going to be at a certain level, regardless of what the behavior is and that the brain wants to make connections between I do this and this happens. And that could mask the brain's sensitivity and precision in doing that. So just like we wouldn't, a doctor wouldn't tell us to take, say, oh, you've got diabetes, take this insulin. A doctor's going to say, let's talk about your lifestyle, your exercise, your diet. So hopefully doctors and clinicians are talking about lifestyle as they're prescribing these medications and how to know when you're better and that it's working.

Yeah, one would hope so. And certainly antidepressants have helped a lot of people, but still it's actually, I think probably not the majority of people who suffer from depression that it's actually effective for.

But even more importantly, the connection with preventive health care. We wouldn't take a serotonin adjusting drug as a preventative. Right. Nobody would get out antidepressants as a preventative. Right.

Well, pharmaceutical companies want us to.

Yeah. Someone.

I won't go there, though.

Yeah, yeah, that. That could happen. Certainly. Maybe we shouldn't even put that idea out into the universe. But you know, while behavior suit the idea of behavior suitables could be a treatment for people who are suffering from depression, it's also something we can use as a preventative. And what one would. It seems logical that the same things that might help depress lifestyle changes and this idea of behavior suitables, types of women, so forth that would help someone recover from depression, would also help prevent depression.

Absolutely. What you're doing with your gardening, I think that's, you know, that's preventative. So that's that one aspect of the coping. I've got this control agency but all their books behind you and what you're doing now, that's the knowledge and information. There's so many levels but absolutely this. I get frustrated. I'm a pre clinical researcher working with the pre clinical models. But I know the reality is that it's hard to package. I can't package gardening and knitting in a little pill bottle and make a lot of money off that. So I hope our society can start to look at medicine a little bit. It's not always a pill or surgery. It can, we can certainly change our bodies and our brains through our lifestyle and we certainly need those pills and surgeries at certain points. But I wish, I hope that we can add this to the table in a more respectable way.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, that's a whole other discussion, you know, of how we've gotten so out of balance and obviously we need to refocus on lifestyle and preventive medicine and preventive healthcare. And instead we've kind of put all the resources into curative stuff and continuing to do things that make us unhealthy and then hopefully we can cure it when we get in trouble. Trouble. And it's kind of all backwards. Right. And it's created a huge industry on both sides of unhealthy input and then curative medicine. And we really need to work to change that with. And I think there are ways in which, because economic levers are really important. Right. And we know how the economic levers drive the pharmaceutical industry. But you know, there's starting to be a real interest and I think some economic drivers and healthy lifestyle, organic foods, you know, the exercise industry, you know, and different things around preventive health and hopefully it'll keep moving in that direction. I think it's really a matter of education which again, again could create that cognitive reserve force. Right. The more we, the more we self educate around what's not good for us and what is good for us, we're likely to make better decisions.

Absolutely. College professor here. Education, that's what I've dedicated my life to.

Absolutely. So you know, we've learned a lot about how the brain concerns the change. The brain is basically a learning machine. It's A, it's a, it's a bioelectrical, you know, chemical learning machine, but still. And it's a system and, and this phenomenon known as neuroplasticity, the ability, the brain's ability to change. And it wasn't that long ago that we thought by the time you're adult, the brain you got is the brain you got. If anything is going to diminish in its capacity over the lifespan. We now know that's not true. Theoretically, the brain could thrive and grow and continue to evolve all the way into being a centenarian, if we're that fortunate to live a long and healthy life. So, you know, and with what we now know about neuroplasticity, we're hearing terms like self directed neuroplasticity, positive neuroplasticity, which is kind of the, the interface between positive psychology and neuroscience. We even hear terms like biohacking and brain hacking these days and the whole, the supplement industry and all of that. You know, it's all kind of interconnected, especially for people that not only want to have a healthy life, but there are people really interested in optimizing brain performance, developing that super brain performance. Right. So I'm wondering as a researcher how what these kind of terms mean for you. Positive neuroplasticity, self directed neuroplasticity and so forth. And about how we can take more agency in, you know, shaping our own brain and our own health for the length of our lifespan.

Right. The theme of my lab is experience based neuroplasticity. So you're right, the brain changes, as I say, from the womb to the tomb. So if we're alive, it's changing in some ways. We're talking more about positive ways. It can change, as I mentioned, with trauma, that accumbens can be sculpted in certain ways. With disease, substance abuse, it can change in a negative way. So it's a double edged sword. But one of the most hopeful things out there, hopeful lessons or themes or findings is this neuroplasticity that when I was growing up, we kind of thought, as you mentioned, we're born with what we have and it's not going to get any better. Wear your helmets. And we do, I'm a mom, so do wear your helmets, but take care of those brain cells because you're not going to get any more. We know now that with other animals, with the rats, we measure neuroplasticity, the production of new neurons and, and how. So neuroplasticity can occur in several ways, but kind of two Major ways are you get new neurons. So this is called neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons. So this does happen. It's controversial about at what rate it happens in adult humans, but through the rats it's happening. Certainly it's happening through childhood and growth and it is happening as adults. But we don't know. Those neurons have to get plugged in. So when you think about a brain and memory, you can't just. That's the thing about an traumatic brain injury or stroke. You can't just insert new brain in there and have all of your memories back. The brain is based on experiences. So it's the creation of new neurons for whatever that means. We're still trying to figure that out. And then the neurons we have can get more complex, more connections and more little receptors and things. So there's lots of ways that we can change the brain and new and neurochemicals that facilitate this like brain derived neurotrophic factor. BDNF is one of our favorite versions. So the things that we've talked about exercise, if you could with the rodent research that where we've done most of the research with the brain, I think that that's kind of we need to get out of the rodent world and test more animals. But running, putting animals in a running wheel is the number one way to increase those cells. So I don't know if we need to be in running wheels or running, but that aerobic activity is very important. And also stress is negatively correlated generally with neuroplasticity. So if we can calm the stress, it allows our brain to have more energy to produce these neurons. And.

And I think optimal this kind of optimism.

It's interesting to think about why the brain needs to reinvent itself, to keep reinventing itself and especially our species that we're always exploring. And as we explore and go into new territories and learn new things, it's going to take new kind of brain areas. And I haven't mentioned, maybe I mentioned flexibility, but flexible cognition and this is a big part of resilience. We don't need if you, if you sense that you're getting stuck in your ways, that you're in this rut, you need to be mindful with whatever way you're monitoring your behavior to say, oh, I need to do something about this. So.

I think often that the neuroplasticity allows us to continue to grow, to explore and to take on new.

Functions that's so important for survival. Now if we were put into a world that was going to stay exactly the same for the rest of our lives. Maybe we don't need neuroplasticity, but we know just in the past months that this world is changing drastically. Sometimes we're doing it intentionally, sometimes it's not. And if we cannot change, we do not survive. So this is not trivial. And I use the example of the koala in Australia as its environment is changing.

It doesn't have a very. I'm from Alabama, so we'd say bless the koala's heart. It doesn't have a very impressive brain. It looks a little deflated in its skull. It doesn't even take up its whole skull. And one behavioral characteristic of the koala as the. As humans are damaging the environment around it and trying to relocate them to the few little spots where it's still healthy for them to have the eucalyptus, because it's become very inflexible in its diet, only eucalyptus, and very inflexible about it. Just can't adapt to a new place. So when they take them to a new place, there's news stories about they just crawl out of the trees and try to go back and they get hit by. By cars and killed by dogs. They can't adapt to a new world. And it's predicted unless something happens, they will go extinct by a certain time. So this whole idea of neuroplasticity gets very philosophical. And it's similar to as long as we think we're going somewhere and there's a tomorrow and there's a reason to live, and that this is something that I don't get exactly from our rats. So I'm extrapolating from that neuroplasticity. And a changing brain is going to be critical for that.

And as well as the ability to generate more neurons, which is a little bit controversial, which parts of the brain and to what extent in humans. But we also can develop new neural networks with our existing neurons. Those neural networks can become more efficient, improve myelinization, improve responsiveness, neurochemical activity and so forth. And I wonder if I want to address two things. One is stress. You've mentioned stress primarily as a negative. And I realize stress can really, you know, have a very undermining depending on how we work with it. But stress is also sort of necessary in human life, right? What we call putting stress on the muscles and bones, we call it exercise, right? If we don't do it, we atrophy of the muscles and bones. So it's really how we work with stress, isn't it? The challenges of the challenges of life, whether they're physical, mental, emotional, spiritual challenges, it can kind of go either way. They can really help leverage our growth and neuroplasticity and growth and, or they can lead to, you know, undermining our health and learned helplessness and, and that lack of adaptability that qualities are experiencing. So what's, what's the determinant of, of which way we go? And then one other question maybe to throw in there is, you know, you mentioned how our life experiences can, whether we have positive experiences can help create a kind of neural propensity towards a more positive outlook. Negative experiences, maybe the, the opposite. There is something called the negativity bias. Because job one for any species is survival. We pay more attention to threat than anything else. And that tends to flood our long term memory with more threat, negative experiences, so forth. So I'm wondering both what determines how we work with stress, whether we can do it in a life enhancing way, a brain health enhancing way and then kind of what we're up against with this default.

Baseline of survival. Right. And a focus on threat.

Yeah, it's complicated. It's a lot of balance. Well, the kind of stress pioneer Hans Selye, he did, he talked about distress and eustress. And the key is really the timing from my perspective. So mostly so we talk about acute stress. So this is short term, you're in a war zone, you need to be stressed for that. While you hear the sounds or in a car accident, you hear the horn or the ambulance, you need to have that cortisol alert, noradrenaline alert. This keeps us alive, that keeps us, the bear, from attacking us. But it's the chronic stress when we cannot turn it off. So we are living like the bear is about to attack us for days, weeks or months. So the cost of that is energy that goes toward our well being. Other times, such as digesting our food and propping up our immune system so it's more sensitive energy to the brain, bone growth and such, reproduction, all of that takes a hit so that we can have this very active stress response. And that's where you get.

Different diseases, cancers, autoimmune diseases and even psychological diseases as well. So through.

Mindfulness.

Coping skills, however you kind of get at this top down processing.

When it is safe to step in and say I don't need to be at this high alarm state right now because it's a cost benefit. And this is one advantage we have perhaps over other animals that we can use these extra neurons in our cerebral cortex to do to engage the top down processing. So we're not living reflexively, kind of like maybe a wilder animal, I don't know. I'm writing a book on wild brains now. I'm thinking about what wild actually means. But so having effective coping skills and we even look at this in the rat, we need support, kind of profile them into. Some are very passive, they just take whatever is given to them and retreat. Others are very active and so they'll fight something and that seems to be better than being passive. But what is the best are those that it depends on the situation. They're passive sometimes and active others so that they're regulating. We call it flexible copers. They're able to regulate the situation and then decide what the best way to respond is.

But that does take this emotional regulation, this top down processing, this awareness of I'm no longer in danger, something else is going on and this is going to affect me in negative ways. So let me do an intervention. Now this could be personal, individual or going. And having helped with that through psychotherapy.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is certainly just as effective as antidepressants for depression. And maybe there's some benefits that's cheaper and such. So timing is important with stress. And sometimes we can't, you know, a loved one is terminally ill for months or years. So it's not something as easy as saying, oh, I'm going to cut that off. But even with that grief and that challenge, there may be ways. I'm going to exercise a little bit every day, I'm going to talk to a support group. I'm going to eat healthy and still do everything I need to not dissociate myself from the situation in an unrealistic way. But just like we would take medicine for other symptoms, we need to think about treating these symptoms of stress because it will. I just can't underestimate, can't express just how potent stress can be in every part. Psychological, cardiac, immune disease, growth, well being. It keeps us alive. It's incredibly important, but it kills us as well. And another thing about these fancy brains is maybe we don't need a lion chasing us to be stressed. We're where we create things to worry about and we have to keep that in check. So we really have to use this neural equipment that we have to try to keep these checks and balances. But it takes education and training and awareness. It's not easy.

Absolutely. So you make a distinction between acute stress, which is very necessary and keeps us alive, versus this chronic stress, which really undermines our Our health and functionality on so many levels and it can really be incredibly, incredibly deleterious and lead to all kinds of serious mental illness and physical illness. So.

With.

I think we all know we don't necessarily always act on it, but good self care by taking care of ourselves with exercise, nutrition, drinking enough water, good hydration, getting enough sleep at night, avoiding the things that are really hard on the body, too much caffeine or alcohol, things like that, all this is good for the body. We all know this. I assume what's good for the body is good for the brain. All these aspects of good self care are also helpful for brain health and brain longevity.

Absolutely. And again, I think people give their brains a pass like they're not part of the body and don't think about taking care of it the way they may heal a wound or put something on a wound or diet. But yes, as I mentioned before, even our neurochemicals are produced from what we eat, exercise, movement is incredibly important. The amount of control we have over our environment and one kind of application of the effort based rewards could be something like a hobby. Like you mentioned gardening. And if we're learning something new, that's good for the brain too, to totally have to learn something. My husband and I are taking ballroom dancing and we're kind of awful at it. But I know that the harder I have to work, the better it is for my brain and it has the movement associated with it. So taking in new information and another part of the brain that is important that some people I think don't realize could have a really negative impact is as we age, which we are in that bracket, the way information gets into the brain becomes compromised, our vision becomes compromised. Hearing, not so much. Our balance, smell. And so if the gateway for information is a little bit clogged, our brain isn't getting as much information as it used to. And so just that in itself, you know, not being able to hear or see can start to diminish your brain's.

Reserves and not only reaction time, we know that, but just not getting as much information. A colleague, Michael Merzenich, he started this company looking at brain training. And even though it's sitting in front of a screen, I love more interactive, but it's called Brain hq. And he was a pioneer in neuroplasticity with rodents. And so he decided he wanted to translate that and that's something we're all interested in translating from our rodent work to the real world and to the clinic. And so he has computer programmers and cognitive Scientists creating this really fun kind of software that is tuning in your visual acuity, your visual field, hearing patterns and some decision making things and things, you know.

Younger my students can see things that are flashed more quickly that I cannot even see. And through training we can get there and keep those senses a little bit younger. And so that's not trivial either. So we need to, if we notice that information is compromised, anything we can do to stay sharp in that way. So as long as we're doing some physical activity, those. Some of the brain. There's controversial. Some of the brain. We hear a lot about brain training, but I know that.

Michael Merzin they've tried to do the evidence based and compare it, use it for different things. So checking it out, looking at the evidence and if it's something you kind of. It's like going to the gym. It's hard to get people to do it. But we kind of need to do something like that and start to think about workouts like that as we age as well and that that makes us. Still gives us. I've got it. So we don't give up as easily when the stress is there and keeps us sharp.

I have a friend who's an audiologist and she says she really encourages people that need them to get hearing aids because otherwise it can lead to cognitive deterioration because obviously you're not getting that auditory input. It's not as rich. And you know, I'm sure in your laboratory work you've seen the impact of impoverished environments versus enriched environments on learning and growth and so forth. So I think it's really important we think of that as children and how we raise children. But I think it's important us to continue to think about it as an adult, as my. You know, with the pandemic, we've all been challenged. We've reduced our social connections. We're getting everything delivered to us. You know, we're isolating. You know, maybe not intentionally but. But I think we have to be aware of the negative downside of all these impacts and make sure we're finding ways to keep an enriched environment. Hopefully we are getting to where we're going, get back out in the world more and hopefully this thing is abating, at least for now. So. But anyway, I think being very conscious about, you know, brain health is an everyday 247.

Concern that we should all have. Because if we again, if we lose that brain health, our quality of life is going to go down really quickly.

Right. And we actually look at enriched environments and impoverished or just the way we rodents were kept in cages standard way would be considered impoverished. But and something else within enriched environments just to keep the animals active and expose them to new stimuli and sometimes make them work for their food. Their brains show more of this complexity and neuroplasticity. There's been a lot of research in a lot of different labs since the 1960s. With that we started playing around with. When I was getting into the literature and people were building these enriched environments, it struck me and my students that they were kind of artificial. A lot of little metal mirrors and plastic things. And I talked to one of my heroes. She recently passed away a couple of years ago. Marian diamond was one of the first scientists that did that enriched environments and actually interviewed her for a writing project. Why has it only been these artificial. And she said, oh, interesting question. They did some natural. Actually had an enriched environment outside. It'd be hard to do that today, even though we're trying to do some things like that. And she said they seem to have a heavier brain. They just did some very fundamental measures than the enriched environments, the more artificial ones. So we started a whole program where we have naturally enriched environments and artificially enriched environments. Kind of like the country rats and the city rats. And any situation where you have exposure to novelty and things to do that's good. But for our natural element, we'll have like a clean dirt coconut husk for them to dig in and sticks instead of plastic things. Same number of objects, but more natural. And cognitive wise, we haven't really seen a big difference. But that emotional resilience that we're talking about putting them, giving them a stressful challenge, they seem to respond in a more adaptive, persistent way with that. Those markers of resilience. DHEA and human research has shown that if we're around green. I've got a few plants here. And Sweden showed several years ago that people who grew up around a park or green space were about half as likely to develop a psychiatric illness. That's huge. That's bigger than the efficacy rates for some of the drugs. So.

Not saying that we should all go back to living completely in nature, but having a walk in the park. I know I live kind of out in the country, so to speak, and seeing the green pasture, that's just such a drug for me every day as I drive back home. So we all have individual differences about what makes us calm and such. But our brains evolved in a world that's different from my office. And so it's maybe more responsive to some of those stimuli. And the Rats are suggesting that that's the case. And a good bit of human research as well.

Yeah, absolutely. Actually, in Japan there's a tradition called forest bathing. And now people that's come to us. You can become a certified facilitator forest bathing. And you spend at least I think three hours in a session out in really forest, deep green forest. Right. It has huge positive impacts on us. Well, this has been incredibly, incredibly rich, Kelly, and thank you so much for this and, and the important research you're doing to help us better understand our brains and what leads to brain health and how to, how to help people when they have gotten into trouble with brain dementia or brain injury. So thank you very much for the important work you're doing and thank you for being part of our summit.

Thank you for what you're doing. It's very helpful and important.

Be well.

Thank you.

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