How to Enhance Brain Function: Change Your Brain, Change Your Life | Daniel Amen

Welcome to the Genius Network show. In this episode you'll discover four simple steps you can take right now to boost your focus, increase your energy and make your brain better. With Change youe Brain, Change youe Life by Dr. Daniel Amen. Dr. Amen is a physician, brain imaging expert, double board certified psychiatrist and 10 time New York Times best selling authority. Recorded live from the Genius Network event. If you would like access to the full feature video presentation, the show notes and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 38 that's geniusnetwork.com 38.

It's the fattest organ in your body. Fattiest. Maybe 60% of it is fat. It uses 20% of your energy in oxygen intake, yet it only weighs around three pounds. That's all I know about the human brain and I'm not even sure that's accurate. Dr. Daniel Amen knows almost everything else about your brain. His Amen clinics around the country have scanned over 110,000 brains. Mine six times. Dr. Amen is a physician, psychiatrist and nine times New York Times best selling author. Plus he just launched a contest using my Genius crowdsource blueprint. His life is devoted to helping people live even better lives by having even better brains. You'll learn a lot in a very short time if you allow your brain to function as it's supposed to. That means listen and focus on this topic. Change your brain. Change your life. Which is also the name of his book which will be coming out November 3rd. The first edition sold over a million copies. Give it up for my friend, Dr. Daniel Amen.

Thank you so much. I am so grateful to be here. Because of course, you know, brains run the world. They run the stock market, the local market, huge corporations, mom and pop shops down the street. Brains run governments, although not that well. Schools. Sexual art program in the Fraser Academy in Vancouver. We teach thousands of kids every year to care about their brains. Churches. We have a brain health program in churches around the world. Families. It's my family and you. Yet most people rarely think about their brains, which is a huge mistake because success in anything you do always starts with a healthy brain. After looking at NOW's 115,000 scans and some of the most interesting people in the world, including Joe, it is very clear to me that when your brain works right, you work right. And when your brain is troubled for whatever reason, a head injury, an infection, mold exposure, you're going to have trouble in your life. With a healthy brain, people are happier, physically healthier, because they make better decisions. Wealthier, because they make better decisions and they're more successful in everything they do. When your brain is not healthy, people are sadder, sicker, poorer, less successful. So your competitive advantage or your disadvantage is the actual physical functioning of your brain. But let's be clear, you're in a war for the health of your brain. Everywhere you go, someone is trying to shove bad food down your throat that will kill you early. The real weapons of mass destruction are processed pesticide sprayed, highly glycemic, low fiber food like substances. The clown and the king have killed more people than ISIS has ever dreamed. And these food companies use neuroscientists. They use tricks to hook your pleasure centers because you know this woman would never look this way if she ate that. Tech companies create addictive gadgets that hook our attention and distract us from our loved ones. New study from Microsoft. The attention span in humans is now 8 seconds. A goldfish is 9. This is evolution going the wrong way. Study from the Harvard Business Review said that only 10% of us are high in both focus and energy, the two things that drive success. 90% of people are without one or the other. Which is why in your bag, I put our Focus and energy supplement. This is the one I hate now that I'm 61, because it's very clear to me after doing a study with 8,000 people, your brain gets less and less active as you age. Typical 55 year old brain with lots of wrinkles. Worse at 82. But here's a friend of mine who actually lives in Phoenix at 82. She has a stunningly beautiful brain. Brain aging is much more about your habits than, than your age. So here's the program. This is the $250,000 idea. And for you in this room, it's way more than that. If you pay attention to me, it's, you're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. I can prove it. Here's the plan we use at Amen Clinics. First you gotta look at your brain. So baseline brain health assessments. We do a study called SPECT that looks at blood flow and activity. Here's a healthy scan. Compared to someone with accelerated aging, someone who has Alzheimer's disease, which we can tell decades before you have any symptoms, someone with a brain injury, someone whose brain's working too hard, such as people who have obsessive compulsive disorder and people who have underactive brains. This one drank way too much. I think of imaging like a map. You know, a picture's worth a thousand words, but A map is worth a thousand pictures. A map tells you where you are and gives you direction on how to get to where you want to go. Without a map, you don't know and you're lost. And it can cost you your life. The second thing we do is we don't want you to have normal anything normal is sick. 51% of the US population at some point in their life will have a mental illness. And if you're fortunate enough to live until you're 85, 50% of you will be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. That's normal. And I don't want any part of it. And Genius Network people don't either. So I want to know your important numbers. And you got a copy of my new book, Change youe Brain, Change youe Life. This program is in there, in chapter 19, in detail. The third part is your brain. People go, oh, take my supplement, because it'll give you a great brain. And it has one thing in it, and that just doesn't work. Why? Because the brain does not get sick in one way. It gets sick in many different ways. And that's exactly how we get it better. So we take a multiple mechanism approach from omega 3 fatty acids for inflammation, ginkgo for blood flow and so on. And the last thing, and I'm really proud of this, in 2005, I wrote a book and I got all sorts of grief for it. It was called Preventing Alzheimer's. You can't do that. But since then, there have been programs at UCLA and Johns Hopkins called Preventing Alzheimer's. I love that. Here's the short course. You want to prevent Alzheimer's disease in yourself or your family, you have to prevent or treat all of the risk factors that are associated with it. And if you go after obesity, diabetes, heart disease, hormone levels that are not optimized, and all the rest of these, this is how you prevent it. So let me show you how this works. Joe's one of my favorite people. I love Joe having a problem. I called Joe Having a great day. I'll call Joe. And Joe called me. He's like, my brain's not right. And this was about five years ago. And he got hurt. He had a head injury. Most people don't know that head injuries are major cause of addictions and psychiatric problems. And nobody knows because psychiatrists are the only medical specialists that never look at the organ they treat. How crazy is that? He came, his brain was troubled, and he just. What I love about Joe is he just did everything I said. Imagine if you Just did everything he said, where your business would be, and in seven months, his brain is better. Five years later, it's freaking normal. It's healthier than his age. Some of you who've come to my clinic, I'll tell you, your brain looks older than you are, and his looks younger than he is. I love that for him. We also did the world's largest study on active and retired NFL players at a time when the NFL was lying that they had a problem. And we demonstrated high levels of damage in 96% of the players that we study. It's horrible. And, oh, by the way, if you played football at any level, 80% of you have brain damage. But my job, my love, is never to tell you you have a bad brain. I'm like the eternal optimist. Well, can we make these bad brains better? And in fact, on this program, 80% of our NFL players showed improvement in memory, attention, mood, and sleep. You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. Here's one of our players, Freddie Dreier, who said, I replaced a part of my mind that had been lost. My energy and focus are much better. Duvall Love played 20 years. He's an offensive guard. His brain just looked awful. Year later, it's much better. Oh, by the way, lost 110 pounds. I was pretty excited for him. Now he has a master's degree. He thinks he's really smart, so that's really awesome. And so, November 3rd, Change youe Brain, Change youe Life, which is in 26 countries. And I'm so proud of this book, but it's old. And so I had to revise it, and I expanded it, and I put all of my best work into this book. So I'm very excited. I called Joe up. I said, joe, how do we get this to the world? He said, well, I have a form, the Genius Crowdsource Blueprint. And I. I'm a good student. I just. I do what he tells me to do. So we have a name. I changed my brain and changed my life to win the prize, Best Video or Essay on how you used my work to help your brain and your life. Our goal is a thousand stories, a million more books sold, and the prize is we will pay for you to come to Southern California, get a full evaluation that we pay for. I'll actually do it because I don't do many of them anymore. And we'll give you a year's worth of supplements. And the deadline is February 14th, because that's love. My brain day. And the first day we got 60 entries, so we now have about two. It's been out for like four days. So one of them, Steve, writes my rental car confirmation number. And I'm thinking, why do I want to know this? The reason I know is that I'm supernaturally able to remember things that I would never have been able to, and they don't go away. My productivity and creativity is off the charts. I'm able to connect with my wife in ways I've never experienced. And the sexual intimacy is another area of peak performance. I love that. But my favorite one so far is Cheryl. My brain was broken because of your work. I went from being homeless and hopeless without the custody of my three children to being an RN on a busy surgical trauma unit in a stable relationship. But most importantly, I'm able to be a good mother to my children. You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. I can prove it. Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Genius Network with Dr. Daniel Amen. If you'd like access to the full feature video presentation, the special resources and show notes for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 38 that's geniusnetwork.com 38 if you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event, go to geniusnetworkevents.com that's geniusnetworkevents dot com don't miss out on more insights, strategy and wisdom like this on Genius Network. Subscribe to Genius Network today by visiting geniusnetwork.com subscribe that's geniusnetwork.com subscribe.