[00:00:00.000] - Dr. Tommy Wood
There's actually several very interesting studies where people learn a skill or they learn some vocabulary or they try and memorize something. Then immediately afterwards, they do some guided breath work or they do a period of meditation. They actually remember those things better afterwards. It's probably because they're getting some true down regulation where the brain starts to cement some of those connections.

 [00:00:28.620] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
You have found your your way to the Lemanne Gordon podcast where Docs Talk Shop. Happy eavesdropping. I'm Dr. Dawn Lemanne. I treat cancer patients.

 [00:00:47.440] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
I'm Dr. Deborah Gordon. I work with aging patients.

 [00:00:51.280] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
We've been in practice a long time.

 [00:00:52.940] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
A very long time.

 [00:00:55.260] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
We learn so much talking to each other.

 [00:00:57.360] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
We do. What if we let people Listen in.

 [00:01:02.740] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
In today's episode, Dr. Gordon and I have the distinct pleasure of speaking with Dr. Tommy Wood, whose new book, The Stimulated Mind, will be available soon. We explore his concept of developing greater head space. That's not hat size, but rather our cognitive reserves as we head into older age. We talk about the kinds of brain training and brain resting that are most helpful for our brain health and function. Dr. Woods also talks about his work coaching elite athletes. He shares his insights about getting better results when we remember compassion, both with ourselves and with others. One fascinating item is we learn why an experiment that put glasses, eye glasses on owls shows us the one missing ingredient that makes it difficult for aging brains to learn. And more importantly, how one specific simple change in attitude turned old owl brains into spring chickens, forgive the pun, able to learn as easily and as well as young owls. Join us for a fascinating discussion and a preview of Dr. Wood's forthcoming book, The Stimulated mind. Enjoy.

 [00:02:35.680] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
We're welcoming onto the podcast today Dr. Tommy Wood. Hi, Tommy.

 [00:02:40.680] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Hello.

 [00:02:41.380] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
Hi. I'd like to just start with a little bit of my introduction of Tommy and then ask you to do a little bit yourself because I think there's some interesting details about who you are and how you've come to be who you are that our audience might find interesting. I first met Tommy about a year before Dawn did at a Physicians for Ancestral Health meeting. It was a wonderful organization that doesn't seem to have meetings anymore, but they were always great because it was just a group of practitioners talking to practitioners. Tommy did a presentation on multiple sclerosis, which I believe was inspired by somebody close to you. Is that right, Tommy?

 [00:03:23.960] - Dr. Tommy Wood
It was my stepbrother.

 [00:03:25.120] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
Your stepbrother. And he threw up on the display platform a spider web of interlocking variables, contributors, aggravators, mitigators. And I went, this is the way real life thinks about problems. This is the way real life problems happen and are resolved. So it was very impressive. And even though you went on to do several more topics over the ensuing years, the approach was always about systems, a systems-complicated interlocking approach. Do you think that's fair?

 [00:04:05.380] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Yeah, I think that's fair. That's the way I've always or increasingly thought about things over time. My wife is a chemical engineer, and She always says that there's a secret engineer in me trying to get out, even though I was never formally trained as an engineer.

 [00:04:22.440] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
What you were trained is pretty much everything else. I think it's interesting that you call yourself neuroscientist. You're not a neurologist, but we are particularly interested in interview talking with you because of your new book that's about to come out soon that I think our readers will be interested in taking a look at called The Stimulated Mind . But you didn't start out with that direction. You started out in an academic family, clearly intending to pursue science, health sciences. And admittedly, I'm biased for this perception I'm about to share with everyone. But it seems to me that your experience with rowing really opened up your career visions and what became important to you? Why don't you give... You did start out going towards medicine, but had some circuitous pathways to where you are now.

 [00:05:28.140] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Yeah, obviously, rowing is this incredible formative experience that everybody should have. Obviously. That was the case for me. You're right, I came from a very academic family. Both my parents are professors. I went to university as an undergraduate. I was learning what we call biological natural sciences at Cambridge. I Actually more similar to the US College system, Cambridge has this degree of Natural Sciences, where you get a much broader range of sciences that you learn compared to other typical universities degrees in the UK, where you would go and you would just learn. You would major in biochemistry, and all you would do is biochemistry. No minors, no additional things beyond that. And so this gave me a broader view of some of the scientific fields. But actually, what I spent most of my time doing was rowing.

 [00:06:38.580] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
Both rowing and coaching rowing.

 [00:06:41.240] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Yes. And so as part of that, First I started off rowing, and then I became head coach. I became captain of my boat club there, and then I went to medical school. I was head coach of the medical school, boat club for a couple of years. And so I increasingly became interested in nutrition physician, physical activity, training modalities, all these other things that contribute to our overall health. It was that that pushed me towards medical school in the first place, but it was always that underlying interest in how we can improve our own individual health well beyond or well before we interact with the healthcare system, ideally, minimizing our contact with the healthcare system, if possible. That was what drove me into medicine, even though That's not necessarily what you do as a doctor. I found that later. Oh, really?

 [00:07:35.120] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
One of the things I've reflected on about medicine, people always make a joke, how much nutrition did you have in medical school? And we had five lectures. But I was repeating that fact for a number of years before I realized I never had any attention to exercise in medical school. We all went and exercised at noon. The whole class did. But Dawn and I went to the same medical school, UC San Francisco. Did you ever have any lectures or instruction in exercise, Dawn?

 [00:08:08.660] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
I don't recall that we did. If we did, I don't remember them. So, Tommy, I want to go back to... So you were captain of the rowing team during medical school, and at that point, you became interested in nutrition. Is it because you saw the effect of nutrition on your rowing or because you the effect of rowing and nutrition on your medical studies and your ability to concentrate and get through classes with ease. You're the nexus guy, how all these things fit together. Tell us a little bit about what you noticed in that period that drove you toward these interests. I'm assuming it's something personal in your performance in all these different realms.

 [00:08:55.580] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Yeah, what a great question. The There's actually a lot of things that intersect in that time period. Going into university, the year before, I took a gap year. I spent some time in Iceland working for a big genetics company there. I have family in Iceland, so I was just spending some time living with my family and working. What I would say is I became overly obsessed with various aspects of health, and it's not really health. I wanted to look better naked, if I'm honest. I'm 18. That was my primary focus. That was a big focus for a long period of time. Almost to my detriment, I probably had what we would call orthorexia. I certainly had an exercise addiction. I was hyper-focused in those areas to the detriment of others, which has actually been very useful for me as I then think about, well, how do we... When we're explaining health information or trying to talk about optimizing things to other people, you have to realize that that is something that can happen, that we become hyper-focused on these things to the detriment of the bigger picture of our well-being. But in reality, the question you asked, when I was thinking about rowing and rowing performance, I'm I'm clearly a scientist at heart.

 [00:10:33.210] - Dr. Tommy Wood
I was like, Well, this is a problem that I can solve with science. I can read papers about what are the best practices to do with sports nutrition. There are many things that are important, but total calories and all the different macronutrients, getting enough protein in, all this stuff. I built a box that was in the corner of our corner of our changing room in our boat club. This is in Cambridge when I was captain. Basically, I would fill that box with food and other things so that everybody would eat immediately after training, because sometimes we're training twice a day. Not everybody was really paying attention to these things, so I took control of that. I think that certainly benefits us in a number of ways. We weren't the best boat club from a skills perspective by any stretch of the imagination, but we certainly made up for that with how hard we trained. That got us some way to being a reasonably good crew. Then I did something similar when I was head coach of the medical school boat club at Oxford when I went to medical school. We actually had some very high-level rowers, and our best boat was our female crew.

 [00:12:00.520] - Dr. Tommy Wood
We had some national international-level rowers. But equally, it can be quite difficult to immediately get people interested in this, especially if some of them are more casual rowers. I would individually feel protein shakers with recovery protein shakes that I would hand out to all my crew after every training session, and then I'd take them home and I'd refill them and take them back. Can I say that doing that had a big impact on our performance? It's very difficult to say, but It was certainly very good from a camaraderie perspective. The crew knew they were being taken care of and that I was invested in their success. All those things, I think, are important as well. Some of it was from coming at it, trying to solve this as a science problem. But then some of it is also just trying to build these systems that make people feel cared for and feel like they're working towards the right goals and they're supporting that through their nutrition. I think both of those were That's what's ultimately quite important in the teams that I was a part of.

 [00:13:03.560] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
Well, I think it has to be something about attitude and that you were also one of them because the attitude you can lead a horse to water, you can't make him drink. I happened to make a whole week's worth of protein shakes every week for both my wife and myself. It takes a little nudge to get that to be consumed. But there's something you talk about in your book, which I believe I can be guilty of, which when you do know more about or when you believe you know more, you knew more how to, after workout, fuel your athlete's exertion to refuel it so they're ready for the next workout, you did it in such a way that they felt supported and appreciated rather than judged for not doing it themselves. Yeah.

 [00:13:54.680] - Dr. Tommy Wood
This is something we do to ourselves as well, to others. I think often those of us who feel like we know a lot, I'm sure both of you have experienced this where you want to give advice to somebody, and then often that advice just isn't well received because people feel like... People feel like either they're not at the right cognitive stage to receive it, or they feel like they're being judged because they're not doing this thing. But we can also do it to ourselves. This is where you When you see these endless lists of things that you're supposed to do to attend to your health, and when we think about all the things that we're supposed to do, and then we think about the fact that we're not doing them, that is actually its own psychological stressor. We beat ourselves up because we're not perfect in every way when, of course, we can't be, nor do we need to be. So, yeah, there's this combination of, yes, we know what's important for supporting health, but the way that we approach that information with ourselves and with others can be really important.

 [00:14:57.600] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
So you just have to add, be kind to yourself about this list as the last item on the list.

 [00:15:03.700] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Exactly. And I have that right. I have one of those lists in the book, and be kind to yourself is one of the items in that list.

 [00:15:11.340] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
Well, speaking about a little bit back, I mean, Let's see. One of the lines that struck me in the introduction, Dawn and I were talking ahead of time about the chapters leading up to your book, and I'm going to do my little part first, and then I I think she wants to talk about the Owls a little bit. You made a footnote on... No, there is a footnote on a page early in your introduction saying that you have an interest, and we might all actually reasonably have an interest in brain health because brain conditions affect nearly half the people in the world.    Obviously, you're not just talking about dementia. But could you say that's stuck in I had to keep reading that. Am I reading that correctly? What brain condition? And I know you've dealt with a number. You've dealt with neonatal brains and traumatic brains. I mean, is that what you're thinking? What are you thinking of when you say brain conditions affect more than half the people in the world?

 [00:16:18.260] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Yeah. So this isn't a number that I put out of the.

 [00:16:23.890] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
There's a footnote.

 [00:16:26.440] - Dr. Tommy Wood
It comes from the the global burden of disease studies, many of which are done by the IHME, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, here at the University of Washington in Seattle. And most of them are published in The Lancet, and they basically estimate what is the burden of individual conditions as well as groups of chronic health conditions and acute health conditions, and how do they then contribute to overall quality of life, disease burden, and then also mortality worldwide? The kinds of neurological conditions that would come under this include dementia, but they include some of the acute neurological conditions that I study in my lab, neonatal brain injuries, traumatic brain injuries, strokes, migraines. Depending on how you classify these, you could include things like certain mental health or behavioral health disorders like severe depression. All of those get lumped into that. It sounds like a scary number, and it's different for each of us. But it's true that the majority of us, at some point, are going to experience some condition related to the health of our brains. That's also something that the majority of us are concerned about. So brain health or worry worry about future cognitive function is something that there's a recent study that's just said 86% of Americans are worried about their brains at some point in their lives.

 [00:18:10.240] - Dr. Tommy Wood
This is really something that's recently come to the forefront that people are increasingly thinking about because there is a large burden. But luckily, I think we see across all those disorders, I focus on cognitive decline dementia in the book, but stroke and depression, for instance, have many overlapping risk with dementia, and many of these are modifiable. The hope is that we have a lot of agency and ability to change the likelihood that we may suffer from one of these and/or maybe treat some of the symptoms if they do arise.

 [00:18:49.360] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
You describe yourself as a neuroscientist, a coach, and a doctor, but your coaching these days and your doctoring is Primarily with high performance athletes. Is that right? Are you functioning at all as the old-fashioned medical doctor like you did in your training?

 [00:19:10.860] - Dr. Tommy Wood
No. I am nobody's doctor anymore. I am still on the GMC, the Medical Register in the UK. I don't have an active license to practice because I don't do any clinical work that would help me keep my clinical validation. The coaching that I do is all in the setting of performance, so largely with Formula One drivers right now, but also some other elite athletes. I'm either coaching the coaches or I'm working directly with the drivers. I will do things like look at blood tests from a nutrition/performance lens rather than a clinical lens. The drivers that I work with have doctors who I work with who do the more clinical side. But that's where most of my direct human-facing one-on-one work happens at the moment.

 [00:20:09.800] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
But you have a real interest in brain health, and we'll link in the notes to your The podcast that you're on more consistently, The Brain Fitness podcast with Dr. Josh Turknett, who we all I met. Did you meet him through Physicians for Ancestral Health, Tommy, or did you know him before that?

 [00:20:30.640] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Yes. I met him at the exact same meeting that I met you.

 [00:20:34.760] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
So he's changed a lot of my patients' lives through his advice about migraines. And so when you said migraine, I thought, oh, okay, that gets my awareness up to half the global population when you throw in brain conditions like that. But you do talk a lot about what you talk about in this book, which is increasing head space through diet, life lifestyle, self-care, all sorts of things that we've talked a lot about, I think, Dawn, wouldn't you say that we've covered a lot of those on the podcast?

 [00:21:08.300] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
We do. And the idea of headspace, I love that word, is, I think an important one. Make some extra connections while you can, and they'll come in handy. You tell a story about owls with upside-down glasses.

 [00:21:26.100] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
We're reading this and going, What is this about?

 [00:21:30.000] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
I was familiar with the studies in humans showing that after a period of time, several days, I believe, if you put upside down glasses on humans so that everything looks upside down, after a few days, the brain adjusts and everything is right side up, even with the classes on. But in these owls, the adult owls didn't fix the upside-down problem until their daily food rations were removed. When they were forced to hunt for their own mice, boom, they fixed the upside-down problem. Their brain plasticity returned and they were doing what they needed to do. And that struck me in terms of humans and retirement, because I think a lot of us think, well, I'll retire and I'll keep my brain active. I'll do crossword puzzles and I'll go do a little bit of easy volunteering. That's actually a little bit more complex. I think that's a good idea. But I I think the idea in your book that really struck me was that there have to be consequences to your actions to maintain that brain plasticity. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and how you came to that and what you actually do yourself to maintain that?

 [00:22:50.960] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Sure. I think some of the focus on this idea in the book is given away by the title, The Stimulated Mind. This is obviously a core part of what I think is important for both developing and maintaining cognitive function. I tell the Owls, the story of the Owls, it's the preface of the book, because I still think the majority of the population have this very fixed idea of what it is to have an adult or aging brain, which is that as we get older, our brain becomes this fixed thing that's impossible to change. We can't learn new things. We're too old to do that. Then we expect decline over time. Because we expect decline and because we don't think that the adult brain can change, we then stop doing the things that prevent decline and that can actually drive change, even in the adult brain. We need to We're trying to completely rethink how we think about the adult brain and the aging brain. The owls give a nice example of that. Even adult owls can re-adapt to this When you flip their world upside down, if they are forced to socialize with other animals or hunt for their dinner, they have to go and interact with the environment.

 [00:24:22.840] - Dr. Tommy Wood
That's really what drives either one or the other or both. Yes. Those were two separate studies, actually, by this owl group. One was the hunting and the other was the socialization. But if we acknowledge, and there's lots of evidence that I provide in the book, if we acknowledge that the adult and aging brain is actually capable of changing and improving function if we provide the right inputs, then we are in a better place to engage in the things that do that. The reason why I talk about retirement is because there are several studies that suggest that this is the point at which cognitive decline accelerates most rapidly, if you're going to look at a a trajectory across the lifespan. That's because we think you're removing both the social and the cognitive stimulus that you receive from work, which are core inputs that the brain requires in order to maintain its function. The idea of retirement came up, or it's been around in a few different guises in historical militaries, but only really became a big part of modern society at the beginning of the 20th century. Some of it, or some of this adoption of retirement is, I say, blamed on, but it's attributed to Sir William Osler, who was a physician and professor at Oxford until his death.

 [00:26:03.700] - Dr. Tommy Wood
If retirement is this point at which we are susceptible to an acceleration in cognitive decline because we removed the stimuli that we get through our work, I think that's where, ideally, we would focus a decade or two, at least before that. But if that's something that's coming up soon or something that's happened already, the primary focus that I think people should have is trying to bring some of those complex stimuli back into their lives. Yes, the cliché is I'll do the Sudoku and the crossword, and those are great, but they don't seem to be enough of a stimulus to really drive some of these neuroplastic or function-promoting processes in the brain because they're just not cognitively challenging enough. Things that we might think about include languages, music. You mentioned volunteering. Volunteering seems to be quite beneficial, both in terms of brain and overall health, potentially because prosocial behavior has a particular benefit in terms of our autonomic nervous system, as well as the connections and the stimulus that we get through the social interactions from those activities. But then complex physical activities that have a motor component, a music component, a social component. So team sports, ball sports, dancing, seems to be one of the most effective ways to regain some of these stimuli.

 [00:27:47.770] - Dr. Tommy Wood
There's also, across all of these, because they can be quite different, there's some evidence that it's just this process of learning and mastering a complex skill that requires us to respond to the environment, requires us to have some elevated level of processing speed, some social interaction. Just regardless of what the skill is, they have very similar effects in terms of how they affect brain networks and brain function. That then means we just need to do something that's challenging, that we're not very good at, that we get better at, we develop these skills. But it can be something that we want to do, that we're motivated to do and that we enjoy. We don't all have to do the same thing because there seems to be these core sets of effects that this complex skill learning has, regardless of what that skill is.

 [00:28:41.460] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
Well, one of the things that you mentioned in the book is that modern medicine, Dr. Osler, as Deborah was talking about, actually set the stage for doctors to not expect much of older people and certainly to Encourage retirement in whatever that means. And so you're actively, with this book, I think, pushing very hard against that idea and hoping that I think the reader will come away feeling a lot more empowered to actually push back against this stereotype, against the relaxation and decline.

 [00:29:26.560] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
Of retirement. So what I was going to I had a patient, probably about 15, maybe more years ago, who was a retired. Actually, if you had ever worked in New York, Tommy, I'd ask if you knew her. She was a neonatal psychologist, so she would go into the newborn ICU as a psychologist and work with patients and families and things like that. And she sustained a stroke in the speech part of her brain, and she was told she would never speak again. And she's the one who first taught me when I met her a few years later, she was giving me her complete verbal history of what had happened to her, of the concept of neuroplasticity. And evidently, there are still a lot of doctors and humans who think that neuroplasticity is a fool's dream, that we're better off just going to the beach and maybe going to Mexico once a year and practicing our Spanish. But there's a lot... I particularly enjoy... I mean, I love my job, and I do get to still row sometimes, so that's good. I think what most of Ashland is doing to keep their brain engagement is a pickleball.

 [00:30:50.640] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
But I'm fascinated by the concept of social dancing, which Dr. Anne Hathaway, who was on our podcast a while ago, that's her favorite, and she believes it's the best documented brain resilience activity. What do you think about social dancing?

 [00:31:12.360] - Dr. Tommy Wood
In terms of the available evidence, I would absolutely agree with her. I think there's a ton for dancing, particularly line dancing and ballroom dancing seem to be the two that have the best evidence to support them. But I do also think that based based on a range of other studies, we can probably broaden out beyond that and suggest that just engaging with these complex, very human skills and activities seems to be where most of the benefit comes from. I think other sports or other movements can certainly be included. Music, other forms of making music absolutely can be included. Languages can absolutely be included. Other types of social activity that might involve some cognitive component. Book clubs have some evidence for them. There's a nice study where they put people in these groups where they had to solve problems, and they saw improvements in cognitive function compared to a control group. So all of these are core complex activities that humans tend to do and usually do in social settings that seem to have similar benefits. I think doctors, and I do lay a lot of blame at the feet of William Osler. I feel like I'm okay to do that because everything at Oxford Medical School is Osler-themed.

 [00:32:41.690] - Dr. Tommy Wood
I was part of many things that were named after Osler, so I have some connection to him. They do a disservice to tell people that something is not going to be possible unless that person is the specific personality type who's like, Well, let me show you. Hold my bear. I'm going to prove you wrong. But not everybody's like that. Obviously, people want to manage expectations. But something that we've seen again and again across multiple different neurological injuries and neurological conditions, and this could be concussion recovery, stroke recovery, cognitive decline, dementia, is that cognitive stimulus or any stimulus, including physical activity, as soon as possible, is really one of the best ways to continue to either support recovery, and some of that's going to be through driving neuroplasticity. One of the reasons why I think there's been this question about neuroplasticity in the adult brain. It's because we're confusing neuroplasticity with neurogenesis.

 [00:33:57.280] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
Before we go on, may I ask you a quick favor? Hit the subscribe button. You're hitting that subscribe button really, really matters. You're making sure cutting-edge ideas that matter to you move to the center of medical discourse, where they belong. Thank you. Yes. She did not grow back the part of her brain where she sustained the stroke.

 [00:34:19.540] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Exactly.

 [00:34:20.170] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
She recruited some other part of her brain to put on a different hat and manage her to be... She said she would be at dinner parties and people would talk She would be thinking the answer to them, following everything. But it was a good couple of years before she could get her brain to make words from a different part of her brain.

 [00:34:40.680] - Dr. Tommy Wood

Yeah. And so that's the key difference is that we know that in adult humans, other than in the olfactory bulb, the part of the brain right at the front that's responsible for smell, and certain parts of the hippocampus, especially the dentate gyrus, nowhere else in the adult brain do we grow new neurons. Because of that, We've assumed that we can't improve or adapt function in the adult brain, but those are not the same thing. Neuroplasticity then is just the reshaping of connections between neurons and creating or adapting networks and neurons across the entire brain. There are a whole bunch of other cells that are important here, too. Astrocytes are important, oligodendrocytes. We often get very focused on the neurons when actually the neurons only make up about half the cells in the brain. Those are very dynamic across our entire lifespan. The only time that we think that we lose the capacity for neuroplasticity is essentially an end-stage dementia. Up to that point, with the right stimulus and then supporting those adaptive processes, the brain can still develop new connections, support new networks, improve its function, as long as the right stimulus is applied.

 [00:35:54.460] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
But certain areas can regrow. Okay, so Coach Wood, I am one of the people that you describe in some page of your book who did lose my sense of smell, which I only belatedly realized was from COVID. Oh, right after that, we had the mock orange bloom the next spring, and I couldn't smell it. There's things I could still smell, but some wonderful backyards. The chicken coop doesn't bother me quite so much. I have been I told, I should get a whole bunch of essential oils, which I'm not a big fan of essential oils, but I could perhaps get lilies in my house all the time or something. So what I'm interested in is what has been damaged in the sense of smell is really crucial, and it's a first sign of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease. It's an early symptom, plus it's a complication of COVID, and it can just be a complication allergies and other ill-kept head and nose health. But what regrows if you retrain? Because I have been told, and it sense of smell is better. I can smell the jasmine now. I'm waiting for the mock orange to come out. I've been told it can improve.

 [00:37:23.240] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
What is regrowing?

 [00:37:25.920] - Dr. Tommy Wood
So Josh and I actually did. We did an episode of this on on our podcast  that I can send to you.

 [00:37:32.820] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
Send me a link to that.

 [00:37:34.120] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Yeah. There are probably a few different things that are going on. But what's maybe consistent across many of the conditions that you mentioned, including COVID, but also some of those other neurodegenerative conditions, is it's an inflammatory process that seems to be interfering with the function of those nerves that are responsible for transducing smell. So some of the recovery will be just as the immune system does its job and it clears some of that stuff out. And of course, we know that chronic inflammation is a contributor to Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease. Long COVID. Long COVID, some proportion of depressions, cases of depression. So it's a critical factor that underlies many neurological conditions. And so then it's, is there some systemic inflammatory process that's also affecting the olfactory bulb versus is there a local inflammatory condition that's affecting the olfactory bulb, which is certainly the case in a COVID. And those nerves do seem to have the capacity up to some point to regenerate, more so in some species than others. But we think that some of that is possible in the adult human. So some of it is Resolving that inflammatory process, some of it is potentially some neurogenesis as those nerve cells are turned over.

 [00:39:08.060] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Then some will be, you're almost like your friend relearning how to speak, is retraining that system. In that setting, the advice would be that you get... It's not that you just expose yourself to a whole range of new smells, which you can do. There's some interesting studies on doing that during sleep. It seems to support memory function. You might have seen that study. But it's actually like training. You get a set of standardized smells. You smell them, You tell yourself, this is pineapple. Your brain starts to remember the things that are getting up into the nose and the receptors that are being activated. That's what's associated with pineapple. It's actually like going to the gym for your knows. And so there's a very standardized set of training protocols that you can do with things like essential oils to do that. So I think all of those things come into play depending on which condition we're maybe thinking about.

 [00:40:15.620] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
I think that one of the things that... I want to change the tack a little bit here and talk about... We're talking about all the stimuli that you can give to your brain to induce change. And you also talk, I think, which is really important about how the rest period afterwards allows the adaptation and how foregoing that, and not just sleep, but if you want to talk about what types of rest actually encourage this type of plasticity to take hold and regroup the function of the brain and how important that is, I think that would be really helpful to our listeners.

 [00:40:57.540] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Yeah. So If anybody who reads the book will see this common theme of stimulus. And I often compare stimulating the brain to stimulating the body like we do with exercise. This is useful to me as a heuristic because I'm somebody who likes to train a lot. I've been an athlete my entire life. I'm a bit of a meathead. I understand, Oh, if I want my biceps to be bigger, I need to do bicep curls. That makes sense to me. In many ways, the brain is essentially the same. The stimuli are different, but the processes are surprisingly similar. But I also know, and have made this mistake, as many amateur athletes do, I know now that if I want to adapt, if I want to get stronger, I want to get fitter, that doesn't happen through training. That happens through rest and recovery. That's when the body then starts to attend to improve Improving the function of the tissues that you stimulated. I think that nowadays, many of us are treating our brains like amateur athletes treat their bodies, which is that I'm just going to train more and more and more and harder and harder and harder because my performance isn't good because I'm not training hard enough.

 [00:42:23.360] - Dr. Tommy Wood
So I just do more and more and more and more. That's why you end up with stress fractures and injuries calories and all those and low energy availability, which is when you're not getting enough calories to support the whole system because you're training so much, which is quite common in amateur athletes. In our brains, what that looks like is We wake up, we're immediately checking email, we're on social media, we're in meetings all day, and we're just doing something constantly all day, and then we don't get enough sleep, which is when all that adaptation occurs and all the synapses are reset and strengthened to cement what you learn during the day and clean the slates for you to go back the next day. You're constantly exposing your brain to stimuli, never giving it a chance to get a break, and then you don't give it that true rest period that it needs. So sleep is critical. But equally, breaking up the day to provide brief periods of rest can be really important.

 [00:43:24.880] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
I am curious about whether I'm actually resting my brain when I think I'm taking a break. I stand in line at the supermarket and scroll through my emails and phone. I love the short form YouTube videos. I spend way too much time. I'm not resting my brain when I'm doing that in the daytime. I get plenty of sleep at night, but I'm not maximizing things, it sounds like.

 [00:43:46.620] - Dr. Tommy Wood
So as is often the case when I talk about these things, and as we talk about these things more generally, I actually think that some of the things you maybe are more of a break than we give them credit for. But certainly, different things will have different effects. So when we think about the different options, the ones that are maybe best studied and true brain breaks are things that look more like periods of breathwork or meditation. There's actually several very interesting studies where people learn a skill or they learn some vocabulary or they try and memorize something. Then immediately afterwards, they do some guided breath work or they do a period of meditation They actually remember those things better afterwards.  It's probably because they're getting some true down regulation where the brain starts to cement some of those connections. That's one option, but that's not something that everybody immediately has access to, to take 30 minutes in your day to go and do some meditation. Much shorter breaks have been shown to have benefits, particularly just in terms of cognitive fatigue and overall energy and vigor in a typical work day. Some studies show just a minute or two outdoors seeing something green, even just 90 seconds of looking through a window at something green has significant benefit.

 [00:45:31.510] - Dr. Tommy Wood
There are studies where they've done, yes, five, scheduled five-minute breaks throughout a workday. One group did a mindfulness practice, and another group watched five-minute comedy clips on YouTube. It was actually that group who felt more energized when they got back into their work than the group who did the mindfulness exercise. I think if we We can use a little bit of scrolling on social media. We can use a bit of YouTube as these mental breaks. It then just it matters more like, what are you looking at? If you're using your break to check your emails and do work, that doesn't count as a break. We know that. It's just more of the same. If on social media, it's full of either the news nowadays or other content that's going to make you mad or distressed or something like that, that's probably not going to do the job. But if it's watching cute dogs doing something funny, which is a lot of my Instagram feed, then I think that that probably counts as a bit of a break. It's just anything One way you truly step away from a cognitive task, just to give yourself a minute to refresh.

 [00:46:50.160] - Dr. Tommy Wood
There are some really interesting studies where people watch reruns of TV shows that they're very familiar with. You've probably I've done this thing. I do this all the time. I put on Friends because I've seen every Friends episode a million times. That process of a fictional scenario that you're very familiar with seems to be restorative in in his own way. You could do this through reading as well, rereading a book that you've already read. Some of these things seem to be inherently downregulating and calming when we're otherwise overwhelmed the rest of the day. The only, again, caveat in that setting is if I've got friends on, but then I'm also doing something else at the same time on my phone, you're increasing cognitive load again because you're trying to distribute your attention in multiple ways. Doing one thing at a time is important. Then something that's truly pulling you away from the cognitive work or stress that you might get associated with certain types of work, that's going to be the rest that you can sprinkle throughout the Ideally, you can go for a five-minute walk outside and you get in nature and that stuff, but we don't always get the opportunity to do that.

 [00:48:06.720] - Dr. Tommy Wood
But there's a range. So right there, there's a range of different things that people can use.

 [00:48:10.330] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
A lot of different options, yeah. The TV programs I grew up with are no longer available online, but I have the dog videos I've liked are the dogs that are... Have you seen the dog videos where they're reuniting?

 [00:48:24.380] - Dr. Tommy Wood

With returning military service members?

 [00:48:27.580] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
Yeah, or just somebody that's been... My A dog who's now living with my daughter does that when I show up, when I haven't been there for four weeks or six weeks. But to see the joy and the exuberance that a dog can have makes me laugh. And so a little bit, what I heard you say is that laughter is actually valuable in this.

 [00:48:47.420] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Absolutely. Yeah.

 [00:48:49.320] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
But I don't think Father Knows Best is still streaming anywhere where I can watch it. What TV shows did you grow up with, Dawn?

 [00:49:00.000] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
My guilty TV show pleasure, and I'm so glad you relieved me of the secrecy, is an old British show called Are You Being Served? And I know every single episode of that, and I just love to watch them.

 [00:49:13.440] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
So that's still available? I can check this out. Yeah. Okay, I will do that. I just don't think Father Knows Best would give me the same delight as some of the ones that you two are mentioning.

[00:49:27.900] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
Is there anything else that you would tell our are retired or mostly thinking about retiring listeners about how to proceed in the next 10 years? You're not near retirement age, but some of us are.

 [00:49:43.760] - Dr. Tommy Wood
I think that I wouldn't want to deny anybody the opportunity of retirement and the things that can come with that. You've had a long and stressful or busy career, and you want to do something else. You want a little bit of time to relax. Of course, those are all great things. It's just that if you think about those, when we come back to stimuli, if we think about what you were doing on a day-to-day basis, maybe meetings, meeting with multiple people, solving problems, learning new skills because they were required for that work, having structure to your day where it's going to support circadian rhythm and all these other things. If you lose those inputs without Now replacing them, I think that's where the risk tends to come from. It's interesting that most of the risk in terms of cognitive decline in retirement happens when people retire early. It's happening even earlier in life. You have this even longer period where those stimuli are lost. After, you account for medical conditions and things that might cause people to have to retire early. Really, you can retire, of course, if you want to. 

 [00:51:05.820] - Dr. Tommy Wood

My dad is still a professor at Oxford, and he turns 80 this year, and I don't think he's ever going to retire either, which I think is a great thing because he enjoys his work so much, and you enjoy your work so much. Why wouldn't you continue as long as you're able? But it's just thinking about what are the things that I was getting from my job outside of a paycheck, and how can I recreate that? How can I recreate spending time with other people who I enjoy or will challenge me or we can work to some common goal? That's where a volunteering comes from. How can I continue to do things that are going to challenge me cognitively or where I have to learn new skills? That could be dance classes or language classes or travel. All these things are up for grabs, and I think you're going to give us some of that benefit. Some of what I think people experience when they retire is related to what Arthur C. Brooks calls The Striver’s Curse, which is they're so used to the high-flying accolades of a very successful career as a lawyer or a doctor or something like that. Then there's this dramatic psychological shift that happens when you no longer are getting those things from work.

 [00:52:18.520] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Some of it is probably related to the stimulus, but some of it is also probably related to the environment that you've grown accustomed to psychologically as well. Then you just have to find other ways to get that same benefit. Often it's rather than being the person doing the thing, you're the person teaching the thing. So doing mentorship or other ways you can give back to your community. Like I said, there's no one way to do it. It's just making sure that you're continuing to get those same inputs.

 [00:52:50.710] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
You're suggesting an interesting cognitive exercise for those of us who think we might retire in the next five years or so is to be cognizant, maybe even write down and make a list of what is it? What do I get from my job? Because some people have jobs they hate and are eager to leave their jobs. But For those of us who like our jobs or are aware that they're keeping us healthy in some way, like what you just pointed out is maintaining a circadian rhythm. For people who need help maintaining their circadian rhythm, they are enhancing balancing their health by keeping their job and actually having to do that as long as they don't sleep in really late on the weekends. So a lot of the details that we talk about, and I think our listeners understand about healthy lifestyle. To what extent is your work life supporting those healthy choices you make? And then to your question, what are the ways I can reinvent that when I retire?

 [00:53:58.220] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Yeah, exactly. And this This is an interesting exercise for people to go through maybe at many stages of their career. What is it that I'm getting out of my work? Even if you hate your job, actually this process may allow you to realize there are actually some good things that I get from my job, even if I don't enjoy it on a day to day basis. Often it's the other people. If you hate your job with your colleague and together you hate your job, there's that camaraderie that comes from that thing. I think That can then help us to appreciate those beneficial parts and things that we're getting from our job. Maybe it helps us to reframe what we want to do next or how we might want to shift things. That can happen anytime in our career. But ideally, we do start this process early. If you can start a decade or two out, then you can start to think, Well, what are the things that I'm going to want to do more of when I do retire? Can I start to do those things now so that it's a more seamless transition? Then you can be excited to do more of those things once you do retire.

 [00:55:03.120] - Dr. Tommy Wood
And so that process that you suggest, I think, is going to be really helpful.

 [00:55:08.180] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
We know that we know that we can't really do... We can't postpone our getting in shape on a physical level, I can't say I still want to be able to hike when I'm 85, so I'll work on it when I'm 85. I have to work on that now. Actually, I don't really make New Year's resolutions, but I did realize this New Year's that I'm no I'm no longer competing in rowing. I haven't been. So my VO2 max has just fallen off a cliff. I cannot do high intensity sustained exercise. I don't think I should wait till I'm 85 to work on that.

 [00:55:42.060] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Agreed. Yeah.

 [00:55:45.300] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
So, Tommy, this has been great. And we're going to put in a lot of links to your book, which comes out when?

 [00:55:53.020] - Dr. Tommy Wood
March 24th.

 [00:55:54.020] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
March 24th. Great. And also, I scurried around and found places as you've been on other people's podcasts, and certainly a link to the Physicians for Ancestral Health Talk you gave on multiple sclerosis. Let people watch that YouTube video when they're scrolling through YouTube videos. And thank you so much for joining us today. Dawn, do you have anything else you want to add?

 [00:56:22.240] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
Yes, everybody read this book, especially if you're even thinking about retiring. And there's a lot in there. There's a lot more than retirement.

 [00:56:38.920] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
And I think one of the real salient benefits of this book that stands out, and you might realize I've read a lot of other How to Make your Brain Healthy for a Long Time books, but you keep your coaching skills with you, which are humane, respectful, encouraging without being judgmental, and detail-oriented in a cohesive way. So people will enjoy the content and I think enjoy your coaching tone of voice.

 [00:57:12.820] - Dr. Tommy Wood
I appreciate that. That was very important to me is approaching this as human to human, trying to actually genuinely help people and knowing what it takes to have people think about this information and try and enact some of it in their own lives. I'm glad that came across because that was a core part that was really important to me.

 [00:57:32.750] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
Definitely came across. Thank you very much. People will be looking for your book in March and checking you out for some other appearances on the Better Brain Fitness podcast with Josh Turknett. We'll put links to all that in the notes. Thank you so much.

 [00:57:48.640] - Dr. Tommy Wood
Great. Thank you both.

 [00:57:49.840] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
Take care.

 [00:57:50.860] - Dr. Tommy Wood
You too. Bye-bye.

 [00:57:52.640] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
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 [00:58:18.910] - Dr. Tommy Wood
And thank you.

 [00:58:21.980] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
You have been listening to the Lemanne Gordon podcast, where Docs Talk Shop.

 [00:58:28.400] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
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 [00:58:37.420] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
Com. Happy eavesdropping.

 [00:58:43.080] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
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 [00:59:04.480] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
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 [00:59:16.740] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
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 [00:59:31.160] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
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 [00:59:37.980] - Dr. Dawn Lemanne
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 [00:59:55.440] - Dr. Deborah Gordon
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