Dr. Tommy Wood

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, the show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMBG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately how they got to where they are today. How I think about the various things that are important for cognitive function, I'm less worried about somebody's age because when you look at a range of studies, you can see that the brain is able to adapt to new challenges and develop new skills pretty much at any time across the lifespan, except for maybe in, like, the very late stages of significant dementia.

But for the rest of us, there's always the capability of making our brain function better. On today's episode of the Puck, I talk with doctor Tommy Wood, a neuroscientist, researcher, and athletic performance consultant With a medical degree from Oxford University and a PhD in physiology and neuroscience from the University of Oslo, Wood traverses a nuanced path of mind body balance, lecturing around the world with useful advice on brain health, physical activity, and human performance. We discuss his insights on the potential for everyone's brain development throughout their lives, the cognitive and emotional realities of social media, and understanding the three buckets approach to achieving better brain health. Doctor Tommy Wood, welcome to the book. Thanks so much for having me.

It's a real pleasure to be here with you. And before, you know, we get started, I have to mention that I've read from your own website, and it says, when people ask me who I am and what I do, I say something along the lines of neuroscientist, performance coach, and elite level professional nurse. So I'll ask about all three of those. I mean, tell us about how you became that person. Sure.

It starts with me spending most of my life as a student in education and doing several degrees the long way. So I have an undergraduate degree in biochemistry. When I went into my undergraduate studies, I started to get interested in particularly, like, physical performance and fitness. So I was I was a ROA as an undergrad, and then that continued when I went to med school. And I then became more of a coach as well.

So I was head coach of the medical school rowing team or boat club, and that particularly on the the women's side included some sort of national or international level rowers. I was very lucky to coach above my experience with those kinds of athletes. And that kind of set me down the the course of these two parallel tracks of of my career, which had thankfully now started to come together a bit. So my formal academic work. So, I did train as a physician.

I worked as a junior doctor in London for a couple of years. Then I did my PhD in physiology and neuroscience, and then came over to The US first as a postdoc and then as a as a faculty. So I'm a neuroscientist and faculty at the University of Washington. And that's really I'm in the lab studying ways to treat brain injury across the lifespan in babies, in individuals who have concussions or traumatic brain injury, and then cognitive decline dementia late in life. Throughout that period, I I increasingly worked with athletes.

So I helped build a couple of digital health companies that worked with athletes in particular, trying to improve all aspects of their performance. And now the the biggest part of my work on that front is as a performance consultant for Formula one drivers, where I do all aspects of health and performance sort of support, particularly the coaches who work with those drivers as well as the drivers directly. And those strands kind of come together. What's nice about being a professional nerd just like me or being an academic is I basically get to do all the things I'm interested in. And so now I get to tie together all these different aspects of health and performance and how that relates to how the brain functions and the brain develops across the entire lifespan.

So let's take a minute and talk about the neuroscientist part of this at the University of Washington. So you do work to kind of studies different ways of treating, it sounds like, as you said, brain injuries and damage and so forth. Before we get into the different things we can do to improve our brain health and make our brain work better and last longer, is there room for optimism in terms of the types of developments that are taking place in terms of helping heal the brain? Absolutely. I will say that historically and and over the past, you know, few decades, there hasn't been much movement in terms of treating brain injuries, if we're honest.

I think the most recent significant breakthrough in terms of treating any kind of brain injury in in urology in general was the development of therapeutic hypothermia where you cool an individual down. And this is particularly in newborn babies with brain injury. This became standard of care in 2010. And, actually, the lab I did my PhD in did a lot of that work. Before then, the most recent major breakthrough was maybe, triptan drugs for migraine in the nineties.

And then before that, right, there really hasn't been that much. Right? Aspirin for strokes was developed more than a hundred years ago, and now we have some slightly fancier drugs than that, but they basically do the same thing. And there haven't been any major breakthroughs for traumatic brain injuries, for dementia treatment. However, I think it's worth bearing in mind that we're now developing maybe some better models.

Rats and mice, in general, aren't great for studying the brain, unfortunately, because their brains just don't really look like human brains at all. So that's why we we try and work in other species that that better mimic the human brain. So that's a it's a kind of a a long way of saying, I understand frustration because there hasn't been, you know, really any significant breakthroughs in some of the the things that the people might be interested in. But I think we're slowly making some progress. And we can also say that there are probably some things that you can do that are low risk with high potential for benefits.

So even if we don't have very strong evidence, you know, maybe worth trying in certain scenarios. Interesting. So as we break away from kind of the the science and the series for a minute, let's have a little fun. You're cohosting the Better Brain Fitness podcast. Now does that fall under the professional title of your nerd banner?

Absolutely. This is a passion project I recently started with my very good friend and colleague, doctor Josh Turknet, who's a neurologist. So he comes at it from the sort of neurology medical side. I come at it more from the kind of the performance and health slash neuroscience side, and we answer questions that people have about brain health. So people can submit questions, and then the majority of the show is just answering them in a way that hopefully gives some really practical takeaways.

Well, and one of the things that's interesting is when you from the questions you get, do you get different generational questions? I mean, young people worrying about kind of how they're gonna take care of themselves, but also dealing with their parents and or grandparents. I mean, how does it look from a generational perspective? The majority of questions come from individuals who are concerned about their own cognitive functions. So maybe, you know, in the later decades, in the fifties, sixties, seventies, thinking about the future in terms of their own cognitive function.

Some people do ask about loved ones or or parents. I will say that in reality, it's very hard to care about something more than the person who it's affecting. Right? So, you know, any of us who are interested in health may be familiar with this feeling of there's somebody we know or or care about who could get benefit from some certain thing, and they're just not willing to listen and that they're not interested. And this happened to all of us.

We tried really hard, banged our heads against that wall, and, you know, it's very difficult to make change for somebody else. But you can maybe expose them to a wide range of information, and they start to to make those changes themselves. That's certainly possible. We do also have younger individuals who are maybe concerned more about mental health than than cognitive function more broadly or cognitive decline, although those two are absolutely related. And what's also nice if you think about how the brain works more broadly is the things that support our mental health generally support our long term cognitive function as well.

So the answers are often the same even if the questions are slightly different. Yeah. Clearly, and we'll get into that a little more. I mean, there is this, you know, the the mind body connection and the different aspects of this. So let's talk about things that are on a lot of people's minds now with an aging population and, again, two presidents or president former president or president right now, it looks like we're gonna have two elder people, and we've had a lot of discussion on issues.

So let's talk about Alzheimer's and dementia for a minute and the top line item for battling the onset of those two conditions. Is it as you have written about a robust and resilient brain? And what does that mean, and and how do you do that? Yeah. That that's a great question.

And, actually, we recorded an episode. I'm not I'm not sure it's out while we're talking right now, but it probably will be out when this comes out where Josh and I talked about the cognitive function of our presumed presidential candidates. And I think there's actually more cause for hope than most people have said for the reasons that maybe I'll expand upon now. So when I think about what it is required to both develop and maintain cognitive function, I think there are three broad buckets of variables that are important. The most important, and this is, something that Josh and I have written academic papers about that I think people know is important but don't necessarily think about it as being the primary aspect, whereas I would argue as maybe the primary aspect, is how we use and challenge our brains.

Just like physical activity for physical health and physical fitness, right, you wanna get fitter and stronger, you need to challenge the body with physical exercise, and the brain is essentially the same. And those challenges can be social interactions. They could be learning new skills, new languages. That's the kind of thing that the brain really thrives on in terms of developing new connections and maintaining old ones. So that's kind of one big bucket.

Then if you're gonna respond to that challenge, right, if you wanna build muscles in the gym, you know you're probably gonna have to eat enough protein. Right? You're gonna need some other nutrients. And, again, the brain is the same. There are some nutrients that are really important for the brain, like b vitamins and vitamin d and iron and omega three fatty acids.

So you need to get enough of those in the diet. And then you also need those things to get to the brain. So you need a healthy cardiovascular system, which is the blood vessels and heart to deliver oxygen and and nutrients. And then the third bucket is actually allowing that adaptation to occur. So, again, if anybody likes to lift weights, they'll know that you don't get bigger in the gym.

You get bigger while you're resting and recovering afterwards. And for the brain, that's sleep. That's when that happens. So you need adequate sleep, and then you also need to avoid some things that might inhibit that process. So that's gonna be alcohol, smoking, chronic stress can certainly play a role.

Right? They then inhibit the brain's ability to adapt beneficially to those, like, new skills or things that you're learning. So those are the general buckets. And then just to kind of relate it back to your initial question, if you think about our presidential candidates, regardless of whether they're in politics or in business, they've been challenging their brains pretty significantly for a very long period of time, and they've probably developed the skills necessary to perform the job that they're doing. They also, you know, we've been told, are in pretty good physical health, which supports all of that stuff.

But like the rest of us, they make slip ups and gaffes and have these memory issues. But those things, those issues with memory retrieval, right, we do, like, get a name wrong, you know, sort of a slip of the tongue, don't quite you know, it's like or something's on the tip of our tongue, we can't remember it. Those issues of memory retrieval, and they happen when we're stressed or sleep deprived or under a significant cognitive load, which is also probably the case for those individuals. So perfectly understandable. It happens to all of us, but, you know, we don't get it recorded and commented on and seen by millions of people.

So that's kind of how I think about the various things that are important for cognitive function and why, you know, in that specific scenario, I'm less worried, about somebody's age. Because when you look at a range of studies, you can see that the brain is able to adapt to new challenges and develop new skills pretty much at any time across the lifespan except for maybe in, like, the very late stages of significant dementia. But for the rest of us, there's always the capability of making our brain function better. It's interesting. And you you talk about learning a new language or other things that test and stress the mind.

Again, running for president and being president, I can't even imagine something that would keep your brain more active Absolutely. Than that. The other thing that's that's fascinating about this is looking at things like diet. And how how does diet and what we put into our bodies affect all of this? There are probably two, again, broad ways.

You can think about it. You can think about some of the the beneficial things or the things that the brain needs, and you can think about maybe some some detrimental effects of other aspects of diet. So in general, the diet that seems to best support brain health is one that is minimally processed and nutrient dense. So that's a broad range of generally whole foods, probably mainly prepared at home, but you can certainly get those things, pre prepared if if you don't have time or the ability to cook. But they're gonna provide some of those important nutrients that I mentioned earlier, things like b vitamins, omega three fatty acids, which are most commonly you get from fish.

Then there's other important aspects like phospholipids. They make up, like, kind of the cells or they make up the structure that the fat sit in in the cells. In the brain, you get those things from, like, eggs and and soy. We also know that polyphenols, certain, like, colors in fruits and vegetables can be really beneficial for the brain. So one of the most studied ones is, blueberry polyphenols.

So berries seem to be particularly good, and they they affect gut function. They affect cardiovascular function. They seem to then directly improve the brain as well. So this kind of range of nutrients you can get from these sort of whole minimally processed foods that seem to benefit the brain and sort of in my structure that I talked about earlier is because they're providing the nutrients needed for the brain to adapt to these challenges that we give it. On the other side, there's some evidence that things like ultra processed foods can negatively impact both cognitive function and mental health.

And there's probably two main parts of that. So one is they tend to be devoid of the things that I just mentioned. Those minerals, vitamins, those things tend to be stripped out when foods are heavily processed, so they're not providing those beneficial aspects. And then they can negatively impact things like blood sugar regulation, which we know is really important for brain health in particular, as well as causing things like overeating, which itself can then affect metabolic health, which also affects cognitive function. So those are kind of the the two broad ways that food seems to affect brain health.

Well, as I'm thinking about this, just in terms of my own efforts and family members to take care of yourself, maintain a proper diet, avoid things that are gonna give you diabetes and so forth, and there's a lot of talk about some of the dangers of processed foods and whether or not that's led to higher incidences of things like Parkinson's and so forth. What I'm hearing you saying is that a lot of this is almost common sense and it's across the board, meaning whether or not it's your overall body or your brain health, eating these whole foods, eating in a balanced way, staying as much as possible away from processed foods, it's gonna just help the whole system work better if I'm hearing you right. Yeah. Absolutely. We we like to get very focused on individual things or individual dietary patterns.

Right? You could talk about the Mediterranean diet or maybe you're, like, more of a plant based diet, or maybe you go on the other side and you're gonna talk about keto and low carb diets. And I've seen all of those diets work really well, and I've seen all of them work really badly in different scenarios. But the sort of the core common thread across all of them is you you tend to reduce, heavily processed foods. You increase nutrient density.

And as part of that, you probably also decrease overall caloric intake so you have a better then effect on body composition and, and related things like that. Totally makes sense. So we spent some time talking about diet, and one of the issues that is in the news on a daily basis, and at first may have no obvious correlation to brain health, but let's bring it up anyway. How does social media fit in all of this? There are several ways that I think social media plays a role in brain health, and it can be good and bad.

So some of it is probably partly overblown and just because of the nature of the beast. So one of my favorite sort of pop psychologists, if he doesn't mind me calling him that, is is Mark Manson. I'm a big fan of his work. And he's written about how, you know, historically, we maybe lived in groups of a 100 people. And so if one in a thousand people is a jerk, right, you probably encounter a jerk very infrequently.

However, if on social media you're exposed to hundreds of thousands of people, you're gonna see a lot of jerks. You're gonna see a lot of negativity. And it's not that there's more of them or that social media makes them like that. It's just that you're you're exposed to more total people. So you see more of that.

And and as humans, we have this negativity bias. We focus on the negative much more than the positive. So some of that certainly plays a role. We also know that social connection is incredibly important, and some of the benefits of social connection, not all of them, but some of them can be gleaned from online connection. So, for example, something that I've seen quite a bit is that if individuals are trying to improve various aspects of their lifestyle or environment, often when you do that, it requires you to dissociate yourself from your current environment and your friends.

Right? If you're trying to decrease your alcohol intake, but all your friends are drinking buddies and that's how you socialize, you're probably gonna spend less time with them, but maybe you'll find some support groups online, for instance, who are also trying to make similar changes. So you can feel this support online for some of those things in particular. So that can be good. However, when we think about ourselves as social animals, there's this really interesting effect of how we interact with others in terms of how that affects our thoughts and then how that affects our physiology.

So this is being described as the idea of human social genomics. People like George Slavich at UCLA have done a huge amount of work on this. And what you see is that when you're socially isolated and if you're spending a lot of time on social media, you know, even though you do have some social connection and like, you don't have that same, like, real human in person connection. So you're socially isolated, you know, in your head. Right?

Your your body feels that kind of isolation, and it affects your physiology. So what it does is it shifts how the immune system works, and this is a evolutionary adaptation. So, again, if we go back to our tribal beginnings, when you're living in a group, then you're more likely to be exposed to certain things like respiratory viruses, colds, flus, right, COVID being a recent one. Right. And your immune system adapts to be better at that when you're in a social environment.

When you are isolated, the immune system shifts to better support that scenario. So you're less good at dealing with viruses, but you're more good at dealing with acute injuries. So you actually have faster wound healing than some of these other things that will save your life if you are socially isolated in the jungle, say. But if you're socially isolated in a modern western society, what you see long term is an increased activation of the sympathetic nervous system, so a chronic stress response, and an increase in chronic inflammation, which we know is another significant risk factor for cognitive decline, heart disease, types of diabetes, certain cancers. So this isolation we feel is directly transferred into how our body functions, and then that relates to disease risk.

The final part where social media plays a role there is that it's not just social isolation that has this effect. It's also if you feel like you have a low social rank. So if you imagine you spend all your day on social media seeing people who are richer, smarter, funnier, more attractive than you, right, you demote yourself socially seeing that. You're constantly thinking, I should be better. I'm not doing enough.

Right? All these people are better than me. And the the body physiologically responds in a very similar way. So that's the kind of all the different aspects and ways that I think that social media can play a role. So net, it does seem to be a net negative effect, particularly in younger people, and there are some larger, more rigorous studies that have come out recently suggesting that part of the mental health crisis and dramatic increase in recent, prescriptions for antidepressants in young adults and adolescents is directly related to social media use, but probably also related to what's not happening because you're spending so much time on social media.

Right? If you're spending all your time in that scenario, you're not sleeping as much, you're not doing as much physical activity, you're not doing you know, maybe not focusing as much on other aspects of diet and social connection. So some of it is probably also that trade off in terms of what we're not doing because we're spending so much time on social media. Yeah. You know, I've always felt that on one level, technology was neutral, meaning, you know, you take nuclear energy and you can use it to light a city, yet you can also kill people with it.

The cell phone, right, you you know, being able to make a phone call, being able to find people. I mean, there's so many positive things. And yet we know when we spend too much time on it, it leads to the kind of negative effects that you're talking about. It's almost like we have to develop this ability to change the way we process information so that all this negativity you talk about, we can handle. Is the brain able to adapt fast enough to keep up with all these changes?

Because our blood pressure tends to go up, our anxiety tends to go up. We can talk about the how that affects the brain. But can the brain also just protect itself by saying, I'm gonna stay away from this negativity, or if I'm affected by it, I'm gonna process it in a different way? I don't think that our brains are gonna be able to keep up and, you know, automatically filter out the negative effects of of these technological advancements. We're just not built that way for one of of a better way of describing it.

And there are certainly ways around it. Right? We know that if you have these addictive or nonhealthful behaviors, and so they could be related to social media or or other things, say, you know, alcohol use, gambling, there's some ways that we can intervene by making it less accessible and less immediate. And so rather than saying, you know, we're gonna adapt and just sort of ignore the downsides of this, we have to build in our own structures to kind of work around it. So that can be changing how much and how frequently we access it, you know, what we use it for.

Right? Are we using social media for its original intent well, its original intention, I think, was so that you could look at girls at Harvard. But, you know, after that, it was to connect with, you know, loved ones and family members and and see more about what's going on in their lives. Right? You can intentionally make social media more about that rather than just, like, following influences.

But then more broadly, I think building in you mentioned resilience earlier, building in these other health promoting behaviors that then buffer some of the stresses that occur. And that's where physical activity and sleep, maybe some kind of activity that improves stress or distress tolerance. You have breath work, meditation, mindfulness. It's different for different people in terms of what they prefer. But, you know, focusing on those behaviors the rest of the time, I think, can then also provide a bit of a buffer.

Interesting. Makes sense. So bringing it away from us mere mortals, you also are an athletic performance coach to world champion athletes. What does that work look like, and and what have you learned from doing that work? In general, my job is as an outside consultant.

So these athletes often have or they tend to have really highly specialist, you know, world class coaches, be that related to physical training or nutrition or other aspects of the variables that affect performance. And then those coaches or maybe some of the medical team may reach out to me with specific questions. And so my role is often to either distill or interpret more recent research. So I might have a coach say, I'm hearing all this stuff about x. Is this something that I should be incorporating into my processes?

So then I put on my academic scientist hat, and I read the literature and see, you know, what's the evidence base? Is the the trade off worth it, right, the time investing it versus, you know, the benefit you might get from it? It's often those kinds of things, and it's real tends to be related to all aspects of the environment and lifestyle that may affect performance. So sometimes it's nutrition, sometimes it's sleep, sometimes it's, quote, unquote, biohacks and these other ways that we can manipulate our physiology supplements sometimes. And my main takeaway or there's probably two takeaways.

The first is that even at the pointiest tip of performance, the core health behaviors are still the thing that matters the most. So you can be the most gifted or highly trained athlete, but that will only get you so far, and maybe you can perform well what for one or two seasons. And people do. You know? I've definitely worked with individuals who do everything wrong, and they're still, you know, world champions or the best in their sport.

But if you wanna sustain that, you wanna do that again and again and again for a decade, you wanna build a legacy, then sleep is critical. Diet is critical. How you do your training and get specific adaptations from specific sessions, you're not just like training for the sake of training, which still at that level some people do. Right? Those things are critical.

So the basics always matter regardless of who you are. And then the next takeaway is that you have to be really intentional with changes that you make. So if you are, say, a master's level athlete, you just do it for fun. Right? You're a triathlete.

But you also have a job and a family and a career, but you really enjoy triathlon. Those people, they're just, you know, part of their own team looking after themselves, their own performance. They'll do everything you tell them to do. You can give them a list of a 100 things. They'll do all it.

These are usually Taipei personalities, the kind of people that I imagine you work with every day. But generally in team sports, being those elite sports scenarios, these individuals have incredible travel schedules. They have incredible media schedules. They're often focusing on a whole bunch of other things as well. So, right, in Formula one, they're spending time with the engineers constantly trying to refine and improve the performance of the car.

If you're gonna add something or change something, they have time for, like, one thing. Right? You can't give them a list of a 100 things to do. They just won't do it. And they also have a 100 people trying to give them a list of a 100 things to do.

So you need to figure out what's the one thing that's most likely to have the biggest impact here that has good evidence for it. So you you have to really refine down the wide range of tools you possibly have to to apply in any given person. So you you just have to really think through all of that. And that's that's probably the biggest skill that I've gained from that scenario was rather than showing up with a massive toolkit and throwing everything at every problem, you have to be much more intentional in terms of how you then make changes and track whether they've improved things over time. Well, and as I hear you saying that, you're taking these people that are incredibly busy, and you're saying that to really make a change, you've got to come in with that one specific thing.

But human nature being what it is, and we all feel like we're busy and change is hard, and we like the familiar, even for us mere mortals who technically have the time and the and so forth, would you say that when you're trying to lead a horse to water or teach or make as a family member or as a friend a kind suggestion that you would copy what you're doing and recognize that bringing just one specific tailor made thing that fits that person would be the best approach to lovingly communicate that? Absolutely. And and making it accessible to that individual. There's a huge amount of great information out there in terms of, say, building a new habit. Atomic Habits is a great and very approachable book by James Clear.

And some of the ways you do that, right, you have one specific thing and you make it really easy to start with. Right? So if it's gonna be you're gonna walk more, then just walk for five minutes a day. Right? That's it.

Right? Everybody can walk for five minutes, and then slowly you'll build up build up over time. If instead you say to somebody, you need to do more aerobic exercise, and you'll get the most benefit if you do forty five minutes of aerobic exercise a day, It's nonspecific, and it sounds really daunting, and that person's not gonna do it. So you're absolutely right. You make it specific to the individual.

Like, here's why I think this is important for you. Here's the the thing that you should do, and here's how to start really small. And, you know, if you walk five minutes a day, that's great. Celebrate that win. And then as you feel you've built that into your day, you can slowly build on that.

Yeah. It's funny. When I think back to certain lessons that I learned as a kid, my father was a writer, and I hated to sit down and having to do a book project, for instance, write a report or something. And he he would just say like, you know, put down a title, just write a few words and then walk away. You don't and what?

I gotta get this done in the No. Right? Just a few words, and then all of a sudden, you start to flow into it. Yeah. But if you bite off more than you can chew, you just end up not doing anything because it's too overwhelming.

Absolutely. So staying with athletics for a minute, but moving into altered states of consciousness, you mentioned when we talked before a little bit about this famous mountain bike ride of yours. And I'm just wondering if you can share your experience on that long mountain bike ride and what you learned from that. Yeah. Absolutely.

So there is this long and storied history of humans with periods of of altered consciousness, and we can do that through a number of ways, and that could be exogenously consuming various compounds or another way is is through breath work or physical activity in particular. So about ten years ago, I did the world's supposedly first ever fully off road Ironman. So it was a sea swim. It was mountain biking, end to end across the South Downs, The United Kingdom, if anybody's familiar with that. Then there was a a trail marathon at the end, although there'd been torrential rainstorms throughout the entire thing.

So, actually, they ended up being a bit longer than that. And you had twenty four hours to finish. And when I think back about it, it was probably the worst thing for my body that I've ever done in my entire life. Like, I was in terrible pain. I'm convinced my kidneys were borderline shutting down at the end of it.

But in terms of essentially dissociating from your body and almost dispassionately kind of watching your performance, you just sort of you just keep on going. It's the closest I've come to that real dissociated state, and I think that that has then helped me put a number of things in perspective, including how all these other things can improve mental performance. And one of the things that I did to prepare for that, and I think this relates to when we want to try and do difficult things, which is one of the most important things we can do for our mental and physical health is just challenge ourselves. We already talked about the importance of challenging our brains, but I think challenging our bodies is important as well, Is I knew I was never gonna be able to train for that. Right?

You're never gonna be able to train for that kind of race. You can't do it in practice. So I just made sure that I knew the entire course. I did it in chunks. I always knew what was coming up next, and that kind of allowed me to not worry about that.

And then that, again, that sort of creates that that space from the physical pain or struggle or, like, worry about what's coming up next. And that, we we know that can affect particularly physical performance. So like I said, one of the most amazing things I've ever done, but if you really think about the effect on the body, probably not great, but I'm convinced there are significant mental benefits that come from knowing well, first of all, experiencing it and then knowing that you can do that kind of thing if if you really need to. And as a society, people are experimenting and looking for ways to have these kind of witnessing experiences, call it the dissolution of the ego, the third eye, and so forth. And, obviously, there are healthy ways of doing it, and there, as you say, there can be some unhealthy ways to do it.

There's a lot of talk about psychedelics and microdosing going on right now. What's your perspective in terms of the benefits versus the risks in experimenting with those types of substances? This obviously isn't my direct expertise in in terms of neuroscience, but I'm certainly familiar with a lot of it as well as how people apply it. And in the field of mental health disorders, trauma, other aspects of, say, disordered or, like, obsessive thinking, I think that psychedelics have a huge amount of promise. However, the real benefit seems to come from those psychedelics being consumed in macro doses.

Right? You like, significant psychedelic effects in in the right setting with usually a highly trained therapist who can help you then work through the experience. In that setting, I think we're gonna see a bunch more of that, and it's gonna become standard clinical practice in the next few years, I'm pretty sure. When we then think about related sort of use of psychedelics, particular microdosing, I'm a bit more cautious about that for a few reasons. So when you look at some some animal research on the use of microdosing, and they they've used it in a similar scenario as to what we just mentioned.

So if you have a mouse create, fear associated with a certain experience, you can get a decrease in anxiety and you can extinguish that fear with microdosing of and the study I'm thinking about used DMT. However, in that same study, they found that particularly in the female mice, they had a decrease in neuroplasticity. They had a decrease in connection like, connections between neurons, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, which is where we make decisions. So while you might get this, like, fear reducing effect, there may be a negative effect on the thing that we might really care about, which is developing new connections. In that same study, they also saw that the male animals who microdosed gained more weight, so there may be a negative, like, body composition or metabolic effect.

This is mice. I already told you that mice are maybe not the best way to study humans. So there are two studies subsequently that I think we're thinking about. So one actually used individuals in the citizen science format to blind themselves and introduce a placebo to test at home whether the microdosing of psychedelics was having any effect. And, essentially, what they found, and actually both studies that have have tried this or some version of this have found that people can usually tell if they're microdosing.

But if they're truly blinded to the effects, most of any benefit they see is related to placebo effect and expectation. It's actually not having an effect on creativity, well-being, or cognitive function when they measure cognitive function directly. And there was another study where, again, they had people either have a placebo mushroom or a microdose of psilocybin, and they found that if people didn't know that they were taking it, there was, like, no benefit in terms of creativity or these other things that we think are associated with microdosing. And, actually, there was a slight decrease in some aspects of cognitive function. So where I think the real benefit of psychedelics is currently is in macrodosing in the right setting.

But microdosing across all the studies that I've seen in animals and humans, you know, probably no net benefit and maybe even some detrimental effects. Interesting. Okay. So staying in the realm of chemical compounds, what about the role of stimulants? Yeah.

We all love our stimulants, of course, and caffeine being the most, common one. What stimulants really tell us and it it's the same with other smart drugs, so other and other stimulants like things for you might use for ADHD, so methionine adaphenil, which show, again, there's significant improvements in certain aspects of cognitive function and brain connectivity in individuals where it's prescribed, you know, properly, but other people use them to try and improve focus, in particular when they're under high stress, you know, if you're studying in college or something like that. And what you see with caffeine and some of these other smart drugs in people who don't have ADHD is you see an improvement in well-being, right, subjectively you feel better, and you see an increase in effort. So in studies using both caffeine and these smart drugs, you see that people will try harder to solve a specific problem. So if you give them a a cognitive function test of some kind, but the quality of the effort actually decreases.

So they feel better, they work harder, but their output on a, like, per effort basis is less good. And actually with caffeine, in particular, again, you see some trade offs. So you'll see an increase in reaction time with caffeine. But if you take, you know, even standard doses of caffeine, you'll feel better. You'll have a faster reaction time.

Right? And that's maybe great for certain aspects of driving a formula one car or or anything else we might do, but you see decreases in executive function and certain aspects of working memory potentially. So there's a so there's a trade off. And often, the the net result is you feel better and you work harder, but the quality of your work isn't as good. So that leads me to again, that's the trade offs.

And it's interesting because we talked a little bit earlier about the state of flow. And I when I think of wanting to be in flow, it is an all positive thing. But you had a different way of characterizing the pros and the cons of even being in a state of flow. Can we talk about that for a minute? Yeah.

Flow has become this target cognitive state that everybody wants to be in all the time, and they're always chasing flow. Right. And I think it's really context dependent, you know, mainly in terms of what it is you're trying to perform at. So sort of the the definition of flow is the maximum expression of a complex skill that you have already developed. Imagine that you're an athlete or you're a surfer.

Right? Flow is critically important. Right? Imagine you're a musician. Right?

You're in that group setting. You're playing some very complex piece. Flow is really important. Maybe if you're coding on a computer, right, flow is relevant there as well because you're sort of like you're in it and you know, things just like coming together. That's when flow is important.

However, if we think about the range of different ways that we use our brains, and some of this is really nicely detailed by Gloria Mark. If anybody's really interested in this, I would read her latest book called Attention Span. It's really good. But for most knowledge workers, which is most of the people listening to this podcast, it's me, it's you, what we want is not flow, but is focus. And focus is when something is very challenging and we are highly engaged in it.

And this is only something that we can do in relatively short bursts. But imagine if you're truly trying to challenge your brain, like we talked about earlier, and that's often part of our jobs. Right? You're learning some new complex skill, trying to solve a complex problem. What you want is focus and not flow.

Those things are not necessarily the same thing. So it's not that flow is bad or we shouldn't aim for it. It's just it's context dependent. Like, what is it that you need your brain to do right now? And sometimes flow is good, but sometimes you're sort of right butting up against the current capabilities of your brain, and you're you're you're working really hard to solve a problem.

And that doesn't require flow. That requires focus. And then it's just a different state of how you're using your brain. You know, it's funny as you're as you're saying this, I don't ask me why this popped into my brain. You can tell me why it popped into my brain.

I was thinking about, you know, eat your dessert last. And why is that? Why why why do I do my green beans first? And what's interesting is it's like, well, we all wanna be in flow. Like, we wanna have that feeling of being in flow, and yet we're skipping the earlier stages of doing the work and mastery to, in a sense, be able to have our dessert.

And as a society and otherwise, what what's coming to mind to me is that in this world where with AI and all these other things, we're getting all these instantaneous results, or we're popping pills, or we're eating all this processed food that by skipping these stages, we're robbing ourselves of really that existential flow, that feeling of oneness with the universe that does require that struggle. Absolutely. And so you put it even better than I have, which is that if you really want to experience flow, right, that seamless expression of complex skill, you need to learn that skill first, and that requires hard, dedicated work that is often frustrating. And frustration actually helps drive some of that skill development. So if you wanted to be in flow all the time, you actually couldn't be in the right state to learn new skills and really challenge your brain.

So you're right. That's why I prefer steak to dessert, but that's why you should eat your steak first, right, or your broccoli first. Or you have to eat the broccoli so that you can then get the dessert, which is flow. You know, again, as I grew up, I remember certain things whether or not in the back of a Cheerios box or otherwise, but, you know, no pain, no gain. Uh-huh.

I mean, I've mentioned that to some of my friends in the last years, and they get mad at me. Like, pain's bad. What do you mean? You're struggling all the time. It should just be easy.

And it's like, wisdom is wisdom, and and our brains figured this out over a long period of time. But we've got this collective abhmmesia almost that we forget that we really do have to do this work. You know, if you really think about it, the whole modernization of society has been to remove pain, right, and remove difficulty and remove struggle. And I think we're we're seeing the result of that at a societal level in terms of physical fitness, in terms of mental health. And now we're at a point where we have to build that back in.

Right? You have to add the struggle, and it it's not a negative thing. Like, pain is actually even if you just think about pain in the true sense of pain, it's a beneficial thing. It's telling you that something is happening, and it's directing resources in the body to respond to it. And there are actually really terrible medical conditions where you don't feel pain and you often die early because or you have significant issues because you're breaking bones and all these other things.

Pain is beneficial up to a point. So we're now at a point where we we have to build the pain back in because our that's what our body responds to. They respond to challenge. That's how you grow. That's how you adapt.

That's how you build resilience. And, ultimately, how you improve function. Right? If you wanna be fitter, stronger, smarter, you have to challenge yourself. So I know you mentioned the role of your parents, and I know we've talked a lot about balance and the need to, you know, build our brain health.

What's your secret? How do you put all this together in terms of your own life? I think one of the main benefits of my job is that I have a large amount of control over my time, and not all of us have that, and I appreciate that. Like, some of us, it's easier to eat whole and unprocessed foods because we have the resources and time to cook them, and some of them have the resources and time to do exercise. I built my own gym at home, so it's, like, literally 20 yards from here.

So we have to take that into account as well. Like, some things are more more difficult for some people. But what I've been able to do is essentially build a routine that allows all these things to happen so I can guarantee that I get eight hours in bed and that I can exercise every day. And then, you know, I I cook all of our meals at home. And And those are probably, like, the three core things that remain nonnegotiable.

And that's that's one of the benefits as well is that or one of the important things is that you have these, like, grounding practices that even when you're stressed and tired and sleep deprived, which I am all of those things very frequently. Right? Of course, a huge amount of things to do, and and sometimes I I do sacrifice, you know, some of those things in in order to to get short term gains, and there's pros and cons to that. But having these, like, core things that you come back to in that scenario becomes important. So this idea, which I think can be really helpful, I learned from doctor Simon Marshall, who's a clinical psychologist, a very good friend of mine.

And it's called there's a traffic light system. So imagine three different types of day or week or month in your life. And when, you know, you've got plenty of time and you're relatively relaxed, right, not too many pressures, there are the things that you you really want to do that you make sure that you do. So maybe it's a meditation practice. You eat all your food at home, you walk every day, and you get eight hours of sleep.

Right? That's your, like, green scenario. But then when pressure starts to increase and you become busier, a little bit more stressed, then maybe you lose some of those things. Right? Maybe you don't meditate, but you still make sure that, like, sleep and exercise become your thing.

And then the sort of, like, the core thing that always allows you to, like, ground yourself and get away from everything else that's going on is you where you have, like, at least one nonnegotiable thing. So in your red state, even at your mostly deprived, most stressed, there's something that you always make sure you do. Right? And it it's it becomes part of what keeps you sane, for want of a better word. Maybe it's, you know, an hour's walk, or maybe it's meditation or something.

You still have this one thing. This is the thing that I will always do regardless. And I think that's that's my one main takeaway is that with everything else that's going on, if you have just a couple of core things that allow you to step back, you know, this is my time. I'm gonna recharge, reset. That then, you know, gives you the capacity to go back out and do the things that you need to do.

Makes sense. Well, Tommy, this has been really, really a pleasure. And I will tell you, I've lived a long time, and I've thought about the benefit of sleep. And I'm somebody that needs sleep, and I I get a lot of sleep. But in the same way, as you said, we build muscles when we're not in the gym.

I really had never thought about that sleep was essentially allowing our brain to recover and, in a sense, get smarter. Yeah. Because in the same way, our muscles are getting bigger when we're out of the gym. I never thought about that when we actually do all this work and stress and do hard work during the day, if we don't get a good night's sleep, we're robbing our brain from the ability to really get smarter is what I think I'm hearing you say. Yeah.

Absolutely. And I'm I've kind of been really happy to see, like, over the ten like, last ten years or so, like, sleep has become sexy again, right, thanks to Matthew Walker and some other people. I think that's great. You know? Making sure we're getting high quality sleep is just so critical for brain health.

But, you know, we can't always you know, sometimes we have issues with sleep, maybe if we're stressed or we have to cut our sleep short. The other good thing is that there are some things that seem to offset the negative effects of inadequate sleep. And so the two main ones that have been shown to do that are social connection, so good connection with other people, and physical activity and exercise. So we can't always sleep as much as we want to. Again, I my wife will tell you that I don't function very well if I don't sleep a lot, but we can't always sleep as much as we want to.

So there are some other things. Again, the could be core behaviors that allow us to build some resilience when things don't go quite as we want to. So exercise being a really good one that seems to provide that benefit. Terrific. My one main hope is that people take away this idea of the three buckets of things for brain health.

And in those different buckets, you might think, oh, yeah. That's that one thing. That resonates with me. Maybe that's the thing. That's where I can start to get the biggest bang for my buck in terms of long term brain health.

And for most people, do difficult things that challenge you and force you to learn a new skill. Because even though you feel busy and you feel stressed, you're probably just doing the same thing again and again and again and again. You're not eating your broccoli in the way that can really promote long term brain function. And if I paid attention in class, you don't have to eat your whole plate of broccoli to begin with. You can just eat one piece of broccoli to start and build up from there.

Absolutely. And and I'm not sure how far we can stretch the broccolini analogy, but but we seem to get the most benefit right at the beginning of learning some new skill. So the first piece of broccoli, when eaten regularly, is the most important. Interesting. Tommy, thank you.

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