How to Keep Your Brain Young | Dr. Tommy Wood & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Keeping Your Brain Young

00:00If you were to tell people, look, you want to keep your brain as young as it can possibly be relative to your chronological age, you should what? Like it it so this is a general brain health question, but really I'm specifically asking about plasticity and let's make it multiple choice and then you can add things to it.

00:20Okay, you [clears throat] should exercise. So it can be multiple things and then we'll talk about which types of exercise you should continue to do. the things that you already know how to do. Yeah. And then third option um not mutually exclusive with the others of course is uh you should try to do new things that you can't already do.

00:39And I I still toil with this when I look at the literature on neuroplasticity and aging, right? Like [snorts] yes, use it or lose it is true, but we're also told that novelty and trying things that we're not good at is an essential component of building out brain circuits, continuing to make them function better as we get older.

00:57So, how do you how do you think about all of that? I'll partly answer your last question and then maybe give a framework for how I think about it. So when you look at a combination of epidemiological studies and intervention studies in older adults, everything about maintaining cognitive function later in life, you definitely see that those who continue to engage in hobbies and activities that are cognitively engaging or cognitively demanding and that can be lectures, that can be um volunteering, that can be you know reading crosswords, that kind of stuff.

01:35Those individuals tend to either have slowed rates of decline or better maintenance of function over time and or lower rates of dementia. That's of course observational, right? But that's usually people continuing to engage in the things that you know they've already been doing, right?

01:52So they're holding on to what they've got. Holding on to what they've got by continuing to do that.

Benefits Of Novel Activities

01:56Okay. Now, of course, it could partly be reverse causation because if you're maintaining function, then you will you're more likely to continue to do the things that that you enjoy doing, right? So, there's probably it probably goes in both both directions.

02:07However, there's an increasing body of literature that shows that by engaging older adults in novel cognitive activities, you see improvements in function. So that can be language learning. Uh that can be uh complex like cognitive movement or exercise.

02:26You see the same things with um like musical training like people learning a new musical instrument or learning um musical theory trying to identify different patterns in music. And you see in randomized control trials improvements particularly in executive function that seems to be most common across those different interventions.

02:43But you're seeing um improvements in cognitive function with novel cognitive stimuli. Uh there's a lot of uh recent trials that have also used types of brain training um things like the pointer trial that was here in the US maintain your brain which was a massive online study done in Australia recently and that's sort of broad cognitive training with like an online cognitive training platform.

03:06So again it's it's a new uh or novel um intervention or exposure that seems to provide a stimulus that improves function. So I think both can be or do seem to be important. Can I ask what [clears throat] um for an example of maybe one or two of the things that were in that large scale trial from Australia like just at a at a very top contour level um older adults meaning 65 and older um are doing what the maintain your brain uh study was actually it was um sort of midlife kind of uh 50s and 50s and 60s mainly and they actually had interventions across four different domains based on risk

03:47factors within that given individual. So they had uh dietary a dietary intervention, they had physical activity, they had um cognitive behavioral therapy for those who had um you know some potentially some mental health um concerns and then they had uh online brain training.

04:03Uh there was something similar done in the pointer trial uh which was in older adults now 60s and 70s that was done here in the US that was a replication of an older trial called the finger trial that was done in Finland but what those guys did was something very similar.

04:17So it's uh diet,

Multi-Domain Cognitive Health Trials

04:20exercise, uh monitoring and and treating uh cardiovascular risk factors and then brain training. So what the brain training looks like um so the points trial is a good example. They did um they used a platform called Brain HQ which is an HQ Brain HQ um which was uh developed based on the work of Mike Mzinich um who's you know like one of the godfathers of learning and neuroplasticity right um and they do various tasks primarily focused on developing and maintaining processing speed.

04:54Um, some of that evidence goes all the way back to an older trial called active that was done in the US in the '90s. It was still the biggest ever trial of like pure cognitive brain training again in older adults. So 60s and 70s. They had three different um training groups.

05:12The uh and then a control group. Uh the training groups did memory training and kind of like you know pneumonics, memory palaces, that kind of stuff to help them remember. There was reasoning training which is kind of like looking looking for patterns in numbers and letters.

05:26And then there was processing speed training where in this example it's visual processing speed. So things flash up on a screen in increasingly small uh increments. So could be hundreds of milliseconds. And as you get better at doing it, that time gets shorter and you have to remember what you saw and where you saw it on a screen.

05:45They just

Processing Speed & Dementia Risk

05:47published a secondary analysis of the active trial that showed that um those who did processing speed training with uh booster sessions at one and three years had a significantly decreased risk of dementia 20 years later. Um and they've done some other studies showing that that kind of training improves co-allergic signaling in the forebrain um which we know is susceptible to um the processes of dementia.

06:06So in particular, it's this training uh to be able to improve either visual or auditory processing speed, which is not something that you know, as you get older, you tend to not do activities that require you to process information quickly.

06:23Like driving is probably the the main one, but you can do it in sports and music and and other scenarios, but if you're not doing those things, processing speed tends to drop off sometime around 60 years old. When you say uh well I say processing, you say [laughter] processing uh processing speed.

06:41Um are you talking about reaction time, improving reaction time or pushing people to um stay at the edge of of reaction time? And when I say stay at the edge, I should clarify for people some task where if you go too fast, you make errors. If you go too slow, there's also a penalty in this scenario.

06:57And there are, you know, studies that look at these different functions over time. probably the biggest one looked at data that came from the implicit association test people might have heard of where you get um show these pictures of different things and depending on how quickly you respond it tells you something about like your implicit um you like your implicit thought processes.

07:16Um they took some of the data from that. Um this is

Reaction Time Versus Processing Speed

07:21published in one of the nature journals a few years ago. And what they showed was that um you can separate out reaction time versus processing speed because reaction time is just is a is a very um just the basic of response to a visual stimulus whereas processing requires you is is based on how quickly you can process and remember the information that you're seeing.

07:40You actually think Yeah. So what they showed in this study was that reaction time kind of slowly decreases on average in a population of it was about 1.2 million people slowly decreases in sort of like from about our 30s and then and then maybe decreases even more once we get past about 60.

08:00Processing speed on average tended to be more stable until about 60 years old and then tends to drop off. So in what you're doing in these um training modalities is you're being shown information for a very short period of time and then having to remember what it was you saw and where you saw it.

08:18Um so requires you to actually think and you know remember process the information rather than just like responding to a stimulus. So for people that want to jump to the okay what do I do? Um can we conclude okay if you like crossword puzzles keep doing them but do really hard ones for you.

08:37If you like

Choosing Effective Cognitive Challenges

08:39lifting weights, continue to challenge yourself with those. If you like to run, you know, push harder. Or should it be we shift domains? You like to lift and run, great. Start swimming again. Andrew, I'm telling myself, I used to I you know, I just noticed over time it's it's such a cliche of aging, right?

08:56Um that you one does tend to become more narrow, quote unquote, set in their ways. You like what you like, you don't want like what you don't. You get busier. Probably don't actually get busier, but you convince yourself, well I'll do I'm doing these things and I do plenty of them so but I'm not doing these other things.

09:14Or for those of us, I think this is everybody. If they really ask themselves an answer honestly, you'd love to hold on to your motor function and cognitive function as [clears throat] long as you can, maybe even improve it. Should we push ourselves to do something that's really far outside the box or maybe sort of current skill adjacent?

09:32So, I think of those three categories. What What do the data say? If you want the greatest effect for the minimum amount of [clears throat] time, assuming you're still going to do all the stuff you normally do, you're going to add something else.

09:45Should it be something really different, slightly different, or just push harder in the thing you do? I think it's going to depend a little bit on what it what it is the things that you currently do, right? So like crosswords are a good a good example.

09:57Even if you're doing hard ones, if you look at the work of people like uh Gloria Mark, the things like Crossword and Sudoku, they're less of like a true cognitive challenge, right? It's it's almost has more of like a meditation meditative like effect, right?

10:12Which can be a good thing, right? So you're focused but not challenged really. uh whereas if we're trying to build capacity, you need to spend some time doing something where you are both focused and challenged um cognitively.

Learning Complex New Skills

10:28So that can come from um learning new skills be they motor, language, social um and ideally as broad as possible because you're going to get better like overall stimulus as well as kind of like broader potential for for transfer into other areas of of daily life.

10:50In reality, the narrowness of the response or the breadth of the response is proportional to the narrowness or the breadth of the stimulus, right? So, you could get really good at one very specific thing or you could try and learn a new skill that requires a that involves a wide variety of tasks.

11:12So, I'll give like like an example is learning a new ball sport, right? that is going to require multiple assets of motor skills, social skills. Um, it's going to include both visual and auditory processing that's going to get faster and faster and harder and harder the better you get.

11:29So, something like that uh creates a much broader stimulus um than you know if you get very good at one very specific brain training task on like one computer program, right? This is one of the main arguments against online or you know digital brain training is that you get very good at doing that one specific thing but it doesn't transfer over to other areas of your life.

11:54Whereas some of these broader more complex ultimately more human skills probably give us much broader transfer as well as you know you know because of the the multiple pathways or networks that are being activated. [music]