All your brain is doing is kind of gathering a lot of information. Is it goes along through life in stores that information so that when you're in that situation next you can make that decision about what to do. And a lot of the time we will be making decisions based on did that feel really good last time? Or did that not feel so great?

All your brain is doing is kind of gathering a lot of information. Is it goes along through life in stores that information so that when you're in that situation next you can make that decision about what to do. And a lot of the time we will be making decisions based on did that feel really good last time? Or did that not feel so great?

Wow?

Wow?

Welcome to the one you feed through our time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Welcome to the one you feed through our time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

What if I told you that some of the most popular beliefs about your brain, like the idea that you only use ten percent of it, are completely false and worse, these myths might actually be holding you back from real change. Today, I sit down with neuroscientists doctor Sarah McKay to debunk the biggest neuromiths you probably still believe. We'll also explore why willpower isn't the magic bullet for behavior change and what actually is, And Sarah shares a deeply personal shift. She's making it fifty that might just change how you think about your own life space, if you're ready to separate fact from fiction when it comes to your brain, and maybe even rethink how you're living. Stick around. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Sarah, Welcome to the show.

What if I told you that some of the most popular beliefs about your brain, like the idea that you only use ten percent of it, are completely false and worse, these myths might actually be holding you back from real change. Today, I sit down with neuroscientists doctor Sarah McKay to debunk the biggest neuromiths you probably still believe. We'll also explore why willpower isn't the magic bullet for behavior change and what actually is, And Sarah shares a deeply personal shift. She's making it fifty that might just change how you think about your own life space, if you're ready to separate fact from fiction when it comes to your brain, and maybe even rethink how you're living. Stick around. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Sarah, Welcome to the show.

Thank you for inviting.

Thank you for inviting.

I am happy to have you on. I first came across your work, I think because my partner, Jinny, subscribes to your email list.

I am happy to have you on. I first came across your work, I think because my partner, Jinny, subscribes to your email list.

Oh that's cool.

Oh that's cool.

The thing that sort of hooked me and that I wanted to talk about was that you often talk about neuro myths, and so we'll be getting into neuro myths. We'll be getting into your latest book, which is called Brain Health for Dummies, and all of that in a moment. But first we'll start like we always do, with the parable of the wolves. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins, And the grandparent says, the one you feed. I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

The thing that sort of hooked me and that I wanted to talk about was that you often talk about neuro myths, and so we'll be getting into neuro myths. We'll be getting into your latest book, which is called Brain Health for Dummies, and all of that in a moment. But first we'll start like we always do, with the parable of the wolves. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins, And the grandparent says, the one you feed. I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Yeah, it means quite a lot right now. I was thinking about this last night because I'm one of those sort of seasons of life. Let's say, my mother loves to talk about seasons of life where I think that kind of the balance and moments and places and people kind of working against each other. So I turned fifty at the very beginning of the year. Last year, it was a huge year. I wrote a couple of books. We had a lot going on. I had lots of great, exciting fun things happen, But we also had quite a lot of stress in our family, and I decided that this year, turning fifty, I was going to take like a gap year. I think growing ups are meant to call it a sabbatical, which is I don't want to be at my desk. I don't want to be writing. I don't want to be I don't spend too much time thinking, to be honest, I'm going to do podcasts and speaking, but I want to travel and I want to connect. I'm trying to sort of shift a balance. I think my oldest son it's his final year of high school and he'll probably go away to university next year. And I left academia many years ago when I had my boys because I wanted to be at home with them, and I feel like it's a really nice book end of his schooling to kind of be here, I mean, to be honest, he probably won't notice whether I'm here or not, but he will notice the food and the baking. Just to kind of shift my focus and just sort of slow down and live a bit of a slower linear like I like to say, less of a three sixty life. So I feel sometimes I can be in a tug of war between striving and achieving and trying to do all of the things and parent with trust not anxiety, try and give up control and be a mentor. So I feel like I've purposefully decided this year it's not the word slow down, but perhaps anchor myself a little bit more. You know, people have a word of the year. Last year, I had this word equanimity, and I think I'm going to to reuse it again this year because I think that's about kind of being grounded and balanced and when life is kind of rushing around, I'm going to try and be a little bit more like linear, choosing way to place my focus yep, and a calm away this year. I think I need that, my body needs that. I want to give that to my family again. So that's what that parable kind of. It's about not fighting between different ideas. It's just about lip sitting summ aside and leaning into some others.

Yeah, it means quite a lot right now. I was thinking about this last night because I'm one of those sort of seasons of life. Let's say, my mother loves to talk about seasons of life where I think that kind of the balance and moments and places and people kind of working against each other. So I turned fifty at the very beginning of the year. Last year, it was a huge year. I wrote a couple of books. We had a lot going on. I had lots of great, exciting fun things happen, But we also had quite a lot of stress in our family, and I decided that this year, turning fifty, I was going to take like a gap year. I think growing ups are meant to call it a sabbatical, which is I don't want to be at my desk. I don't want to be writing. I don't want to be I don't spend too much time thinking, to be honest, I'm going to do podcasts and speaking, but I want to travel and I want to connect. I'm trying to sort of shift a balance. I think my oldest son it's his final year of high school and he'll probably go away to university next year. And I left academia many years ago when I had my boys because I wanted to be at home with them, and I feel like it's a really nice book end of his schooling to kind of be here, I mean, to be honest, he probably won't notice whether I'm here or not, but he will notice the food and the baking. Just to kind of shift my focus and just sort of slow down and live a bit of a slower linear like I like to say, less of a three sixty life. So I feel sometimes I can be in a tug of war between striving and achieving and trying to do all of the things and parent with trust not anxiety, try and give up control and be a mentor. So I feel like I've purposefully decided this year it's not the word slow down, but perhaps anchor myself a little bit more. You know, people have a word of the year. Last year, I had this word equanimity, and I think I'm going to to reuse it again this year because I think that's about kind of being grounded and balanced and when life is kind of rushing around, I'm going to try and be a little bit more like linear, choosing way to place my focus yep, and a calm away this year. I think I need that, my body needs that. I want to give that to my family again. So that's what that parable kind of. It's about not fighting between different ideas. It's just about lip sitting summ aside and leaning into some others.

Yeah, that idea of being away from your desk is one that sounds good. I've been working on my first book and it's due to the publisher in a month.

Yeah, that idea of being away from your desk is one that sounds good. I've been working on my first book and it's due to the publisher in a month.

So oh, congratulations, thank.

So oh, congratulations, thank.

You, thank you. So I spend a lot of time at my desk. Normally you spent a lot of time sitting down alone even more. Yeah, and just lately the last few days, I've just had this feeling like I get off and I'm like, I just need to go for a walk, you know, with no music, no audio books, no podcasts. I hate to say it, listeners. I don't advise that. I think you should always have the one if you want, now.

You, thank you. So I spend a lot of time at my desk. Normally you spent a lot of time sitting down alone even more. Yeah, and just lately the last few days, I've just had this feeling like I get off and I'm like, I just need to go for a walk, you know, with no music, no audio books, no podcasts. I hate to say it, listeners. I don't advise that. I think you should always have the one if you want, now.

Do walk without a podcast if you have a busy brain. I find it stops me thinking. As I say I don't like this three sixty, my brain will just be going off in a million angles.

Do walk without a podcast if you have a busy brain. I find it stops me thinking. As I say I don't like this three sixty, my brain will just be going off in a million angles.

So I agree, And generally I felt like no stimulation for just even thirty minutes, where it's like there's not something coming at me. So let's move into talking first about neuro myths. What does that mean to you? And what are some of the most prevalent neuro myths out there.

So I agree, And generally I felt like no stimulation for just even thirty minutes, where it's like there's not something coming at me. So let's move into talking first about neuro myths. What does that mean to you? And what are some of the most prevalent neuro myths out there.

This is interesting because I haven't thought to be perfectly honest about neuromths in quite some time. I feel like when I started, I sort of started the current phase of my career, which was very much about my backgrounds a PhD neuroscientist, a research When I left academia and I was home with my boys for a few years, and then I set up a sort of teaching talking writing about neuroscience was probably at a point in time when I don't know whether people know whether that's gone backwards. People were as scientific literate as they are now, But then sometimes I wonder if that's, like I say, changed again. Neuroscience wasn't as popularized then as it is now, and I don't think people had as clear understanding. And so there were lots of ideas people had about the brain that were reasonably whether they were widely shared, whether I just tuned into them that as a neuroscientist I'd never heard of. Because when you're in the neuroscience research world academia, you're doing your thing and you're surrounded by other like minded people. And so then when I first stepped out, there were people saying things about the brain that I didn't necessarily think were correct or I'd never heard of before. So I thought, I'm going to bust those myths. Let me show them and tell them. And so I started talking about some of these ideas, and honestly, it feels a little bit old for me now to talk about what some of them are. Maybe these ideas around we have a right creative brain and a left analytical brain. And you're either right brained or you're left brained. Or learning styles either a kinesthetic, an auditory, or a visual learner. We only use ten percent of our brain. I think these are some of the more popular ideas that are out there about the brain. And initially I used to be I'm going to bust the myths and I'm going to tell them. And I have learned a lot in the last sort of seventeen years. I suppose of doing what I do that busting a myth isn't a way of connecting with other people and educating them about neuroscience. No one wants to be told now what you think is wrong, in fact that it'll make them dig their heels. And that's why I say, when you say, what do neuromiths mean to me? This is what it means to me. Now, That's not how I now approach their work that I do. It's around taking ideas that are correct and are accurate, and are based in the research or at least our current understanding of where ideas about neuroscience are, and then sharing them in a way that will resonate with someone that will land with someone and then if they come to me and ask, well, what about this or what about that, then I might say, hey, let's kind of take a look at what our latest understanding is. And often it will be kind of different. I suppose some ideas that have persisted over the years, and maybe not so much neuro myths, but might be just inaccurate ways of phrasing discussions about the brain. And perhaps the one that I still tend to rant on a little bit about would be the reptilian brain or the lizard brain. And this gets thrown about, is this kind of phrase that we've all got this kind of lizard brain inside of us, kind of waiting to be scared, to freeze or to flee, or to fight where lizards don't typically fight, and that kind of controls everything that could potentially go wrong, that controls our behave. And we don't have a lizard brain because we're not lizards. We're humans. Our brains are far more complex. We're not born with this kind of fear hub inside us waiting for something to go wrong. So that is perhaps not a myth that I tell people is wrong, But I try and present different ideas instead, which I think are more contemporary ways of explaining how the brain works that I think are more useful and give people a bit more agency and a bit more to kind of move on with in a useful way.

This is interesting because I haven't thought to be perfectly honest about neuromths in quite some time. I feel like when I started, I sort of started the current phase of my career, which was very much about my backgrounds a PhD neuroscientist, a research When I left academia and I was home with my boys for a few years, and then I set up a sort of teaching talking writing about neuroscience was probably at a point in time when I don't know whether people know whether that's gone backwards. People were as scientific literate as they are now, But then sometimes I wonder if that's, like I say, changed again. Neuroscience wasn't as popularized then as it is now, and I don't think people had as clear understanding. And so there were lots of ideas people had about the brain that were reasonably whether they were widely shared, whether I just tuned into them that as a neuroscientist I'd never heard of. Because when you're in the neuroscience research world academia, you're doing your thing and you're surrounded by other like minded people. And so then when I first stepped out, there were people saying things about the brain that I didn't necessarily think were correct or I'd never heard of before. So I thought, I'm going to bust those myths. Let me show them and tell them. And so I started talking about some of these ideas, and honestly, it feels a little bit old for me now to talk about what some of them are. Maybe these ideas around we have a right creative brain and a left analytical brain. And you're either right brained or you're left brained. Or learning styles either a kinesthetic, an auditory, or a visual learner. We only use ten percent of our brain. I think these are some of the more popular ideas that are out there about the brain. And initially I used to be I'm going to bust the myths and I'm going to tell them. And I have learned a lot in the last sort of seventeen years. I suppose of doing what I do that busting a myth isn't a way of connecting with other people and educating them about neuroscience. No one wants to be told now what you think is wrong, in fact that it'll make them dig their heels. And that's why I say, when you say, what do neuromiths mean to me? This is what it means to me. Now, That's not how I now approach their work that I do. It's around taking ideas that are correct and are accurate, and are based in the research or at least our current understanding of where ideas about neuroscience are, and then sharing them in a way that will resonate with someone that will land with someone and then if they come to me and ask, well, what about this or what about that, then I might say, hey, let's kind of take a look at what our latest understanding is. And often it will be kind of different. I suppose some ideas that have persisted over the years, and maybe not so much neuro myths, but might be just inaccurate ways of phrasing discussions about the brain. And perhaps the one that I still tend to rant on a little bit about would be the reptilian brain or the lizard brain. And this gets thrown about, is this kind of phrase that we've all got this kind of lizard brain inside of us, kind of waiting to be scared, to freeze or to flee, or to fight where lizards don't typically fight, and that kind of controls everything that could potentially go wrong, that controls our behave. And we don't have a lizard brain because we're not lizards. We're humans. Our brains are far more complex. We're not born with this kind of fear hub inside us waiting for something to go wrong. So that is perhaps not a myth that I tell people is wrong, But I try and present different ideas instead, which I think are more contemporary ways of explaining how the brain works that I think are more useful and give people a bit more agency and a bit more to kind of move on with in a useful way.

With the lizard brain, I mean, obviously, I think that you're right, we're not lizards.

With the lizard brain, I mean, obviously, I think that you're right, we're not lizards.

Yes.

Yes.

Secondly, I think one of the things that you talk about in your book, and I think if you dig into neuroscience a little bit, you start to realize is that there's a lot of connectivity among parts of the brain. So to think that one part of your brain is doing all of something is misleeding. But is it safe to say that we have a part of our brain that is more I don't even know if this would be safe to say limbically based a part of our brain that is more react dictionary that is from older brain structures in creatures that we've evolved from and we've built on top of that. Or is even that a misunderstanding.

Secondly, I think one of the things that you talk about in your book, and I think if you dig into neuroscience a little bit, you start to realize is that there's a lot of connectivity among parts of the brain. So to think that one part of your brain is doing all of something is misleeding. But is it safe to say that we have a part of our brain that is more I don't even know if this would be safe to say limbically based a part of our brain that is more react dictionary that is from older brain structures in creatures that we've evolved from and we've built on top of that. Or is even that a misunderstanding.

The brain is complicated. It does a whole lot of things. This idea that we evolved from lizards, first of all, is inaccurate, because an evolutionary biologist will be able to tell you, you know, mammals didn't evolve from lizards. If you kind of look at a kind of an evolutionary tree, they branched off. We branched off. We kind of evolved along one kind of path, and they evolved on the other. So this idea that we've retained some lizard part in us as inaccurate. On top of that, if we look at how the brain develops, this idea that there's this kind of like layer by layer kind of development of the brain where by these primitive lizardy parts develop first and then the other parts grow on top or develop on top. Again, that's not necessarily how our brains develop either. So the idea that they evolve and then develop in this way has been set aside. The idea was really popularized many, many years ago, kind of back in the nineteen sixties. We've learned let's just say we've learned. We've learned a lot in the last five years, let alone a lot from the nineteen sixties when it was originally proposed this idea of this kind of lizard brain, or the limbic brain. It was proposed by this chap Paul MacLean, And when he was first describing the different parts of the brain, he didn't even label the limbic brain, the so called limbic regions of the brain as the lizard brain. He in fact labeled them as the mammalian brain. The lizard part or the reptilian part of the brain was even kind of more sitting below there. It was more parts of the brain that are involved with things like kind of respiration and heart rate and sleep and awake, et cetera. So, if his description is accurate, people aren't using his description accurately today, And I think, what's kind of funny. What I always encourage people to do, do a Google image search for lizard brain or reptilian brain and look to see the diagrams that people have drawn of this, and you could get an array of twenty of them, and I guarantee every single one of them will label a different part of the brain is lizard or reptilian. And the reason they can't label that is because it doesn't exist. It's not kind of a thing. What we understand now the current contemporary neuroscience perspective, and this may change, is that we don't have these kind of hardwired neurobiological basic emotions that are widen from birth whereby every human on the planet is going to respond in an identical way, in the same way that every lizard on the planet does, like elizard of Morocco and New York and in my backyard here in Sydney. You're all going to behave the same way we humans don't. Instead, we talk about this idea of constructed emotions, and some of this has been popularized by various neuroscientists, whereby like everything else in our brain, like a thought or a memory, or an expectation or a belief, and emotion is also constructed from kind of multiple inputs, or we can think about them as like ingredients. So some of these would be from our bottom up kind of physiological body, the sensations we feel in our body. Some of us are more consciously aware of what happens in our body than others. The situation we're in, the context we're in, the people we're with, I mean, and there's a whole lot of data coming in these days from like your mobile phone. So a war happening on the other side of the world is now happening thirty centimeters away from your face, and that gets combined with our memories and our personal experiences. The language we've learned to describe these kind of feelings. And so there's this kind of conglomeration of or this kind of a mix or construction of all of these different components that create this kind of feeling that we would have that we would give a particular word too. And we know that this is the case because people can learn to experience new emotions as they have different experiences. As they're going through life, we gain a much broader kind of emotional vocabulary, so to speak, as we get older. We see this from small children to teenagers to adults in terms of the nuance and the kind of shades of gray that we learn to understand and feel and experience. And we also know, from say therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy or other types of sort of learning or training, that we can learn to respond in different ways to situations by understanding all of these different inputs. If we had a lizard brain that controlled our emotions, where would be like the lizard in Morocco, New York or Sydney. There would be no variation, And that's not the case in a human.

The brain is complicated. It does a whole lot of things. This idea that we evolved from lizards, first of all, is inaccurate, because an evolutionary biologist will be able to tell you, you know, mammals didn't evolve from lizards. If you kind of look at a kind of an evolutionary tree, they branched off. We branched off. We kind of evolved along one kind of path, and they evolved on the other. So this idea that we've retained some lizard part in us as inaccurate. On top of that, if we look at how the brain develops, this idea that there's this kind of like layer by layer kind of development of the brain where by these primitive lizardy parts develop first and then the other parts grow on top or develop on top. Again, that's not necessarily how our brains develop either. So the idea that they evolve and then develop in this way has been set aside. The idea was really popularized many, many years ago, kind of back in the nineteen sixties. We've learned let's just say we've learned. We've learned a lot in the last five years, let alone a lot from the nineteen sixties when it was originally proposed this idea of this kind of lizard brain, or the limbic brain. It was proposed by this chap Paul MacLean, And when he was first describing the different parts of the brain, he didn't even label the limbic brain, the so called limbic regions of the brain as the lizard brain. He in fact labeled them as the mammalian brain. The lizard part or the reptilian part of the brain was even kind of more sitting below there. It was more parts of the brain that are involved with things like kind of respiration and heart rate and sleep and awake, et cetera. So, if his description is accurate, people aren't using his description accurately today, And I think, what's kind of funny. What I always encourage people to do, do a Google image search for lizard brain or reptilian brain and look to see the diagrams that people have drawn of this, and you could get an array of twenty of them, and I guarantee every single one of them will label a different part of the brain is lizard or reptilian. And the reason they can't label that is because it doesn't exist. It's not kind of a thing. What we understand now the current contemporary neuroscience perspective, and this may change, is that we don't have these kind of hardwired neurobiological basic emotions that are widen from birth whereby every human on the planet is going to respond in an identical way, in the same way that every lizard on the planet does, like elizard of Morocco and New York and in my backyard here in Sydney. You're all going to behave the same way we humans don't. Instead, we talk about this idea of constructed emotions, and some of this has been popularized by various neuroscientists, whereby like everything else in our brain, like a thought or a memory, or an expectation or a belief, and emotion is also constructed from kind of multiple inputs, or we can think about them as like ingredients. So some of these would be from our bottom up kind of physiological body, the sensations we feel in our body. Some of us are more consciously aware of what happens in our body than others. The situation we're in, the context we're in, the people we're with, I mean, and there's a whole lot of data coming in these days from like your mobile phone. So a war happening on the other side of the world is now happening thirty centimeters away from your face, and that gets combined with our memories and our personal experiences. The language we've learned to describe these kind of feelings. And so there's this kind of conglomeration of or this kind of a mix or construction of all of these different components that create this kind of feeling that we would have that we would give a particular word too. And we know that this is the case because people can learn to experience new emotions as they have different experiences. As they're going through life, we gain a much broader kind of emotional vocabulary, so to speak, as we get older. We see this from small children to teenagers to adults in terms of the nuance and the kind of shades of gray that we learn to understand and feel and experience. And we also know, from say therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy or other types of sort of learning or training, that we can learn to respond in different ways to situations by understanding all of these different inputs. If we had a lizard brain that controlled our emotions, where would be like the lizard in Morocco, New York or Sydney. There would be no variation, And that's not the case in a human.

Do you think the lizards are insulted by us constantly talking about them in this way?

Do you think the lizards are insulted by us constantly talking about them in this way?

I don't really think that lizards. You have that many deeper thoughts. I do spend a lot of time. I've got a little lizards, very familiar with lizards. Have little lizards sort are happening in my house. There's lizards inside the house. Australia is a wild place to live. There's a lot of wildlife in an out My dog just thinks that they are all meant to live in here with him. Has it learned that they don't belong. What I really try to teach and encourage people to do is to think about the words and the phrases they use to describe neuroscience and all the brain and all their behavior, because it can be very limiting if we use certain phrases. It almost dials us in to think that that is the only option. So I don't even like using the word stress. And that's kind of I suppose related to these ideas of lizard brains. When we say the word stress, it's a useless word in the English language, because it could mean the thing that's happened out there, know, whether it be a natural disaster or something that you've seen on your phone, or it could be something that you've imagined It could be a threat, it could be a challenge, it could be an opportunity. One event could be all those three diferent things, depending on who you are. We've got various sort of physiological response systems which are deployed over different sort of time scales and response to those threats, challenges, and opportunities. We've got sort of our stress response systems, but they're not only responding when something is scary or a threat. They're also responding. You know, your heart rate rises as you stand up so you don't faint. That's controlled by your sympathetic nervous system. Some people like to call out your fight and flight system. Your heart rate isn't rising as you stand up because you were once chased by a sabertoothed tiger. It's just how your body is responding and engaging. And then we've got the feeling that we use. So we've got the threat, challenge, you, opportunity, the response systems, and then we've got this word that we would use to describe our physiological response in the context. And again we like to use the word stress. So what I try and do with all of the neuroscience education I do is to give people a very clear biological understanding what is happening, and then some more sophisticated language to describe that, and that blows open opportunities for them to act in different ways instead of focusing and all, we've got a lizard brain in this vital flight.

I don't really think that lizards. You have that many deeper thoughts. I do spend a lot of time. I've got a little lizards, very familiar with lizards. Have little lizards sort are happening in my house. There's lizards inside the house. Australia is a wild place to live. There's a lot of wildlife in an out My dog just thinks that they are all meant to live in here with him. Has it learned that they don't belong. What I really try to teach and encourage people to do is to think about the words and the phrases they use to describe neuroscience and all the brain and all their behavior, because it can be very limiting if we use certain phrases. It almost dials us in to think that that is the only option. So I don't even like using the word stress. And that's kind of I suppose related to these ideas of lizard brains. When we say the word stress, it's a useless word in the English language, because it could mean the thing that's happened out there, know, whether it be a natural disaster or something that you've seen on your phone, or it could be something that you've imagined It could be a threat, it could be a challenge, it could be an opportunity. One event could be all those three diferent things, depending on who you are. We've got various sort of physiological response systems which are deployed over different sort of time scales and response to those threats, challenges, and opportunities. We've got sort of our stress response systems, but they're not only responding when something is scary or a threat. They're also responding. You know, your heart rate rises as you stand up so you don't faint. That's controlled by your sympathetic nervous system. Some people like to call out your fight and flight system. Your heart rate isn't rising as you stand up because you were once chased by a sabertoothed tiger. It's just how your body is responding and engaging. And then we've got the feeling that we use. So we've got the threat, challenge, you, opportunity, the response systems, and then we've got this word that we would use to describe our physiological response in the context. And again we like to use the word stress. So what I try and do with all of the neuroscience education I do is to give people a very clear biological understanding what is happening, and then some more sophisticated language to describe that, and that blows open opportunities for them to act in different ways instead of focusing and all, we've got a lizard brain in this vital flight.

Yep. So let's change directions just a little bit, because I'd like to get a neuroscience perspective on a couple of different things. So one of the things that this show is about, and one of the things that I help people do in various different ways, is to make changes in their lives of different types. But change is difficult. This may be me using a broad term like change, which is like using a broad term like stress that doesn't isn't helpful enough. But from a neurological perspective, is there a reason that change is so difficult for us? Yeah?

Yep. So let's change directions just a little bit, because I'd like to get a neuroscience perspective on a couple of different things. So one of the things that this show is about, and one of the things that I help people do in various different ways, is to make changes in their lives of different types. But change is difficult. This may be me using a broad term like change, which is like using a broad term like stress that doesn't isn't helpful enough. But from a neurological perspective, is there a reason that change is so difficult for us? Yeah?

I mean as a neuroscientist, bat that back and asking to define change in a little bit more of a clear way. So if I was to reframe that question and think about change, would be you're in place A and you want to get to place B. Now that might be you're wanting to learn something new, So maybe you're you know, you're fifteen years old and you're a real example. You're in high school and you're studying Shakespeare and you've got to learn some quotes, but you know an essay that you've got to write in class coming up. That's change. That's you've got to read Shakespeare, which you find a struggle and really difficult, and then you'll get to the point where you've learned those and you can understand and write about that. So that's change. Learning something new is change. Having perhaps a mood that you know, you've got low mood and you've been struggling with that for some time, and you want to have more upbeat moods. So perhaps you've been diagnosed with depression or anxiety. Perhaps you've just got the blues and you want to not be like that anymore. That's that's also changed. So we've got different types of scenarios. Or perhaps you're trying to learn a new skill, Like you know, I'm in a musical theater group. I'm very untalented at singing and dancing, but I do like knocking about in the back row with the other mums and the ensemble. We've got to learn a new dance for the show. Coming up, and it's like we first get taught it and again that's changed. I have to change something to be able to get from point A to point B. And if you are, you know, five years old or ten years old, and it's a context relevant type of learning that you're doing or change that you're trying to make, it is a whole lot easier than it is when you're fifty years old. Anything is easier to learn when you're young versus old. And one of the principles around that is based on the degree of plasticity in which your brain kind of has, or the degree to which it changes by experience. And we know that there are certain times through life, particularly during infancy, childhood, adolescence, and then interestingly, some context relevant plasticity takes place in pregnancy for women, where the brain is incredibly kind of receptive and can be shaped very very easy by the experiences it has, and in fact, it often fundamentally requires those experiences to guide its development appropriately. And we might call these sensitive periods of development. And by and large, these kind of phases of life open and then they close because you want to grow up and learn and adapt to the environment and the context in which you're in and be changed and molded and shaped for it, and then an adulthood function within that. And so what we see is that the capacity for plasticity dialing down. Some types of different brain networks that are responsible for different types of behaviors we might perform, will retain plasticity longer than others. So your hearing centers and your brain are very very plastic when you're very very young in infancy, and then they kind of close down. So it's much harder to learn languages later in life than it as earlier in life. Life, and if you're born profoundly deaf and you never hear spoken language, it's going to be very very hard for those brains you just to ever hear spoken language later in life if there's not an intervention straight away. However, we can still learn to solve a maths problem, We can still learn to play a new musical instrument, you can still learn new dance moves, and your fifties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. It's just a whole lot harder than it was then. So again it's going to very much depend on what is this change that you are wanting to make and what is the process by what you're going to go through that change. If it's learning a new motor skill, if it's changing a thought process. Often those are kind of two different things, because learning something new is often easier than trying to unlearn something old, because typically, say you have this thought that you're always having, Perhaps you berating yourself for being a useless mother. I used to do that. Now I think I'm a brilliant mother. But back in the day when my boys were young, I used to think I was terrible. It was completely fine. It was just going through early toddlehood years. It was very hard to unlearn that to stop that thought process. In fact, I had to figure out what triggered that thought process. This is what we would do if we were talking about habit change. What is triggering or causing that particular thought, and what can I think or do instead when I encountered that trigger, Instead of trying to unwind a thought, I had to learn a new thought in its place. So it's very important when we're talking about change to say, am I just trying to learn something new? Do I need the skill development that someone could teach me? Am I having to learn something new but I really don't want to like learning Shakespeare quotes, And so the problem isn't the teaching and the skill development. The problem is like the kind of the motivation and the grit and the kind of emotional regulation required to form the task and the absence of wanting to or is there some particular habit or learned skill that you don't want to do anymore? So you need to kind of unpack the trigger for that and learn a new process in its place. And those are three different kind of brain networks and processes that would be involved for change.

I mean as a neuroscientist, bat that back and asking to define change in a little bit more of a clear way. So if I was to reframe that question and think about change, would be you're in place A and you want to get to place B. Now that might be you're wanting to learn something new, So maybe you're you know, you're fifteen years old and you're a real example. You're in high school and you're studying Shakespeare and you've got to learn some quotes, but you know an essay that you've got to write in class coming up. That's change. That's you've got to read Shakespeare, which you find a struggle and really difficult, and then you'll get to the point where you've learned those and you can understand and write about that. So that's change. Learning something new is change. Having perhaps a mood that you know, you've got low mood and you've been struggling with that for some time, and you want to have more upbeat moods. So perhaps you've been diagnosed with depression or anxiety. Perhaps you've just got the blues and you want to not be like that anymore. That's that's also changed. So we've got different types of scenarios. Or perhaps you're trying to learn a new skill, Like you know, I'm in a musical theater group. I'm very untalented at singing and dancing, but I do like knocking about in the back row with the other mums and the ensemble. We've got to learn a new dance for the show. Coming up, and it's like we first get taught it and again that's changed. I have to change something to be able to get from point A to point B. And if you are, you know, five years old or ten years old, and it's a context relevant type of learning that you're doing or change that you're trying to make, it is a whole lot easier than it is when you're fifty years old. Anything is easier to learn when you're young versus old. And one of the principles around that is based on the degree of plasticity in which your brain kind of has, or the degree to which it changes by experience. And we know that there are certain times through life, particularly during infancy, childhood, adolescence, and then interestingly, some context relevant plasticity takes place in pregnancy for women, where the brain is incredibly kind of receptive and can be shaped very very easy by the experiences it has, and in fact, it often fundamentally requires those experiences to guide its development appropriately. And we might call these sensitive periods of development. And by and large, these kind of phases of life open and then they close because you want to grow up and learn and adapt to the environment and the context in which you're in and be changed and molded and shaped for it, and then an adulthood function within that. And so what we see is that the capacity for plasticity dialing down. Some types of different brain networks that are responsible for different types of behaviors we might perform, will retain plasticity longer than others. So your hearing centers and your brain are very very plastic when you're very very young in infancy, and then they kind of close down. So it's much harder to learn languages later in life than it as earlier in life. Life, and if you're born profoundly deaf and you never hear spoken language, it's going to be very very hard for those brains you just to ever hear spoken language later in life if there's not an intervention straight away. However, we can still learn to solve a maths problem, We can still learn to play a new musical instrument, you can still learn new dance moves, and your fifties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. It's just a whole lot harder than it was then. So again it's going to very much depend on what is this change that you are wanting to make and what is the process by what you're going to go through that change. If it's learning a new motor skill, if it's changing a thought process. Often those are kind of two different things, because learning something new is often easier than trying to unlearn something old, because typically, say you have this thought that you're always having, Perhaps you berating yourself for being a useless mother. I used to do that. Now I think I'm a brilliant mother. But back in the day when my boys were young, I used to think I was terrible. It was completely fine. It was just going through early toddlehood years. It was very hard to unlearn that to stop that thought process. In fact, I had to figure out what triggered that thought process. This is what we would do if we were talking about habit change. What is triggering or causing that particular thought, and what can I think or do instead when I encountered that trigger, Instead of trying to unwind a thought, I had to learn a new thought in its place. So it's very important when we're talking about change to say, am I just trying to learn something new? Do I need the skill development that someone could teach me? Am I having to learn something new but I really don't want to like learning Shakespeare quotes, And so the problem isn't the teaching and the skill development. The problem is like the kind of the motivation and the grit and the kind of emotional regulation required to form the task and the absence of wanting to or is there some particular habit or learned skill that you don't want to do anymore? So you need to kind of unpack the trigger for that and learn a new process in its place. And those are three different kind of brain networks and processes that would be involved for change.

Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What's one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it's there, You've tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You're not alone in this, and I've identified six major saboteurs of self control, like autopilot behavior, self doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's the good news. You can outsmart them. And I've put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at oneufeed dot net slash ebook and take the first step towards getting back on track. In psychology studies, there is discussions about the idea of willpower or self control, and in general, the behavior change lens on this is that you want to rely on these things as little as possible, right. You want to set up your environment, you want to get all the support that you can get, et cetera, et cetera. But neurologically, do we know where this idea of willpower or self control comes from? Which, I guess I'm just going to define it as I'm in a moment where I need to make a choice, and I've got the two wolves going right, and one wolf is the one that I've decided I want to follow, and the other is the other wolf. Do we know what's happening neurologically when somebody is sort of in a moment of wrestling with these questions and then making the right choice. Is it solely an executive function? Do we know? It?

Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What's one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it's there, You've tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You're not alone in this, and I've identified six major saboteurs of self control, like autopilot behavior, self doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's the good news. You can outsmart them. And I've put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at oneufeed dot net slash ebook and take the first step towards getting back on track. In psychology studies, there is discussions about the idea of willpower or self control, and in general, the behavior change lens on this is that you want to rely on these things as little as possible, right. You want to set up your environment, you want to get all the support that you can get, et cetera, et cetera. But neurologically, do we know where this idea of willpower or self control comes from? Which, I guess I'm just going to define it as I'm in a moment where I need to make a choice, and I've got the two wolves going right, and one wolf is the one that I've decided I want to follow, and the other is the other wolf. Do we know what's happening neurologically when somebody is sort of in a moment of wrestling with these questions and then making the right choice. Is it solely an executive function? Do we know? It?

Probably depends how sophisticated yourself awareness and executive functions are, and whether you're able to kind of stand back and look at those choices from a distance and then consciously choose which one or the other to choose, or whether you know, perhaps you're very emotionally disregulated and you know you'll be driven to the right or the wrong decision. You're listening to your emotions instead of being able to thoughtfully engage in that task. What I always try to explain to people is pretty much that one of the main things that the brain does is it draws from our past experiences and predict what we should do next. So whether that be you know, the construction of emotion. Last time I was in this situation and my body was feeling this way surrounded by these people, then this is what I felt, So I feel that again. Or the last time I was in this situation, I made choice A and that felt really good, So I'm going to do choice A again. Or last time I was in this situation, I chose B and it did not work. I was very disappointed, or it was really scary, or I really didn't enjoy it, So I'm going to do A instead of B. So all your brain is doing is kind of gathering a lot of information as it goes along through life in stores that information so that when you're in that situation next you can make that decision about what to do. And a lot of the time we will be making decisions based on did that feel really good last time? Or did that not feel so great last time? And part of that learning process, the signaling process for that one component of that there's a whole lot going on, is what we would call like kind of our dopamine system. People think that dopamine is released just when something feels great, but actually it's a learning queue. It's been constantly kind of dribbled out this kind of like really sort of slow rate. And the reason the brain often sort of has these kind of baseline rates. It's not going from zero to on. It's got a baseline rate. That means it can dial up the release and it can dial down the release, so you've got far more kind of you know scope there. Dopamine to act as a teaching signal. So if something was really horrible last time you did it, dopamine dropped off. If it was really good last time, dopamine went up, and that's a teaching signal that didn't work, that did work, and so the next time you encounter that, an advance of you making the decision to act, you'll be going, oh, that felt really great. Oh it didn't feel really great, and that'll be part of the desire to do it again, or the kind of oh gosh, the feeling of not wanting to do it again. Often the problem lies therein when last time you think you didn't really enjoy it. But it's kind of the smart voice, and then you're trying to override that feeling of a version or disappointment or you know, I just I don't want to do that. But that's the thing that you've got to do, and that's really tough. And that's all around dopamine acting as a teaching signal, so a brain can predict what to do next.

Probably depends how sophisticated yourself awareness and executive functions are, and whether you're able to kind of stand back and look at those choices from a distance and then consciously choose which one or the other to choose, or whether you know, perhaps you're very emotionally disregulated and you know you'll be driven to the right or the wrong decision. You're listening to your emotions instead of being able to thoughtfully engage in that task. What I always try to explain to people is pretty much that one of the main things that the brain does is it draws from our past experiences and predict what we should do next. So whether that be you know, the construction of emotion. Last time I was in this situation and my body was feeling this way surrounded by these people, then this is what I felt, So I feel that again. Or the last time I was in this situation, I made choice A and that felt really good, So I'm going to do choice A again. Or last time I was in this situation, I chose B and it did not work. I was very disappointed, or it was really scary, or I really didn't enjoy it, So I'm going to do A instead of B. So all your brain is doing is kind of gathering a lot of information as it goes along through life in stores that information so that when you're in that situation next you can make that decision about what to do. And a lot of the time we will be making decisions based on did that feel really good last time? Or did that not feel so great last time? And part of that learning process, the signaling process for that one component of that there's a whole lot going on, is what we would call like kind of our dopamine system. People think that dopamine is released just when something feels great, but actually it's a learning queue. It's been constantly kind of dribbled out this kind of like really sort of slow rate. And the reason the brain often sort of has these kind of baseline rates. It's not going from zero to on. It's got a baseline rate. That means it can dial up the release and it can dial down the release, so you've got far more kind of you know scope there. Dopamine to act as a teaching signal. So if something was really horrible last time you did it, dopamine dropped off. If it was really good last time, dopamine went up, and that's a teaching signal that didn't work, that did work, and so the next time you encounter that, an advance of you making the decision to act, you'll be going, oh, that felt really great. Oh it didn't feel really great, and that'll be part of the desire to do it again, or the kind of oh gosh, the feeling of not wanting to do it again. Often the problem lies therein when last time you think you didn't really enjoy it. But it's kind of the smart voice, and then you're trying to override that feeling of a version or disappointment or you know, I just I don't want to do that. But that's the thing that you've got to do, and that's really tough. And that's all around dopamine acting as a teaching signal, so a brain can predict what to do next.

Well, you've got the other example also, which I think addiction is the extreme version of you know, I've heard addiction framed as a learning disorder. I'm a recovering person. When I heard that, it made a certain sense to me because in the beginning it was all good. It's obvious to me why I did it and why I kept doing it because it felt freaking great and I loved it and it made my life.

Well, you've got the other example also, which I think addiction is the extreme version of you know, I've heard addiction framed as a learning disorder. I'm a recovering person. When I heard that, it made a certain sense to me because in the beginning it was all good. It's obvious to me why I did it and why I kept doing it because it felt freaking great and I loved it and it made my life.

That's kind of the unspoken yeah thing about it. Especially they say drugs of addiction, or it feels really good, that's why you keep doing it.

That's kind of the unspoken yeah thing about it. Especially they say drugs of addiction, or it feels really good, that's why you keep doing it.

But over time the adverse effects start to really add up, and it almost seems as if the brain is not getting the new learning information on a deep enough level. Right. It almost just seems like that reward learning loop somehow has just been broken. Yeah, but I think we can say this even on a much lesser level. Let's say people who have a mild issue with eating more than they want to in the evening, and when they do it, now what they end up with is shame and remorse, which seems that if reward learning was driving the whole show, your brain would be like, oh, the last three times I did that, maybe it felt good for a minute, but I just then felt terrible for an hour. And yet yeah, we continue.

But over time the adverse effects start to really add up, and it almost seems as if the brain is not getting the new learning information on a deep enough level. Right. It almost just seems like that reward learning loop somehow has just been broken. Yeah, but I think we can say this even on a much lesser level. Let's say people who have a mild issue with eating more than they want to in the evening, and when they do it, now what they end up with is shame and remorse, which seems that if reward learning was driving the whole show, your brain would be like, oh, the last three times I did that, maybe it felt good for a minute, but I just then felt terrible for an hour. And yet yeah, we continue.

Particularly when we're talking about drugs of addiction, they have a psychoactive component. Part of the problem there is that acting on the exact same neural pathways and signapses as that reward learning process. So that kind of makes it twice as hard because they've interfered with that process others, you know, it's more like the act of doing them. The psychological process is acted on those pathways. So I don't know enough about addiction neuroscience to know how much we can sort of differentiate in tweak between those two. But I suppose one of the definitions, and there's many definitions of addiction, is that you are compelled to keep on doing this behavior or activity despite the negative consequences, even if you're not getting the high or the pleasure from it anymore. And that's the difference between what we would call a habit or an automated behavior and an addiction, because a habit you can always intervene, you can consciously intervene, whereas an addiction, you're often compelled even if you don't want to do it, you still appear to be compelled to do it despite the negative consequences. And that makes that very very hard. And I mean that's why we have these, you know, support programs of people with problems, because again these circumstances, change is so incredibly difficult, yep.

Particularly when we're talking about drugs of addiction, they have a psychoactive component. Part of the problem there is that acting on the exact same neural pathways and signapses as that reward learning process. So that kind of makes it twice as hard because they've interfered with that process others, you know, it's more like the act of doing them. The psychological process is acted on those pathways. So I don't know enough about addiction neuroscience to know how much we can sort of differentiate in tweak between those two. But I suppose one of the definitions, and there's many definitions of addiction, is that you are compelled to keep on doing this behavior or activity despite the negative consequences, even if you're not getting the high or the pleasure from it anymore. And that's the difference between what we would call a habit or an automated behavior and an addiction, because a habit you can always intervene, you can consciously intervene, whereas an addiction, you're often compelled even if you don't want to do it, you still appear to be compelled to do it despite the negative consequences. And that makes that very very hard. And I mean that's why we have these, you know, support programs of people with problems, because again these circumstances, change is so incredibly difficult, yep.

And habit has aspects of that nature to it, though, right, I'm basically probing it an unanswered and probably unanswerable question, right, which is where does something verge from being a bad habit into an addiction? And I don't think we have to answer that, but there is something happening. Even with a bad habit, you sort of feel it, right. You might technically yes, you can intervene, but I like to think of it as like the habit energy, which is just the pushing forward. Yeah, it feels so strong.

And habit has aspects of that nature to it, though, right, I'm basically probing it an unanswered and probably unanswerable question, right, which is where does something verge from being a bad habit into an addiction? And I don't think we have to answer that, but there is something happening. Even with a bad habit, you sort of feel it, right. You might technically yes, you can intervene, but I like to think of it as like the habit energy, which is just the pushing forward. Yeah, it feels so strong.

Yeah, and often. I mean if it was as I like to call them, a true habit from a neuroscience perspective, which was very, very similar to an automated behavior riding a bike, for example, as the motor process that has learned. You have to be very conscious and aware about it, engage a lot of cortical networks to learn that process, and then eventually your brain goes wrong. I know how to do that. I'm going to store that down and the striatum where I would just roll at motor program out when someone gets on a bike, you don't roll the motor program out when you're not on a bike. So there's a specific trigger or contextual situation in which that behavior is performed, and it doesn't require typically motivation. You don't really need to think about how to do it. It's a little bit like the analogy of brushing your teeth. I like to say, well, it's a light brushing your teeth, but actually it's not just going and brushing your teeth. It's that the way that you move your hand around your mouth, move the brush around your mouth. You probably do that the same every time, but you never really think about that. So again, that's a stored behavior. But you can get on a bike and go, well, I'm just going to not pet all. I'm going to stand here and not do that, so you can intervene consciously. The addiction would be not being able to stop yourself from doing that despite not wanting to. So that's how we would differentiate a habit from an addiction. Addictions that compulsion despite the negative consequence.

Yeah, and often. I mean if it was as I like to call them, a true habit from a neuroscience perspective, which was very, very similar to an automated behavior riding a bike, for example, as the motor process that has learned. You have to be very conscious and aware about it, engage a lot of cortical networks to learn that process, and then eventually your brain goes wrong. I know how to do that. I'm going to store that down and the striatum where I would just roll at motor program out when someone gets on a bike, you don't roll the motor program out when you're not on a bike. So there's a specific trigger or contextual situation in which that behavior is performed, and it doesn't require typically motivation. You don't really need to think about how to do it. It's a little bit like the analogy of brushing your teeth. I like to say, well, it's a light brushing your teeth, but actually it's not just going and brushing your teeth. It's that the way that you move your hand around your mouth, move the brush around your mouth. You probably do that the same every time, but you never really think about that. So again, that's a stored behavior. But you can get on a bike and go, well, I'm just going to not pet all. I'm going to stand here and not do that, so you can intervene consciously. The addiction would be not being able to stop yourself from doing that despite not wanting to. So that's how we would differentiate a habit from an addiction. Addictions that compulsion despite the negative consequence.

Let's talk a little bit about some of the things in your Brain Health for Dummies book, and the things that you talk about in that book are cognitive diseases, Alzheimer's dementia being some of the most common ones. I think there's a section that's called knowing what's normal aging versus dementia. So talk to me about this because those of us like you and me, who've hit fifty, right, we have to start to wonder about this stuff a little bit like Okay, what's normal here and what's early mild cognitive impairment? And my dad died of Alzheimer's, Ginny's mom died of Alzheimer's. So we're on the lookout to a certain degree. So how do we know what is normal aging and what is a problem.

Let's talk a little bit about some of the things in your Brain Health for Dummies book, and the things that you talk about in that book are cognitive diseases, Alzheimer's dementia being some of the most common ones. I think there's a section that's called knowing what's normal aging versus dementia. So talk to me about this because those of us like you and me, who've hit fifty, right, we have to start to wonder about this stuff a little bit like Okay, what's normal here and what's early mild cognitive impairment? And my dad died of Alzheimer's, Ginny's mom died of Alzheimer's. So we're on the lookout to a certain degree. So how do we know what is normal aging and what is a problem.

Yeah, we do get to a certain point in life when you have those sort of like tip of the tongue moments, or you used to be really really quick and sharp, and I'm like that. I used to be like they really quick and sharp, and now I've got like quick, sharp teenage sons and it drives me crazy because because they think I'm kind of a bit dopey and slow, and I'm like, excuse me, I'm very well qualified. I may be your mother, but that not capable. So we do get to these points in life when these things happen, or they can happen throughout life. It just may depend what we want to attribute them to. And to use the example of teenage boys who are very sharp and quick, they I reckon at least two or three days a week now, Still they will come to me because they can't find their school tie, or they can't find their shoes or one of them left their pea bag at school. Now, if I was doing that much forgetting of my personal belongings, I would be probably at the GP asking for some kind of cognitive test. But we're not assuming that there's anything wrong with them. What's probably going on there is attention. And when we think about memory and we think about what we remember, a big part of the information that we take in and what we felt out is around attention. And that's one of our most kind of precious resources that we can kind of learn how to control that we're kind of halfway there. So sometimes when we are forgetting things, like we're leaving things in places, it's really just coming down to what are we choosing to pay attention to and what are we not. We know, through pregnancy and early motherhood, lots of women, many many women, for out of five women will say, oh, I'm really forgetful. I can't remember everything, Like my brain's not working the way it used to. And part of that is around attention and just still trying to do it all as well as trying to look after a whole new human. So again, a lot of that is around attention. But other times in life it may not be you know, just that there's a lot going on and we're trying to remember things. You may genuinely feel that there is some kind of cognitive impairment with your brain, or you might just be noticing that things are sort of starting to slow down or change. And as we go through life, we know that one thing that does change is kind of the processing speed in which we're kind of able to sort of sort through all of the information that we have with our brain and retrieve it. You know, part of that is not that the information's not there and it's inaccessible. We might just be a bit slower at retrieving it. However, at the same time we've learned, we've gained a whole lot of experience and a whole lot of wisdom, so you know, we've also got this kind of treasure trove of content and information and learning that the young swift thinkers don't necessarily have at hand. Forgetting where you left things is probably an attention issue and is pretty common and normal, But getting how to drive a car or getting lost when you're driving, that's when we need to sort of start checking things out. So then you would head off to your general practitioner or your family doctor or wherever you are in the world. I tried to write this book so everyone in the world could read it, because there's different healthcare systems in different places, so people are going to have access to different resources. Then you would go and you might say to you, I would go down to my local GP and I'd say, Ruzica, I'm forgetting things. And then she would just look at me because she's this very tall Eastern European lady and should be like, tell me a little bit more. She would be slightly skeptical knowing me. But then there's various types of cognitive testing that can be done that would act as a good screening tool to help her decide we need to send Sarah off to say a memory clinic to get this locked out in much more detail, or we can reassure Sarah that this is completely normal. And there's standard tests that are used in a lot of places in the world where say a perfect score might be thirty, and they test all different aspects of your memory and your reasoning and your being able to name objects and remember numbers. There's a lot of kind of quick type executive skills that are tested in these and say a perfect scores thirty. If you've got below sort of twenty four to twenty five, then that might be kind of cause for concern, and perhaps we'll go away and do a bit more of an investigation to see are these cognitive symptoms the sign of something to be concerned about, something neurological. If you get above that, it might just be you need to kind of look at you know, what's your sleep, like, what's your mood, like, are you're doing enough exercise, all the kind of typical health and wellbeing things, just to kind of get you back on track, because it might not be neurological. It might be just lack of well being.

Yeah, we do get to a certain point in life when you have those sort of like tip of the tongue moments, or you used to be really really quick and sharp, and I'm like that. I used to be like they really quick and sharp, and now I've got like quick, sharp teenage sons and it drives me crazy because because they think I'm kind of a bit dopey and slow, and I'm like, excuse me, I'm very well qualified. I may be your mother, but that not capable. So we do get to these points in life when these things happen, or they can happen throughout life. It just may depend what we want to attribute them to. And to use the example of teenage boys who are very sharp and quick, they I reckon at least two or three days a week now, Still they will come to me because they can't find their school tie, or they can't find their shoes or one of them left their pea bag at school. Now, if I was doing that much forgetting of my personal belongings, I would be probably at the GP asking for some kind of cognitive test. But we're not assuming that there's anything wrong with them. What's probably going on there is attention. And when we think about memory and we think about what we remember, a big part of the information that we take in and what we felt out is around attention. And that's one of our most kind of precious resources that we can kind of learn how to control that we're kind of halfway there. So sometimes when we are forgetting things, like we're leaving things in places, it's really just coming down to what are we choosing to pay attention to and what are we not. We know, through pregnancy and early motherhood, lots of women, many many women, for out of five women will say, oh, I'm really forgetful. I can't remember everything, Like my brain's not working the way it used to. And part of that is around attention and just still trying to do it all as well as trying to look after a whole new human. So again, a lot of that is around attention. But other times in life it may not be you know, just that there's a lot going on and we're trying to remember things. You may genuinely feel that there is some kind of cognitive impairment with your brain, or you might just be noticing that things are sort of starting to slow down or change. And as we go through life, we know that one thing that does change is kind of the processing speed in which we're kind of able to sort of sort through all of the information that we have with our brain and retrieve it. You know, part of that is not that the information's not there and it's inaccessible. We might just be a bit slower at retrieving it. However, at the same time we've learned, we've gained a whole lot of experience and a whole lot of wisdom, so you know, we've also got this kind of treasure trove of content and information and learning that the young swift thinkers don't necessarily have at hand. Forgetting where you left things is probably an attention issue and is pretty common and normal, But getting how to drive a car or getting lost when you're driving, that's when we need to sort of start checking things out. So then you would head off to your general practitioner or your family doctor or wherever you are in the world. I tried to write this book so everyone in the world could read it, because there's different healthcare systems in different places, so people are going to have access to different resources. Then you would go and you might say to you, I would go down to my local GP and I'd say, Ruzica, I'm forgetting things. And then she would just look at me because she's this very tall Eastern European lady and should be like, tell me a little bit more. She would be slightly skeptical knowing me. But then there's various types of cognitive testing that can be done that would act as a good screening tool to help her decide we need to send Sarah off to say a memory clinic to get this locked out in much more detail, or we can reassure Sarah that this is completely normal. And there's standard tests that are used in a lot of places in the world where say a perfect score might be thirty, and they test all different aspects of your memory and your reasoning and your being able to name objects and remember numbers. There's a lot of kind of quick type executive skills that are tested in these and say a perfect scores thirty. If you've got below sort of twenty four to twenty five, then that might be kind of cause for concern, and perhaps we'll go away and do a bit more of an investigation to see are these cognitive symptoms the sign of something to be concerned about, something neurological. If you get above that, it might just be you need to kind of look at you know, what's your sleep, like, what's your mood, like, are you're doing enough exercise, all the kind of typical health and wellbeing things, just to kind of get you back on track, because it might not be neurological. It might be just lack of well being.

So if you draw a clock and it looks like a Salvador Dally picture, that's a good sign that maybe things are going wrong.

So if you draw a clock and it looks like a Salvador Dally picture, that's a good sign that maybe things are going wrong.

Yeah, So there's lots of different kinds of tests in there, like here, copy this or remember this. You know, we'll name ten animals you know be able to kind of perform those, And I guarantee that a teenager will be able to do that quite quickly. Someone in their fifties will be doing that slow. You probably get there, but you might not be quick quick quit quick. But then as I talk about and the book, there are lots of different types of mental abilities. And if I was going to go and have brain surgery, because you know, so I had a benign tumor that I needed removed, for example, I would much rather have a fifty five year old skilled surgeon who maybe sometimes is a bit slow at remembering names versus the twenty two year old trainee who's super super super quick, because obviously there's a skilled set involved there. So there's a whole lot of different ways to think about mental capacity as we age, And there's this lovely idea whereby, you know, perhaps we do need to be kind of quick and fast, and we're building and we're kind of creating, and we're kind of as we're younger, we're needing all of the quick fire. And then as those skills kind of lessen as we get older, that's okay, because we need to be kind of still, and we need to be slow, and we need to be able to gather the information and mull over it and in part wisdom. So maybe becoming like if you're a female and matriarch, isn't about having that quick fire memory and remembering every single little item. It's about the kind of the slower imparting of wisdom in a more thoughtful way.

Yeah, So there's lots of different kinds of tests in there, like here, copy this or remember this. You know, we'll name ten animals you know be able to kind of perform those, And I guarantee that a teenager will be able to do that quite quickly. Someone in their fifties will be doing that slow. You probably get there, but you might not be quick quick quit quick. But then as I talk about and the book, there are lots of different types of mental abilities. And if I was going to go and have brain surgery, because you know, so I had a benign tumor that I needed removed, for example, I would much rather have a fifty five year old skilled surgeon who maybe sometimes is a bit slow at remembering names versus the twenty two year old trainee who's super super super quick, because obviously there's a skilled set involved there. So there's a whole lot of different ways to think about mental capacity as we age, And there's this lovely idea whereby, you know, perhaps we do need to be kind of quick and fast, and we're building and we're kind of creating, and we're kind of as we're younger, we're needing all of the quick fire. And then as those skills kind of lessen as we get older, that's okay, because we need to be kind of still, and we need to be slow, and we need to be able to gather the information and mull over it and in part wisdom. So maybe becoming like if you're a female and matriarch, isn't about having that quick fire memory and remembering every single little item. It's about the kind of the slower imparting of wisdom in a more thoughtful way.

Is there much happening in the neuroscience world that you're aware of that seems exciting On this dementia front, there's.

Is there much happening in the neuroscience world that you're aware of that seems exciting On this dementia front, there's.

Things that are happening and then the things that I'm excited about it. So I think that people are desperate to try and find it, like a cure if you've been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or front of temporal dementia, one of the dementia's like, what kind of medicine can we give that person and make them better straight away? And there's lots of different people working on that problem, and it's incredibly complex because you know, I think it's pretty safe to say that Alzheimer's disease is a disease of unhealthy brain degeneration, typically seen as you're older, but it's kind of an accumulation of years, if not decades, of unhealthy brain aging, and so it's not like if you've broken a leg, where you can kind of fix it. So it's a very complicated problem in there. What I'm more interested in, which I think is more kind of population data science, I think is taking a look like a really big like kind of zooming out from the whole globe, looking at rates of dementia around the world and looking at different kind of cohorts of ages of people going through because we've got a lot of throwaway statistics about dementia, like two out of three cases of dementia women. Why is it women? Is it something to your female biology. Let's look at menopause and that must be the answer. Give woman an HRT. You have solved Alzheimer's disease. No one's kind of going back to that original statistic and trying to interpret and understand that. And it's interesting if you look at the difference between prevalence, which is the number of people with a diagnosed disorder at any kind of moment in time, versus incidents, which is kind of always the rate in which you're adding new cases in. We've also got it's like a pool of water, You've got incidence as the inflow, but you've also got people dying as they're flowing out the bottom. And if we look at healthy, wealthy countries around the world, sometimes the US is included and that sometimes it's not Australia. And you know, so the Nordic countries and some European countries. That's to say, to be more safe, we're actually seeing the incidence of Alzheimer's disease and other dimesias declining slightly. We're seeing more prevalence because that's as less outflow because people are living longer, but actually the inflow is slowing a bit, so we're starting to see that incidents coming down, and that gives us some clues to the cause. And we know partly the incidence is coming down because we're getting much better at treating some of the diseases that predispose people to Alzheimer's, like art disease and metabolic disorders, diabetes, etc. So that's slowing the incidents down in the healthy, wealthy countries, but we're not seeing that in parts of the world that are less wealthy and more unhealthy with as much lower socioeconomic support, where people are poorer but want of a better language. So that's interesting because I think if we take that perspective, it gives us clues into where we could be intervening as well. The two out of three cases of dementia. We need to have a look at Alzheimer's disease and again prevalence versus incidents, and what we see in terms of Alzheimer's disease that males and females when we're looking at women in their sort of sixty seventies and eighties, we're looking at people in their sixties, seventies and eighties. There's more females in there because they're living longer. But are the incidence rates the kind of the rates of inflow the same. It would be very easy to think, oh, it's the rate of inflow of females as much greater, but actually you don't see a greater rate of inflow until you're looking at people in their nineties. The men just kind of die off soon as that they're coming out of the pool. So the overall prevalence is higher. And so we've got to start to be a little bit more sophisticated with thinking about the stats instead of assuming the statistic that you heard is correct and then trying to look at the causes from there. I'm interested in taking this bigger picture perspective because we must do that, or else we will jump to trying to solve a problem that may not necessarily be the right problem to solve. Midlife The greatest risk factor, which no one talks about because it's very unsexy and it doesn't make for good social media content, is hearing loss. It's an untreated hearing loss and then later in life untreated vision loss, and no one wants to talk about them because they're very, very boring and very unsexy. But what is that meaning If you can't hear and you can't see, your brain is not like interacting with the world. It's not receiving input from the world. It's almost shutting off one of the signals coming up from your body. It's completely shutting off those senses to the world. And that's how we kind of a meaning of the world and navigate our way around and use our brain for what it evolved to do. So there's lots of kind of points in which we can intervene, and I think unless we take this big picture perspective that's what I'm interested in, we're going to be intervening in the wrong places.