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Hello, everybody.
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This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to academic life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the producer and your host, Dr. Christina Gessler. And today I am so pleased to be joined by Rachel Barr, who is the author of how to make your brain your best Friend, A Neuroscientist Guide to a Healthier, happier life. Welcome to the show, Rachel. Hello.
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Thanks for having me.
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I am so glad that you're here and that you're going to share your book with us. I have really enjoyed reading it. Before we dive into it, however, will you please tell us about yourself?
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Yeah. Yes. So, I'm Rachel. I recently wrote a book. I'm also a neuroscientist, and, like you, a big, big lover of books. So, I mean, I'd always known that I wanted to write a book ever since I was old enough to hold one, and then kind of moving my way through my academic career, becoming a scientist, realized it was going to be about that, so. Yeah.
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And you wrote this book while a grad student, which is incredibly impressive. When I realized that, I felt tired just knowing it, because grad school is a lot all by itself. When you think back to younger you who was looking ahead at what you wanted to study and where you wanted to end up, did you know you Wanted to go into science. How did you figure out your path?
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Yeah, yeah. Certainly would not recommend writing a book while doing a PhD. That was horrendous. And also, it's always. They always give you dreadful deadlines for stuff like that. So I ended up writing the book in eight months. Barely saw the light of day or slept. It was crazy, crazy time. But, yeah. So younger me, I mean, I. I didn't think I would ever go to university. I mean, I just mentioned the fact that I'd always wanted to write a book, but when you're a kid, you dream big, and then life sort of beats that out of you a bit. And I. I mean, I have my diagnosis now. I know that I. I'm autistic and I have adhd. I know that now. But I got my diagnosis in my 30s. So I went through all of my schooling not knowing that about my brain and really struggling as a result. Really, really struggled at school. And it's a strange brain to have because I love learning. Like, all I want to do is learn and read and write and study, do experiments. That's all I want to do. I'm a very curious person, but my brain just isn't aligned with traditional educational context. So really struggled, believed I was stupid and just kind of accepted my fate. I thought, you know, like, I'm never going to do anything really, with my life and had accepted it. And then I was, I think, was 23 when I started my undergraduate degree, so a little bit later than my peers. And it was an impulsive decision. I was just so bored of life. It was an impulsive decision. I hated my job. I was working in retail at the time, so I had, like, a coach, a personal trainer who was teaching me how to, like, power lift and had said to him, yo, Chris, like, maybe I'll become a personal trainer or something. And he said, no, Rachel, go to university, do a degree, keep your options open, and you might train elite athletes one day. So I thought, all right, and then just started university, like, four weeks later. And that was kind of what kick started me. It was sports science initially and worked my way through that degree. Understood that it wasn't quite the right subject for me, but there were things I did like about it. I liked the sciencey stuff and decided I would kind of use that as a stepping stone to a master's. Had read Norman Doidge's the Brain that Changes Itself. I'm not sure if you've ever picked that book up. Have you heard of it?
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I haven't. It Sounds great.
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Oh, it's very popular. I think you'd. I think you'd enjoy it. So he's. He's a medical doctor, and he tells all these stories about people healing their brains back from, you know, like, terrible strokes, somehow recovering beyond what doctors thought were would be possible. There's even a patient who kind of reclaims vision after bouts of blindness. It was incredible to read that. And in this moment, I mean, first of all, I clearly was interested in learning about the brain, but also there was this other element of it which was like, God, like, I didn't know that brains could change. Like, maybe my brain could change too. You know, it was kind of the first moment that I thought, well, maybe I'm not irreparably stupid. I might be able to apply myself yet. And then. So, yeah, then eventually found my way to a master's course in molecular neuroscience. And it was. I mean, it was a real slog. Going from sports science to. That was tough, but it was clear to me that this was what I wanted to study. It was just so exciting for me.
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For listeners who haven't gotten a copy of the book yet, the book is how to make your brain your best friend, A neuroscientist guide to a healthier, happier life. And you tell us a bit in the book about what inspired you to write it. But for listeners who haven't seen the book yet, can you describe what the book is about and what inspired you to write it?
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Yeah, so there's a few threads there. First, like, as a neuroscientist, I just kind of noticed that a lot of the conversations that we're having about the brain and mental health and wellness in social media podcasts, like, the public conversations about mental health don't tend to align with what I know about the brain. They're very at odds with what I know about the brain. Then, as a kind of more personal note, my mum really struggled with her mental health, and in the end, like, she didn't survive it. And, yeah, I think I just felt compelled to sort of change. Change the conversation a bit. And there's also that, like, very irrational human response to something senseless and heartbreaking happening in your life where you're like, no, I can still fix this, you know, And I feel like books are like little time machines in their own way. So I think it was my way, I think, of having that conversation with her and saying all the things that I wish I could have taught her about taking care of her brain and finding reasons to live, even if Even if you've got like a lifelong mental illness which many people live with, you know, chronic mental illness for which there are no cures. How do you move forward now? What, like how do you find reasons to live? And so I wanted to write a book about self care, kind of an anti self help, self help book that is not interested in extracting yet more capital from your already drained body and mind or making you more productive, more efficient, making you more marketable. It's like kind of a pushback against self optimization culture, which doesn't ultimately make us happy. It's that that doesn't lead us to more fulfilling lives. So it's about what does the brain need to thrive? Like, what are the conditions that the brain evolved to thrive in and what are the conditions we're subjecting it to here in modern life? And how can you navigate that in a way that actually enriches your life, makes you feel more fulfilled and like real personal growth, you know, getting closer to the human you inhabit, not just making it more productive in the capitalist sense.
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And you jump right into that in chapter one. Chapter one is called Know Thyself, Reclaiming Identity in the Age of Optimization. And you push back against optimization in part by teaching us how our brain really works, how it really functions. You invite us into seeing it as a hunk of fat. That's one of the most complex things in the universe. Can you take us into understanding our own basic neuroscience so we can work with our brain and not against it?
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Yeah. So I think one of the first things I make clear in that chapter is that we like to think that we're in full control, we the conscious human hosts. But in fact, there's so much that goes on in the brain that is not visible to us that we're not aware of, that is not under our conscious control. The brain has its own agenda, so to speak. What we have control over is what we expose it to. What are the conditions that we're asking it to navigate, what are we feeding it, what are we exposing it to? And so like in the age of social media, I know it's not exactly new to say that we're all kind of having a social media induced identity crisis, but the kind of new perspective I add to that is we're essentially existing in a marketplace that's masquerading as a social space. And humans, if nothing else, we're incurably social. Like the fact that we want to express our identity and have our own identity is actually rooted in us being socially cooperative. Animals, it's like a socially constrained process. We need to signal our utility to the tribe so that they don't exile us, which would have meant certain death throughout most of our evolution. So that's where identity comes from. And in this marketplace masquerading as a social space, the social cues that we're picking up on, social learning is the bedrock of human cognition. We don't realize it, but we're just gobbling up all those social cues all the time, implicitly and imitating them. Identity signaling has been co opted by commercial interests. The example I give in that chapter is if we think of like a Paleolithic hunter wearing a necklace strung with the teeth of his prey. Like, that's him saying, you know, I'm a hunter, you know, I can make delicious mammoth stew, don't exile me. But that identity signaling, it comes from the act of doing stuff that's related to that. It's like he really went out and practiced hunting. So the identity signal, it's not, it's like it matches how he feels on the inside. Like his internal sense of identity is congruent with that on social media. Because those identity signals have been co opted what we associate with certain identities. Like, I think the example I gave was like, if every wellness influencer you follow has the same fancy bottle, you begin to sort of associate that with the act of wellness. And so now we can kind of jump straight to buying the identity signals. And that that creates kind of a sense of like identity vertical, because we've got signals, but internally we don't actually feel that sense of accomplishment, the sense of identity. If we're not going out and doing the hunting and we're just buying the teeth instead of the second. I think more common problem is the opposite. So you are a hunter, or like you are an athlete, you are living and breathing wellness, but you don't have a bottle because you can't afford it, or you don't like those bottles and you feel similar, like identity vertigo, you know, like fitness influencers, for example. I mean, they're all gorgeous, no shade to them, they're all beautiful. But not every athlete looks like that, you know, not every athlete looks like that. And so I think people are feeling really estranged from themselves because of that and so many other examples. It's not just this. I mean, people talk about the highlight reel effect, you know, it's not just that. There's so much more going on on social media that is making us feel estranged from ourselves and from each other.
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At the end of Each chapter, you offer a chapter summary. At the end of Know Thyself, you give a number of things for people to really think about that you've summarized down for them. And one is called be the scientist and the lab rat. And you encourage people to approach their personal growth with a mindset of experimentation. Your advice is that they keep track of experiences as they go along and note what works and what doesn't, and to give themselves permission to adapt and discard concepts when they prove unsuitable for your needs. This advice seems the opposite of what social media advice is you're talking about. As social mammals, we see these things and eventually, unconsciously, we feel the pull to conform. And here you're asking us to really take a step back and use our own body and our own feelings as a gauge.
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Yeah, it's because. For two reasons. Because even evidence based advice, it doesn't work for everybody. Like, science operates often on means and averages. So as an example, meditation and mindfulness very well evidenced to be an intervention that successfully reduces stress and has, you know, positive effects for mental wellness on average. But there are a subset of people for whom, like mindfulness meditation induces panic. Like it induces a panic attack. And if you're not prepared for that and you think, well, no, no, no, I've been told, the scientists have told me this is supposed to work, you can end up kind of forcing yourself through a process that just is not good for you. You know, like we're trained to distance ourselves from our North Star, which is like, how do we actually feel about things? You know, we people will wake up in the morning and check an app to figure out like, if they've slept well before ever asking themselves, do I feel rested? Because that's kind of what we're trained for. So even with evidence based advice, it's important to just put things on on trial and see how you, the individual, respond to it. Equally, that protects us from misinformation, because a lot of the misinformation sphere is predicated on feeding you a lifestyle that you end up attaching to your sense of identity. And when something is attached to your sense of identity, it's really hard to let go of, like giving up an intervention or lifestyle that's harming you after you've decided it's part of your identity is like an amputation, you know, so put things on trial, keep it. Like, try to tell yourself, I'm going to give this one week or two. Take notes. And if your new diet ends up in gastrointestinal armageddon seven days a week. You have that evidence and you can say this is not for me. And you don't even have to figure out if it's evidence based or misinformation or not, because that practice protects you equally from both.
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It's okay not to be perfect with finances. Experian is your big financial friend and here to help. Did you know you can get matched with credit cards on the app? Some cards are labeled no Ding decline, which means if you're not approved they won't hurt your credit scores. Download the Experian app for free today. Applying for no Ding Decline cards won't hurt your credit scores if you aren't initially approved. Initial approval will result in a hard inquiry which may impact your credit scores.
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Experian.
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There are several more things on the chapter summary there One is control what you feed the beast, which is choosing your surroundings with care and really being selective about what you're willing to expose yourself to in your online consumption and the kinds of voices you listen to in your day to day life as well. You encourage people to distance themselves from the marketplace, to recognize that so much of it is about developing a consumer driven identity and that's not what our brains are wired for if we want them to be healthy. You talk about being kind, not deterministic, which is acknowledging that people are going to have their own individual experiences responses which you alluded to earlier about no advice is one size fits all. Even something that we're told that's benign, like meditation, if you have PTSD will really do a number on you. One of the final things on that chapter summary is about cultivating self compassion. This really fits with the work of reclaiming your own identity in an age of optimization, because with that self compassion you're inviting us to get to know ourselves. You say warts and all without judgment and this is where you develop a clear understanding of your strengths and to give yourself opportunities to apply a growth mindset, particularly in the face of failure, which I think is something that will land well with this audience because so many of us are told that failure is final and if we treat it with self compassion we can use it as a learning ground. There's so much data in something that didn't work and the more it didn't work the more data there is and we just need this self compassion for just our approach of everything in our day to day. Is that right?
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Yeah, look, I mean in science you really get well acquainted with failure and it's in a sense it's good Training, because as you say, that's data, like that's the work of science is, you know, measure, theorize, experiment, fail, and then do the whole thing again and fail in a slightly new way. That's like what science is all about, kind of narrowing the, the scope and yeah, I mean the. I make a distinction between self compassion and self esteem. Self esteem is market to us as our armor from life, slings and arrows. But actually like self esteem is wobbly. It changes day to day depending on how well things are going for you. Your sense of self esteem actually is very variable depending on like how much you're failing lately. It's particularly receptive to social failures. It's kind of like a little sociometer really. And you don't have any control over that, like how people respond to you. You simply don't have any control over that. And like you mentioned the kindness over deterministic point that I made, it was in relation to that. So the brain, the brain is like a little prediction machine. Its sense of reality, like any given moment, so much of what you're experiencing is actually like the brain's hallucination. It's not taking all of the sensory data from the environment because that would just be too costly. It takes some of it and then just kind of makes inferences predicting the rest based on data that's already collected. Now the way that it gets away with that is that it has what's called prediction error signaling. So if something deviates from what it predicted, then there are little prediction errors and it updates its model of the world. So we have this, we have reward prediction errors with dopamine signaling. We have cognitive like it's threaded throughout all of our cognition. And here we have a social prediction error, which is self esteem. So if you crack a joke and it falls flat, your self esteem, you update your model, your social model of your value, which is self esteem esteem. And for some people, those prediction errors are more reactive. So we see a stronger response from the insua and the npfc, which is like the pain signal, and the mpfc, which is kind of like the CEO of your identity. We see a stronger signal in people with lower self esteem. And for some people, their brains are better at encoding those negative prediction errors and are not very good at encoding. Like you crack a joke and you're not expecting much and everybody's howling and inviting you to their birthday party, their brain just doesn't respond quite as much. There's a negative bias there. You can't choose the brain that you have for Some people, those social rejections hit really hard. Like, neurobiologically, you know, it's not just psychological. It's not about having resilience of character. Like, for some people, their brains are responding differently. And I think it's important that you are aware of that. Like, your reality is not the same as mine. We're all living in different realities. However, where the deterministic thing comes in. It's equally unhelpful to assume the worst of your brain. Brains, like people, we tend to respond better when, you know, people aren't expecting the worst of us. Like, optimism actually has a benefit there. So you can never really know what your brain is doing, what's going on inside your brain. Unhelpful to assume the worst. But I think it helps to be compassionate with yourself, to know that you're not living the same reality as everyone else, but also to hold on to the sense of agency that change is possible. You know, I think that's really important in all aspects of life and mental health.
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C
You tell us in the preface, what I can teach you is how to care for your brain so that perhaps in turn, it will better care for you. We've been talking about chapter one, and there's quite a bit more about the neuroscience of how the brain works and how you can work with it and not against it. And chapter two is called When Life Feels Impossible Turn on Delight. In that chapter, you invite us into the importance of moments of delight, and you tell us you were influenced by the poet Rasge.
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Yeah.
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C
And how you've really used this in your own life and the value of delight. You are a scientist. Please explain this to us, because when I tell people about it, they still believe delight is optional, and I do not believe having delight is optional.
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Yeah. So actually, when I get a bit of a chance, I would like to take Delight into the lab. There isn't really much research specifically on delight, but in the writing of that chapter, what I did was break delight down into its constituent parts. And from there I was able to pull from the research. But yet, I believe that delight is an important human experience for several reasons. The first is, you know, life is very stressful, and we modern humans, unfortunately, have to deal with chronic stress, which we're not really built for. We can manage stress, but chronic stress, we kind of physiologically start to break down. There are all kinds of mental and physical health problems that arise from chronic stress. And unfortunately, in the brain, chronic stress makes us more susceptible to chronic stress. They're kind of little brake Pads in the hippocampus, largely that once the HPA axis, which is your brain stress response team, once they've initiated the stress response, and then you release cortisol from the adrenal glands and have your stress response that feeds its way back up. And these brake pads in the hippocampus are supposed to sense that, like, all right, I'm smelling some stress hormone. Seems like we successfully deployed that stress response. Let's usher the brain and body back to a state of calm. We've probably escaped that saber tooth tiger by now. And if there's no other sensory signals to keep that stress response going, like, say, the sight of the saber toothed tiger, then indeed your stress response will start to wind down. But your car brake pads, they can wear out from chronic stress. Then you can end up in this never ending cycle of stress with nothing really to stop you. We've got to manually stop the car instead. Little tiny little experiences of delay are exactly the right shape and size to be able to do that. I talk about microdosing delight throughout the day because it's no good to wait until the weekend or your vacation for like big sporadic dumps of relaxation. I'm not even sure it's a good idea to leave it to the evening. We need to push the brakes on that stress response little and often, frequently throughout the day. And so I think little experiences of delay very successfully tell the HPE axis in the brain, like, we're not in danger, time to calm down. The second reason is life is tough. We're not always happy. Happy is kind of a long term feeling. There are times of life where we're not happy. When we're grieving or going through a breakup, you're not happy. And how do you hold on to hope? How do you keep your head above water when you're going through that? Sometimes, like in going through those kinds of experiences like that sometimes when people choose to die because it just feels so inescapable, you forget really what it's like to not feel bereaved when you're in the thick of it. Delight are these like small transient experiences that kind of remind you that life is worth living, gives you a brief reprieve from feeling like rubbish. And the thing about delight tends to be something that like, tethers, you know, to animals, to other people, to the planet. It like reconnects you to something outside of your grief and reminds you that life might actually be worth living. The trouble is we have no mechanism really to drive us to go and seek Delight out. You know, it's not like we crave delight in the way that we crave hedonic pleasures. And also we're not driven towards it with like fear based aversion. So again, it's up to us to carve out space and time during each day. Like take your lunch break in a cat cafe, take your morning coffee break outside and watch the squirrels perform an elaborate heist on the bird feeder or something. Take yourself to spaces where delight is likely to happen and pay attention so that you're ready to catch it if it appears.
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C
And on page 15 you break down delight for people because I think we can attach our own definition to it and I think for many people it's kind of an over the top. To go back to our earlier talks about social media, we've kind of amplified what every emotion should be through being social media consumers. And delight takes us back into really the simplicity of these moments that you're talking about. So on page 50 for listeners, it breaks it down and it's One is enjoyment. Quite simply, delight feels good. Another is attention to the present. Given the spontaneous nature of delight, finding it requires a presence of mind paying attention to the current moment. Another is reflection and gratitude. Gratitude is often about recognizing and valuing what can easily be taken for granted. Similarly, delight typically finds its place in the otherwise mundane moments of everyday life. And finally, connectedness. Delight tethers us to something, whether it's to ourselves, to others, to animals, or to the world we inhabit. And listeners can find more in the chapter summaries at the end of each chapter, there's more about delight and what it is and isn't. Chapter three takes us into the neuroscience of why we need each other. Chapter four is called I Sleep, therefore I Am. We're coming close to the end of our time together, but there's something really important in chapter four that I'd love for you to share with listeners, which is this moment of learning we can do right before we fall asleep, where you encourage people, no matter what their day was like, not to invalidate if you had very difficult things in that day, but to also attach moments of self compassion or meaningful reflection to it. And you talk about how these moments before we go to sleep can really positively not only reshape our brain, but help us as we move forward in a more healthy way.
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A
Yeah, I'm glad you picked out that. Most of my research career has been in sleep, so I really wanted to do that chapter justice. And it's like boring, isn't it, to Be told to go to bed and sleep. I don't think it gets the credit it deserves. It's like neurobiologically speaking, sleep is incredible. It's amazing, very strange and exciting like mental state to be in. And yeah, I talk about how like sleep is, is where you were made. We're born with most of the neurons we'll ever have and it's in prenatal sleep. Couple of few weeks before your entry to life on earth, you start making connections and dreaming and that's kind of the origin of you. And yeah, so sleep is so much more than rest. It is rest and it is a time where the brain kind of cleaves out like a waste products and such like. But it's also where we return to ourselves, close off the world and return to ourselves and decide which parts of each day were going to keep and consolidate into long term memory. And I mean I gave a story of like back when I was like in behavioral science consulting in a client meeting just making a really ill time joke and being like mortified. Somebody like shot on screen, I can't remember the number like 500,000. Does any. Can anybody tell me what this number refers to? And I was like, is it the number of times in a day I tell my cat he's a good boy just like not the time or place for a joke like that fell flat. Everybody was mortified. Could see the array of faces on my screen just like not looking impressed. And of course it's like I thought about it all day. I thought about it right before bed. I dreamt about it, I woke up thinking about it. I've never forgotten it. And you can't like you're never going to be able to convince your brain to not consolidate those kinds of memories. Like that's a keeper, right? You're not going to convince your brain to not consolidate memories about the love of your life leaving you. What you can do is deliberately layer on top of that some self compassionate thoughts. So things we learn right before about sleep we tend to remember more effectively. And so this time before bed it's like you, you're getting to choose who you want to be when you wake up effectively. I could, instead of just chastising myself like that night, I could have also told myself like oh it's, you know, it happens to the best of us. Like we all have moments like that. Or like you know the, the clumsiness that sometimes comes from wanting to be liked like happens to everybody could have layered that self compassion on top of It I could have also taken some time to, I don't know, think about some small wins that day. Like we often forget about that stuff because it just doesn't register. It doesn't activate enough signaling in the brain to be like carried into long term memory. We forget about the little nice moments where we made somebody a really nice cup of tea or were we successfully resisted road rage, you know, or when we successfully like protected our children from our own heartache, put a brave face on it and they were, they would have never known that, you know, we were feeling so bad, protected our children. Like these kinds of things. We just like, we don't think about it and then we forget about it and then it doesn't become a part of our memory. Like it doesn't become a part of our sense of ourselves. Like we remember all of our failures because that's what the brain is designed to do. But I think taking these moments before bed to deliberately choose to remember the small stuff that we're proud of. And there's always something. There's always something. It increases the chance that like it actually becomes a part of your sense of self.
- [36:31]
C
You also let us know in the book that self compassion isn't new, that the roots go back to Socrates. In the section on sleep, you talk about how you need a routine as a reliable pattern that helps prime us for sleep. You let us know that life is messy and it's normal to want to grab for clarity, but that's often grabbing for snake oil. So you invite people to put any new concept on probation, to use your power of skepticism to really test something out before you wholeheartedly adopt something that you got as advice or that you saw online. You remind us that asking who we are is a normal question, but that we will get existential vertigo from asking who am I? To other people, particularly in an online age. You remind us that self esteem's more dependable cousin is self compassion. You remind us to temper our pessimism. You tell us that the journey to self discovery is never over. And you remind us that even when it doesn't seem like it, our brain is on our side. The book has eight chapters we've only had time to touch on on a few things. Chapter eight is called the Meaning of Life. And you tell us the book isn't a prescription for a perfect life because no such thing exists. And the book is not a magic fix for all your problems or definitive answer to the meaning of life. You tell us that human life is driven by a powerful undeniable need to shape the outside world, marking it with some small imprint of our existence, however modest. In the few minutes we have left. I want to ask you, what do you hope this episode will spark for listeners?
- [38:24]
A
Yeah, I think what I would like for people to feel is, I mean first of all, the reason I named the book how to make your brain your best friend. And the reason all the way through the book I kind of talk about the human host and the brain as being these two separate entities is because I think that encourages like instinctually a very different approach to self care. Like oh, it's like hack your brain into submission. Like stuff that we receive online is bonkers. And like the absurdity of that becomes really clear if you apply it to any other living thing. Like if your dog were acting out, you know, or your child were like we're having behavioral issues, clearly acting out, having some kind of mental health problem or struggling in some way, you wouldn't like hop online and be like oh, how can I hack my child into? It was just so absurd. You, you would respond with kindness and care. You would try to understand the problem and provide kindness and care. And it, that's, it's that we are also living things and your brain is a living thing. So I think that's what I hope to achieve is just to kind of change people's approach to self care in that way. And like, as well, as a scientist, like I do recognize that a lot of the concepts, especially ones we've talked about today, to some people it sounds like a fluffy bit of old drivel, I get that. But all of this is like evidence based and it's easy to forget that we are experiential creatures. You know, the salt and sawdust physiology of the way that exercise benefits our health, that is equally scientific that the science that shows that living a meaningful purposeful life reduces all cause mortality. It's like that experiential stuff is just as physiological as sleep and exercise, which there are chapters on. And there's also a chapter, my favorite chapter is about the art and creativity one. I think it's chapter five, art and soul, the heartbeat of human creativity. It's something that we so many of us don't make time for. Art and creativity. And yet it's like it clearly intrinsic to human behavior and well being. And there's so much evidence in support of like art, they call it art therapy. I try to make a distinction between art and creativity. Art is made by artists. The rest of us are under no such obligation. Like we can lower the stakes. It's okay if you create something that goes straight in the bin. The point of it is that you go through the process of creating, pulling your brain into symbolic processing so you can like figure out your messy human feelings and existence without words, which you know aren't always a suitable medium for doing that. So yes, it's about approaching self care from a perspective of care and understanding that personal growth and improving one's life, like all of that, is a natural human desire to want to be better, to build a happier, more fulfilling life. But just be cautious of advice that's actually about making you more marketable, extracting more capital from you is the advice you're being given. Does it sound like something that will actually make your life feel like it's more worth living? Because what is the point of an optimized life if your brain can no longer find reasons to live it right? Like personal growth, personal development? It should ultimately be about building life that you're happy and fulfilled within and building a human that you're proud to inhabit. So, yeah, so it was a long one. I was trying to fill in all the most important parts of like the remaining four chapters, so.
- [42:41]
C
And listeners will find more in the book. There's chapters on why we need each other, on how creation is the heartbeat of Human Creativity, Chapter 5, Art and Soul, about the mind in motion, finding freedom through movement, a chapter on WI fi and keeping it together online. There's much, much more in the book that listeners will find when they have a chance to pick it up. Thank you so much for being here today, Rachel, and sharing from your book, how to make your brain your best friend, A neuroscientist guide to a healthier, happier life. You've been listening to the academic life. Please join us again.