Transcript
A (0:00)
HubSpot is a success story partner now. If you're an entrepreneur, listen up, because HubSpot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers. If you are building a business, you need to get HubSpot. Why? Here's the perfect example. Morehouse College needed to reach new students with fresh, engaging content, a problem that every single business in the world has. But with a 900 page website, even the tiniest update took 30 minutes to publish. Now Breeze, which is HubSpot's collection of AI tools, helped them write and optimize their content in a fraction of the time. And the results? 30% more page views and visitors now spend 27% more time on their site. If you are ready for impossible growth like this, visit HubSpot. Com in this lessons episode, explore how novelty and mental challenge protect the brain from cognitive decline. Learn how trying new activities builds neural pathways that delay dementia. Learn why staying socially and mentally active is more powerful than relying on diet or supplements. And learn how Ulysses contracts help us beat temptation and make better decisions for our future selves. One more, One more thought and question on memory and sort of brain health and brain optimization I've spoken to Steven Kotler, who does a lot of work on flow state, and he's written several books, I don't know how many, and he was speaking about activities that ward off Alzheimer's and dementia, and I don't know about the science behind it. He has a lot of conviction that certain kinds of activities can ward off Alzheimer's dementia. Is there anything that is studied or proven to ward off Alzheimer's dementia, if that's something that's in your family? He was mentioning, if I remember correctly, he mentioned that tennis was one of the most beneficial activities because it's cognitive and physical at the same time, which apparently is something that is not prevalent in many other sports. I don't know where I think he's done research on this. But regardless, in your studies, have you found anything like that to be the case where any sort of activity prevents cognitive decline? Maybe any foods, any, anything at all, really?
B (2:25)
I'll tell you, the whole, the whole thing comes down to challenging your brain with, with novelty. So the key is, and, and, and you can fit anything you want in here, including tennis. But the key is if you are an expert tennis player, then playing tennis in your 60s or something is not going to benefit you. The thing that'll benefit you is to not play tennis, but to start something else that you've never done before that you're terrible at, that you need to learn how to do. That's the thing. And this is true across whatever it is, whether it's. I don't know, people always ask me about Sudoku or, you know, sailing or whatever. The thing is, it's got to be something that's challenging. What you always want to do, but especially if your brain is getting closer to cognitive impairment, is put yourself between the levels of frustrating but achievable. So you're taking on a new task. Let's say you've never done Sudoku before. Then that's cool. You start Sudoku, you don't know what you're doing. You're putting a lot of effort into it. The point is, what that's doing in the brain is building new roadways. You're making new things happening with your synapses that you haven't done before. As soon as you get good at Sudoku, then you have to drop that and pick up something else, like tennis, like, whatever the new thing is that you haven't done. But the key is the challenge, and that's where you always want to be. And weirdly, that's actually our best thing that we know about for, you know, for dementia, is challenging the brain. Obviously, there's lots of pharmaceutical work going on and other things like that. As far as foods go, I don't think there's anything that's particularly convincing about that. If one already has a balanced diet, I don't think there's some magical new food that one can do there. But the key is to constantly build new roadways and bridges in the brain. There was a study that's been going on for, I think, like, 30 years now called the Religious Order Study. And this is on nuns who live in convents in the Chicago area who all agreed that they would donate their brains upon their death. And so over the years, different nuns have passed away and donated their brains, and the brains have been autopsied. And the stunning result from the study is that a number of these nuns actually had Alzheimer's disease. Their brains were ravaged molecularly. You can see this in the tissue. The tissue is degraded their brain tissue. But even though they had Alzheimer's disease, they didn't show the cognitive deficits that one would expect. And this came as a giant surprise. But the reason is because these women live in these convents till the day they die. And in these convents, they have chores and responsibilities. They have this very active social life. And, you know, when you have an active social life, you're arguing with people and fighting with People and getting along with people and whatever we sometimes say in the field, that there's nothing as hard for the brain as other people. And so it's a constant challenge. They're constantly keeping their brains active. And as a result, even though their brains are degenerating, they're building these new roadways. Compare this to people who retire and don't have that kind of challenge and, and sit at home alone and watch television on the couch. That's a very different thing that's happening as their brain tissue degenerates. There's no new roadways being built. And that's why you can see the cognitive correlates of the degeneration.