Show full transcript 1:07 and through the science of neuroplasticity, you will realize you are capable of so much 1:13 more. 1:18 Sometimes the hardest part of starting something new is starting, right? 1:23 And that's especially true with new exercise routines. 1:26 That's why ultra-running shoes, they're designed to make that first step more comfortable. 1:31 And the secret is in the Ultra Fit, 1:33 which is more room for your toes 1:35 because when your toes aren't squished, 1:37 you get comfort, balance, and strength all in one. 1:40 Shop now at ultrarunning.com slash mel 1:42 and use code mel10 for 10% off at checkout. 1:46 That's A-L-T-R-A running.com slash mel. 1:50 Stay out there. 1:51 If you're a small business or even a big business 1:53 trying to get yourself recognized, 1:56 you need really good swag. 1:57 And that means you need to know 1:59 about our sponsor, Vistaprint. 2:00 Vistaprint helps your brand get in more hands with affordable, high-quality merch. 2:06 Vistaprint helps you bring your design ideas to life. 2:09 Through custom drinkware, bags, stickers, notebooks, t-shirts, and more, products that 2:13 help you market your business your way. 2:16 Plus, Vistaprint makes it easy to order everything in one place. 2:20 Vistaprint, print your possible. 2:23 Right now, new customers get 20% off with code NEW20 at vistaprint.com. 2:28 That's 20% off with code NEW20 at VistaPrint.com. 2:32 You know those mornings where it's like wall to wall? 2:34 It's like you commute, you got meetings, 2:36 you're on Zoom things, you need a solid breakfast 2:38 because it helps you power through. 2:40 Starting your day with a Belvita breakfast biscuit 2:43 as part of a balanced breakfast 2:44 is gonna help you make it through the morning chaos 2:46 from busy mornings on the goat 2:48 to slower mornings at home. 2:50 Belvita breakfast biscuits 2:51 are an easy way to kick off your day. 2:54 Baked with whole grains, 2:55 they have all kinds of delicious flavors 2:57 and there's no artificial colors or sweeteners. 2:59 And when you pair it with low-fat dairy 3:01 and a serving of fruit, boom, you got a balanced breakfast. 3:05 Find Belvita Breakfast Biscuits 3:06 at your local store today. 3:11 Hey, it's your friend, Mel, 3:12 and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. 3:15 I'm so thrilled that you're here today. 3:16 You're gonna love this conversation. 3:18 It's an honor to be together. 3:19 I love spending time with you. 3:21 If you're new here or somebody sent you this episode, 3:23 I just wanna take a moment 3:24 and personally welcome you 3:25 to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. 3:27 And what I love about today's episode is our expert says that simply by listening to 3:33 today's conversation, your brain is going to change. 3:37 Your brain will not be the same by just listening to this. 3:40 How cool is that? 3:41 Dr. Lara Boyd is a world-renowned neuroscientist, physical therapist, and award-winning researcher 3:46 on neuroplasticity, which is your brain's ability to change throughout your life. 3:50 Dr. Boyd is a distinguished university scholar and professor at the University 3:54 of British Columbia. 3:55 She also directs the university's brain behavior laboratory where she studies how the brain learns and adapts after injury and illness. 4:04 Her TEDx talk on the remarkable power of your brain to grow and change has been viewed more than 45 million times. 4:13 Please help me welcome Dr. Laura Boyd to the Mel Robbins podcast. 4:16 Thank you. 4:17 I'm so excited you're here. 4:19 I've been looking forward to this so much. 4:21 I love your research. 4:22 Thank you. 4:22 I love this topic. 4:24 Thank you. 4:24 And here's where I want to start. 4:26 Okay. 4:27 So there's a person who is listening right now 4:30 who has no time, but they've made time 4:33 because Dr. Boyd, they really want to learn from you. 4:37 If they take everything to heart 4:39 that you're about to teach us about the brain, 4:43 neuroplasticity, the fact that we can change over time, 4:48 what could improve about their life? 4:51 I want to start by saying, I listen to the show 4:54 and I've heard you say many times 4:56 that people can change their brains. 4:58 They have this fundamental capacity for change. 5:00 I absolutely couldn't agree with you more. 5:02 I want to take that idea and I want to stretch it. 5:06 And with that knowledge, it should be very empowering 5:09 for you to go out and continue to make that change. 5:11 You understand why sometimes it's hard, 5:13 why sometimes you struggle, why sometimes you fail. 5:16 And I hope you walk away knowing that all of those things, 5:19 Failure, struggle, difficulty are actually very good 5:22 for the brain, very healthy for the brain. 5:24 I want to give you an example of the power of that. 5:27 So did you know that if you take school children 5:29 and you teach them their brain changes 5:31 when they learn their grades go up? 5:34 That's remarkable. 5:35 Like you can improve your child's grades 5:37 just by helping them understand. 5:38 That's all I needed to do. 5:39 I know, right? 5:40 Where were you when they were in high school, 5:42 Dr. Boyd? 5:43 Really, you just tell children? 5:45 This power of knowing they have the capacity for change 5:48 shifts their mindset and enables better academic performance. 5:53 So here's the important key ingredient, if you will. 5:57 The single largest driver of change in our brain 5:59 is our experience. 6:01 There's no drug, there's no magic bullet, 6:04 it's the experience you engage in. 6:06 So if you know that, then you can choose experiences 6:10 that are really positive, 6:11 that are things you want to learn, 6:13 places you want to be, 6:15 people that are healthy and positive for you. And by doing that, you're shaping your brain. 6:23 And so by engaging with Mel and I today and having this conversation with us, 6:29 your brain will not be the same after this conversation as it is when we began right now. 6:34 From here forward, it changes. And I just think that's amazing. And I hope you do too. 6:39 and I hope you do too because it's just the most exciting thing. 6:44 Dr. Boyd, I'm not sure I've had anyone sit in that chair that's caused me to have goose bumps 6:51 that quickly into the episode. Often in life it's easy to feel as if life is coming at you 7:01 and all you can do is respond. But when you said the word experiences you engage in, 7:08 it made me feel empowered and it made me think that maybe I have more control over the way my life 7:17 feels than I currently do. Could you just kind of broaden what you meant by experiences you 7:25 choose to engage in? So we know experience is what's changing our brain, but we also understand 7:31 that engagement and motivation are large influencers 7:36 on those experiences. 7:39 So we see a larger effect of things 7:42 that we're paying attention to, 7:44 we're motivated to learn, we're engaged in, 7:47 we're working hard at, 7:49 those are gonna change your brain to a larger capacity, 7:52 to a greater degree, 7:53 than things that we may be more passively observing, 7:58 letting come by us in different ways. 8:00 We can actually see this when we do imaging studies of the brain of people who are engaged 8:06 versus kind of passive experiencers. 8:09 We see different networks of the brain light up, and we see different long-term effects 8:13 of those experiences, if you will, of that engagement. 8:17 That's super cool. 8:18 To think that based on some of the choices that you're going to talk to us about, 8:23 about, we have the ability to actively change our brains and that that can improve our lives. 8:32 For the person who does not know the term neuroplasticity, could you just, Dr. Boyd, explain what is 8:40 neuroplasticity? 8:41 Neuroplasticity just means brain change. 8:44 Your brain is, now we understand, to be incredibly plastic, so malleable. 8:49 So it's changing and shifting. 8:51 And it's doing that all the time. 8:53 It's been doing that from the moment you took your first breath and it's going to do it until 8:56 you take your last breath. So this is a lifetime of change in our brain. Why did you want to become 9:02 a neuroscientist? I'm very interested in learning. I always have been and my first career was actually 9:08 as a physical therapist and my job was to help people with brain injuries and stroke get better. 9:14 Now, this was in the early 1990s, so a long time ago, and I had a patient that broke me, 9:23 to be quite honest. The young man, he'd had a bad head injury. He was a wonderful young man, 9:30 beautiful family, lots of support, and he needed to be able to walk to go home so his 9:37 family could take care of him. And we worked so hard. I worked with him for three months. 9:41 we did everything. I asked for help from experts. He worked so hard. I worked so hard and I couldn't 9:48 help him. And it forced me to come to a decision point. So I realized I was a car mechanic who 9:58 didn't know how the engine worked and you brought me your car and it was your precious car and I 10:04 couldn't fix it. In a moment that could probably be described as a professional tantrum, 10:08 because this all happened within two weeks. I quit my job, and I applied for a doctorate, 10:15 and I went back to school. And I have been trying to understand how the brain works when we learn, 10:19 and in particular, then what happens after it's damaged, and we're still learning and relearning, 10:24 ever since. You know, Dr. Boyd, this will probably be the only time I actually correct you 10:30 in the conversation we are having today. I would not call that a professional tantrum. 10:37 Oprah Winfrey would call that an aha moment. 10:40 Okay. We can reframe it then. I like that. 10:42 At the time, it felt a little self-indulgent. 10:44 Aha. I think my parents were alarmed. 10:46 Yeah. 10:47 But I just felt I had to make a change. 10:49 I couldn't continue this way. There had to be more. 10:51 I had to understand more in order for me to be able to help people. 10:56 And here we are. 10:58 I love that. 10:59 And you know what else I love about that? 11:00 Is that it's easy to think that you are stuck doing what you're currently doing. 11:06 And your story, both in being a physical therapist and wanting so much to make a difference, 11:13 and saying, I have to learn more, I have to figure this out, change the trajectory of 11:18 your life. 11:19 And now here we are 30 years later and you're about to teach us everything that you've 11:25 learned in your research that will help us use our brains to change our lives. 11:29 I mean, talk about full circle. 11:32 It's pretty exciting. 11:33 Yes. 11:33 Yes, I'll take that kind of professional tantrum. 11:37 So what have you discovered, Dr. Boyd, is really happening inside the brain when we 11:42 learn something new? 11:43 So when we learn, we're changing our brain in three fundamental ways. 11:47 So we change the brain's chemistry, we change its structure, and then we change its function. 11:53 And so the first thing that happens when we start to change our brain is this change 11:58 in brain chemistry. 12:00 And this is because our brains communicate through the sending of small chemical packets, 12:07 if you will, they're called neurotransmitters. Just little chemical signals that go from brain cell 12:14 to brain cell. Now, what's exciting about these chemical transmissions is the chemistry of our 12:19 brain can change quickly, really fast. And this is the basis of short-term memory. So, 12:24 we've all done that right away, even in this conversation. We're changing chemistry 12:28 in our brain, we're creating these short-term memories that are going to allow us to maybe make 12:33 a long-term memory and remember this tomorrow, maybe not. That depends on a lot of different things. 12:38 So, give me an example of a short-term memory that just got created. 12:41 So, we were talking a little bit ago about my patient, for example, that struggled to recover. 12:47 And that was now is in your short-term memory. 12:51 Yes. 12:51 So, you may have recalled a certain detail about that or not. 12:54 He couldn't walk and he needed to be able to walk in order to go to go home 12:58 So tomorrow, maybe you remember just that he needed to do something to be able to go home 13:03 But yeah, you don't get the walk apart. Okay, and so that would be a short-term memory 13:07 Now if you do recall of all that tomorrow, you've created structural change in your brain. Oh 13:12 So changing brain structure takes time and critically it also takes sleep 13:17 The third thing you said was function function. Yes 13:20 So our brain operates as this integrated network of regions that are turning on and off together. 13:26 And these regions are going to shift the way they're functioning together 13:30 with practice and with learning. 13:32 So for the person who's listening right now, because a lot of people listen 13:35 and take us on a walk, or maybe right now you're listening and you're driving a car, 13:41 can you explain kind of how you're using even more functions in your brain? 13:45 Absolutely. Driving was the example I was heading for. Actually, you read my mind. 13:49 Driving is such a complicated task, right? 13:52 We have things we're doing with our feet, with our hands, 13:56 we've got vision, we've got this complicated visual environment. 14:00 And we're probably like listening to music, maybe eating our lunch, 14:03 doing many, many things all at once. 14:05 It's a wonderful example. 14:07 So when you first learn to drive, you're very focused, right? 14:10 You maybe don't have the radio on, you probably shouldn't have the radio on. 14:13 And you're just focused on the operation of driving. 14:17 as we become better and it becomes more automatic, 14:20 we can pay less attention 14:21 to the actual physical parts of driving. 14:24 We're now continually to pay attention to the road, 14:26 if you will, and that is allowing those other parts 14:30 to be available, to do different things, 14:32 to listen to music, to maybe have a conversation 14:35 on the phone, maybe it's to be able to eat 14:38 or have a conversation in the car, right? 14:40 And so because you've freed up those brain regions, 14:43 they can do multiple things at once 14:44 and that's a part of learning. 14:45 I'm curious, what has patients who have experienced a stroke or traumatic brain injury taught you 14:53 about our brain's ability to change and grow? 14:57 So firstly, working with people with stroke and head injuries, we now understand that the 15:03 brain is capable of massive reorganization after that damage occurs. That reorganization has 15:11 has some critical time windows though. So we know that very early after injury the brain's 15:17 neuroplastic capacity is very heightened and it has this larger ability for reorganization. 15:24 That capacity doesn't end. We continue to have it, but it does diminish with time. So 15:31 we know it's really important to intervene early to help people recover. The other thing 15:35 we've really learned is that we understand that there are areas of the brain that 15:38 It can take over lost functions. 15:40 So things that can no longer be controlled 15:43 by the area of the brain that's damaged 15:44 can be taken up elsewhere. 15:47 However, those functions are never quite as good. 15:50 They're never quite as able as they were before. 15:53 So people are gonna recover some ability, 15:55 but it may look different. 15:57 The other thing that we've learned 15:58 is that it matters a great deal 16:00 how healthy the brain is before it's injured. 16:03 So the story of a younger individual 16:07 who maybe has an incident to their brain when they're 20 versus someone who has that same 16:12 incident to the brain when they're 70. They're going to look very different in the outcome. 16:17 Okay. One thing that we understand is that immediately after the injury, the brain is 16:23 less inhibited, which means it's more excitable. And that excitability seems to lend itself to 16:29 more neuroplastic change. Now, this window of excitability after stroke, for example, 16:35 Well, seems to last 30 to 60 days, perhaps. 16:39 Let me just make sure I'm tracking 16:40 because I think it's super important. 16:41 So are you saying that the research shows 16:45 that after somebody has had a stroke, 16:47 there's a 30 to 60 day window 16:49 where the brain is ripe for the interventions 16:53 that help somebody recover from the stroke? 16:55 Exactly. 16:56 That's cool. 16:57 It's very cool. 16:58 And it lines up with the timing 16:59 of our interventions medically. 17:02 However, at the end of that 60 days, let's say, 17:04 Most people are not fully recovered and this is where we run into trouble because what happens? 17:09 They get discharged from the hospital and they go home and they're struggling now in their daily life and 17:16 they may not have access to much continued therapy. Therapy is very expensive. 17:21 However, if you can continue to intervene in that time frame, you can draw out this period of recovery. 17:27 We talk about it of keeping the window of neuroplasticity open. We can reopen and hold that window open, 17:33 keep it going longer. 17:35 But it takes a real important dedicated effort. 17:39 You said failure struggle difficulty 17:41 are very good for the brain. 17:44 Why? 17:45 We've done studies using magnetic resonance imaging. 17:48 So an MRI like you might have on your knee. 17:50 We can look at the brain 17:51 and we can see the brain changing 17:53 in response to interventions and experiences. 17:56 And what we found, what we think about 17:59 is that there's a sweet zone of difficulty. 18:02 So I have something to show, that's all right. 18:06 Okay, yes. 18:07 So I have this nice prop, if you will, 18:10 to help explain this. 18:11 So let's talk about difficulty and struggle. 18:13 Yes. 18:13 So we've done work scanning people's brains 18:15 while they're learning. 18:16 And what we've discovered is that 18:19 if something's too easy, if we're over here, 18:23 well, you don't need to change your brain 18:24 because you can already do it, right? 18:27 So there's no need. 18:28 It feels good, but you're not changing your brain. 18:30 you're just repeating something you can already do. If something's too hard, right, if we're over in 18:36 this zone, you give up, right? You just can't accomplish it. And so there's no practice that 18:42 can take place. You want to live here. You want to live where something is hard, where you're 18:50 sometimes failing, but often you're succeeding and you're struggling with that activity. 18:56 And that's where actually we can map and show this is where you're changing brain 19:01 This is where neuroplasticity is actually taking place. Give me an example 19:06 So we have created a game to computerized game for people with stroke for example and in this game 19:13 It's a very important game 19:15 You're gonna use your stroke affected hand and you have to catch an asteroid before it hits the earth and blows us 19:20 All up and we all die 19:21 That is an important game. 19:23 It's an important game. 19:24 And you get a score of how many lives you've saved. 19:26 Your hand is a little spaceship 19:27 and you reach out and you catch this asteroid 19:29 and then you have to throw it into an extractor. 19:32 And we actually, we do good, 19:34 we extract minerals from it 19:35 and you get these little scores. 19:36 So it's a motivating game. 19:38 It's an engaging game. 19:39 You're having an experience. 19:41 And what we can do is based upon the person's ability, 19:44 make that game easier or harder 19:47 and then map their brain. 19:48 And so we see that when we make that game hard, when they're struggling, when their success 19:55 rate is right around 50, 60%. So it's hard. This is when we're seeing the most neuroplastic change 20:03 and specifically we're seeing them change their brain structure most at that particular time 20:09 as they're practicing the task. And importantly for people with stroke, they're also changing 20:15 their ability to move their stroke affected arm. Because as they're chasing this asteroid, 20:20 we are actually slowly moving them farther than they thought they could move. We're pulling them 20:24 out farther away. And so this is kind of the sweet zone of difficulty that we've found. 20:31 And the important thing about this idea is that your optimal challenge 20:35 is going to be different for you, Mel, than it is for me. And it might be different for me 20:39 from day to day. We have days where we're really good and days where things are just harder 20:44 than they should be. And that's okay. That's reflecting where your brain is in that day. 20:48 And as long as you're challenging yourself, you're changing your brain. 20:52 How would you apply this to something like the gym? 20:55 Right? 20:55 You know what I'm saying? Like getting yourself in that sweet spot where you don't really want to 21:01 be doing it. It's very hard. I mean, I think it's kind of cool to think about the fact 21:06 that the things that you push yourself to do that feel hard are really good, not just 21:13 in the case of the gym for your muscles, 21:15 but that the things that you push yourself to do 21:17 that are really hard are really good 21:20 for your brain development. 21:21 And any example you take, it's true. 21:24 So at the gym, you know, you're always pushing, 21:26 you don't want to quite fail, you want to hurt yourself, 21:28 but you're right on that edge. 21:30 You lifted this amount, you know, two days ago, 21:32 and now you're going to bump it up 21:33 and you're going to bump it up. 21:34 It's the same principle in your brain 21:36 as you would with strength training. 21:37 You're going to make it a bit harder 21:39 and make it a bit harder. 21:40 And this is true really for no matter for whatever we're learning. It doesn't really matter struggle is going to be good 21:46 And you want to always be working towards this a little bit harder level of difficulty 21:50 You are studying 21:52 somebody who survived a stroke and you are 21:58 forcing them to 21:59 Learn maybe new movements whether it's moving an arm that had been impaired due to the stroke and while they're doing it 22:07 you're mapping their brain and measuring chemistry, 22:11 structure, and function. 22:12 We can measure all three of those in the MRI machine now. 22:15 It's really exciting. 22:16 So we can measure neurochemistry in certain areas of the brain 22:20 and look at the chemical neural signal. 22:23 We can image the structure of the brain 22:26 in a couple of different ways. 22:27 Actually, we can look at how some brain regions 22:30 will get larger with practice 22:32 or smaller with less practice. 22:34 And we can also then look at how the connections of the brain are changing. 22:40 So how well connected is one brain region to another, and that's also a structural change. 22:47 And then lastly we do what's called functional MRI, where we can see what areas of the brain 22:51 are lighting up as people are doing different tasks and learning. 22:54 What I love about this is you're not just showing up here going, yes, your brain 22:57 can change, neuroplasticity, you're like, no, I have imagery. 23:01 We study this. 23:02 we can see the chemistry, the structure, the function. We see the changes happening in real time. 23:11 And if this can happen in somebody's brain who has had a stroke, 23:16 right, then I take it it can happen in mine and the person listening. 23:19 Absolutely. 23:19 So for somebody that has a learning style like I do of dyslexia, 23:25 or you've got other neurodivergent issues going on in your mind, 23:30 what excites you, Dr. Boyd, about neuroplasticity 23:34 and the brain's ability to change? 23:36 Whatever your learning style is, 23:39 if there's a label on it to dyslexia or no, 23:41 you still are very capable of neuroplasticity. 23:44 Everyone is. 23:46 And instead, I think we need to think about people. 23:48 It's just learning differently. 23:50 Maybe at a different scale, 23:52 maybe at a different timeframe, 23:53 but they're still learning. 23:55 They're still making change in their brain. 23:57 They're still showing neuroplasticity. 23:59 So we did a study a few years ago where we took individuals who showed below average 24:05 mathematics scores, and we had a large cohort. We had kids across the third grade and some with 24:11 better mathematics scores. We actually were able to show that there was an area of the brain 24:16 that was less well-developed in the children with the lower math scores. And so it was really 24:22 a biological explanation for why they were struggling in math for that time in their life. 24:29 And it suggests to me at least that it may be that these children have capacity to learn. 24:37 Maybe their brain just isn't matured enough yet for that level of math. 24:42 So this is a newer field called educational neuroscience where we're starting to understand 24:46 and how school at least affects the brain. 24:50 And at what points in different children's lives, 24:54 are they ready to learn certain things? 24:56 That's so cool. 24:58 So I really look forward to a time 25:00 where we understand the brain well enough 25:01 where we can precisely prescribe. 25:04 What educational intervention are you ready for now? 25:07 And what therapy is gonna be appropriate 25:10 for this person with a damaged brain 25:12 and really start to have precision 25:14 around our interventions and our learning outcomes. 25:19 So it could be that we look like we're learning the same 25:22 and our brains are doing totally different things. 25:25 We've done experiments where we find this. 25:27 So we had a task, we asked a bunch of people, 25:30 both healthy people and people with stroke to learn. 25:32 And then we looked at, they all learned it, by the way, 25:35 they all showed they learned, that was great. 25:37 And then we looked at their brain activity 25:39 and they were all doing something totally different, 25:42 but they all learned. 25:43 And that was kind of my first hint that like, oh, we have a problem here. 25:47 We were thinking everyone did everything the same way before that. 25:50 This is one of these things we've learned in our research. 25:53 So from that forward, the question then becomes, is one of those strategies more effective? 25:58 Or are they different ways to the same point, different pathways to the same endpoint? 26:02 Maybe it doesn't matter. 26:04 So as long as you're learning, you're doing it, like that's great. 26:09 Well, what I'm learning from you, Dr. Boyd, is that everybody's brain is unique and different. 26:14 Yes. 26:14 But everybody's brain has this ability to grow, stretch, and change based on what you force 26:23 yourself to engage in, which is super cool, right? 26:27 Can you really change your brain at any age? 26:29 Absolutely. 26:30 And I feel like I should just like throw the mic on the floor and walk out the door. 26:33 But I won't. 26:34 You can. 26:35 No, we can, and that's what's just so astonishing and exciting. 26:40 So that's really the big learning in the last 30 years, 25 years. 26:44 My dad who's 82. 26:45 Your dad who's 82. 26:46 My mother-in-law who is 89 can change. 26:49 She can absolutely change. 26:51 I can change, you can change, and our kids are changing, and we will continue to change. 26:55 The trick here is that you have to pick what you're changing because remember we can 27:01 change for better, but we can also change for worse. And it's going to depend upon our experience 27:07 and the experiences we're engaged in. If we're continuing to be engaged in things and we're 27:13 continuing to experience in them deeply and struggle to learn them, our brain is going to 27:18 change to do that. But if we do nothing or we do very little, then our brain will also change 27:24 and it won't be for the better. You will actually lose capacity. So it's just like a 27:28 muscle. It's a use it or a lose it situation. I'm going to ask this question because I almost 27:34 felt the person listening, thinking about somebody in their life, maybe a widower, 27:40 maybe somebody who has gone through a divorce or lost a job and you go through these seasons 27:46 where you withdraw and you're grieving. But if you are not engaging in life and you're 27:53 not challenging yourself and you're not pushing yourself to do the hard thing, even if that 27:59 just means leaving your house today or forcing yourself to apply for that new job. 28:05 Is there a period of time where you lose it? 28:07 You do. 28:08 What? 28:09 Your brain is that neuroplastic. 28:11 So if we're not engaged, what we see is we will see these losses in function. 28:17 You even see kind of a wholesale reduction in capacity for neuroplasticity. 28:23 you'll see increased inhibition in the brain making it harder to actually get out. And so 28:29 there's actually a neurobiological reason why it's hard. It doesn't just feel hard. It becomes hard 28:34 to turn parts of your brain on. And there's some interesting examples of this. So people with 28:40 depression, for example, have a much easier time remembering bad memories than good ones. 28:47 so neurochemically they become more inhibited. We see that after stroke as 28:53 well, longer term after stroke. You'll see that part of why it's hard to move 28:57 that stroke arm is because the corresponding brain region has now 29:00 become over inhibited and suppressed. And so it's hard to move it kind of 29:06 biomechanically, just the motion and the activity of the muscles. But it's 29:10 also hard to even activate the brain to get it to move. And that's also 29:15 neuroplasticity. So it's kind of a promise of you can change if you want, but there's also peril 29:21 in not changing and not engaging. We have phases in our life where that happens though, right? 29:27 We become depressed. Bad things happen, unfortunately, in the world. I think the important part to 29:33 take away is that even if you are in one of those low places, you can push through it. You 29:38 You can start to take those small steps to reengage, to have different experiences, and 29:45 maybe take on some different activities that will promote you back towards a more excitable 29:50 brain, a more neuroplastic brain in a positive direction. 29:54 I also think it's helpful to know that if you're in a period in your life where 29:59 you've been withdrawn or you're going through a challenge and everything feels hard, 30:06 that your brain can still stretch itself and the hard thing today is relative to 30:15 the fact that you've been in this kind of withdrawal grieving mode and if you can 30:20 push through and start to do the things that feel hard that things will start to 30:26 become easier. Yes they will eventually. I don't want to 30:29 discount that it's hard though because it's hard and yeah and we've all been 30:34 there, right? It's different phases in our life. But I do want to make sure that people 30:38 understand that you can push through. And as you're pushing, it might feel like you're 30:43 pushing and nothing's moving, right? But slowly by slowly, you can change back the 30:49 other direction. 30:50 You know what I love about how you teach Dr. Boyd? You have this mix of science 30:55 and encouragement that just feels very empowering. And I love that you're reminding us that 31:01 it's important to keep going, especially when it's hard. 31:05 This feels like a really good moment to just take a pause 31:08 so we can give our amazing sponsors a chance 31:10 to share a few words. 31:11 But don't go anywhere, because when we come back, 31:14 Dr. Boyd is gonna share three simple things 31:16 you can do based on the research 31:19 to help you rewire your brain to learn better, 31:22 remember more, and better handle stress. 31:25 So stay with me, we'll be right back 31:27 after this short break. 31:32 You know what I did this weekend? 31:33 I got my flu shot at CVS, and it was so painless. 31:37 I now feel invincible. 31:40 You know, part of my fall routine includes a very important thing, 31:43 going to CVS Pharmacy to get a flu shot, 31:46 because your annual flu shot helps strengthen your body's natural defenses against the flu virus. 31:52 Flu shots at CVS are free with most insurance, 31:55 and you can even schedule up to four family members at one appointment. 32:00 In fact, Chris and I went together. 32:01 It was so easy. 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So this is actually the process of learning, is you have to have sleep in the 36:15 middle of practice and then practice again, and practice again, if you will, because that 36:21 is where that chemical change is being transformed into a structural change in the brain. 36:27 So I tell my students, I'm a professor at a big university, and I say, you can't cram 36:33 for the exam. 36:34 I mean, you can. 36:35 You could come in here, you could stay up all night and form all these short-term 36:38 memories and then write my exam as fast as possible, but you won't have learned it. 36:43 So I hope you won't need that information later on and since I teach in the med school. We're hoping they'll remember 36:50 What is happening in the brain when you sleep? 36:52 So this is when we see 36:54 Structure actually changing in the brain. It's hard to map in a human brain because it's happening on such a small scale 37:01 But there's an idea that what we've done the day before is actually being replayed in our brains as 37:08 as we're sleeping. 37:10 And so there's experiments done by people 37:12 who need less sleep than I do, 37:13 because they stay up all night studying sleep. 37:15 It's very ironic. 37:17 Well, we're actually having people sleep all night long 37:19 in an MRI scanner. 37:21 And they can see that if they have someone practicing 37:24 a task during the day, and then they scan them all night, 37:28 they'll actually see the same brain regions reactivated 37:30 almost as if we're practicing offline. 37:33 Maybe we're replaying the memory as we're sleeping. 37:37 that's one idea. There's some other ideas around different phases of sleep and how they may affect 37:43 learnings. You know, we have these times in the night where we're deeply asleep, times the night 37:48 where our eyes are actually moving under our eyelids called rapid eye movement. They may be 37:52 supporting different types of memories. I think that the jury is still out scientifically as to 37:58 exactly what is happening in sleep. That is so essential. But certainly, we are very clear 38:06 that if you don't sleep, you don't learn. 38:09 Dr. Boyd, what are the brain-changing benefits of exercise? 38:13 Exercise is rocket fuel in the brain, and it can be many different forms of exercise. So any 38:20 exercise helps. You don't have to sign up for the Boston Marathon. Okay, we're not going to get 38:24 too crazy. You can if you want to. It's wonderful, very fun. You can walk, you can garden, 38:29 you can dance. That's exercise. If you're tighter on time, the exercise that we study 38:34 in my lab is called high-intensity interval training. So, HIIT, that's just horrible. 38:41 Well, the good news is it only takes nine minutes. Okay. So, for the busy person, 38:45 this might be for you. What we do in the lab is we pair these short bouts of very intense 38:51 exercise. So, people do three minutes at 85% of their maximal capacity, hard as they can. 38:59 And I have stroke patients doing this. I have 85-year-olds doing this in my lab. 39:03 They do that three times, and then they practice a task they're trying to learn, and we see 39:09 significant increases in the amount that they learn in that task by pairing it with that 39:14 exercise. 39:15 And then we can map and see all the changes that exercise is inducing in the brain. 39:19 So we did this amazing experiment in my lab. 39:22 It's one of the best and most exciting ones we've ever done. 39:24 My graduate student had people exercise and then practice a task, and we looked 39:32 to see was there an effective exercise versus no exercise on their learning. We saw nothing. 39:38 The not exercise and the exercise group look exactly the same. So they slept, 39:43 and the exercise group had significantly improved from where they were the night before. 39:49 They got better overnight with exercise, paired with the practice the day before. 39:55 The rest group that didn't exercise, they just practiced the task. They look exactly the 39:58 same. So it suggests to us, and we think that this is one of the things exercise is really doing, 40:04 is that it's helping that consolidation process. So it's helping that overnight learning, if you will. 40:11 So what exercises? Because now that you've told me that stroke patients are doing this, 40:16 now I feel like I can't be complaining about it. 40:18 So in my lab, we use a cycle, a bicycle that people can ride because it's in a tight 40:23 lab environment, but any kind of high-intensity exercise or these interval trainings seem to be 40:29 very powerful on the brain and actually also powerful on our metabolic system. 40:35 So work from my colleague at the University of British Columbia, her name is Teresa Louie Ambrose, 40:40 she's looked at strength training, this bouts of this very intense strength training, 40:44 and shown that it is particularly powerful for women and that what we find is that 40:51 that they are not falling as much. 40:53 They're bone density and bone muscle mass goes up. 40:55 That's all great. 40:57 But what she found that she didn't train at all 40:59 is their cognition, their thinking improved. 41:02 And this seems to be a very particular advantage 41:04 of the strength training in older women in particular. 41:07 So that's another way. 41:09 The other kind of benefit of all these exercise 41:11 interventions, do you know what they do? 41:13 They help you sleep. 41:14 And so you see this kind of cycle go together, right? 41:17 So you exercise, you sleep better, 41:19 you're less depressed, then you might exercise and you start to spin up what we call a positive 41:24 feedback loop. So one positive behavior leverages the next and the next. 41:29 So I want to talk about how I can do this at home, because it sounds like if I push myself for 41:34 three minutes on a bike or I lift some heavy stuff and do some strength training, I'm going 41:39 to get some like brain juice that makes me remember things or learn faster or just think 41:46 clear or is that's what's going on? Like how do we apply this? 41:49 How do you apply it? Yeah. 41:50 So if you engage in any exercise, what you're actually doing is releasing a neurochemical 41:57 that makes your brain more neuroplastic. It's called brain-derived neurotrophic factor. 42:03 And what it does is it allows our neurons to reorganize more easily. 42:08 And so it's a byproduct of exercise specifically in both our muscles and our brain. 42:15 What kind of exercise you engage in? 42:17 It depends on what you enjoy. 42:18 Remember we came back to engagement and enjoyment. 42:21 So what is it that you like to do? 42:23 I like to cycle and run and I love to ski. 42:26 Those are my three favorites. 42:28 Maybe you really enjoy walking or rock climbing. 42:32 It really could be anything. 42:34 And do I have to do it for a certain period of time 42:36 or is just literally getting your rear end out the door 42:39 for a lousy walk around the block 42:42 and moving your body will start to activate, not a technical term, my term, brain juice to help you 42:48 think more clearly. It will. That's pretty cool. I think it's amazing. And the third thing that you 42:54 said that is really good for brain health and neuroplasticity is anything that you do that 43:00 lowers your stress. So when we're stressed, we release a stress hormone cortisol. And cortisol 43:07 cortisol has this negative effect of blocking the growth factors that allow the brain to 43:15 be more neuroplastic, so they compete. 43:18 So I sometimes describe this as, imagine you've got just a few parking spots in your brain 43:23 and if cortisol is parked in them, we can't get our trophic factors that allow brain 43:29 change into that same spot. 43:31 It's full. 43:31 So if the parking lot is full, flooded with cortisol, we're not nearly as capable of learning 43:37 as if we can reverse those cortisol cars out and allow our trophic factors to come in and 43:45 now allow the brain to be more capable of neuroplasticity. 43:49 We actually did a study in my lab some years ago and we were looking at people who 43:53 practice yoga versus runners. 43:56 My student brought me the study and I will tell you I'm a runner and I was like, 43:58 oh, the runners are going to be better than the yoga people. I live in Vancouver, so everyone 44:04 does yoga. So I have great disdain because I don't do yoga because I'm very inflexible. 44:08 So, you know, you can change Dr. Boyd. If you do hard things and get on that mat, 44:14 your brain and your flexibility will change. It would be so much better. 44:17 And I really should. And when I tell you the findings of this study, am I going to feel 44:21 silly? Because what we looked at was how people responded to a stressful environment, 44:25 a stressful situation. 44:27 We had people in the MRI machine. 44:29 We're imaging their brains as we're putting them 44:31 into happy, fearful, and stressful situations. 44:36 And we're looking at how the amygdala reacts. 44:38 And in those runners, that amygdala lit up like a fireball. 44:43 And I felt kind of silly because in our participants 44:46 who practiced yoga, and these were not people 44:49 who did a million hours a week, 44:51 did three recreational classes a week maybe, maybe two. 44:54 to. What we saw was the amygdala turned on, but then other memory structures turned on. 44:59 And so our inference and from our interviews with these folks, we took away. They were 45:04 able to see that environment, that stressful environment, and observe it and judge it, 45:10 but they weren't taken over by it. And so there maybe is something to these practices 45:15 of meditation, mindfulness, maybe that's a part of yoga that may give people an ability 45:23 to more easily deal with a stressful situation 45:27 when they see it. 45:28 We right now are running a study of meditation 45:32 or a mindfulness intervention 45:33 called loving-kindness meditation. 45:36 And so what we've done is we've taken teachers, 45:39 we've looked at their burnout rates, 45:41 their rates of depression and anxiety. 45:42 They've engaged in this loving-kindness intervention, 45:45 meditation intervention, 45:47 and they practice it on their own for 30 days. 45:49 They have one class, they practice it, 45:51 they come back and we see significant change in their levels of burnout and in their brain. 45:57 So your hypothesis, so to speak, because you're in the middle of the studies of this particular 46:04 form of meditation, and can you explain for the person just briefly who does not know 46:08 what that is? 46:09 Because I only recently figured out what this was. 46:13 Sure. 46:13 It's a form of practicing self-compassion. 46:16 So just giving yourself a break. 46:19 And I don't know if there's anything special about this form of meditation. 46:23 I think the practice that you can find or the environment you can put yourself in 46:28 to reduce your cortisol, to be more mindful, to be compassionate with yourself, 46:33 all of those things are incredibly helpful and we can see their impact on the brain. 46:38 That's so cool. Dr. Boyd, how long does it take to rewire your brain? 46:44 Well, we just did it. 46:46 What do you mean? 46:46 So we've done it today. 46:47 We've done it in the time we've been speaking. 46:49 So this is such an interesting question. 46:51 I think it was Malcolm Gladwell who popularized this idea 46:54 that we need 10,000 hours of practice 46:55 to learn something well. 46:57 It's become a master. 46:58 So I can tell you that you change your brain 47:00 in the first hour of practice in that 10,000. 47:03 And if you did 10,001, 47:05 you're still changing your brain, right? 47:07 I don't think there's a magic number. 47:09 It's happening. 47:10 It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of practice 47:13 but you're incrementally changing it 47:15 with every trial of practice, every hour of practice, 47:18 every day of practice, 47:20 that may also be different from person to person. 47:24 So in my research, we call this the dose problem. 47:27 So what's the right dose of practice to change the brain? 47:31 And we really don't know. 47:33 And one of the reasons we struggle with this 47:34 is because it's different for every person. 47:37 So as a scientist, we try to run a big study 47:40 and then have some statistics 47:41 and come to one single answer, 47:43 But I don't know that there's a single answer. 47:45 I think that maybe is very simplistic 47:47 and it depends on the learner, 47:50 what you're trying to learn 47:52 and how well you're trying to learn it. 47:55 But I think what we can take away from all of that 47:58 is that every time you're practicing, 48:01 you are changing your brain a little bit more, 48:04 a little bit more, 48:05 and the accumulation of practice across time 48:08 is what's gonna really lead to a lasting change. 48:11 change, your point is when you actively engage in certain types of activities, particularly 48:19 ones that are kind of hard for you to do, that's an example of your brain rewiring itself. 48:25 Rewiring itself in real time. 48:26 The other part of that dose issue is you can't just practice at the same difficulty 48:30 over and over again, right? 48:32 It needs to get harder as you go. 48:34 Oh, wait. 48:34 So, hold on. 48:35 Wait a minute. 48:36 It has to get harder as you do it for it to force a structural change in your brain 48:41 to keep changing it right. 48:42 Can you give me an example? 48:43 Sure, well, let's say you wanna learn to play piano. 48:45 So the only thing I can play on the piano is Chopsticks. 48:48 Right? Yeah. 48:49 And so if I just keep playing Chopsticks forever, 48:52 I'm not changing my brain, I can already do it. 48:54 So continuing to practice that is not helpful. 48:58 So if I really wanted to be able to play the piano, 49:00 I really wanted to change my brain to allow that, 49:03 I would have to move on to a more, 49:06 a somewhat more difficult piece, 49:08 and then a somewhat more difficult 49:09 and somewhat more difficult. 49:10 Well, what I love is you can reframe the fact that it's hard as evidence that you're changing 49:17 your brain and that you're growing. I would love to talk about visualization. Dr. Boyd, 49:24 what's happening in your brain when you are intentionally visualizing something, whether 49:31 it's a race that you're going to run, or it's a date that you're going to go on, 49:36 or it is you working hard on something that you care about, 49:41 what's happening when you imagine something? 49:44 So, when you're imagining something, you're mentally rehearsing it. 49:47 Okay. 49:48 And do you remember I said that our brain is functioning with these networks of activities? 49:53 Yes. 49:53 Different brain regions are lighting up together. 49:56 When we mentally rehearse, those same brain regions are lighting up. 50:01 If you're mentally rehearsing a movement, for example, 50:03 Well, every brain region lights up except for the motor area. 50:06 So it's as if we get all ready for the movement 50:08 and we just don't issue the go command, if you will. 50:12 Yep. 50:12 And so this is why most elite athletes 50:15 engage in mental rehearsal. 50:17 This is how the race is going to go exactly. 50:20 It's a great way to get more practice 50:23 without it being physically exhaustive. 50:25 So you think about maybe the stroke patients 50:27 that I work with. 50:28 This is a way for them to go home and practice moving. 50:31 It's safe. 50:32 if they're not going to fall, they're not going to need help, and they can continue 50:36 to get a high dose of practice. 50:39 Now the type of visualization actually matters, it turns out. 50:43 You could imagine being on the ceiling and looking down at your body, or you could imagine 50:47 you're in your body and you're engaged in it, and it turns out that if you're 50:51 in your body, you're more first person engagement, that mental rehearsal is going 50:56 to have a better effect on learning and on brain change than if you're a kind of observer 51:02 from the outside. 51:04 So if I have like a big sales meeting, you're saying, Dr. Boyd, don't imagine a scene where 51:12 you're seeing yourself doing the presentation. 51:16 Imagine a scene where you're looking out at the audience or the people around the 51:22 conference room table, because what happens when you imagine it from inside your own body? 51:29 So when you're imagining from inside your own body, you're generating predictions of 51:33 what it's going to feel like. 51:35 So you're almost pre-predicting the sensory experience that you're going to have. 51:40 And so it makes it a more realistic form of practice. 51:43 There's a part of your brain called the cerebellum that's very good at these predictions, 51:49 predicting errors and correcting for errors. 51:50 and so you're letting it engage in that preparation with you, and that's why it's probably a more 51:55 effective approach. That's super cool. Isn't it neat? Yeah, really neat. Dr. Boyd, as a neuroscientist, 52:02 what is your opinion on manifesting? Manifesting is really interesting. It's a way of visualizing 52:08 as well, but kind of projecting that visualization or that mental rehearsal. There's some evidence 52:15 that as we're doing mental rehearsal, we're visualizing or manifesting how we think something's 52:21 going to go, that we actually are generating activity in one of the, what we call reward 52:26 circuits of the brain. So another one of these chemicals in our brain, this one dopamine, 52:32 which is a very positive, it's our reward chemical. We did something good. It's like 52:36 our little brain gold star, like you did it. That when you're thinking about manifesting 52:41 something visualizing, you may be getting these dopamine releases that are highly reinforcing 52:48 towards that goal that you have, towards what you're working towards. And so that is one of the 52:54 kind of theories, if you will, for why this may be an effective tool. The other thing that's 53:00 really interesting about manifesting is we think that it's a way of preparing the brain 53:06 for what's to come. The word we use would be priming the brain for change, so getting the 53:11 brain to a state where it's ready to take on that new information, that new task. And so it's almost 53:17 like a practice or a preparatory phase so that then when you do have the physical engagement, 53:23 your brain is actually ready to take the most out of it. Manifesting is a tricky one, 53:28 but there certainly is evidence to suggest that it has these strong effects within the 53:34 brain and we think that's why it can be a positive, I guess a habit, if you will, to engage in. 53:42 Can you explain, Dr. Boyd, why starting the day with a statement 53:46 today is going to be a good day? How that works in your brain? 53:51 I love that. And I want to agree. I think this is a wonderful way to start your day. 53:56 When you start your day off with some kind of a positive affirmation, 54:00 you again are priming your brain for what's to come. 54:03 You're preparing your brain, you're setting the brain table. 54:06 This is going to be a good day. 54:08 So in that process, you've pushed down your stress hormone, 54:13 cortisol's going down. 54:14 You're releasing dopamine 54:16 because you're predicting something positive, right? 54:19 So you're getting, you're happy, if you will, 54:23 neurotransmitter out. 54:24 And if you take that forward, 54:26 there's really good evidence 54:28 that people who are optimistic, who demonstrate this optimism across their life, they actually 54:33 have better brain health and they have better outcomes after their brain is hurt. And so, 54:39 the overall idea around kind of this optimistic projection is you're changing the neurochemistry 54:46 of your brain and you're setting your intention, if you will, and then you're much 54:50 more likely to follow through on that as you move through the course of your day. 54:54 Are there other things you could say to yourself or sentences that could have that kind of positive 55:03 upward spiral effect on your brain? 55:06 I think it doesn't probably matter the content of the sentence. 55:09 Whatever it is you can pull out that's going to push you towards that optimistic state. 55:15 That's what's going to work best for your brain. So, today's going to be a great day or 55:20 for, this is amazing. I feel so lucky to be here in Boston with you, really just expressing 55:26 and we know that the expression of gratitude can be a very, very healthy thing on the brain 55:31 for all these reasons that we've talked about. It's probably falls into these cortisol, this 55:36 been of what I call cortisol reducers. So I'm grateful. I'm grateful that I have this 55:40 opportunity that I had a family that allowed me to go back to school and get a PhD in 55:46 my mid-twenties. How lucky am I? Many people would have loved to do that and maybe couldn't. 55:51 And I don't take that for granted. I take that forward with me. In my day, I remind 55:56 myself of that often, and then how lucky I am to be able to be here and basically get 56:02 to learn things for a living. 56:04 An active practice of gratitude is forcing yourself to notice what's going well instead 56:10 of stressing about the things that aren't. And based on everything that you're teaching us, 56:17 I can only imagine that when you force yourself to notice what's going well, 56:22 there must be a positive wave happening through all three of the things that you talked about, 56:29 the chemical, structural, and functional part of the brain. 56:33 That is indeed the case. So, we see that it's again bringing that engagement and that priming 56:40 to the act of learning. People who practice gratitude again have better neurochemistry in 56:47 their brain, less rates of depression. And again, you're spinning down these negative things, 56:52 spinning down your cortisol, reducing your depression, probably sleeping better, and so on. 56:59 Dr. Boyd, I love that image of spinning down. 57:04 Don't choose you hear Dr. Boyd talking about this 57:07 and you keep coming back to the same message. 57:10 You have more control than you think. 57:13 And I love knowing that 57:15 and I love these simple things that you're teaching us. 57:17 Let's take a quick break. 57:19 I want that to all sink in 57:20 and I also want to give our amazing sponsors 57:22 a chance to share a few words 57:24 but I want you to stay with us 57:25 because when we come back, Dr. Boyd 57:27 is going to explain what makes learning stick and how to figure out exactly how your brain 57:34 learns best because your brain learns differently than mine does. And Dr. Boyd is going to unpack 57:38 that after this short break, so stay with us. I'm going to come right out and say it. 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And then suddenly 61:20 you see the green Rivian pickup everywhere. And the day before, you didn't see it. What's 61:29 actually happening in your mind when you suddenly see the cars or you hear the song that you 61:37 just said? 61:38 It's really an awareness building that's come to you. Of course, there aren't more 61:42 of those cars. They were already all there. That is a marvelous car, by the way. They were 61:46 already all there, and now you've just brought your attention to it. So attention is another 61:52 really interesting thing within our brain. We know that attention plays very importantly 61:58 into our ability to learn, and it also plays very importantly into neuroplasticity. 62:04 So the things we pay attention to, we're better able to change our brain around. 62:10 So, whether that be a task you're trying to learn, whether or not you're looking for 62:14 a particular car or you've noticed a song. 62:17 We were talking about learning styles and how basically everybody's brain learns a little 62:22 bit differently. 62:23 How do you figure out how your brain learns? 62:26 It takes a bit of self-experimentation to find it. 62:30 In terms of what's your style, what's going to help you be the best learner, I think 62:36 that that comes to just practice. 62:38 be okay if it fails. That's okay. Failure's great. I've had lots of failures. I've had 62:45 many experiments not work. Many grants not funded. I mean, the life of an academic is 62:50 mostly failure, to be quite honest. But they're all instructional. Like, this didn't work. 62:54 Okay. Well, let's do that. Like, that's really important and interesting next. And so that's 63:00 what you have to do as you're learning for yourself. What is your style? What's 63:04 your environment that's going to work the best. 63:07 You can help yourself by doing these other things 63:09 we've talked about, reduce your cortisol exercise, 63:12 sleep, be engaged, try to learn something you really love. 63:16 Like I will tell you, if we were talking about calculus, 63:19 I would be decidedly less passionate. 63:21 So one of the treats I get to have is I'm learning 63:24 about what I'm obsessed in already. 63:27 It's not hard, right? 63:28 Cause I think about it, I wake up in the night 63:29 thinking about it, I think about it on my runs. 63:31 is kind of what I do and what I'm really, really interested in. 63:35 And then the last thought there is 63:37 that's gonna change throughout your lifespan. 63:39 What you're interested in, how you're learning, 63:42 and in what environment you're learning best 63:44 is shifts with time. 63:46 I love the council to really just think about 63:51 the environment or the ways in which you best learn. 63:55 Like my husband loves working in a coffee shop 63:59 Because I don't know what it is about the noise and the activity, he just is able to focus. 64:05 So interesting. 64:06 I can barely pay attention to the cup of coffee I'm drinking because there's so much distraction 64:11 going on. 64:12 So that would be an example for me of going, can't work in a crowded environment like that. 64:17 The other thing that I've learned about myself in terms of the way my brain works 64:21 is if you hand me a piece of paper and expect me to read something and retain 64:26 it. I can read that thing probably faster than anybody, but I don't remember it. But if you tell 64:34 it to me, and I've also learned that I am better if I am responding to something versus having to 64:46 start it. And another thing that I've learned is I'm obviously a talker. And so it may be helpful 64:53 as you're listening to this podcast to know that the books that I write, I typically talk out. 65:00 And then it's really easy with all the tech today. You just record yourself and then you 65:04 can transcribe it. And once you see what your words look like on paper, it's so easy to respond 65:10 and edit to it. For me, my first degree is in English literature. I was going to be an English 65:15 professor. Life intervened and I went another way. But I love to think of things as stories. 65:21 So I actually think of my science just as a story. 65:24 That's why I love talking about it. 65:25 I'm just telling you the story of my science. 65:29 And so for me, that's how I learn. 65:31 That's how I engage is, okay, 65:33 what story are these data telling us? 65:36 This is why I say to my graduate students all the time, 65:38 we might not like this story they're telling us. 65:40 Maybe it's not the story we expected, but just a story. 65:44 Dr. Boyd, I'm gonna put myself on the spot 65:46 and I'm gonna ask you to coach me. 65:48 Okay. I have always wanted to learn conversational Spanish. 65:54 And I have a gigantic story that I am incapable of learning languages. I took seven years of 66:03 French and cannot remember a damn word of it. I am dyslexic. Did you hear the stories coming? 66:10 I've always struggled with this. And I've always wanted to do it, but I have a story 66:16 that I can't. Can even I learn Spanish? You can. It's hard though. And languages, it's 66:25 interesting you chose language because language is a, it's kind of a special, more special 66:30 category. Okay. 66:31 So I'm going to get to use this and I've been so looking forward to it, but I have a brain 66:35 model. Fabulous. So this is a human brain and we're just looking at two sides. So 66:40 this would be the front. Your eyes would be up here and you'd have your ears on 66:43 the side here. And so this is the back. And so humans very uniquely have this front part, 66:50 this pink area. 66:51 So your forehead. 66:52 Your forehead, yeah. It's called the prefrontal cortex. We have this big piece of brain that 66:57 we developed that pushes out forward that no other animal really has. This area of 67:02 the brain is really important for paying attention, what we call executive functions, 67:08 and then judgments. So is that a good idea? What could happen if I then fill in the blank? 67:17 This is the part of the brain that is wired up very last. So early on, especially for boys, 67:25 explain so much about our 20s, doesn't it? And our children, it's all coming clear now. 67:29 And so what we find is that our brain is kind of maturing according to what we need. So we 67:35 We get our motor and sensory area first vision, 67:39 and then it slowly kind of works forward in its development. 67:44 And so coming back to kind of our language coaching, 67:48 these areas on the side, 67:49 this would be your areas where languages, 67:52 especially specialized on our left. 67:54 Oh, it's like right over by my temple. 67:55 Yeah, you know, if you stuck your fingers in your ears, 67:58 you'd hit it more or less. 67:59 Got it, okay. 67:59 I don't, but it's there. 68:02 And so it's on the left side, 68:03 in particular language in most humans. Occasionally it gets flipped, but most of us it's on the left. 68:09 This is wired up relatively early and it becomes difficult to change, which is why 68:13 it's hard for you and I. I only heard English as a child. I'm assuming you did too. 68:18 Yes. 68:19 And so it becomes harder for us as adults. 68:21 This will be another thing I blame my parents for. 68:22 You can- 68:23 I'm just kidding, that was a joke. 68:23 Yes, right. We can blame them as well. 68:26 But you told me earlier that you're a very auditory learner. 68:30 Very much so. 68:30 So, my suspicion would be, my prescription, the experiment we could do on you, which would 68:35 be fun, is you need a Spanish immersion. 68:40 So you need to just go, in fact, this is your excuse. 68:43 You need to just go to Spain, pick a great city. 68:47 My husband and I are talking about doing the Camino Trail next year. 68:50 You're an auditory learner. 68:52 So you need to go, and as you do the Camino, no English, none. 68:57 Then I'm going to be practicing before I go because I want to talk to Chris on it only Spanish 69:02 So you have to immerse and you're gonna have to force 69:06 Your brain to rewire, you know what this sounds like toilet void. It sounds very hard. It sounds really hard, right? 69:13 It's it's what we need to do. It's exhausting. It really is exhausting 69:17 so when my daughter entered into this late French immersion in 69:21 Elementary school the teacher said I will speak English to them the first week of school and then never again and 69:27 And she said, by Christmas, they'll be responding. 69:29 And I thought, oh my gosh, 69:30 and my daughter came home multiple nights in tears. 69:33 She was so frustrated. 69:34 They did math, they did science, they did everything. 69:37 By Christmas, they were speaking in French. 69:39 It was truly remarkable. 69:41 In fact, I kicked myself. 69:42 I'm like, I should have been scanning her brain 69:43 the whole time. 69:44 Like, what was I, I missed it. 69:46 I had a twin in French immersion and a twin, not. 69:48 We could have done the perfect twin study. 69:49 What, you could have done a twin study? 69:51 Right? 69:51 I'm a terrible scientist. 69:53 But you're an amazing mother. 69:54 I was trying to just dry tears and yes, but I do suspect that for you to just immerse 70:03 in auditory language, I also would be the key. Realize the auditory and the speaking of it 70:09 is what I need to do. Yeah. I don't care about reading it. I just want to be able to speak it. 70:15 I think that once you were there and you were fully immersed, the reading would come 70:19 very naturally. But that's a prediction. You know what I'm going to do? That's a hypothesis. 70:23 I am going to, this is going to be the thing that I'm going to learn and I'm going to start practicing. 70:27 What are the best things that I can do to help what I'm learning stick? 70:36 So repetition is a big one of just again, again, looking at it in different ways. So 70:43 not just rote repetition, but let's turn it on its side. Let's look at it upside down. 70:47 let's repeat it back. 70:49 So that would be one because again, 70:51 our brain does require this dose of practice 70:54 in order to show that it's learned. 70:57 And then remembering that you have to sleep 71:00 to have that memory be consolidated. 71:02 So you're going to have to practice it 71:06 and then come back later and see, 71:08 did you actually learn it? 71:10 That's a test. 71:11 It really is the next day. 71:13 How much did we learn? 71:14 And then practice it again 71:15 and then come back the next day. 71:18 Dr. Royde, could you take us through, 71:20 kind of from waking up through the end of the day, 71:23 what are the habits and routines 71:26 that really support neuroplasticity 71:30 and better brain health? 71:32 Well, first you're gonna have slept. 71:35 I think starting the day with something positive 71:36 is really important. 71:38 Could be gratitude, could be, 71:40 this is gonna be a great day. 71:41 day. And here's why. Give yourself some ideas. Exercise is certainly going to be in there. 71:49 By the way, and I haven't said this, it doesn't matter when you exercise. It could be right 71:54 before you practice something, could be right after, could be a little bit later. It seems 71:59 to not really matter a great deal when that occurs. Thinking about how you can keep 72:04 your stress low or your court is all down. And you could be in a stressful environment 72:09 and still think about being mindful, letting it go, being compassionate. If you can't keep it all up, 72:16 you're not perfect, and that's okay. Pushing yourself to learn something hard, being socially 72:22 engaged seems to be very important for brain health and brain plasticity. And always trying 72:28 to learn something new. So what is it you're trying to learn? And let's practice that today. 72:34 You know what I love about that is that you just proved the statement that you said at 72:40 the very beginning of our conversation, which is that simply by listening, you're going 72:45 to grow and stretch your brain. 72:47 And one of the reasons why I love this podcast so much is because I learned something from 72:55 every single person that comes on this show. 72:58 Yeah. And I almost feel like my brain is getting bigger in my head because of your brilliance. And 73:04 now I'm like, oh, this is so cool. She's in a lab and she's researching the brain and studying all 73:09 this stuff and doing all these cool things. And now she's teaching me. And now I feel like I have 73:13 a big brain. It's like the elastic pants only. It's the elasticity in my mind to learn new 73:20 things. Talk to me about being social. Yeah. So being social seems to be one of these 73:26 things that helps to reduce depression to increase engagement to cause you to have to practice 73:35 our interactions, the complexity of the thought and the cues, the social, the verbal, the non-verbal 73:43 cues, all of those things together seem to be really important for brain health. I think we're 73:48 just built to be a social species. We want to be in a group and we want to be in a group that 73:53 values us and loves us and cares for us. Those things together seem to be quite important 74:00 for healthy aging. 74:01 I can see that. I got to ask you, Dr. Boyd, is there something in particular as a neuroscientist 74:07 that you do as your evening routine that is supporting brain health and neuroplasticity? 74:15 When you get paid, you're told from a small age like, pay yourself first. Take 74:19 the money you're putting in your savings and do that before you do anything else 74:22 with your money, right? So I always think about for me, my days are so busy and I travel 74:28 so much. I always pay myself first. I actually do it in the morning. I'm going to flip your 74:32 question. Before anything gets in my way, every day I exercise, I always say I'm paying 74:37 myself first. In the evening where I'm really trying to position myself is trying to be 74:44 able to get to sleep. So I'm a woman. I'm getting a bit older and my sleep is not 74:51 as nice as it used to be. Actually, I can go to sleep, I just can't stay asleep. This is my challenge 74:56 of the last few years. And so, I've been really working hard on actually my sleep hygiene. So,
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