Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Appearances
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Now, if your mother wasn't sure that she could rely on her partner to take care of her and her baby, you were born with your fight or flight turn on, the HPA axis, hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. Your brain was, because cortisol and adrenaline go right through the placental barrier.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
So the Hopi have a saying that before you're born, that you have a twin, an invisible twin, all of us do. And before we're born, the twin looks out of the uterus to see if the world is safe. And if the world is safe, it says, come, come on, come on, let's go out into this world. It's loving. If it's not safe, part of you is not born.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And you're born with soul loss, what they call in native societies, they call soul loss. So you have to do a soul recovery. But when you're born incomplete like that, we know the brain chemistry now. So this is that you're born with your fight or flight switched on that damages your hippocampus. You cannot have a new experience. You cannot learn. You can't store memories.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
That's what the hippocampus does.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And the body. You know, in the West, we practice medicine by specialty, you know, geography. Neurologists don't talk to the GI docs, and most of what's happening in your brain is coming from your gut.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
So there's no people that do the entire system, and this is what... Well, I do. Yeah, yeah. You and two or three others that I know... But this is what the shamans, the indigenous people do. They look at the entire system, and not only the entire body and mind, but how you're relating to the ecosystem, to nature, and to the family system, and to your destiny.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Like an important part of the healing is finding out what is it that you came to do here in this world. And when you go on that quest, even if you don't find out what it is you came to do, but you're looking, searching for it, suddenly the universe has your back. Mother Nature begins to support you in your healing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And this is what I learned in the Amazon, because I was in the biology department, and in biology you believe that Mother Nature, that Gaia, the planet, loves her species, but she doesn't care about the individual members of the species. She cares about the species. You and I are expendable.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
But the shamans believe that the minute you come into service of the mother, that you become an earthkeeper, that you become conscious of the impact of your actions in the earth, that she takes a personal interest in you. And then magic begins to happen. They call it magic. We call it health. So that one of the things that I stopped doing, I always used to bless my food.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
I stopped blessing my food. Now I ask my food to bless me. This is coming from the mother. So your return to the mother is so important because what happens at that point is that you heal yourself. Shame. And shame is the most bedeviling, befuddling, toxic emotion that we can have. Shame means I am not worthy, I'm not a good person.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And that's the very first experience that we have, emotion, in the West, because our mythology... See, when I was in the Amazon, I would ask people, what's your mythology of origin, your first story ever told? In our first story ever told, we got banished from the garden. Bite that apple and we're screwed for life. Because we were ashamed. God comes and says, where are you guys?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And why are you hiding? And Anna says, because we are ashamed. So we heal the shame. The shame is the deadliest thing. toxic emotion that we can have. And the way we heal it is by returning to the mother and finding out that she loves us.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
sort of repair a lot of that damage that look you can't grow a new brain on french fries no you can't you gotta have the right french fries for dinner the right neuro nutrients to be able to do that and an essential one of these is is tryptophan so you know tryptophan is a precursor for serotonin and serotonin is ubiquitous it's everywhere in nature
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
So trees have it, butterflies, plants have serotonin. And for us, it's a neurotransmitter. For a plant, it tells it when to go flower. But I suspect it does that for us too. When do we blossom? Haven't you seen a plant that looks kind of depressed, you know, and it's kind of saggy and sad looking? Yeah, put a little bit of tryptophan. And today we can order it from Amazon, you know.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
You don't have to go to the Amazon. You can order it from Amazon. And tryptophan, or 5-HTP, is a precursor for serotonin, and serotonin is what repairs the hippocampus. This is absolutely the key, and we're serotonin-deprived right now. Our foods are devoid of serotonin.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And 100 years ago, a pea, a sweet pea, had twice the amount of tryptophan that it does today because we're breeding foods for sweetness.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Precisely.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
We have a hunter-gatherer genome evolved two million years ago. Our DNA hasn't changed that much in two million years when we were hunter-gatherers. Primarily, we were gatherers, scavenger-gatherers. We would find roadkill and bring some meat home, but most of the time, we were gatherers. And the animal protein was very scarce.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
So the transport system to get tryptophan into the brain gives priority to the three amino acids that are the branched chain amino acids, valine, isovaline, and leucine. Prioritizes them because we had such little, for thousands of years, so little animal product. And then tryptophan has to take a second place because you need these for protein synthesis. But today we're serotonin deprived.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And that's why so many people are in the SSRIs, which are flooding the brain with serotonin to help you stabilize your mood and your hippocampus repair. And the hippocampus is where learning happens.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
You know, the thing I really don't like about being interviewed by you, Mark, is you've written about half of the stuff already. But luckily, I don't read all your books, so I come up with my own.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Totally.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Precisely. And the thing is that... Today, we have to become our own chief scientist because we can't rely on the science. You know, the editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal wrote that 50% of the articles that they publish are bogus. They're bad science, but we just don't know which 50%.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
So we have to be very careful researchers, find out who we trust, and especially when it comes to probiotics and comes to the gut, because the probiotics we buy at the store are only 1% of the whole... gut probiotic system, which are the anaerobic ones, the oxygen breathers. 90% or 95% of our gut is the non-oxygen breathers, the anaerobic ones that you can't buy them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
You can only feed them and hope that they grow and they get strong because that's where you produce serotonin. Your gut transforms tryptophan into serotonin and then it gets taken by the vagus nerve and by the bloodstream across the blood-brain barrier and into the brain. There's this little teeny bit of serotonin produced in the brain by the raphe nucleus.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
One out of a million neurons are serotonin producers. Most of it comes from your gut. If your gut's broken, you're not producing serotonin, which then the pineal gland, once it gets to your brain, if it gets to your brain, turns into melatonin so you can sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And if your fight or flight system is attenuated, is toned down, if you're not in constant alert, waiting for danger, or who's the shooter that's going to come by, you know what kids are most terrified of today is going to high school because there's such, you read about such danger. If your fight or flight system is toned down, then the
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Pineal gland can not only produce melatonin, but it will begin to methylate serotonin, which is a tryptamine, and you end up with di-2-dimethyltryptamine, which is ayahuasca. Whoa. Which is the brain produces. And all of the psychedelics, by the way, work on serotonin receptors in the brain.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
LSD, ayahuasca, which is the most powerful psychedelic known to humans, is produced by the brain. That's why we have receptor sites for it. But you have to get the serotonin in there. And then you wake up the higher brain, and this is what allows you to create psychosomatic health. Because you have the experience of oneness. of communion, of belonging.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
You understand how life works and how you're part of it. Wow.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Well, you know, there's a dozen books written about these, including a couple by you. Yeah, yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
This is the key for us. The work that we do is a product called Saccharomyces boulardii, which is actually a yeast. So it's not really a probiotic, but it's a yeast that acts like the United Nations peacekeeper inside the gut, and it begins to regulate the colony, and it gets rid of candida, which has taken over the gut of most people in America today.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Candida is a yeast that proliferates the minute you take antibiotics. And you can look at your tongue and if it's got a white film on it, you've got Candida. Now, the purpose of Candida, everybody should have a little bit of this yeast.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
But especially of Candida, it's to ferment you after you die. This is like nature's garbage disposal system. Kind of like the Last of Us TV show where they get eaten by the mushrooms. This is it, yeah. But you don't want that to happen a day too early, of course.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
So Saccharomyces boulardii, and this is in my website, you've got instructions, it's in my books, is actually a yeast that competes with candida, brings balance to the gut, especially to this kind of dark area, this kind of black hole that we have in our guts of the anaerobes, the non-oxygen breathers.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
It's a little bit higher. It's connected.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And it brings balance to them and allows them to proliferate and it gets rid of the bad parasites. It gets rid of the H. pylori, for example. There's a really good science behind the use of sarcomycin. And it's been used with babies and children for 50 years to stop diarrhea.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And the beauty of boulardii, a saccharomyces boulardii, is that it doesn't stay in your gut. It doesn't colonize. It leaves after about six, seven days.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
In the Amazon, the rate of dementia is one out of 100 people. In America, it's one out of five people. Wow. And primarily women. You know, women have a stronger incidence of Alzheimer's. So what did they know about the brain that we didn't in the laboratory? How did they protect it? And we found it. We found the secret.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
You know, if you want to see animals in Africa, you go to where the food is. That's where the animals go. And that's what these bacteria did in our gut also. They went to where the food is. So they get to eat first. That's true. They eat first. They eat first. And then there's actually about 10 levels, 10 layers of probiotics in your gut.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
That's right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And then we get to eat less because one layer, they begin to break down our foods. So, boulardii is an excellent remedy, and then you've got to feed the others. And what do they feed on? They feed on the stuff that you don't digest.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Well, I'll tell you. What's important here is to understand that we grow a new brain already anyway every 20 days. An entirely new brain, you know, at different rates of speed. We grow a new body every seven years, you know, skin cells every seven days. The lining of your gut is every three days. But we thought the brain didn't repair itself.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
So they actually love that stuff. You've got to feed them. This is the best way because the probiotic market is an $80 billion market annually. And most of the stuff doesn't work, unfortunately. There's some good ones, but none of them work with the anaerobes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
The only way to work with them is with ubiquinol, with quercetin, the polyphenol-rich compounds that will feed them, and the fiber also is really important. So beginning with the gut, and then you find the keystone species. So in Yellowstone National Park, they shot... Many of the wolves drove the wolves away, and they found that the whole ecosystem went out of balance. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And they reintroduced the wolves, and the ecosystem went right back into balance. And one of the keystone species is the Archimansia municipalia. So if you work with these keystone species, they bring order to the ecosystem.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Yeah, it's incredible how quickly they respond. But you've got to get rid of the bad guys first. Sometimes you have to take fluconazole, or you've got to take something to get rid of the yeast, which colonize very rapidly. And then you've got to reset your vagus nerve, because the vagus nerve is a transport, it's a highway, taking serotonin to the brain.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
You're not going to get it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Yeah, 100%. To begin with. I mean, it's a miracle. It's like the Tao, I call it the Tao of biology, like the Tao of physics. And the people that say the psychologists are great, it's good to be able to tell your life story to someone else. But you can tell your life story, but how do you change your story when your story is deeply biological?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And it's not just what happened to you when you were little. So the perspective that I learned from the shamans in the Amazon is that trauma is not what happened to you. It's a story you wrap around it. There are no traumatic events, there are only traumatic experiences. And to heal that experience that's been damaging your hippocampus, you've got to support your hippocampus.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
You can't write a new story about your life journey until you begin to repair the hippocampus.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Remember in college, we learned that you only had so many neurons and every shot. You messed them up with drugs. Drugs, that's it. Every shot of tequila was 20,000 brain cells. Today we know not only that we have stem cells, but that every neuron through a process known as protein synthesis regenerates itself.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
You cannot. You've got to change your brain to change your mind. You can't change your mind without changing your brain. And that means intervening with the hippocampus first and foremost, repairing the gut. But the quick fixes are things like L-tryptophan, 5-HTP, the precursors. for serotonin, and in six weeks it begins to work and you begin to feel happier.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Serotonin, you know, is the happy molecule. So then you have to go on the quest. And the quest is the quest for, what am I doing here? What did I come to do in this life? Did I come to spend another year in therapy? What is your personal quest? And how can you make a difference in the world? Leave this place a better place? and the way you found it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And that's what's going to bring you... Then you're not going to be fighting with your body. You're going to begin to shift your priorities to eating natural, seasonal, local, organic, to becoming a kinder, gentler person, to forgive more easily, and to love yourself, and to make your way back to the garden, back to Eden. You've got to drop the whole shame story, which is, I am not worthy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And you only do that, you cannot do it through psychology. You gotta do it by returning to the mother, by becoming an earthkeeper, a steward of our planet, in your own little way.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Yeah. You can never be disconnected from nature because you are nature. Yeah. You can be disconnected and you're all in it, but you are nature. You embrace your nature and you recognize that you're on a spiritual quest.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
To find out who, you know, the three ancient questions that every spiritual tradition has. Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And you know, the church answered that for us for a long time. And then science came around and said, you came from a primordial soup. Who am I? You're a bunch of molecules, and where am I going? Nowhere. Right, right. Disorienting. But the spiritual traditions are about you finding, going on the quest. You begin by asking the questions, but you've got to get to the higher brain.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
The problem is that our lower brain, our limbic brain, the Neanderthal brain, needs ceremony in order to change. And that's why you have ceremonies in every culture, every society in the world.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Yeah. And the ritual is so important because you're giving the person permission to get well. You're giving them permission to explore something new in their life. That's why we have graduation ceremonies. That's why you go into the military. It's full of ritual and ceremony. You need permission.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
permission from the healer and from yourself and you need to go through a little rite of passage it doesn't need to be yak butter on your chest and your genitals you know so the uh it needs to be a small rite of passage that you create with your provider sometimes it's prescribing a medication that'll do it but if you can also orient the person towards their quest put them on a quest ah
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
then healing has accelerated tremendously. But to be on a quest, you need the brain nutrients. And the neural nutrients are the stuff we're deficient in. And you need to detox the brain because we're exposed to so many toxins. Remember, the body in its wisdom stores toxins in fat.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And the brain is 70% fat. And this is the kind of fat you don't want to lose, you know, when you go on a diet.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
It's really quite amazing. You know, especially when you look at the statistics, if you get to be 75% one out of two people will have diagnosable Alzheimer's. If you get to be eight, I'm sorry, one out of three, if you get to be 80, one out of two people. This didn't exist 100 years ago before Dr. Alzheimer's got to put his name on this illness he identified.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
In the Amazon, the thing that amazed me is that the incidence of dementia is one out of 100 people There's very little heart disease. There's 1% there and 20% here. 20% here. It's crazy. And it's, of course, related to our lifestyle. So learning how to grow a new brain is a pretty important topic. It's really important. And remember, the brain is fat. So you've got to give it the good fats.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
You cannot turn on the higher brain until you go first on a ketogenic diet. And it doesn't need to be eating meat three times a day. But you got to go into autophagy, you got to go into start recycling cellular waste and eliminating. And we know how to do that now. The beauty of it is not only do we have the diagnostics, we know how to reverse this stuff. We know how to create a new brain.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
We know how to help people grow a healthy brain that's not only going to prevent the dementia, it's going to let them step into this place of gnosis, of wisdom.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
So how does that come up in your book? You know, the mitochondria, it's a big section on mitochondria, and how do we restore mitochondria? There are fuel factories inside every cell, and your brain and your heart have the highest concentration of these fuel factories, energy factories in mitochondria, but they're not only producing energy... They are actually in charge of the death clock.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And whoever runs the death clock runs the show. They tell cells when they need to die so new ones can be born, so regeneration can take place. But mitochondria, they don't belong to us. They are actually bacteria that join our cells. They form the eukaryotic cell.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
millions of years ago, so that it cut a deal with these multicellular organisms saying, hey, I'm going to give you energy, you keep me protected, keep me warm, keep me safe, and that's what they do. But what they do is they turn, basically, they store energy in the form of sunlight.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
of ATP of a molecule called ATP adenosine triphosphate this is like the little sparklers that kids use and when that they're depleted that energy becomes goes from being ATP to ADP adenosine mono AMP adenosine monophosphate your fuel tank is empty yeah and the um so this process of
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
storing energy, of processing energy, of protecting the mitochondria who have 38 genes in a ring that are unprotected. Because our DNA is 24,000 genes in a double helix.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
That's right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Because we get it from the mother. So how do we protect, repair? And here's where we get into zombie cells.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
You're not talking about that. Kind of. Because zombie cells. These cells are neither living nor dead. And they're actually a cancer protection mechanism that every cell has. So if a cell is not able to copy its DNA, its information accurately to a daughter cell, mother cell, there are mother cells and daughter cells. There are no daddy cells.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
If it doesn't copy correctly, it will neuter that cell. So it cannot... replicate, because we call that metastases. So it'll neuter it, but it won't kill it. So these cells are not able to reproduce, they're neither living nor dead, but they're mitochondria.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
In fact, I'm going to put on my shaman's shawl. There you go. Shaman's shawl. You know, I started out in a brain laboratory at San Francisco State, and then I went to the Amazon. But I noticed that Gabor is using a show. I like that. I like that. And today, I think we have to become neuro shamans. You know, because we study the brain, and we're looking at the hardware. But what about the mind?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
They become fat and swollen and are starting to produce chemical signals, chemokines, cytokines, that are pro-inflammatory, and they're very toxic. But it's a cancer protection mechanism. But when you have too many of these, Remember, the problem here is the copying. If the copying is not accurate, they get neutered.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And what interferes with the copying is the signal-to-noise ratio of all the toxins we're exposed to. These cells begin to build, and we end up with cancers. These senescent cells, they're called. And they were discovered by James Kirkland at Mayo Clinic, who did a beautiful gerontologist who said, I'm tired of prescribing walkers and wheelchairs. How do we begin to...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
deal with the causes of aging, and he found that there were senolytic agents that actually switched on, the kill switch, turned it back on in these cells. And you could get rid of them, you could do away with them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Kill the aging cells. So how does that work? How do you do that? Well, we don't know exactly, at least I don't know how they work, but they seem to switch back on the kill switch in mitochondria.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And those therapies are combining things like quercetin and fisetin. Fisetin is made from strawberries.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And quercetin is polyphenol. It's made from onion skins, a variety of products, natural products. And it's a hit-and-run intervention, four or five days. And I have a senolytic protocol that we use in our retreat center in Chile that you've been to. And in four or five days, you do away. It's a one and done treatment that you need to repeat.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
We're finding out three or four times a year because we got 40 years or 50 years of senescent cells in us. And what that does is to basically reset the system. You don't have this burden of zombie cells that you're functioning with. It cleans you out.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Yeah. Yeah, and this is, I think, essential, absolutely essential. Our protocol is not only fisetin, quercetin, which is commonly used for this, because this will kill the zombie cells, but how do you get rid of them? So you've got to work on the transport system and support the liver in eliminating them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
So we're combining it with alpha lipoic acid and with liver support, including glutathione or glutathione, to help the transport and eliminate them out of the body so they're not just sitting there. This is amazing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
serotonin uh you know but see this is trauma this is plant-based this is working with and the reason you're you're going to hear a lot more about senescent cells because we're getting to molecular solutions to pharmaceutical solutions yeah But this is available today. Fisetin is strawberries. You'd have to eat 30 pounds of strawberries to get the same effect. You can take it as a supplement.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
But it's an amazing supplement, four- or five-day intervention that lowers your burden of these toxic cells that are pro-inflammatory.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
None of these brain scientists have anything to say about the mind.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
How does it work? First, let me share a story about how I kind of got on this track. Because I was running a small lab at San Francisco State. We were looking at, can we create psychosomatic health? What are the mechanisms? And I got frustrated at one point, shut the lab down, and And went to the Amazon to see what they did.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
People that had no technology, but they had the plants, the natural world, the plant world. And the mind, the power of the mind to create. You know, we know the placebo effect is the most tested medication in the world. Yeah. Because every pharmaceutical is tested against placebo. Yeah. And we know it's extraordinarily effective.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
I mean, it's 68% as effective as morphine in the case of gunshot wounds. Amazing. So I began looking at what's the placebo effect. We don't know what the mechanism is, but we know it works. We know it works even when the person you're giving the sugar pill to knows that it's a placebo. That's amazing. It's extraordinary.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
A lot of the shamanic healing is based on mobilizing this resource that we have to create health. that we dismiss derogatively as a placebo. That's just a sugar pill.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
The one between your ears, yeah. So this is what I became interested in. So how do we do that for ourselves? Well, meditation seems to be one of those things.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
um practicing inner peace breathing practices that begin because that's the interface between your um that can allow you to self-regulate your your physiology and your nervous system so i think we have to discover what works for us we have to provide the brain with the neural nutrients the support get the serotonin we're serotonin depleted right now And this is things that we can do immediately.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And then turn your kitchen into your laboratory. And then take part in what a number of people are calling the experiment of n is equal to one. where you have, you know, in medicine, if you have a research project, you want to end a number of participants to be as big as possible. But here the experiment is n is equal to 1. My experiment is called Alberto. Yours is called Mark.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
I love experimenting on Mark. Yeah, me too. And the thing is that if you don't do the experiment, you get to be in the control group. And the control group is deadly statistics.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
You want to be an outlier in that bell curve. So we need to take control of our brain today, not outsource it to our digital devices like we've done. Our memory functions are all outsourced to our digital devices. I was writing one of our blogs today, and it said, this thing popped up. Do you want help with writing this blog? It was ChatGPT asking me if they wanted me to do it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Soon, we're only going to be here to clean the machines. So we need to really upgrade our brain, take the next step in human evolution. Because a couple of interesting details. There are 40 million species in this planet, more or less, and only three of those don't have a death program in their DNA. And they're humans, dolphins, and whales. Every other species in nature has a death program.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
There are no grandmothers in nature. They're eliminated. Whereas we not only have grandmothers, but we can live 30, 40 years after menopause. There's no menopause in nature. It doesn't exist. Nature is doing a biology experiment with humans, dolphins, and whales in longevity. And to take part in that experiment, we need to be proactive in it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
We need to attenuate the systems that create psychosomatic disease. The amygdala, the production of cortisol and adrenaline, and switch on the production of the psychedelics that the brain produces to awaken the higher brain. It requires the psychedelics.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
It's amazing. If you've seen the brain on drugs, on psychedelics, you find that they're 20 to 30 times the amount of neural networks.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Not the one with the fried eggs, yeah. And the problem is that we're doing this experimenting without a traditional sacred structure. So every culture that works with psychedelics knows that you need a diet to prepare for it, a diet that's rich in serotonin, for example, and some of the MAO inhibitors.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Repair the brain. Our brains are broken today. And we know the list of the things that are breaking the brain. But we really don't know yet how to repair it, how to upgrade it. How do you upgrade the brain to create psychosomatic health? That's what we were investigating at San Francisco State. And when I got to the Amazon, I shut my lap down.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And you need to prepare a sacred space, a safe space, not just drop some acid or give somebody some ketamine. But even then... Tremendous healing happens. So that's the chemical effect is what we're looking at. Other societies looked at the sacred. What was the environment? How do you create a safe space? How do you are able to commune with the divine in whatever form you encounter it?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And that's part of what we're looking for that we don't have the answer for.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
So what does the future look like? Tell us about how you see the future. I am very optimistic. I see the future as tremendously exciting. I think that there have been five extinction events in the planet before. We're living in the fifth one right now. started about 15, 20 years ago, more species are dying than the previous one.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
That's when a gigantic meteorite struck the Earth and wiped out 90% of life forms. Wow. During extinction events, nature seems to take the foot off of the brake and step on the accelerator, evolutionary accelerator. So it's not only evolution in between generations, but now within generations, that we can become a new human.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Epigenetic reprogramming to become a new human being that can have long life, long health, and can become a keeper, an earth keeper, a steward of the earth. and can experience her and his divine nature.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
psychosomatic health now we've all heard of psychosomatic disease it's all in your head yeah you're talking about the opposite right how do you do that we know how to create psychosomatic disease basically it's a stress hormones you know adrenaline cortisol the the amygdala running the show you being angry all the time you're gonna get sick we know that but how do you create psychosomatic health and come to the optimized brain function come to the state that the ancients used to call gnosis
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
They have very low levels of cortisol that's been happening for generations.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Yeah, very rapidly. Not only that, but we inherit not only the toxic legacy of our ancestors, both biological, chemical, emotional, but also the gifts-
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
It makes us into beings that are incredibly powerful, that have tremendous potential and possibilities, and can be part of a grand plan of dreaming our world into being. We are the sons and daughters of heroes, of people that had so much courage, that crossed the Bering Straits, that survived under conditions, that were sitting around a fire looking at the stars and realizing we're not alone.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
10,000 years ago. We have that in us as well, and we need to awaken. It's so easy to find what's wrong. Now we've got to begin to awaken what's right within us.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
So, Alberto, tell us how they can find more about your book, about your work, about your website. The book is called Grow a New Brain. It's out now, and it's in bookstores and Amazon.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
and it's um and it has some risky practices in it too so i've got to caution you on that because some of these are meditative kind of journey practices and the uh my website is called the four winds dot com the four winds dot com and what i do today is to train modern shamans neural shamans that's why i have my scarf on my shaman scarf so beautiful thanks so much for being back in the doctor's pharmacy great to be with you again mark all of our wisdom and knowledge
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Thank you so much.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
which is direct knowing, which is we think it's knowing all. That happens when you operate from the lower brain where you think you're know-all. Take a 15-year-old kid, you know.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Why don't you leave now, home now, honey, while you know everything? But we're talking about upgrading the brain so you know the all. And you come into the state of gnosis where you understand how nature works, where you understand how you can create health.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Yeah anxiety to violence the projection of the shadow the enemy is the other and we don't see it in ourselves so we know these psychological mechanisms and But when I shut my laboratory down, I was in the biology department. Not in psychology, but in the biology department. And we had a small brain lab. And we were in the section where you keep the brains, the formaldehyde.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
I was surrounded by 200 brains. Pickled brains.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
I spent two years in that lab surrounded by brains and I couldn't get a second opinion from any one of them. It was a terrible thing. Then I shut it down and I went to the Amazon to see how people protected the brain. Remember, Native American peoples had no writing. They had no record keeping.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
So how do you protect the wisdom, the knowledge of a tribe, of a society, of pyramid builders, of architecture? Because it's all stored in the brain, the mind of the elders. How do you protect the brain of the elders when you don't have writing? What happens if you forget how to make fire? That could be a big problem. Yeah, definitely. So that's what I began to study.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And I was funded at that time by Big Pharma. I was a medical anthropologist, and they wanted to know the next big cure.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Precisely. And because in the Amazon, the rate of dementia is one out of 100 people. In America, it's one out of five people. And primarily women, you know, women have a stronger incidence of Alzheimer's. So what did they know about the brain that we didn't in the laboratory? How did they protect it? And we found it, we found the secret. Really? Yeah. Okay, lay it on us. Totally.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Dr. Waldo, what are you talking about? I'll tell you what it is. I'll tell you it's about restarting systems that shut down at about the age of 35. which are the detoxification systems, which are the NRF2 activators. That's what we know them to be.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
I bet most people listening don't know what an NRF2 activator is. I can't pronounce it. But NRF2... Nuclear factor kappa... Kappa beta, yeah. It's a protein that sits on the cell membrane. They're like the Navy SEALs. And when they're needed because of some outside insult, they go in from the cell membrane into the nucleus,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And they begin to switch on the genes to create health and silence the genes that create disease. Now, this was only discovered about 20 years ago. And the Johns Hopkins researcher, they found in the laboratory is that these systems, which are the master detoxifying systems, begin to shut down at the age of 35. But today we know how to turn them on again.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
We know that we have to get to password-protected regions in our DNA to switch on these systems because biology invests heavily on the young. So what's the password? The password are certain plants that are DNRF2 activators. And we know what many of them are, and the Amazon is full of them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
What we found in the Amazon was that, actually we found this with our friend David Perlmutter, that the sacred plants... Not the teacher plants, those were the psychedelics, which we can get to a little bit later, but the sacred plants were the ones that switched on your detoxification and regeneration systems. And today we know what they are. You know, five-day-old broccoli sprouts.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Broccoli is a huge NRF2 activator. Coffee is an amazing NRF2 activator. But there's the hormetic curve, the hormetic effect. If you do it for more than five days in a row, you begin to... shut down the very systems you're beginning to turn on again. So you've got to cycle them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And you've got to have... the ones that are bioavailable. Like the most bioavailable one that we know is sulforaphane, which comes from broccoli sprouts, five-day-old broccoli sprouts. You've got to chew them well. Imagine you're a rabbit trying to eat a broccoli, and then there are these toxins being produced, which is the defense mechanism that all plants have, that for us becomes medicine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
At the right dose. And that will switch on these very same systems because the body thinks that suddenly you're consuming a poison. And it'll mount a huge antioxidant defense. It'll start producing glutathione, which shuts down normally at about the age of 35. It'll begin producing superoxide dismutase. A massive production of these.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
But if you keep eating those broccoli sprouts every day, it'll shut them down. Say, hey, this is not poisonous.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Precisely. And this is what the Amazon indigenous people discovered without knowing what an RF2 stands for. They just know that these were the sacred plants that promoted longevity.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
No, they have a bunch of other, uña de gato, cat's claw. There's 50 others that are extraordinary, but we can't get them in the West because we don't know the quality that we're getting and we don't know how accurate the dosing really is. It's all in the dosing. There's other ones like curcumin.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Curcumin is an amazing one, but curcumin is 5% bioavailable, whereas sulforaphane from five-day-old broccoli sprouts that you grow at home, you've got to turn your kitchen into your laboratory. Right. We're all going to be hippies and grow sprouts in our kitchen now? Totally. We used to do that in college. Five-day-old broccoli, homegrown broccoli sprouts are 85% bioavailable.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
So do your curcumin, do your golden milk, but be sure that you pay attention to it. And it's in my book, my most recent book, which is the Grow a New Body cookbook.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
All of the science is there, but now if we're growing a new brain, We need the NRF2 activators and the things that will promote neuroplasticity and neurogenesis.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Precisely. BDNF.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
BDNF stands for brain... Not BDSM, it's BDNF. BDNF. Brain derived, coming from the brain, neurotropic factors. Factors that regenerate the brain. Now this switches on the production of stem cells. So that one of the best BDNF inducers is mother's milk. But it's hard to get at the health food stores. You can't get it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
But because mother's milk is 50% DHA, omega-3 fatty acid, DHA, omega-3s are promoters to turn on the production of BDNF. So does exercise, meditation. But the classic, the best one is DHA. It's omega-3. And in fact, Nate, you know, I'm an anthropologist, but at the... Native American peoples in North America used DHA as their money, as their currency. Yeah. Well, it was, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
It was a fish called, what was that fish called? The candlefish. It was so rich in oil that you could put a wick in a dried fish and light the wick, light your fish, and it would be your candle.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
And they would extract the oil. Even today, they still do it. 100% rich in DHA. And that's what they used to trade with. and also it turned on the higher brain production of stem cells, and it repaired the hippocampus, which is why there's so much trauma today. Today, trauma has become as common as air. What's the hippocampus, and how does trauma impact that?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
The hippocampus is the learning center in the brain, and it's rich in cortisol receptors. I mean, it's full of cortisol receptors. And when you have trauma, when you switch on the fight or flight system, and it's not fight or flight that does it. Fight or flight, you get to fight, you get to run. It's when you can't fight and you can't run.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
If you're six years old and an uncle is fondling you, you can't fight, you can't run, you freeze. And you get into freeze. And when you get into freeze, your brain is to wash in cortisol and adrenaline.