David Perlmutter

On any particular topic at any particular time, I do my best to keep up, but there's no chance.

Oh, I'm more now than ever.

Really?

Yeah.

I mean, I'm in the gym this morning prior to our time together.

And I'm talking to ChatGPT about, you know, something called brain-derived neurotrophic factor and how exercise increases its production.

And I learned something very interesting for any of the geeks who are watching us right now, that it's not the BDNF, they'll understand what I'm talking about, made by the muscles that's good for your brain because it does not cross the blood-brain barrier.

Though it's called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, hey...

It's made in the muscles.

But there's another pathway from exercise that turns on in the brain the production of this really cool miracle grow for the brain so you can grow new brain cells, make better connections.

So yeah, I'm loving the science.

So you can actually grow new brain cells just from exercise?

Yes.

Yeah, that's pretty remarkable.

In my day, even back in medical school, we would fully and categorically deny the idea that humans grew new brain cells.

We saw it in rodents.

We saw it in primates.

But there was almost a religious rejection of the idea that we grew new brain cells.

And it was in 2001 that the first research demonstrated that, in fact, this process called neurogenesis, what a cool word, was happening in humans.

And how that happened was really quite interesting, and it's a very interesting story.