Dr. Andrew Huberman

Very concerning.

Okay, so the point here is that

I think very soon you're going to hear about drugs, prescription drugs and supplements to augment the release of neuromodulators, not for sake of empathogenic states or psychedelic states, but to try and keep those dopaminergic neurons online to offset dementia, because that's what the question's about.

In fact, there's a Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist at Columbia University, whose name I won't tell you, or maybe I will, who when I went to visit his office, chewed no fewer than five pieces of Nicorette in the course of a half an hour.

And I'm like, what's going on?

it's got a Nobel Prize, but this looks kind of pathologic.

And I said, why?

And he said, well, the nicotine is to offset age-related loss of dopaminergic and cholinergic neurons.

I thought, really?

He's like, yeah, when I quit smoking because I didn't want

lung cancer, but this is him, this is anecdata, I'm not suggesting you do this.

I think there are a number of things that we can do, but protect those neuromodulators, keep perfusion, that is blood flow to the brain, strong.

There's a case for cardiovascular exercise, and it does seem, it really does seem that exercise that engages the neuromuscular connections more than cardiovascular exercise, so not just resistance training, but anything that involves coordinated bodily training, learning new physical skills,

dance, et cetera, really does seem to offset some of the loss of cognitive functioning in adults.

So it's kind of interesting that physical exercise is great for cognition and probably cognition may or may not help physical ability, but one,

probably can imagine why there's a bidirectional relationship there.

Your nervous system doesn't really distinguish between physical and cognitive.

It's all working as a bunch of functional units.

I could go on and on about this, but hopefully that at least gets the gears turning around some things that perhaps you've heard about and some things that you haven't.

And we'll do an episode on dementia and offsetting dementia in order to get into some of the fine details.