Dr. David Eagleman

You're getting stronger.

You don't get as out of breath.

And so all these things help.

Exactly.

But in order to keep the cycle going, you need to figure out what is spinning this flywheel and what are all the other things in your life, whether good motivations or bad.

It doesn't matter.

You just figure out what it is that you can do to get there.

The general story is exercise is really important for the brain.

I'll give you just one example of that, which is there's still this debate going on about whether we get new neurons in the brain.

The general story has always been you're born with 86 billion neurons and those slowly die with time.

But in rats, for example, there is a little trickle of new cells, new brain cells.

And there's been a debate for a long time about whether that little trickle happens in humans or not.

Still unresolved.

But in rats, what you can see is that exercise causes the trickle to increase.

If you stick the rat on the wheel and it's doing physical exercise, you get more new brain cells.

Now, we don't know for sure that this happens in humans, but lots of things about physical fitness and exercise matter a lot to the brain.

This is nothing new.

Exercise, sleep, diet.

There is something that all of us are thinking about, which is about social media and the internet in general.

I do think one of the interesting things about the internet and social media is that if we were growing up in a village 500 years ago, you just know the people in the village and what they can do and so on.