Dr. Mark D'Esposito

It's really amazing.

And to think about it sort of fluctuating, certainly during the menstrual cycle, we can think about how much it fluctuates in an injured woman over 30 days, but then you can think across individuals, you can think about how much it can account for individual differences.

So not only sort of knowing your dopamine level, but just knowing sort of estrogen and cholesterol.

In all of the groups around the country that are trying to develop cognitive therapies, they often use aerobic exercise as another type of therapy.

And so, for example, a group at University of Illinois, Champaign-Arkhamer's group has done aerobic exercise quite a bit, and they can find it just as effective as cognitive therapy and improving executive function, just straight up aerobic exercise.

Wow.

And so, you know, the hard part in the real world is how do you get, you know, a seven-year, eight-year-old, you know, to do the kind of aerobics.

But now, you know, recumbent bicycles, and now there has been studies with seven-year-olds with just putting them in, mostly with recumbent bicycles, it's sort of designing.

We have to think about ways to design exercise that can get aerobics up.

But it's...

And you know, neurologists are starting... I think, you know, my field is starting to realize that there's... we got to tackle this at all... every way we can.

And so, now I'm hearing... you know, you hear more neurologists talk about that, you know, 30 years ago no neurologist would say you got to exercise more, you know, or just...

Now it's talking about exercise and nutrition and sleep and it's all becoming sort of part of our package of how we're going to help our patients.

But the aerobic exercise is super interesting and I think it's going to be... You know, that kind of made me think that what we didn't talk about was mindfulness.

And so, a lot of these studies also if they add mindfulness training,

to the hardcore goal management training, it's better than just the executive training alone.

Just learning skills to stop, relax, refocus kind of gives this sort of boost to executive function as well.

And that's half of the problem with not achieving our goals, right, is we lose our focus.

And so building into sort of strategies to main focus, you know, to stop and relax and refocus is an important strategy for boosting executive function.

And it doesn't seem to matter what, you know, I know there's all different flavors of mindfulness, so we just happened to use one when we were studying it.