Dr. Tara Swart
speaker
511 appearances
9 recordings
7 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 24 May
Dr. Tara Swart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But once you get to the critical mass of enough neurons, suddenly it feels like everything's easy and everything's manifesting. And I do feel like people have to get a taste of that before, you know, at least once with a quick win to have the courage to take it to the next level.
So the first one is myelination and anyone who does a lot of sport who repeats a certain, you know, weight training will understand that that's what's happening in their muscles. You know, when I said, you know, you come here pretty much every day and you sit with someone and you interview them and you're really great at asking questions.
That's like something you're super good at that because you repeat it, it becomes like a superpower. And that means that what's happening there is myelination. So myelin is a fatty substance that coats some neural pathways and those pathways become fast pathways. Now, there's a reason from evolution why we have some fast pathways and some slow pathways.
And the reason is that if you put your hand in the fire, your reflex to snatch your hand out is a fast pathway. But your pain reflex is a slow pathway, because if you were incapacitated by pain, the minute you put your hand in the fire, you wouldn't be able to get away from it. One of the mechanisms of neuroplasticity is becoming even better at something that you're really good at.
And that's happened through myelination. The most common one, which is something that you're quite good at, but if you had loads of time, you could become really good at it, but you maybe don't have loads of time, happens through synaptic connection. So that's the one that can feel like quite hard work. But if you put in the effort, then you can change your brain.
So that means that neurons that already exist in the brain connect up with each other and start to form new pathways. And the third mechanism, which doesn't happen a lot in the adult brain, but it does happen around the hippocampus because we do lay down new memories in life, happens a lot in children's brains, is called neurogenesis.
And that is little embryonic nerve cells that float around in the brain actually becoming fully formed nerve cells, neurons, and connecting up through synaptic connection and maybe getting myelinated. And there's a factor, a growth factor that's involved in that, the embryonic cell becoming an adult cell, which is called BDNF or brain derived neurotrophic factor. And trophic means growth.
So neurotrophic is growth of neurons. And the things that contribute mostly to that are aerobic exercise and eating dark skinned foods. Yeah. Yeah.
dark skinned foods yeah so let me just cover the exercise one first because this is one of my fun facts which is that if you are regularly doing aerobic exercise the turnover of those cells in your brain is about 13 14 percent so like the the amount and the speed in which they like die die off no the speed in which they go from embryonic to full-grown so okay yeah okay so because we want neurogenesis to happen okay
If you haven't been doing exercise for a while and then you start, the rate of cell turnover is like 30%. So it increases after a period of inactivity with new aerobic exercise. So that's my excuse for like being a couch potato half the time and then starting up again.
Yeah, making the embryonic cells grow into new cells and then connect up with existing ones.
Yeah.
There are benefits to your brain of other types of exercise, but weight training doesn't relate to neurogenesis as much. Okay.
This isn't so much about language, but it's another example of mind over matter. So this was an experiment done on two groups of weightlifters. Thought you might like this one. That's a big compliment.
Totally.
um this was finger and elbow weights though so maybe not so glamorous in this experiment okay so one group lifted finger or elbow weights i think this was a two-week study and they showed i think it was about a 40 increase in in muscle mass of the targeted muscle group for those weights Their counterparts only imagined lifting weights for two weeks. They lifted no weights for two weeks.
They just sat there and they visualized themselves lifting weights. And they had a 13% increase in muscle mass.
Have you been secretly doing that? No, but I could be doing that instead. I've been going to the gym.
Well, I don't think you can watch the football. I think the whole, like, visualisation and, you know, intention and attention stuff was an important part of it.
Well, think about the number of athletes that use visualization as part of their training. Of course, they do the exercise and the practice and everything, but that's hugely used in sports.
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