Dr. Tommy Wood

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1,133 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 20 Jul

Dr. Tommy Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Huberman Lab · Accelerate Learning & Increase Cognitive Capacity | Dr. Tommy Wood · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

I don't need to know how to do this, so I'm going to refine that away.

That's kind of the developmental theory of aging or part of the developmental theory of aging.

So...

in that when you're learning a skill as an adult or any time, a big part of refining that motor patterns that you're developing has to be the removal of connections or the downregulation of connections that aren't allowing you to do the skill that you want to do.

I'll partly answer your last question and then maybe give a framework for how I think about it.

So when you look at...

a combination of epidemiological studies and intervention studies in older adults, where we're thinking about maintaining cognitive function later in life, you definitely see that those who continue to engage in hobbies and activities that are cognitively engaging or cognitively demanding, and that can be lectures, that can be volunteering, that can be reading crosswords, that kind of stuff.

those individuals tend to either have slowed rates of decline or better maintenance of function over time and or lower rates of dementia.

That's, of course, observational, right?

But that's usually people continuing to engage in the things that they've already been doing, right?

So they're holding on to what they've got.

Holding on to what they've got by continuing to do that.

Okay.

Now, of course, it could partly be reverse causation because if you're maintaining function, then you're more likely to continue to do the things that you enjoy doing, right?

So it probably goes in both directions.

However, there's an increasing body of literature that shows that by engaging older adults in novel cognitive activities,

you see improvements in function.

So that can be language learning, that can be complex like co-ordinative movement or exercise.

You see the same things with like musical training, like people learning a new musical instrument or learning musical theory, trying to identify different patterns in music.

And you see in randomized control trials improvements, particularly in executive function, that seems to be most common across those different interventions.

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