Dr. Wendy Suzuki
speaker
915 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 7 Jan
Dr. Wendy Suzuki’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 — 2 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
growth factors get released and they go to the hippocampus and they actually build new brain cells in the hippocampus. They help new brain cells grow in the hippocampus. Now you want as many shiny new hippocampal brain cells as you can get, which means that, and they don't pop up like mushrooms. It takes a while. You need to keep up that physical activity.
And for that, the best way to get high levels of growth factors in your bubble bath is to do an aerobic workout. any workout that increases your heart rate. Now, this gives you lots of options. You like to dance, go dance. Like to take your dog for a walk, go take your dog for a power walk. Like to walk, go for a walk.
Anything that gets your heart rate up, I don't care what it is, will help with this. But keep it up. And it's like, I picture a watering can with growth factors going on your left and your right hippocampus, making it big and fat and fluffy. And that is one of the harbingers to great brain growth. The other brain area, which I'm sure is huge in you, is your prefrontal cortex.
Living a life of a monk and doing that deep practice of focusing your attention, keeping it there, makes your area 10, which is right behind your forehead, enhanced, enriched, not because of new neurons, but likely because of new synapses.
And so basically what a healed brain looks like is a bigger, fatter, fluffier brain that is kind of flush with good neurochemicals and is building new synaptic connections. That is kind of the beautiful picture of what I call positive brain plasticity.
Well, you know, I think that sometimes it's hard to appreciate what's going on. It could be that you're not moving quite in the same way. I think it's easy to get in a habit of moving. And so sometimes you need to push yourself a little bit more. If you're doing 10 minutes of walking, maybe try 15 minutes. And it's, you know, there are some pillars that not just me, but so many neuroscientists
have shown are so important for brain plasticity, which is actually what my undergraduate advisor discovered as she was a young neuroscientist in the 1960s at UC Berkeley, Marion Diamond. And so exercise was one of the pillars. Stress reduction that comes from meditation. Social interaction. We are social beings. I'm sorry, social media does not count person-to-person interaction.
That is what humans were evolved to do. Sleep, which we haven't talked about, but is so critically important. And the fifth pillar is good nutrition. Social interaction, sorry, I need to add that social interaction doesn't mean just eating conversations. I include love there.
Having love in your life is something that neuroscientists don't often talk about, but it is absolutely critical for the health of your brain.
Well, so you can study the neurobiology of love and compare the brain areas that get active when you look at the picture of an acquaintance versus the picture of somebody that you might have just- What would you see? You would see reward areas lighting up. But other areas, social interaction areas as well.
And one of the most interesting findings that I love from that neurobiology of love, fMRI study of love literature, is that they've also started to look at How does the brain response to your loved one change from the first throes of romantic love when you can't get enough of each other to a relationship that has evolved to something stable but very, very loving?
And what happens is it goes from just... lots of dopamine and lots of reward areas and kind of a suppression of the amygdala and kind of the fear. You're fearless when you are first in love. And I know, you know, I felt fearless. I don't know if in a good way, but we feel fearless.
And it starts to evolve into a pattern that looks like the maternal or paternal pattern that is that protective element. And we can't see everything from fMRI, but I thought, I thought that's such a beautiful pattern to think about. That, yes, I can't sustain that first flush of love for the rest of my life.
But that deep love that you do feel for a child, that is what comes with long-term commitment. Wow.
Yeah.
Yes, yes. Not in every single, you know, morsel. But when you look at the relationships that you admire, you know, those long-term relationships, there is the devotion that is there. That, of course, you see for, you know, protection for your young child. It's not identical. But that devotion is beautiful. That's what's moving about those kinds of relationships. Yeah.
Absolutely. And I immediately think of the university. And that is a natural place of gathering. In-person universities, you're gathering every single day, multiple times a day. But sometimes I see the stress and the worry of, do I, you know, am I smart enough, you know, in this room? Pushes people apart and then they go and they go on their phone and it's more comfortable to do that.
That is what I'm trying to shift so that we take full advantage of this person-to-person relationship. place of gathering at our university that they feel connected to each other. They feel like they belong there for whatever thing that you want to promote. I as dean want to promote the joy of learning. That is what I want to teach them. That is what I want them to feel like.
And so, yes, all of you university professors out there, you have this power to make your place of gathering One of these places where people are talking and interacting. And of course we all try that. It's harder because of the pandemic and we're not used to being together as much in society or, you know, in our growing up. So the answer to your question is yes.
It's our responsibility to do that. How can we do that more?
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