Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
Chapter 2: What strategies can be employed to prevent dementia?
Recently, the Huberman Lab podcast hosted a live event at the Plenary Theater in Melbourne, Australia. The event was called the Brain-Body Contract and featured a lecture, followed by a question and answer session with the audience. We wanted to make the question and answer session available to everyone, regardless if you could attend.
So what follows is the question and answer session from the Plenary Theater in Melbourne, Australia. I also would like to thank the sponsors for the event. They are Eight Sleep and AG1. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. And one of the key aspects to getting a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment.
And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up in the morning feeling refreshed, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees.
Eight Sleep makes it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment at the beginning, middle, and throughout the night, and when you wake up in the morning. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly three years now, and it has dramatically improved my sleep.
If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, you can go to eightsleep.com slash Huberman to save $150 off their Pod 3 cover.
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Chapter 3: Is enhancing willpower similar to muscle training?
Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Huberman. The other live event sponsor, AG1, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens and other critical micronutrients. I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they decided to sponsor the live event.
The reason I started taking it and the reason I still take it every day, once or twice a day, is that it ensures that I meet all of my quotas for vitamins and minerals, and it ensures that I get enough prebiotic and probiotic to support gut health. Now, of course, I strive to consume healthy whole foods for the majority of my nutritional intake, every single day.
Chapter 4: How can shift workers minimize circadian disruption?
But there are a number of things in AG1, including specific micronutrients that are hard to get from whole foods, or at least insufficient quantities. So AG1 allows me to get the vitamins and minerals that I need, probiotics, prebiotics, the adaptogens, and critical micronutrients.
To try AG1, go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman, and you'll get a year's supply of vitamin D3K2 and five free travel packs of AG1. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman. And now for the question and answer session from Melbourne, Australia. Hey, Dr. Heumann, some of your listeners are in or approaching our 50s. Okay, same.
Chapter 5: What is the difference between NSDR and meditation?
and are thinking of doing all we can to prevent dementia. Same. Do you have any additional thoughts or protocols or research we could focus on? Yes, so for the next two and a half hours, no, I'm kidding. I'm not known for being succinct. I didn't go over too much earlier. So, okay, so ground truths.
So let's start with ground truths and then let's move to emerging, let's maybe get to a little bit of speculation.
Chapter 6: How can we combat mindless phone scrolling?
Let's avoid conjecture. Ground truths. Blood circulation is good for the brain, perhaps most important for the brain. So anything that is good for cardiovascular health is going to be good for brain health. It's not the only thing, but that's true.
Chapter 7: What insights were gained from dream clinical trials?
We know this. So you hear these days a lot about zone two cardio. I don't know who gets credit for that. Peter Atiyah talks a lot about it. I talk a lot about it. None of us invented the notion, but You know, 150, probably more like 180 to 200 minutes of so-called zone two cardio per week is good numbers to shoot for. Some of us get more, some of us less. What is zone two cardio?
Zone two cardio is cardiovascular exercise. Could be running, could be swimming, could be walking, depending on your level of fitness, which you can just barely maintain regularly. a conversation. Were you to push any harder or faster, you wouldn't be able to complete your sentences with much ease, okay?
Chapter 8: What are the implications of the Q&A session for future research?
So is this zone two cardio for me? No, but if I were to jog and try and have a conversation at some point, I would have a little bit of a hard time. That's a zone two cardio. So we know that's true. Why?
Well, it seems to do a number of things at the level of release of growth factors, brain-derived nootrophic factor, at the level of different, let's call them, I realize the immunologists are going to roll their eyes, but anti-inflammatory cytokines and things of that sort. You also have inflammatory cytokines. and things of that sort.
It does seem that increasing blood flow in and through the brain is important for brain health, which is not all that surprising. There are species of animals that spend part of their life swimming about, and then when they stop and stick to a rock or something, a good portion of the nervous system actually degenerates.
But neurodegeneration and dementia are not necessarily the same thing, and this is something that we don't often hear about. the age-related decline in memory capacity, in particular working memory, can be related to reductions in dopamine transmission in the brain. So things that increase the catecholamines that we talked about earlier.
This could be pharmacology, of course, but it doesn't have to be pharmacology. It could be anything that increases the catecholamines. And we talk about this on the podcast. We have zero cost protocols that you don't have to sign up for. You can just go to our website and go to dopamine regulation and it will list out ways to increase the catecholamines through zero cost and very low cost ways.
are known to improve working memory. Working memory, of course, the capacity to maintain a string of numbers or information for sake of kind of immediate goals, but not information that's passed to the longer term memory. So that's different than neurodegeneration. That's simply reductions in the amount of neuromodulators like dopamine being deployed as we get older.
So modulating dopamine through healthy, ideally, means But I do think we are going to see an increase in the use of selective pharmacology for this purpose. And here I'm not recommending anyone do drugs or take drugs, prescription or otherwise. But it does seem that certain compounds like nicotine, believe it or not, even though it increases vasoconstriction and blood pressure,
can offset some of the age-related reductions in dopaminergic and cholinergic acetylcholine, cholinergic transmission. And, you know, you don't want to smoke, vape, dip, or snuff.
I'm not even recommending people take Zin patches, but I think there is some use cases for nicotine, provided you're doing it with, you know, your physician knows and you're not getting into blood pressure, dangerous blood pressure problems, range or supplementation with choline donors and things of that sort to increase acetylcholine and dopamine.
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