 Hello, this is Tracy Takahama-Spinosa, and this is the Mind-Body Connection. Today, we're going to be considering the Mind-Body Connection in global terms, and then comparing this with these other ideas of well-being and quality of life, and what does it mean to have your body in good shape versus your mind or both. And we want to do this within the context of the great range of human variability. There is nobody who wants to try to dictate and say, this is the right diet for you, or this is the right exercise, or this is the right amount of sleep, because we know that there's huge human variation and that's very normal. So instead of prescribing things, we want to look at the risk and protective factors that use an individual might need to take into consideration when you're trying to find this balance in the Mind-Body Connection. So the three topics we'll look at today have to do with sleep, physical activity, and nutrition. One of the big ideas that we hope that you'll take away from this class is that your mental processes affect your physical states and that your physical body is influenced by how you feel and how you think. We can't just look at the concept of the neuroscience of learning as a purely cognitive concept. I just want to begin with a personal motto when I ran a small office here at a very small liberal arts school here. I would always tell my team members, you know, think in terms of priority, you know, health, family, and work. And, you know, keep your health in order and then make sure your family's doing all right and then come to work. And when I know that that's in place, I know that you're going to come 150 percent. And that's really important because it's evident to me that if you are in ill health or you do have a family problem, you won't be able to work at your best. And in fact, errors can occur when you're not at your best or at your peak and you can't focus on things when you don't have good health. So we know there's a huge connection between what you're able to do in terms of general performance, which is directly linked to your good health. And when we think of health, we think of it on different levels. We think of your physical health, but we also think of it as your mental health. So where did the original idea of the mind-body connection come from? This is René Descartes and his idea of, you know, I think therefore I am. So I know what I am and what I'm doing because I can be cognitively aware of this. But he made this distinction, this dualism that had more to do with, you know, the physical body in contrast with the immaterial mind or thoughts that an individual would have. And if we look at this in sort of a modern day context, he's, you know, dividing what is the body from the spirit in the mind or what is biological to what is psychological. So if we use this as our basic starting point, we can look at the idea that this was something that was considered a contrast. And nowadays we don't look at this as something that is, you know, either or, or this happens in comparison with, but rather these are intricate systems that work together. And another twist on the modern view is that we throw the brain in here, right? So if you think of the body, your brain is part of your body. So how do we then go from the brain to something that is the mind that is rather intangible? So we want to take it from this perspective where we're thinking of the mind-body connection. We do want to keep the brain and mind as well. So now let's look at this big idea of well-being and this other idea of quality of life. Well-being, you know, before originally and much of the literature in the late 60s had to do with, you know, financial well-being. And we've now kind of evolved to look at or consider, you know, well-being is not only just, you know, financial stability, but it also has to do with mental well-being. And we've moved also from this idea of just looking at the, at society. Do we have qualities of life in our society or well-being for the group? But also what does it mean to have an individual well-being? And this gets complex because you have to try to think, how am I going to measure well-being? So is well-being purely the physical? Does it have to do with the social? Or what does it have to do with my environment, the economic situation, psychological? Basically because you could have well-being in one area, but not the other. And that doesn't give you a balance. So there are even some programs that try to break it down for you to say, you know, you're 100% well in your body, but maybe not your mind, for example. And so how do you get that perfect balance where everything is really in sync? And there's other people, other programs who have sort of given you a checklist and said, you know, do I have a focus time? Am I able to concentrate on things to the level that they need to be? Do I have playtime where I have leisure, right? Do I have connecting time where I can be with other people or physical time where I can focus on my body? Or time in where I'm looking internally and meditating maybe or thinking about my internal self? Do I have downtime where I'm really just not doing anything? And do I have enough sleep time? All of these things are related to concepts of well-being. And it's very important that all of us think when we're looking at our own personal risk and protective factors, when do we feel at our best? What does it mean to have well-being? And what are the consequences then of what we do to our body that affect our mind and our general well-being in that sense? So it's important then to ask this big question, is the mind inextricably linked to the body? If you look at the Gallup's National Poll trying to define well-being, they have these big categories, you know, how is our social life and how is control or how is our positive living environment, or do we have peace of mind? And all of those things, if you break them down, it's very interesting to see that most of these things, well, we might think of them being maybe economically linked, they actually are related very much to, you know, the state of the body so that the mind can function well. So we know that, for example, a problem where a risk factor related to well-being in the United States has to do with obesity. But it's interesting, it's connected directly to economics. So income is more to blame for obesity than food choices or what people choose to eat. We also know that lack of exercise contributes to obesity. So the general risk factor of obesity has many roots to it, all based on choices that your mind makes about what to do to the body, right? So other circumstances also end up being indirectly linked to your body. For example, your work situation. People who are disengaged in work are more likely to smoke, for example, and engaged employees tend to have healthier lifestyles in general. So while you might not think of your work as being directly related to your body, we can see circumstances under which it actually is directly impacted by choices that you'll make. The Gallup poll also identified things about attitudinal things related to gender, optimistic outlook on life, or how emotionally impacting physical hardships are more on women, for example, than on men, or at least they're expressed that way. We also know related to economics, of course, not having employment leads to depression, and depression leads to deterioration of the body's ability to fight off disease, for example. And other external events, things that can happen to you. Earthquakes, tornadoes, natural disasters that you have no control over can also take its toll on your body for various reasons and consequently affect your mind's ability to function in its optimal state. So if we ask this question, is the mind inextricably linked to the body, then we have to also ask, is well-being then linked to the mind-body connection? And if we think of well-being as being this global concept that involves things like your ability to learn or work or have good housing situations or your stable family life, if you think of well-being as being this mixture of all of these different events, then we also have to ask ourselves, does your physical state, does your bodily state influence your ability, for example, to learn or your ability to have financial security, get the job you want, or your ability to have good health or the type of work you can get. So how does your physical state influence your ability to achieve well-being? And we can also ask ourselves, do all of these different sub-elements of well-being depend on a balance between the body and the mind or a positive mind-body connection? And to put this a bit more historical perspective, Maslow had this idea of a hierarchy of needs back in the 50s and he suggested that unless basic motivational needs are met, you cannot get to this higher level of interaction, cognition, reflection. So if we don't have basic physiological needs met that take care of our bodies, you know, have we eaten enough, have we slept enough, have we had a roof over our head, right? If we don't have those basics in place, it's very difficult to move up on a higher level of cognitive abilities. And so your ability to learn would be compromised. So if we look at this from Maslow's perspective, he would basically give it a thumbs up. Yes, it's very important that we have a strong connection, a strong positive connection between a good physical state of our body, a good mental state of our minds in order to reach higher cognitive levels. But thinking about quality of life, it's very hard to measure because it depends on what is valued by the individual. If you look at the literature, there's some things that look at how quality of life actually changed by how old you are, right? Or is quality of life good health or is it the absence of illness? We can think of quality of life as being culturally bound. There's different things that are valued in different social settings. And we can also look at quality of life as being relative to your current state. So what is the state of your economy now as compared with 20 years ago? Or what is the state of your country's health care system as compared to the past or what is promised for the future? So your relative situation can also lend itself to an interpretation of what quality of life actually means. So if we look at this as complementary terms, what is the difference then between well-being and quality of life? Many countries actually do a quality of life index in Europe. The euro stats actually collect information on what is quality of life in Europe. We also see that there's quality of life as measured, for example. This is the New Hampshire state evaluation. Quality of life relates to your standard of living or your family structure or the level of crime in your neighborhood or your personal health. So these are definitions of very macro terms of quality of life. The difference really being in macro and micro concepts, right? So quality of life measures that have a lot to do with things that you don't have a lot of control over. So the crime rate in your neighborhood, for example, whereas well-being has to do with things that you actually can take control over. So if we look at quality of life, it's this more global thing that involves elements of the economy, culture, welfare and environment. This concept of well-being and health is very much something that we see at the level of an individual. So the big question is then how can you improve well-being and improve your quality of life? So you can take this approach of doing basic checklists, looking at the dimensions of quality of life and or stages or steps to improving your quality of life or you can take this reflective stage and decide that it's not really possible for somebody else to dictate to you what would be the measurements of your well-being or your quality of life? Why? Because we have to look at this huge idea of human variability. What might be good for you might not be good for me. So if we ask ourselves, is there a single formula for well-being or quality of life? We might say that most human beings, going back to Maslow's idea, most human beings really need these basic needs met before they can go up higher on the scale, but when you look at those basic needs you'll also find that there's a huge range of human variability within all of those things. So it does behoove each individual to really think about what is it what are the risk and protective factors in my setting that create quality of life for me based on these different elements that impact my body that influence my mind. So key message, there is no one size fits all prescription. There's no perfect diet that suits everyone and there's no perfect sleep pattern that satisfies everybody. There's no exercise regime that responds basically because we're all individual. You are unique. Remember we talked about this in week one and two related to your genome and your phenotype and how this is all impacted by the environment you live in. So different people are going to combine these needs in different ways. Your own personal recipe for what is quality of life based on this balance between your body and your mind will be unique even though we can say there are certain parameters. So what we'd like to do is to ask you to reflect during this class on different risk and protective factors. Remember we discussed this in one of the first classes. Those things that enhance the probability of blocking a natural state would be a risk factor. What is it that's keeping you from having this great balance between your body and mind? And what are the things that are actually protective factors that help promote a natural state of learning? We'd also want you to think about this from a very macro state to also down to your micro state. So we'll reflect on this big question. What are some of the risk and protective factors in your life related to the mind-body connection? And we'll look at these three areas right now and I'd like you to keep a pencil by your side and jot down some of the things that you find are risk or protective factors in your own personal context. So if we look at sleep, there are certain characteristics of sleep that are important to understand. Most humans spend about 25% of their time in the sleep state in the rapid eye movement or REM state in which you are dreaming and sleep typically occurs in cycles. People normally call these four stages of sleep. Some people cut five when you're actually in full awake state but these different cycles of sleep and each time you go through one of these cycles it takes about 90 minutes. There are people who can actually shorten their sleep cycles which is why some people can sleep in short amounts of time but still have the benefits of going through all of the stages of sleep. They're distinct physical areas related to sleep versus dreaming. So REM sleep is controlled by the quarantine brainstem mechanisms. Dreaming is controlled by forebrain mechanisms which is really, really interesting. It's very different. So if we say is REM sleep always equal to dreaming. This means that REM can occur with or without dreaming. So REM is not 100% always dreaming. So REM can occur with or without dreaming and dreaming it and REM itself are actually controlled by different mechanisms. REM is controlled by brainstem mechanisms and dreams seem to be controlled by dopamagenic forebrain mechanisms. Having said that if I were to wake you up in a REM state if I'm looking at a person and they eyes are moving under their eyelids right as if they're watching a movie they're in rapid eye movement state. If you wake up somebody in that state almost every single time you do that they are waking up from a dream. So if they're in REM they're actually waking up for a dream state. However dreaming is also present in a small percentage of non-REM awakenings as well. So in general we can't say it's 100% but there is a high correlation between REM sleep and dreaming. So there's not only different changes that you'll see related to the electrical activity in the brain. The stages of sleep are measured by electrical activity but they're also modulated by chemical changes in the brain. So according to Hobson studies REM sleep is mediated by acetylcholine when neural adrenaline and serotonin are at low levels. And dreaming shows an association with a lack of neural adrenaline and serotonin in the REM sleep activated brain. And this is important to know why because neural adrenaline and serotonin are known to be necessary for attention, for learning, and for memory. So if we look at different networks of the brain there's a different cortical area. When a person is actually hallucinating you'll see a lot of activity in the parietal lobes and this is associated with dream states. So, and they address a lot of prefrontal cortex so when someone enters a dream state there's reduced memory there's confused direction of thought there's decrease of self-reflective awareness and a decrease in logical reasoning that occurs while someone is dreaming. So the big question is always, you know, why do people sleep? We know that there's at least two big reasons one is to take over your body and the other is to take over your mind. Most people find it instinctive to say that your body needs to rest, that you need to be physically attentive therefore your body needs to rest. This is very true. But how is it that your body regenerates physically? This has a lot to do with thermal regulation. So when dreaming acetylcholine is present and effectively this allows the brain to to reduce the level of thermal regulation and this allows the body to regenerate physically. So related to the brain in mind we know that the REM sleep subserves the consolidation of memories. This began by Hobson and continued now by Stickels work at Harvard that shows that there's a combination of neurotransmitters in the brain that's present uniquely present during REM sleep that actually solidifies memories in the brain. Remember we mentioned this in the class that you might have as a teacher you might have a student who stayed up all night or you yourself as students might have stayed up all night and you show up to the test and you do great on the test. And then you go home, flop on the bed and you go to sleep for a while. You might do great on the test but if I ask you the exact same question about 24 hours later you won't remember anything because you did not sleep on it. You did not consolidate that memory and pass it to long-term memory which is what really counts for learning. So this brings us to the main idea of why sleep and dreaming are very important to learning. We know that memory and attention are vital to learning. If you don't have memory you don't have learning. If you don't have attention you don't have learning. Well dreaming permits for the consolidation of memory and sleep allows for focused attention. So both of those things contribute to your learning outcomes. And related to this sleep impacts your active working memory and dreaming impacts your long-term memory. So both sleep and dreaming are related to memory systems as well as to attention systems. So sleep permits the body and the mind to be focused and to pay attention. Sleep also permits the body and the mind to perform consistently. Anybody who has had a lack of sleep understands that you can sort of get away with it short-term. If you're really interested in your activity and your focus tightly motivated you can get away with sleeping less than what is your personal normal. However there'll be a bill to pay later on. Sleep curtailment compromises your ability to be attentive, to organize, to read, to write, to listen, to tell. So you really need to have those skill sets in place and you can only do that if you have a good night's sleep. If you have sleep deprivation for long periods of time, let's say for you know two to three days long, you'll end up having really bizarre dreams due to your brain being bathed in certain neurotransmitters that are just waiting to be released, right? Sleep deprivation also leads to negative things for your body. There's higher risk of infection, loss of body temperature regulation so we know that you pay at a price for not sleeping what is normal for you. And we say you pay a price when you don't sleep what is normal for you. There are people who are short sleepers, they sleep four to six hours a day, that's no more abnormal or unusual than long sleepers, people who sleep eight, ten, twelve hours a day. The average might be eight hours but that is not necessarily what anybody really does and we also have to take into consideration that people don't always sleep the same amount each day and the structure of sleep based on social problems or climate or your own personal experience will change your sleep patterns. An interesting study by Hobson that's not reported here today but I'd like to share it with you is that when he did experiments with people in sensory deprivation tanks, when they had no sense of what time of day it was, they couldn't hear things that gave them an indication as to the time of day they didn't see the sunlight. People in those situations actually slept something closer to a 25 hour cycle instead of a 24 hour cycle and basically nobody will sleep eight hours. Most people will sleep for about four or five hours and they'll get up and they'll be up for about four or five hours, six hours, then they'll go back to sleep for a few more hours and then they'll wake up again. This idea of having a eight hour pattern of sleep and then going to work for eight hours is very much socially contrived. It's something that your human body might not naturally do on its own. Finally I want to introduce this idea of efficient or productive sleep. There are records in history of people who basically say they can resolve problems in their sleep. Einstein, Tchaikovsky, there are many people who said they did their best creative work while they were sleeping. While no new learning can take place while you're asleep, like you can't put a tape recording under your head and you can learn Arabic by tomorrow morning, that just doesn't happen. You can review information you have already learned in a conscious state. So this is why people can say yes, I woke up and I have resolved this problem where I went to bed with this idea and I've now come to a better conclusion about that idea. As sleep is a behavior, like all behaviors it can be modified. So you can learn to sleep more efficiently. You can change your pattern of sleep and you can also learn to be productive in your sleep. So when can productive sleep take place? If you look at Hobson's work, he suggests that during lucid dreaming basically just before you're about to fall into sleep, it's this moment when you know you're not really asleep but you know you're not really awake it's almost a meditative state so just before you go into a sleep stage, you can give yourself an idea. You can consider something. You can rehearse something in your mind think this is something I'd like to think about or dream about. So this is a moment this is the moment of sleep onset which he suggests is a particularly fruitful time to decide what you'd like to dream. So let's say though however you let's just say that you don't want to resolve a problem but let's say that you want to dream of flying or that you want to do something that's particularly interesting to you that attracts you. This would be a wonderful dream to have. That's the moment that you should give yourself that idea. Unfortunately because many people have poor sleep hygiene. You fall asleep watching the TV or for some other reason you don't take the time to train yourself to sleep better. So if I were to ask you during productive sleep what are some of the ways that dreams can be used to solve problems? And who are some of the people that you've heard of that have used their dreams to solve problems? And what are some of the characteristics of problems that can be solved while sleeping? Are they concrete problems? Are they abstract problems? Are they questions of form? Do they have to do with content? Remember you cannot do any new learning in sleep but you can resolve problems based on tools that you already have in your conscious state. Finally the last point has to do with sleep throughout the life span. We do know that sleep decreases throughout the life span at 26 weeks of gestation when the baby is still inside the mother the baby would be in REM state almost 24 hours that's something really interesting to look into right? And newborns spend an average about 16 hours a day in REM and one year old is 12 hours a day sleeping in about 3 hours in REM. But when you get down to being a bit older hit about 30, 40, 50, 70 years old people sleep far less but their REM sleep regulates goes anywhere from an hour and a half to two and a half hours of REM sleep. So what is happening there? Is this due to a change in balance of hormones? Is this due to a change in a lack of need for sleep states? Why is it that older adults then sleep far less than younger adults would? So to wrap up the sleep portion I want to show you a quick video on what is good sleep hygiene? It's just a four minute video but it talks about some of the key elements related to sleeping well and I'd like to ask you if you personally believe that you have good sleep hygiene. Most people when asked will tell you they just don't sleep enough. Almost nobody feels like they sleep enough. So is there some way that you can retrain yourself to sleep better or are there things that are preventing you in your environment from sleeping well? So let's look at this video and then we'll have a think about that right afterwards. This is Sleep Better TV I'm Scott Drake and we welcome back into the studio my guest Dr. Jacques Ebert once again he practices dentistry and treats sleep breathing disorders in Montreal, Quebec. Now this time we're talking about sleep hygiene. Dr. Ebert welcome back. What exactly is sleep hygiene? Sleep is a part of our life that we seem to get less and less as we go along with our busy life and very busy schedule. There's no reason why we shouldn't be able to get a good night's sleep and you don't have to be a snoreworm or have a diagnosis of sleep apnea to make changes and then to people to get a good night's sleep. Even people who don't suffer from this condition can benefit from making simple changes around bedtime to get a good night's sleep. A series of simple recommendation and changes to get a better night's sleep are basically what we call sleep hygiene. Can you give us some good recommendations for proper sleep hygiene? Some of those recommendations are as follow. First one should be to get a regular schedule. Meaning that you're trying to go to bed at the same time every night and also wake up at the same time every morning. This just settles everything around there so you're more relaxed when it comes time to go to bed and wake up in the morning. Second one the bedroom should be used only for sleep and intimacy. Don't bring your computer to bed it will stop you from going to sleep. Third one if you lay awake in bed trying to fall asleep limit that to 20 minutes. After 20 minutes if you're not asleep get out of the room, go do something and just come back to the bedroom only when you feel sleepy and ready to go to bed. Another one the bedroom should be dark should be peaceful no loud noise and should be set at very cool temperature. Also you have to avoid drinking alcohol or beverages at least 3 to 5 hours prior to going to bed. Also caffeine limit your consumption of caffeine to 1 to 2 cups a day and then no later than 6 hours before going to bed. And then we all know that exercise is very good for you you should exercise daily but you have to avoid strenuous exercise routine at least 3 hours or 3 and a half hours before going to bed. Finally what are some signs of poor sleep hygiene? The main indicators of what we would call poor sleep hygiene are excessive daytime sleepiness or fatigue or just simply having problems finish our day and then just going back to at home at night and then feeling like we're exhausted. It could also be problems falling asleep or even staying asleep or most of the time most of the people will mention that they suffer from frequent awakening. They wake up often during the night and sleep and they awake again. And basically everything that will disturb you sleep and make you fatigued during the day. Those are the signs that we usually look at to start with. My guest is Ben Dr. Jaquet Baer who practices dentistry and sleep breathing disorder therapy in Montreal, Quebec. Dr. Rae Baer thank you again. Well thank you for inviting me. You're watching Sleep Better TV you can see more at sleepbetter.tv This is a good transition then into the next topic that has to do with physical activity. So what is physical activity? If I were to ask you can you name all the things that you might do in a day that are physical activity? And so it pretty much ranges from absolutely everything from sitting meditative activities doing martial arts to doing anything super active and intensive extreme sports. So all of that can be considered physical activity. And people are quick to associate benefits of physical activity with your body. But does this also help your mind or your brain? The Center for Disease Control and Prevention notes that there's benefits of physical activity that have to do with weight control risk for cardiovascular disease reducing risk for diabetes and for some cancers and for strengthening muscle tone. All of those things are physically related but are there things that are related to physical activity and improvement related to the mind connection as well as to the body? People are always reflecting now what is the right amount of physical activity? If you look at different government bodies they might suggest things. For example, if you do two hours and 30 minutes or 150 minutes a week of brisk walking for example or if you do two or more days a week that we're working all of your muscle groups, your legs, your hips, your back, your abdomen or 75 minutes a week doing something like jogging. Or two days a week if you do a lot of strenuous exercise through all of your different body parts, legs, hips, back, abdomen, chest, shoulders, arms or alternatively if you do aerobic activity once or twice a week these are general guidelines and recommendations and obviously different people will need different things and different people will enjoy things. Some people just love doing physical exercise and they can do every single day of the week do something and feel really good about it and find that they push themselves. So there's other alternatives. There's these exercise pyramids or these physical exercise pyramids that says well you can either do this or you can do that or you can do this or you can do that. So if on a daily basis you're walking and taking care of your garden that's okay, that's pretty much as just as well as if you twice a week did some heavy aerobic exercise. So the idea is that this should be part of your weekly routine. Are you fitting in physical exercise for your body but also for your mind? So we know related to the neurochemistry of exercise that there's an increase in or pronephrinum, serotonin acetylcholine and GABA. These different neurotransmitters as you recall and you can also look back at the section on neurotransmitters are very beneficial and are directly related to aspects of learning. So how does the physical activity improve cognitive functioning? One of the key ways aside from these other neurotransmitters as mentioned has to do with brain derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF which is related to nerve growth neurogenesis and is very key in long-term memory. This is shown to increase during not only environmental enrichment so maybe at a cognitive level but also due to physical exercise. But this like all of the other things we mentioned it can be risk or protective factors so you can have factors will put at risk the BDNF if you are depressed for example. It can be a protective factor if you have enhanced physical activity for example in active state. So we know that BDNF is very important for learning and it can be influenced by both your mental state as well as what you do to your body physically. So there's multiple studies that show that BDNF is shown to increase with physical exercise. So this is well documented in literature. In the earlier studies you'll find that a lot of this has a lot to do with other types of physical exercise. There's a lot of evidence especially through sports medicine analysis of how this is improved in human beings. To give you a global sense of how physical exercise can improve potential for learning I'd like to show you a quick video. Exercise is interesting in terms of the effects on the brain because it works in about four or five different ways. One of the most obvious ways is blood flow. So if you get your heart working it's sort of interesting is it's been thought that exercise produces new neurons. So exercise induces the production of growth factors one's called BDNF and it actually stimulates the production of new brain cells. Now when I was in school 20 years ago we were told you can't get any new brain cells so when you're born that's your lot. You're not going to make any more. But more recently we found that exercise is a really good way of stimulating brain cell production to function well and so just this notion that something that you can do can generate new brain cells is a really great thing to think about. We were wondering why exercise helps the brain and what one theory is it just reduces stress. So maybe it's not that your blood is coming to the brain maybe you're less stressed and then that was something that imaging allowed us to test and so we scanned a whole lot of people with high cortisol levels so if you're stressed, if you're angry about something or even if you're stuck in traffic, your cortisol levels can be very high. One of the things we found is that the people with high cortisol levels lost brain tissue faster well that's a serious problem so as soon as you know that's true you can look at ways of reducing your cortisol and so that's a very easy thing to do. We can get less stressed by exercising, walking, taking breaks so imaging established a physical connection between something in your blood, cortisol that's a sign of stress, an actual physical change in the brain that's very useful to know. Take care of your brain and there's a lot of ways we know that you can take care of your brain, you can eat a good diet, you can exercise, you can reduce stress you can make sure you're well educated and these things just build up a sort of mental bank account for the future and so even though it seems like work is hard when you're building a store of brain connections that you'll need for the rest of your life so these are practical messages that we've learned from imaging a lot of people. So this begs the question you know what types of exercise would actually be beneficial or what could we recommend with without reservation and there seems to be a lot of studies related to aerobic exercise but there's a big debate that's still out whether or not they should be short term intensive aerobic exercise if these should be very prolonged aerobic exercise for longer periods of time but in general we know that acute intermediate intensive exercise for not too long of a time seems to show in several studies that this is beneficial to your brain. In a key study by Chadda Cayman and colleagues which looked at young children, 7 to 10 years old, they wanted to see what was the relationship between physical activity, aerobic fitness, cognition in the brain and it was noted that you know higher fit children, kids who are already in shape they had larger brain volumes in the basal ganglia and hippocampus which have to do with long term memory and they also found that higher fit children also show superior brain function during tasks with cognitive control better scores on tests and higher performance in real world tasks compared to children who are less fit so obviously the big question when you look at research is ok what caused what you know where they fit and then that caused better cognition or were they just smart which is why they stayed fit so it's the chicken and the egg thing we're not quite sure what it does but there does seem to be a positive correlation between physical activity, aerobic fitness and cognition in the brain if we look at the cell biology and immunology related to exercise so in fascinating new studies out this was just out last December showed that exercise initiated in early life increases gut bacterial species involved in promoting psychological and metabolic health to show that exercise during this early developmental period promoted optimal brain and metabolic functions across the lifespan so again just like other things when we say you know the earlier the better it's never too late but the earlier the better may be beneficial to long term physical as well as mental health finally there's a large group of studies related to exercise and cognitive decline there is evidence that exercise serves to stave off cognitive decline dementia and Alzheimer's disease also thanks to BDNF so this is especially important to take into consideration as the world has a aging population we have learned very uh to pretty you know high extent how to take care of our bodies what we have not been able to do is perfect how to take care of our minds that go along with these aging bodies so people are getting older and older but are we offering them quality of life if we keep your body alive but your brain but your mind is gone you know what what does that mean is that really quality of life I'll share with you parenthetically that I am I come from pretty good stock you know my mother's mother died when she was 98 years old so my grandmother her mind was so sharp until the day she died she was terribly sharp but about years before she died she would start to complain bitterly about her body and she just you know she even told me once on the phone you know I don't think human beings were meant to live this long um she goes I can't get my body to do what it needs to be doing now I don't know why just I didn't cooperate it was like well you're 98 years old that's why your body is not cooperating but in the case then of though my my great grandfather on my father's side my father's mother's father my paternal grandfather my father's father also lived to be 97 years old but his his mind went before his body went and um it was really hard on all of us so it's very hard to know how can we find this compatibility level where you've got your mind and your body in sync about 10 years before he went we would go and visit and he would look at us and he would say things like um I don't remember your name but I know I like you and so you know he's losing it and he was you know sansom guy very charming fellow but he lost it mentally before he lost it physically and so in the case of my mother's mother she lost it you know physically before she lost it mentally so you know nobody knows exactly what the best way is to go but ideally you know you could have in sync this you know optimal body functioning as well as your optimal brain functioning for as long as possible so this big questions and looking at physical exercise in aging populations is a very big area of research right now that is very promising very interesting and well worth looking into a study done by Ericsson and colleagues noted that physical activity is a promising intervention that can influence endogenous pharmacology of the brain to enhance cognitive and emotional function in late adulthood so whereas we say the general rule is start as early as possible to get in these habituated actions of taking care of your body you can even start late and after four or five years of intervention they found that there was definite benefits okay now we're going to turn to the last topic that has to do with nutrition and the big question is always you know what's the diet for the brain what should we actually eat for your brain you got a lot of people who are really willing to tell you all this great advice and say oh this do this do that to the other thing the problem is they're not really all saying the same thing they're all saying kind of different things so this leaves us you know wondering what is really the perfect diet for your brain and again there is no such thing because depending on your individual physiology maybe need things different from somebody else there was recent article that came out last week and on the best diet for your brain and the bottom line of the article is basically saying there is no perfect diet but there are a lot of good indicators now so I want to share some of those findings with you so the authors of this article found that people who eat well tend to have other healthy habits as well so this makes you wonder whether or not just having a healthy diet is really what's taking care of that brain or not or it's the combination of having a healthy diet and also doing exercise and having good sleep hygiene that's actually benefiting the individual and they also noted the outset you know good eating also does reduce things such as depression and straight away there is no doubts diets that include fish with high omega 3 fatty acids have been recommended pretty much across the board what are other things that they found so aside from the omega 3s they found that fermented foods such as yogurt pickles sauerkraut they also help things like anxiety and things like green tea and antioxidant fruits in longer term studies they are indicating that they may help keep dementia at bang there are other researchers who are looking at the connection not only for depression but for other emotional states as well as to cardiovascular disease those things are pretty straight forward your brain is an organ just like you know your heart so if you have no other rule of thumb the best ideas to get what's good for your heart is probably good for your brain what jack and colleagues found and this is true with many studies it's always easier to prove something negative rather than something positive is that western diets appear to reduce the size of a left to a campus meaning it's worse for your brain and memory things there is also other studies cited here that have to do with this fellow I don't know if you recall he went on a 10 day binge and only ate McDonald's and showed that he had higher levels of fatigue and other things so it's easier to prove a negative than it is to prove a positive or to get away from any additional studies and look at causal studies in this article they do a comparison between three very popular diets that have been toted as being good for your brain the Mediterranean diet the Okinawan diet and the Scandinavian diet and what they seem to have in common is that fruits vegetables nuts whole grains fish lean meats and moderation olive oil a little red wine here and there those things tend to appear and all of these diets and tend to be beneficial for the individual and there to you and colleagues also found that the diet may actually preserve neuronal connections in the brain so this may be beneficial in maintaining the connections between neurons in the brain and Morrison colleagues also found that combining the Mediterranean diet with also just low salts may help slow cognitive decline and possibly help prevent Alzheimer's they did a study on 960 delts over five years time and they found that people who were on this Mediterranean diet with also less salt achieved scores matching those of people who have been half years younger so there is something to this over time they're finding these longitudinal studies that the change in diet can be beneficial even if the change in diet happens in old age itself let's have a quick look at another video that summarizes some of the best ideas that we have now about nutrients in the brain let me tell you how miserable my mornings are without breakfast I hate everyone yes everyone even that old lady who took the last seat on the train I hate you hey guys Julie here for D news do we need breakfast? I mean your mom always tells you you need to eat it but do you really need to? a recent study published in the journal public economics says yes the researchers found that schools that provided free breakfast for their students had better test scores than those that didn't the kids performed 25% better in math and had similar gains in other areas like reading but this news isn't entirely new breakfast is often heralded as the most important meal of the day there are loads of studies that show just how important it is for learning and memory but it might not have the weight loss benefits you think anyways is it breakfast that helps give your brain a boost or is it the type of food you eat? I mean the brain consumes a lot of energy almost 20% of the energy we consume goes to the brain some researchers say that the brain functions best when there's 25 grams of glucose circulating through the bloodstream so really you should keep that as level as possible any spike or dip can leave you feeling off so maybe eating more frequent smaller meals throughout the day can help you avoid a post-lunch crash but is there a way to hack your brain with food is there such a thing as brain food? I was always told to eat a banana before a test curcumin and omega-3 seem to be buzzing around the blogosphere of late and that may have some truth to it according to a paper published in the national review of neuroscience these nutrients less than cognitive decline in the elderly and improve cognition in people with brain injuries your typical sources of omega-3 are in fish like salmon and in other things like flax seeds and walnuts. Curcumin can be found mostly in turmeric a type of spice other nutrients like iron and B vitamins help memory and brain function in women while diets high in saturated fats tend to do the opposite omega-3 is another micronutrients might be the heavy hitters of brain food one study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that a cocktail of omega-3's iron zinc, folate, and vitamins A, B6, B12, and C helped kids in Australia and Indonesia do better on learning and memory tests a study published in the journal Appetite by some of the same researchers found that foods low on the glycemic index are better for breakfast the glycemic index rates food based on how it affects your glucose levels or level of sugar the study found that yes, kids' memory and cognitive function do decline throughout the morning but a low GI breakfast reduced that decline more than a breakfast with a high GI low GI foods are like fruits and vegetables or maybe even oatmeal so a good breakfast might be a bowl of oatmeal with a banana rather than a bowl of sugary cereal a balanced diet with fish and fruits and veggies seems to be good for the brain eating breakfast might keep you perkier in the morning so you're more alert to learn more so before a big test, eat a good breakfast no not sugary cereals what is your go-to test food? let us know in the comments below and why you're at it, hit those like and subscribe buttons and keep coming back here we've got new episodes every day of the week okay so some things we can debate about in that video but summarizing a lot of the big ideas that we're just trying to present here there's another thing that's very important it was mentioned in this last video of certain vitamins but it's very important to remember Emily Deans at the Harvard Medical School points out that it's better to get your nutrients from food rather than supplement so bottom line and always a good guide is as close to its source as possible in order to maintain the key nutrients that are in the foods you're ingesting so there exists an international society for nutritional psychiatry research what they point out is that the emerging and compelling evidence for nutrition as a crucial factor in the high prevalence and incidence of mental disorders so if we look at this as a grand continuum of whether or not you're basically looking at nutrients in order to sustain or maintain a basic level or to learn even more this is actually saying this is a protective factor for things that might be negative for mental disorders so they suggest that diet is as important to psychiatry as it is to cardiology endocrinology and gastroenterology but the big question again we keep going back to this idea is there such a thing as a perfect diet and if I ask you this I would like to also attach to this idea are diets culturally bound not everybody has all foods in all places recommending everybody eat salmon all the time is a great idea if your country has salmon that's easily accessible or not out of your price range so if we look at this from a cultural vantage point it's also pretty interesting on the left you'll have Harvard's new idea of a healthy eating plate getting away from the typical pyramid they went on to look at proportions or based on how your plate might look now not as a pyramid but we have a larger and larger number of people who are becoming vegetarians or vegans so here we have a vegan pyramid then you have things that look like a Mediterranean diet which includes things down here at the bottom so down here you have dancing as well as high level of socializing which is part of the diet if you look in Japan though they have an inverted pyramid pretty interesting what kinds of things do you really need including your exercise level the proportions of things that you should have in your daily fare in the more traditional food pyramid this is how it was divided before we had this plate that Harvard has now this is considered an Iranian diet which has a far greater number of fruits and vegetables meat proteins that don't come from things like fish but they do have things with chicken for example and then a typical Asian diet pyramid so instead of putting all these breads and grains that are more like rice and noodles so anyways on the whole you can say that the general nutrients that you might find are going to be relatively similar because humans need more or less the same kinds of things but it's really important to consider that there's no real perfect diet because they will have lots of cultural considerations and also your access to certain foods so remember I told you when we began this that there were many people who were willing to give a lot of advice about what the best diet would be for your brain and there were many cultural restraints in those recommendations so we end by looking at this idea again remembering, reminding ourselves that there's huge human variability and so there's nothing that's going to be 100% for all people all the time in all places so now let's look at yourself what are your risk and protective factors and do limit it for the sake of this reflection to these three areas of sleep physical activity, nutrition obviously there's other things that have to do with sleep balance including things like sex and shelter and all these other things we haven't talked about but let's limit your reflection to these three areas of sleep physical activity and nutrition what are the risk factors in your life right now is your sleep hygiene at risk is your physical activity at risk for what reasons nutrition wise what is the risk factor that's involved there or do you have protective factors so have you mindfully incorporated protective factors into your practice so that you can take care of your body so your body can take care of your mind so that your mind can take care of your body in this infinite circle what is the balance of your risk and protective factors related to the mind-body connection so I want to invite you to take a moment think about those risk factors think about the protective factors and how you might be able to move yourself towards a better balance of elements related to sleep, physical activity thank you very much, if you have any questions please shoot me an email and I'll see you next week