Augmenting the Brain, Part One: Chemicals

there are things that squishy, you know. I wasn't actually going to make this a guessing game. I was just going to tell you tell me about brains, John, I was just gonna say that we were going to consider them in general to be good things to possess, right, to be able to think and problems solve and anticipate things. This is these generally good traits. I I enjoy mine

about fifty of the time. That's more than half. Yeah, you'll notice that in the animal kingdom, or let's say, in nature more generally, organisms that don't have brains usually are not very funny. They don't have much good technology, yeah. Yeah, their stand up comedy is lackluster at best. Yeah, it's pedestrian truly. Yeah. Okay, so we probably all agree that we have the power to develop our minds through education, right, so we should learn new skills and absorb new knowledge.

But what I want to talk about today is whether we have the power to actually increase our base aptitudes in things like memory, reasoning, focus, all of the abilities that make up what we call intelligence or brain power. So can a person tune up his or her brain and simply make it a more effective machine. Also, we should just go ahead and address this right off the bat. I didn't put this in the notes, but we really it's one of those things that I'm sure all of

our listeners already know. But unlike the popular depiction in media, such as in films like Lucy, we do in fact use of our brains. Where the whole idea of you only use ten percent and if if you could just unlock that other of gray matter that's just laying dormant inside your skull, you could fly and look like Scarlett Johanssen. Yeah. What I've always thought about this is, um, if you only use ten percent of your brain, how come brain

injury matters. I mean, wouldn't like nine percent of brain injuries miss the part that you use, or or you would just have another dormant part of the brain take the place of the injured part. Thus you essentially have have greater life in that brain. That that's one of those that's such nonsense. I don't even know how it got started unless it's just one of those things that was just where a metaphor came to be taken literal by accident, Like somebody was just saying, oh, you know,

we have untapped potential. We probably only use ten percent of our brains. And they didn't even mean it literally, or they minute some way of saying, like ten percent of your brain is dedicated to cognitive thought and the other nine is to everything else that the brain does. Even even then it's really misleading at any rate. So we're not going to talk about the ability to suddenly unlock some potential in your brain that otherwise will remain untapped.

We're talking about actually making your brain work better. So it's still gonna be working, it's just now it is more efficient that it's able to pack more in that than it was before. And uh, this in this particular episode, we wanted to really look at the ways you could do so through either dietary changes, chemicals, this kind of thing. How because our brains are electrochemical organs, right, they communicate through electrochemical uh processes, and so it's not a huge

surprise that chemicals and affect that. But before we get into all that, we should probably look back on just the idea of how humans as a species, how how we've seen our brain sizes increase over the ages. Right over the last seven million years or so, the human brain has nearly tripled in size. A lot of that growth took place over the last two million years, actually partially because in general, the more healthier diet, the larger our brains could get. So the development of agriculture was

a big step up from us as hunter gatherers. Access to a variety of foods also helped. And some researchers are speculating that when humans began eating meat, you know, which we can see in the fossil record as human teeth marks on bones about two point three million years ago, they speculate that that led to our brains to start really growing. And you know that that when we started cooking our food. That helped a lot more as well, because we can get more nutri shin out of it

when we have cooked it. Now, our brains haven't been growing steadily this entire time. Eventually, as agriculture became organized and then industrialized, and also as we didn't need to, you know, to raw food really hard, our our skulls and brains began to shrink a little over the past

like ten thousand years or so. But there's a lot of friendly scientific disagreement among various researchers in various fields about what humans have done or haven't done exactly to make that happen, and furthermore, whether we can change our

brains on purpose. Absolutely, And then there's also just the uh, Unfortunately, there's also all on misinformation out there for from various individuals, organizations, companies, whatever, that are trying to market specific substances that are supposed to give specific effects and may or may not have any actual scientific foundation to make such claim. So it's a complicated substance subject, certainly, and it's it's not all

necessarily malicious. I mean, there have been many instances in history where people had the best of intentions but just we're operating under a very basic misunderstanding of what's going on in the brain. Yeah, I suggest we take a brief stroll through history and look at what people have thought in the past the brain did, and ideas they might have had about how its powers could be improved. So what I mean, when did we figure out that

the brain was for thinking on a universal timeline? Actually? Yeah, like about about it was pretty late, right when I read the script? Yeah, yeah, no, Um, folks have been pretty confused about the brain's functions and and our capacity to influence it for most of history, starting in ancient Egypt.

Is really when we have record of this by way of uh, the the Egyptian funerary practice, which dictated that the brain just kind of be discarded during the embalming process because the heart was considered the seat of knowledge. And you've probably heard about that before. Yeah, but how about the fact that this theory still dominated around four

hundred and fifty BC, thousands of years later. Okay, that's when Alcman, who was a Greek physician around that time, wrote down for the first time that we can determine now in modern history, Um, that the brain was actually important. It wasn't just something that you had to pull out through the nose and discard in a little trash urn. Yes, um, And like a hundred years after that, even Aristotle stated that the brain is basically just a radiator designed to

keep the heart at at its appropriate temperature. And it wasn't until dissection and comparison of human brains with animal brains became more widespread. Circle like three hundred BC two two D b C or b C E I should be saying all of this time that the idea of the brain being responsible for memory and intelligence was actually popularized.

That's really interesting to me. It makes me wonder what people in the ancient world thought when someone suffered a head injury and their their ability to uh to to function would be impaired, And wonder how they they were able to reconcile that with this belief of that the

heart the heart of thought. Oh. Interestingly enough, there's also records from a few physicians and more kind of like lower class physicians that we're doing preliminary, kind of crude research, albeit into how to fix brain injuries and help people out for for all of this time, but it wasn't really popular. It wasn't the common widely held aristocratic belief certainly then, Okay, Starting around a hundred and seventy b c E. We got the Roman physician Galen's ideas about humors.

And I'm sure that everyone's heard of this kind of thing. It's one of my favorite terrific, completely untrue things. It's the no it's the concept that the balance of four fluids being blood, FLGM, color, and black file are responsible for a person's mental and physical health. And furthermore, that

the brain is a gland that creates those four humors. Right, so you have an imbalance of humors when you are not well, and depending upon your your your symptoms, you have a deficiency or surplus of a certain humor and they must be rebalanced. I still go to a physician who does this. Your primary care physician doesn't know. Well, it's funny got out of this around a thousand. See, we still have it in our language, right, like you can be really sanguine about something, or you can be

flegmatic flegmatic however you say that word phlegmatic automatic. But so this this theory persisted for like a thousand years, okay, and it was just the idea that the brain was basically only a place where this fluid developed and that was all it was really good for. When we finally started getting out of that concept, the Church went ahead and banned human dissection in anatomical study as desecrations of

the body. So, uh, we didn't really get any more research into the brain for another four or five hundred years. Are you saying you're in favor of desecration? Yeah? Actually scientifically speaking, so okay, it wasn't until about the sixteen hundreds or so that we started to actually understand anything about the brain and it's and its functions, um, at which point we promptly continued to bork the entire business.

Uh So, powdered human skulls, dissolved brains, and even the moss that grew on unburied heads was thought to improve various brain related conditions from like the sixteen hundreds to the nineteen hundreds. I feel like that's part of a sort of common way of thinking about medicine in the olden days, which is, if something touches something or if it's like something that's what you use. It's a type

of magical thinking. Yeah, sure, sure, And I mean specifically, I'm talking about cannibalism, not about the in in Western culture at any rate, it was mostly cannibalism and not animal brains and skulls. So I mean, like, to the point that duties were placed on skulls imported to England from the battlefields of Ireland in the seventeen hundreds. Is that big of a thing that people were like, we could tax this and make some money, y'all. That's okay,

all right, Well, how about something closer to modern time. Yeah, in better news. Coca cola back when it you know, actual facts, had cocaine in it in the eighteen hundreds, was sold as and I quote, the ideal brain tonic. There were, in fact, a lot of cures, cures in quotation marks being sold around that time for neurasthenia a k A, nervous exhaustion a k A. Basically any mental health issue one could possibly have, um, most of which were just us and whatever else seemed good at the

time to grind up and putting booze. There were just yeah, you know, mental health problems weren't all booze. I'm sure that part of that was it says it cures everything. It's got to work. One of the one of the rural synonyms for coke for coca cola is dope. Did you guys know that? Yeah, and certain areas of the southeast it was referred to just as dope because it was known to have, you know, stimulants in it, so

it was doped with stuff. Um, And it was you know, supposed to be this kind of approach to you know, the sort of tonic exactly as you were saying that, it was not considered necessarily just a drink, but also a potential cure for things. Um. As it turns out. We'll we'll return to stimulants a little bit later in this episode and talk about how those are currently being um uh, experimented with as far as brain function goes. Yeah, these days many remedies that are on the market are

a little bit more reliable. However, you know, there's still a lot of claims that go on and f d A not approved kind of warning labels that packaging is required to have on them if, for example, it's totally not been checked out by the f d A to affirm whatever claim they're making. Um. And I think it's interesting the very first court trial that tested The Pure Food and Drugs Act, which sprang up in the early

nineteen hundreds, was about one of these brain tonics. It was called Queue for Headache, brain Food, food fu d it might be food food. Yeah, makes me think of a far side cartoon that was Harper's Cure for Headache brain food to be specific, and also cure broken bones emphysema.

It made a lot of claims and I don't think yeah, okay, well for Actunately, once we get into more recent medical history, we do start getting a better idea of some compounds and chemicals that actually do have a positive effect on brain health and brain power. Yeah. One of the big ones we can first point to and say here, here's a definite Yes. One thing we really know for sure is iodine um so. Iodine has been shown to be very important in brain health, especially for pregnant mothers and

how this will affect their baby. So early gestational iodine deficiency is known to be a cause of later mental disability. In a study published in the Lance that found that even a mild iodine deficiency during pregnancy can cause lower verbal IQ scores for children. And then there was a paper published in in the National Bureau of Economic Research. I thought this was really interesting, and it's called the Cognitive Effects of Micronutrient deficiency Evidence from salt iodization in

the United States. Salt iodization right, adding iodine to salt. Now, obviously iodine effects health in more ways than just your mental powers, like you can get goiter and thyroid issues if you don't have proper iodine in your diet. So iodized salt was widely introduced in the United States in nineteen twenty four. Um, we don't have large distributed samples of intelligence scores to work with from the time, So how do we look back and see if salt made

a difference in intelligence back then? Well, the authors of this paper I just named came up with a really interesting method. They looked at the placement of armed forces recruits to infer data about mental aptitude UH for children before the introduction of IODI salt and then after, and from the looks of it, the salt made a difference in parts of the country where there was previously known

to be an iodine deficiency. Introduction of IODI salt led to a greater number of young men from those areas being admitted to a branch of the armed forces with higher aptitude requirements. And you could see the effect pretty much immediately kids and after it's a spike in Yeah, and so there's one example where we know pretty sure that this is a chemical that really does affect brain brain function for the better. You get it in your diet.

It's something you need. Your body can't manufacture it naturally, so you've got to get it through the foods you eat, or through a supplement, or through salt or whatever it is. And it really does make a difference. But I dine is not the only chemical we know of today that can have a positive effect on our brain power, right, And some of these chemicals, actually, the one I'm going to the broad category of chemicals I'm going to tackle next,

has a temporary effect. So this is not something that you know, you take a pill and then suddenly you're smarter. This is you end up taking some dose of this chemical or this type of chemical, and part of your brain function might be sharpened or focused for a given amount of time until the effects of the chemical wear offs. Okay, so it's not increasing like your continuous base i Q, but it might might give you a really good edge on the study session. Yeah, it's not going to be

across an entire population. This one is truly individual, right, this and this may very well mean that you're able to, like you said, study more effectively and that you are able to form memories more effectively and you remember more of what you studied or that you memory is a really big one. That's one of the more popular uses for this broad range of chemicals which are are known as new A tropics, which essentially means to bend the mind.

So if sure sure does like matrix style like there is no spoon, no like what they call the Matrix the movie right on Netflix, it's a mind been ding thriller. Yeah. Now we'll get into more like the matrix style stuff in our in our Companion episode where we talk about the tech that can manipulate your brain. But in this case, these are drugs that have an effect of some sort, or at least they're supposed to, and not everything necessarily listed as a new tropic might have an actual effect.

This is one of those things where you're going to be able to find a lot of stuff that's out on the market that isn't necessarily um overseen by the f d A, so some claims may be unfounded, whether on purpose or not. But there are stimulants that can affect the way the brain functions, and in fact have been used in medicine for quite some time, often to treat various disorders and diseases, things like Parkinson's disease or

a d h D or Alzheimer's. These are all various conditions that doctors have treated with the use of certain types of drugs, including UH stimulants. Not all new tropics are stimulants, just a lot of them happened to be so kind of similar to something like caffeine. If you guys have ever had a study session where you drink some caffeine so that you could really kind of feel focused and just zone in specifically on what you wanted to look at and ignore everything else. That's really what

we're talking about here. But then you end up playing contra until four in the morning. That is that that can be an issue. Actually, one of the things that I have heard about people who you know, there are obviously people who are prescribed this medication in order to treat an illness or condition. There are some people who get hold of it to use it specifically to try and sharpen up their their minds for a specific purpose.

And uh, that's not what the drugs are being sold as officially anyway, legally, um, but that there is a huge market for it, particularly in places like uh, prestigious schools where there's a high pressure environment to do really well. And so um. The thing is that sometimes it can really help you focus on what you need to do. Does not necessarily make you a super genius. It just means that you are able to focus much more effectively

than you normally would. You might be able to recall things more effectively, or you may just be able to really concentrate well, so that if you have the dedication, it's helpful. It does not magically have you learned everything in your class by taking a pill? Right? No, No, it's not an osmosis of knowledge pill. Right. And so then better at low doses, yes, yes, higher dose often

will actually impair neurological function. So normally the doses that would have this kind of effect where you're able to focus your attention would be very very low doses, at least initially. Uh. The body has this habit of building up tolerances to chemicals depending upon the type of chemical. So sometimes you will have people who just realize that the effect no longer has the kick that used to have, and that pupping the dose does not necessarily give them

that same feeling they had at the onset. It may just be that it's not effective at all for them, uh, at least to you know, sharpen up their brains. It might be very effective in hurting them, which is one of the issues about New A tropics. Another is that if you aren't focused on the specific task you wanted to to really concentrate on, you might find yourself, you know, distracting yourself with anything else to do that will take up your time. I read accounts of people who said, yeah,

I did. I took some fully fully intending to study for a big you know, mid term or something along those lines. Instead spent four hours reorganizing my music collection, or you know, endlessly cleaning the room I was in as opposed to or or yeah, or the proving to my friends that I can get there without using the Konami code. Um, you know, these are certain things that

can happen. And uh, it's again I us that this is something I would really recommend staying away from until science is able to catch up and determine what stuff is actually effective, what stuff is safe, whether or not anyone should ever try this kind of thing, because the thing with a lot of these uh man made brain chemical altering substances is that we're not sure why they

do what they do. That's a big thing. The inner workings of the brain are still so mysterious to us that we can't be completely certain that something that at least on the surface appears to be beneficial does not have some other effect that could be really bad. And we don't know what the long term effects are because these drugs have not been out there that long, and

especially haven't been used to treat someone indefinitely. Right, It wasn't necessarily a drug that you're going to be taking this for the rest of your life type thing, or or as regularly as someone who perhaps is really trying to excel at a particular high stress environment might be doing. And since the drugs are fairly new, we don't have any lifetime studies about all of that long term kind

of stuff. We do have a lot of people who have UH tested it quite a bit, and you know, like like the and not just not just people who are testing it, you know, self testing, like I tested that whiskey a lot less week, but like like the military. You know, obviously the military has a vested interest in making sure that certain individuals are able to really focus on tasks at hand, like the Air Force being a

great example. If you have pilots who are going to be on a particularly long mission and you want their mental acuity to remain at peak performance throughout the entire uh, the entire endeavor, then you may say, hey, you're going to want to take this type of medication. It's going to keep you sharp so that you and your team are remaining as safe as possible through the duration of

this mission. But we should say that not all of these chemicals that affect to the brain are necessarily a man made Some of them occur naturally in foods that we might consume. Well, I mean, maybe our ancestors didn't consume chocolate, but certainly we consume a lot of chocolate. There's a there's a substance in cocoa called flavanols. Is that what makes chocolate so very tasty? No, that's sugar and fat. I'll just be over here eating my vat

of sugar fat. You guys, go ahead, no, I mean people love to be told eat chocolate and you'll be smart. But there may be some evidence to this, not necessarily that you should go just buy candy bars of chocolate and eat them, but there might be healthier ways of preparing the cocoa inherent to chocolate so that you get the chemical that we're about to talk about without so much sugar and fat and all that. But anyway, here here's the scoop. There is evidence that consuming cocoa flavor

als could have brain enhancing effects. And the sample I'm going to site is a twelve study published by the American Heart Association's journal Hypertension. So here's what we had. There were ninety elderly participants with mild cognitive impairment, and they were separated into three groups, and each of the groups was going to consume a cocoa flavor and all

beverage in different quantities. So you had the high consumption group, which was nine milligrams, then you had the intermediate consumption group, which was five twenty milligrams, or the low group, which was forty five milligrams, and they had them consumed this beverage for eight weeks, not like continuously just consuming all day. That sounds like some kind of extra bonus material from seven a journal, Day three. I must escape. It's all

stained with chocolate. Okay, No, So then a researchers gave the participants neuro psychologic exams to test performance on different mental functions like UH. And they gave the list. It was quote executive function, working memory, short term memory, long term episodic memory, processing speed, and global cognition. And what

do they find. Well, they found that for the people drinking the high level flavoral consumption and the intermediate flavoral consumption, there was significant improvement on the scores UH for the tests of the ability to relate visual stimuli to motor responses, the test of working memory, task switching, and verbal memory. And they also said that the people who drank the high levels of flavoral drinks just had higher overall scores

on the cognitive tests. That's pretty cool and so the idea there, and we see this a lot in studies about improving brain function is a lot of these tests tend to be not so much focused on Let's get a group of you know, twenty five year olds and and see if we can make them smarter. But a lot of it's on counteracting damage done by neurodegenerative disease

or by dementia. It's it's just like the the approved uses of the new A tropics tend to be in treatment of various conditions, not not meant to be sold over the counter as necessarily a brain booster. It was the work that was done was really meant to try and uh find new ways to treat these these various conditions. Yeah, and let's step back for a minute and acknowledge that that's really i'd say the most important thing here, right, sure, I mean, the real priority before we get about going

to you know, how can I be smarter? I'm not chocolate, is to think about what can we really do for people who have had some kind of loss of ability through disease or through injury or whatever it is. That seems like something that's a truly profound and important thing to achieve. Absolutely, therapeutic uses, you know, medical treatment uses obviously our number one priority, and chocolate consumption is a

distant second, still very important, but a distant second. Most of the experts that cover this cocoa flavor all news. By the way, I want to remind you yet again, as we did earlier, this does not just mean you have license to go eat as much chocolate as you want. That's probably not going to be good for you overall. Yeah, that that can actually be counter productive in in several ways. Uh I can I can actually talk about one of

those ways right now. Let's talk about antioxidants, y'all. Okay, So, and sorry, sorry guys, if if there's any weird awkward pauses, we're jumping all around in our notes. So that's that's what that is. That's not our editor fallen down on the job. Noel is great. We are scatter brained, yes that thing. Okay, So antioxidants. Let me tell you a story about brain cells. Brain cells are perhaps particularly susceptible

to oxidation. Oxidation being the destruction of cells by unstable, electron deficient free ranging punk rock, oxygen and or oxygen involved molecules which are created as a byproduct of the conversion of glucose to energy. Fascinating story. I know everyone is waiting on no, no, no, I understand. Yeah, So you take some sugar, you need to turn that into something your body can do with it, right, makes some oxygen.

In the process, you create these little particles that are not going to do your cells any good brain cells in particular, and eating too much food can make this worse because perhaps obviously your body will be breaking down more glucose. This is where all that extra chocolate comes in. Um. But antioxidants are these molecules that will prevent cell damage from oxidation by sacrificing themselves to the oxidation process. And lots of stuff, I mean mostly fruits and vegetables, green tea,

stuff like that, are really terrific sources of these. And so if you've ever heard anyone harping on about how you should eat stuff with antioxidants in it, that's that's what they mean. Right. I've actually seen green tea listed as another one of these chemical compounds that may improve brain function, right right, As far as I know, it's because of the antioxidants in them, but I'm not sure.

I'm not sure if there's other claims, right, And to be fair, again, this is one of those things where we know that the antioxidants are important, that does not necessarily mean that that buying supplements that are labeled as being antioxidants are necessarily going to give you the same effect as eating a good diet. Okay, And this transitions me into what we're going to call Lauren's rent time. Okay, Lauren's rent time. So, nutritional supplements are really shady business.

Most of them are not approved by the f d A, and in general, every single scientific study I don't have any to site for you right now because it is all of them, you guys, indicate that eating food is way better for getting nutrients into your body than taking a supplement. The food is what your body is used to processing in order to get nutritional content out of the supplements, I don't know it's in m You don't know what's in them. The people who made them might

not know what's in them. So eat good food. I heartily approve of this rant, and in fact that it flows right into the next point that I was going to mention, which you all have heard that Fisher brain food, right, That's not just me, Fisher brain food. Fisher brain food is that a person fish fish? Are you from the South? You know what I'm talking about? Fisher brain food. Are we talking about the band? Because I love them? No? Not fish with a pH what has happened in here

definitely not brain food. Look, fish are brain food. That's one of the things I remember hearing all the time when I was a little kid, and I absolutely detested fish. As an adult love it, love it, but hated it as a kid. It was, to be fair, they only gave you the heads. I think it was. I think it was mostly, first of all, that implication I resent. The Second of all, I think it mostly had to do with the fact that my I grew up from ages one through five about two blocks away from a

Captain D's. So yeah, so my idea of what seafood was was pretty twisted. The fish to hollow, brittle, grease ratio is not that high. Yeah. The breading, let me just put it this way. My favorite thing to get from Captain D's was like the little, the little canst thing of all, just the breading that had been fallen off of everything else, that was just in the fryer. That was my favorite thing. I've gotten better anyway. As it turns out, fish are brain food UM, and specifically

fish have a lot of omega will. Certain fish have a lot of Omega three fatty acids UM, which look they helped slow down the aging process in the brain. Or really, if you want to think of it another way, if you don't have omega three fatty acids in your diet a sufficient amount, then your brain will age more rapidly. So perhaps it's better to look at it that way, to say that you really want to have this, not to not necessarily to uh slow down the aging process,

but to prevent a rapid aging process. It's kind of a glass have full glass, have empty kind of argument, but it is an important distinction to make. Um. So in other words, you want to have these omega three fatty acids in your diet. So one way of doing that is just to make sure you're eating you know, a good amount of fish, not like an enormous amount of fish. No. No, And if you're, for example, pregnant, you might want to avoid fish that are high in

heavy metals like mercury. Absolutely very good point um. But a Mega three and also a Mega six fatty acids for that matter, are known as poly unsaturated fatty acids, which you can contrast with the saturated fats that your food labels all warn you about and the trans fats that are currently being banned from lots of fast food and packaged products. The difference chemically speaking, is that unsaturated fats aren't carrying as much hydrogen as they could, which

allows them to bond differently with stuff and things. Honestly, I don't understand it very well more than that, but I just wanted to put in there that there's a reason that they're called saturated, and that it's a chemical thing at any rate. Um saturated fats and trans fats can negatively affect your brain health and that they well, first of all, they negatively affect the body's vascular system.

And yes, eating heart healthy foods means that you're also helping your brain because your brain contains blood vessels and blood. So when you do stuff that hurts your blood vessels, you are, in the long term, hurting your brain. Very good. Yeah, our bodies are just it's a big ol interconnected system. And yeah, sometimes when you affect one part of that system, it can have long reaching effects in other parts that you wouldn't necessarily think about just from the top of

your head, so to speak. I feel like there's a few brain puns that I should be making right right in here. I didn't mean to make that one you have the brain pun of a stagecoach Tilter and Fisher brain food tripped you up. So poly unsaturated fatty acids um also have a more direct connection to brain support. They They help create more plasticity and synapses, and have

been shown to improve learning and memory. A deficit of them, in fact, has been associated with increased risks of mental health problems like a d D or dyslexia, dementia, depression, and schizophrenia. Yikes. So it's it's good to have them. Yeah, And again, just like we were saying, it's good to have them in your diet, like by actually going and eating fish as opposed to taking fish oils up. Yeah,

exactly the same sort of thing. And if you don't like fish, like child Jonathan, there are many other sources of them which I do not have listed in front of me, but the internet can tell you all about that. Yeah. Yeah, but I love fish now. In fact, I'm kind of craving it right now. But let's let's continue through the rest of this. We're a little power through the end of our episode, so we can tell people other important things to know about brain chemistry and how to best

make sure that you're operating at peak levels. Okay. So, in addition to fats, which your brain is made up a lot of and is required for stuff to happen in it, glucose is one of the other really important things. And we were just talking I know about how breaking down glucose can be sort of bad. But the thing is that the brain draws its energy from these sugars, meaning if you're meaning that, if your bodily sugar levels drop too low, it gets harder for your brain to

keep all of those important or transmitters flowing. Uh. Steady stream of sugars, in fact, is best for your mental health. And you know, via complex carbohydrates like whole grains or vegetables, not candy bars. I can specifically state that when my blood sugar level drops, all I can think of is murder. Yeah. It's physiologically identical to having a panic attack, is it. Yeah? Yeah, Well that that explained a lot of things. I mean, they're angry is a real thing, it is. It's a

danger to all of us. Joe has Joe has yet to have experienced the two of us. Lauren, yea double double hangar, hangar? What are you talking about? I've experienced this, what with both of us at the same time. I don't think, so you're still here, so I suspect that you have not. So these are some of the more common things that have been researched and vetted as having a direct impact on brain health, but lots of this research is still being done very recently in the past

like year or two. It turns out that even the bacteria in your gut can impact your brain. Um. Some bacteria have connections to depressive behaviors or autism behaviors, and others to the immune system, which can in turn impact brain cell related diseases and risks of things like schizophrenia in mice. At any rate, as far as I know, none of this research has extrapolated out to humans yet,

but it's it's really interesting stuff. And if this proves true across the spectrum the spectrum, then it could mean it could have huge impact. Yeah, that's true. So yeah, it's one of those things where, uh, like we've been stressing all along. The brain is one of those those organs that just we don't know everything about yet, we don't understand everything as we learn more, as we learn more about its operation and uh, at what is within

the norm versus outside the norm. We will perhaps find new ways to leverage that information and perhaps not just treat people who have lost some capacity uh in in mental function, but also improve those of us who you know, are fall within that range of typical whatever that might

be defined as UM. And also just the thought that as our society progresses, as it becomes more complex, and as people get access to uh nutritional foods, healthy foods, that will continue to see a development on an evolutionary basis, not grinded. That's a scale that's so long that you know, we can only guess about it. We're not going to be around for it unless we've all figured out how to download our brains. In that case, it's just really

software patches. Yeah, curse while it's going to be around for it. Yeah, he'll he'll be upgrading us. We'll put you up to Jonathan fifteen point two and get it so that you stop being so neurotic. Would be fantastic. I don't know what I think about the whole singularity thing, but I know it's a little bit of extra Kurtzweil snark.

I didn't intend to go quite that snarky. My bad guys. Well, I'm just saying that I certainly do hope with humankind at least that if we do continue to improve our intelligence that as a species that does come as a result of technology and medicine and something deliberate rather than say, natural selection, which is maybe how we got as smart as we are now. It's not something we want to

encourage happening to humans. Well, I also hope that it comes about through rigorous scientific inquiry and not so many d I y projects that could potentially go awry and negatively impact a person's life. Right, So we really got to narrow it down here. Okay, good science, compassion, tasty food, tasty food. Yeah, yeah, I think I'm on board for

all of that. So uh. The interesting thing here is that that we will continue to learn more about the brain, and we will find ways to use that information to help people. Whether or not we ever get to a point where you take a pill as a kid and you're magically super intelligent, I doubt it, but it's you know who knows. We don't know enough to say that that will never happen. So I'm interested to hear what

our listeners think about this. If you guys, have any opinions about anything that we've talked about, everything from the nutrition to neo tropics, you should let us know. Drops a line on Twitter or Facebook or Google Plus, or handle it all three. As f W thinking we'll be addressing this again in another episode about using technology to boost our brains and how that is both interesting and terrifying, So look forward to that and we will talk to

you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places