Get everyone Sam here.
Today is a really interesting episode because it's one of those things where we're talking with one of the world's best neuroscientists, and sometimes I feel like understanding the brain is just too complicated for a simpleton like myself that I don't delve into it because I don't think i'll understand it. And the refreshing thing about today's episode is
it was exactly the opposite. It was explained by someone who's highly, highly intelligent but speaks in a way that hopefully you'll understand, and I understood, so I think you're really going to enjoy it. And then I'm going to answer some of your fitness questions to help kick off twenty twenty three in the best way possible. So we'll get to those questions later on. But now our incredible
neuroscientist Chantell Pratt. I am joined from the West Coast of America up in Seattle by the incredible Chantell Pratt, who is a neuroscientist and author of her new book which is called The Neuroscience of You. Chantell, Welcome to the WOODLFE.
Thank you so much for having me so.
Chanteau, You've done a lot of work studying the individuality of our brains and how they are all unique and differ, which I have to admit is very different to what most of us will definitely what I have been taught when it comes to the brain. I kind of thought, we're all in the same boat a little bit. So what led you down this path of finding I guess, the passion for the brain and challenging what has been so widely except for decades.
I started out wanting to be a medical doctor, a physician anyway. I was deep into this accelerated pre med program and I needed to take one social science class. Took a class purely because it fit into my schedule. Is a night class introduction to psychology, and the first day of this class, our instructor started to outline the fact that the psychological principles were also biological by telling
the story of Phineas Gauge. Phineas Gauge was a railway worker who suffered an accident that resulted in a railway spike being blown out through the top of his head, right through his frontal lobe, and the fact that he walked away from this would be phenomenal even today, But he walked away being fundamentally changed his personality changed, just the idea that you change this organ and you change the person and it was just game over for me.
I'm like, how is that possible? There's a physical entity between your ears that makes you you? So when I went to study neuroscience, the fact that the normal that the typical paradigm for studying how the brain gives rise to the mind or how the brain gives rise to feelings completely ignores individual variation and averages across to people. Takes a mean or a sort of characterization or a sketch of a group of people to describe how the brain gives rights to the mind and the feelings and
the mental life. I found this like utterly not only surprising, but unsatisfying, Like, Yeah, why do we care how groups of people's brains look in different contexts? And why do we form theories on how the group average changes when you have a group of people do different things and the theories can't account for why two people doing the same task are using dramatically different parts of their brain to accomplish it.
I love how it sort of lit that spark in you and you've just you know, followed it intently.
And so passionately for so long.
Why still, then, do we have these sort of very not archaic, but very basic sort of stereotypes of I'm a left brain person or brain person. I'm either this sort of analytical think or this creative think. Here, it's are we just simplifying it down, way, way, way too much.
Yes, I love to ride, you know, right off into the sunset on my individual differences matter, shy horse. Yeah, but the brain is really freaking complicated. Sure, on the one hand, we have to pick some dimensions to simplify to understand anything. Sure, and starting with a characterization of how most people work or you know, how the average brain works, is a good place to start. What I like about the right brain left brain thing, there are
two things I like about it. One is it is people use it, and I think it's one of the only kinds of labels we have to understand or to describe what we all know intuitively, And that's that we don't all work the same, right Like the one size fits all approach to neuroscience doesn't fit anyone very well. Right, just like one size fits all T shirts don't fit
anybody very well. So we have this intuition that not everyone works the same and the right brain the left brain analytical versus right brain creative thinker is something that we can grab onto as a way of describing sort of characteristic differences between people. What's cool about that story is the science that it's actually based on, So it's not garbage, it's not myth, it's based on an actual scientific fact about how the two hemispheres of the brain work,
and these differences between people. One of the fundamental differences between people in terms of how our brains work is actually a difference within us, and that is that everybody has two hemispheres. Well not everybody, but most typically developing people have two cerebral hemispheres in their brain, and these two hemispheres are halfs of your brain process the world largely independently. They get input and they create computations or
understandings of the world. They vote about how you can behave and then they share information with one another. And this kind of symbiosis or collaboration between brains is what drives most of our behavior. And because of that sharing, we don't necessarily feel divided. But there are two perspectives happening within our own minds, and one of the most
interesting differences is how distinct those two perspectives are. So in a typical strongly right handed individual, the left hemisphere is processing the world by dividing it into very skilled small problem sets, like processing the trees in a forest. It is larger in some areas, faster to do a lot of computations, and this kind of lopsidednes This larger left hemisphere allows us to become specialized for things like language calculations, et cetera, newer kinds of human thinking tasks.
But what's interesting about this, and one of the main points of my book, is how different doesn't necessarily mean better or worse. It's just a continuum of trade offs. What's interesting about this is that the way the brain becomes lopsided, which allows this left hemisphere specialization, is actually by shrinking parts of the rate hemisphere, so it actually sort of handicaps the area of the brain that does
spatial navigation and three dimensional processing of the world. I just read a book called The Dyslexic Advantage that talks about how people with dyslexia tend to be better at like mechanistic or world building things that require this three dimensional view that takes place in the rate hemisphere.
So my wife and my seventeen year old daughter are both dyslexic and have ADHD, and at first in our relationship I used to get frustrated because I'm quite the opposite. You know, I can sort of see words and numbers really really easily. But if we were together, I would be the one that gets lost. Or if a pram arrives to put together for our kids, all stare at the instructions for about three days and still not to
be able to do it. In my seventeen year old to be able to put it together in about eight seconds without the instructions. It's like, it's fascinating. How do we identify what type we are? Or at least you know, as you know, narrow it down as much as possible.
Well without being able to come into a lab and get a picture of your brain, which I assume the people who read my book won't do. Yes, the most straightforward instinct or insight you can get about how lopsided your brain is is by thinking about the relative skill of your two hands.
Right, So hold on really quick, you got dogs playing here that this.
Is about the left hemisphere's ability to stay goal oriented and focused versus the right hemispheres noticing ability to be reflexively wondering wh the dogs is summery.
We cave it real in the chel dog's backing. It's oh, part of the shot. I love it.
Well, Okay, So number one, Handedness is a continuum. You know, most of us identify as right or left handed, but in fact the degree of handed the sort of degree of skill between your hands, varies on a continuum. And what's interesting is that it's actually the we can, the strength of the we can that determines how balanced you will be. So so one way to do this if you go to my website, which is Chantelpratt dot com. There's a research tab and I've linked to other people's research.
So one thing you can do is check the boxes exercise where you actually take a mouse with your right hand and left hand and see how many bubbles you can check in sixty seconds, and just compare the relative strength of your two hands. Most people cannot, like not do anything with their non dominant hand, but some people can, you know, would never open a doorknob with their non
dominant hand, where others can do it. No problem. And there are other things you can do too, like if you're strongly you know, right hand dominant, and also like always go up the stairs with your right foot, or would sit like would also like look into a microscope
with your right eye. These are all hints that you're strongly right side dominant, which means that you have this left lop sided brain because control of the body and the brain are switched to the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body.
This is so powerful because you need to understand what you are naturally and then you need to embrace that to reach your potential by working out this is who I am, and this is if I do something from a career perspective that utilizes my natural kind of way of thinking and skill set, then I'm just going to be more successful because I'm working. I'm working in the
space that I'm stronger. But you're saying if you take that too far and you neglect to the other side completely, that actually causes a lop sidedness, and you better off having a balanced approach where you sure utilize your strengths but don't neglect your weaknesses.
Is that sort of what you're saying.
That's a very interesting take. I think there are advantages to being everywhere on the spectrum, right, Like, just like you said, like you know, verbal instructions come quite easily to you, but you would like get lost in a new building or whatever. You know, there's a cost to this linguistic advantage that's pretty new in our brain's evolution. And right now we live in a society that highly
prizes being able to read. Right, So all of education for better or for worse, and I think it's for worse because language is really new in terms of skills that our human brain is able to do. And I think what has happened is that we take for grited some really computationally hard but older things that our brain does, like navigation or just basic like memory organization or spatial
rotation or motor function. So like, think about the fact that we have all these computer algorithms that can beat the world's expert in chess, and we think, oh, that's like chess or go or whatever is you know, really that's a smart quote unquote way of behaving. But a computer these ais can beat us. But yet we don't have a robot that can move a chess piece. With
the acuity of a five year old. So we have an idea of the way, the optimal way of being that's defined based on a cultural norm of right now, but really doesn't appreciate the sophistication and the importance of all the computetions of our brain, be they motor, be
they navigation. You know, we have this like idea of how to focus, how to communicate that really involves like Western educational systems and working in an office nine to five, and really largely ignore what our brains evolve for the broader range of things that are defined us success in the human brain. And so what I you know, sort of went into this thinking is like why do I have eighty six billion neurons and I can't do two things well at the same time? Like what is the
point of this brain design? Why are we so bad at multitasking? Are like changing our behavior in goal oriented ways? And what I've come to realize is that a lot of things that feel frustrating or feel like sticking points for us are precisely the thing that allows us to do something else phenomenal. Right, And so like, for instance, I think that attention and the fact that we are
actually not. I think I know that the reason we can't focus on multiple things at once, or we can't operate based on multiple goals at one time, is because this remarkable flexibility of human behavior. Humans can like I could say something to you right now. I could say, please, every time my dogs bark, stand up and do a jumping jack. You know, I could tell your listeners that, and they could do it immediately instantly, despite the fact
that there was no reward system in your life. I think I would be willing to bet that there's no situation in your life in which doing a jumping jack when you hear a dog bark was rewarding or important where you ever practice that. But I can use language to reprogram your brain instantly, or reconfigure the networks of your brain to have them do something that they've never done before. But that takes up about a third of the neurons in your frontal lobe. And we could play,
you know, for two hours. I could say, well, okay, jumping jacks for dogs or this or that, and there are almost infinite number of things that you can do. The flexibility of this system requires a whole lot of brain power, and because it's taking up about a third of the frontal lobe. These networks in the brain that don't have specialized jobs, they're flexible. They can be recombined in different ways to do different things. I can't do
more than one effortful thing at a time. If I maybe if I get really lucky and find two things that don't overlap and need the same neurons, maybe I can kind of juggle between those two things. But most animals don't do that. Most animals move through the world in stimulus response ways and sort of practiced behaviors. It's precisely the human flexibility, the nature of our flexible information
processing that creates this information bottleneck. So that you know, I guess what I would say to your listeners is be careful what you wish for a lot of things, like forgetting is really important to generalizing and learning categories of things. You know, people who can't forget have a real hard time learning any kind of abstract principle. So a lot of the things that we want to be better or different about our brands are actually really optimally working for us.
The education thing I find fascinating because I was only talking with my teenage daughter because she's just she's doing her year eleven exams, she's just finished them. Who's not wonderfully academically. You know, she's dyslexic, so she struggles to finish her exams in the allocated time and all this kind of stuff. She gets very distracted when she's trying to study in focus. But she's creatively brilliant, and she
knows that she wants to study fashion. She wants to go to New York and study fashion.
And part of.
Me is like responsible dad saying it's really important you finish your schooling and you take it seriously, and the other parties, I'm not worried about you at all because I actually think you what you want to do is what you should do, and you're just going to flourish.
What would your advice be to parents who are looking to help their kids through schooling, and not not necessarily my age children, but as they get older and they're kind of understanding how their brain works and embracing that individuality.
You know, I study predictors of learning success. So we've shown that if you close your eyes and do nothing for five minutes, you can tell by the patterns of connectivity in the brain how easily someone will learn a natural language like French or even a programming language like our Python or Java. So there's something in the way your brain is connected that can determine how successful you'll
be in a particular environment. Does this mean that if your brain isn't working like that, like give it up, don't even try and learn a language. No, Because the number one predictor of success of most of the hard things in life. I think as soon as I say this, you're going to say, duh, like this is obvious is motivation, right, And so what I think happens in schools is that you learn that you're not good at something, yeah, and you have to work harder to do that thing. And
that can be very non motivating. If you're not inherently driven to learn algebra and you don't know why you're going to need algebra in your life and you struggle, it can be this sort of self fulfilling prophecy, right, because you have to be more motivated, you have to work harder to learn this thing for whatever reason, and you don't think you're going to be good at it. There are a couple hidden layers here. One is it doesn't mean you're not good at algebra, or it doesn't
mean you're not good at a foreign language. It means that in the way that that is being taught to you right now is not the natural way that your brain thrives. So I think, like the messaging you send your kids is not you're bad at this. Yeah, but how is the best way to expose you to this information?
This is hard for everybody, and it's you know, easier when it's matched to the way that your brain learns, because I can give you you know, for every person I've ever talked to about learning, there's a story about someone telling them they were no good at something. You're not bad at math. You're having a hard time learning the way this is being taught to you.
Yeah, I mean just just reframing it like that. I mean that that.
Simple sentence that you just said is every child needs to hear.
I think that's right. And how crappy would the world be if everybody was smart in the same way. There's a reason that our brains work differently because in a team, you know, you were talking about like ADHD also right, like imagine that there are our ancestors were like hunting and gathering and you've got a team of people. You need somebody to keep you on track. You need somebody to tell you, hey, we've already been in this neighborhood.
But you also need somebody to notice the thing that nobody's expected.
Yeah, save everybody's life.
I knew today would be we scratch the surface our listeners. That which there will be a lot of them that are really interested in this and would like to buy your book. It is called The Neuroscience of You. And then if people wanted to find out a little bit more and do some of your tests that that mouse test, the right side, left side one, I'm going to absolutely go away and do that. They go to Chantelpratt dot com.
Is that correct?
That's correct, that's correct, And there are a bunch of other games you can play there. You get it for each one. You can click. If you want to actually do research, do a little bit longer, maybe fifteen minute tests and okay, that will then contribute to the research.
If you don't feel like you want your brain being researched, you can just click just for me and they'll get a short and sweet version that also gives you feedback on how you did and what it means, and I think that's a great way to get started.
Beautiful. I love it.
Thank you so much for joining us here on the wood Life.
Have a great day.
Thank you so much.
So I definitely think that chat would have got our brain's ticking.
Excuse the pattern.
There's a link in the show notes to Chantel's website where you can do one of her little brain tests. I say it little, maybe it's not little, but I'm going to go and do it. I think it's really interesting to find the uniqueness of our brains. Now we'll move away from brains to bodies as it is time
for me to answer some of your exercise questions. All right, our first exercise questions for twenty twenty three, Which is good because I if nothing else comes of listening to the Woodlife this year, but it gets you moving more.
That puts a huge smile on my face and is a massive win.
So let's get into some of these questions that perhaps are holding you back, or you feel like when you're training you're not getting the most out of your training.
You're still a little bit confused.
I'm a big fan in training smarter, not harder, So if I can help you in any way that you modify your training and you get better results because of it, then that that's what I'm all about. So our first question has come through from an.
Hey, Sam. I often hear about resistance training and how important it is to include two to three times per week as well as our cardio type of training, whether that's walking, running, swimming, But in terms of the resistance training, you very seldom hear people give detail of what that should include. How long should each session be, what should we be doing, should we be doing half upper body, half lower body or concentrate on full body for every session, etc.
Thank you bye, And that is I mean this sincerely.
That's going to be a question that's going to be hard to beat this year because I think you spot on. I think so many people are starting to get the message, which is a good message. I need to be doing some form of resistance training. Remember when we talk about resistance training doesn't have to be heavy weight training.
It can be anything against a resistance.
Two to three times a week to really get the best results both from a fat burning and a sort of tone and strength perspective.
And it's correct. I one hundred percent agree with that.
So if you're doing these two to three sessions or anywhere from two to five. Really, I don't think you need to be doing resistance training seven times a week, and then how you do it needs to depend on how many sessions you're doing. So if you're doing five resistance training workouts a week, I probably wouldn't do full
body every time. If you're doing two or three a week, I think doing full body is a good thing because you're probably going to have a day of full forty eight hours in between your sessions.
Let's say you're doing resistance.
Training every day Monday to Friday, you're not likely to be able to train at the volume or the intensity that's going to give you the best results if you're doing full body every day, because you're going to be effectively training sore, fatigued muscles again.
The next day, I like different splits.
I like push pull legs, So that's one day I do push exercises, so I do all of my pushing movements my chest, my shoulders, my triceps. The next day I do all my pulling movements where I work my back and my biceps, and the third day I do my lower body. So I do three workouts a week. Two of them are focusing on my upper body strength but with very different muscles targeted, and then one of
them is lower body. And I think if you can do let's say three to five strength training sessions a week, and if it's closer to five, you're doing more of a split, and if it's closer to two or three you're doing full body, then you're.
Going to be holding yourself in really good stead. Our next question is from Allison.
Hey, Sam, I just wanted to know what your thoughts were on swimming and running for cardio and which one is better and why.
They're both great. Allison, I think it really depends on what you're training for. Are you training for general fitness. If you're training for general fitness, I would have both of them if you can, in your weekly routine because they're so different. One of them's wonderful cardio of vascally but no impact, and one of them's wonderful cardio vascually bit high impact because our feet are banging against the ground.
But if you're training for a marathon, I'd probably be doing more running and maybe the swimmings once a week or once a fortnight as a bit of a cross training recovery session, but if you're not training for a specific event, I'd include both in my weekly routine.
Our last question is from Jodie.
Hey Sam, just wanting a bit of advice of what sort of exercise I can do that won't put extra pressure on my lower back. I do have a sway back and I get a bit of pain in my lower back with a lot of exercises. So it's usually when I'm doing something horizontal like a plank or in pilates with leglowers, but I also feel pain or some pain with some standing exercises, like if I'm doing bicep curls, my back starts to ache. So any suggestions would be great.
Thanks.
That's a great question, Jody. I'm a bit of a swaybacker, so welcome. Welcome to the club. I don't know if it's a great club to be a part of, but your glutes are your best friend. And what do I mean by that. The reason you get a saw back is your pelvic tilt is out of whack, which means you've got a big curve in your lower back, a big sea curve because your pelvis is tilting backwards. So you need to get good at tucking your pelvis or your hips under and then holding that position with your
glutes squeezed. And to be honest, whether you're in a plank position horizontal, whether you're standing up in front of the mirror doing bicep curls in a vertical position, it doesn't matter. And I guess the thing here is we think about it really consciously when we're doing a plank because it's a static exercise where we're not doing anything else, So working on that pelvic tilt, squeezing those glutes becomes
a really simple thing to focus on. Then, when we're doing shoulder press or bicep curls or something else with our arms, even with our legs, we tend to forget our better perfect till because we're focusing on our biceps or our triceps or whatever.
It might be.
You need to do your bicep curls side onto the mirror, and you need to tuck your pelvis first, squeeze your glutes, and you need to continually remind yourself are my glutes on them? By that, I mean are you clenching a walln up between your butt cheeks? And if you've relaxed your butt cheeks, stop doing your bicep curls, reclench, and then go back to your arms. And if you do that, whether you're horizontal or vertical, first of all, you'll get
a better bum. Second of all, you'll get us less sore back, and third of all, your posture improved dramatically across your whole body. I promise you, over time you'll correct it.
And you'll be very thankful that you did.
There we go.
Three brilliant questions.
You've obviously been waiting for me to get back from holidays, and away we go.
Just make sure if you've.
Got any questions fitness, food, whatever they are, there's a link in the show notes. I'd love to hear from you, and I'll see you next week.
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