TRAIN INTERVALS

“So in this essay, he's talking about, you know, if if you gave a biologist a radio, what they would do is they would, they would take it apart. They would look at all the individual components. They would count them. They would look at their colors. They would, like, change the color of the transistors to see if that affects their function and all this kind of stuff. But in reality, what they would have is just like a bunch of bits, and they wouldn't necessarily know how they fit together.”

“And so he talks about the idea of cognitive prosthetics versus cognitive orthotics. A prosthetic is something that you use if you are missing a function. An orthotic is something you use to boost your function. And so we can use AI as orthotics. We can do the work ourselves and then, you know, say to whatever tool it is, you're like, what am I missing? What can I do better? All of this requires you to be engaged in the work to actually think yourself, and you're building your skills.”

“My my definition of of a healthy brain is, is a brain that does what you wanted to do when you wanted to do it. And it's kind of less, like, slightly adapted from there's, like, a WHO brain health definition or something. But I put it in put it that way because each of us wants our brains to do different things.”

“So nicotine can acutely boost cognitive function. There are some studies that kinda suggest that chronic nicotine users have a lower risk of of, Parkinson's disease in in particular long term. I will say that we know nicotine is addictive. We know that it it produces tolerance and withdrawal. So you need higher doses to have the same effect, and then you get significant withdrawal if you stop taking it.”

“What I will say is that there are lots of studies that show that when we use stimulants to improve cognitive function, we think we're performing better, but often we're actually performing worse. So we've they've seen this with caffeine. They've seen this with, methylphenidate and many of the others. And it it's the same with creativity and cannabis. Like, you think that your brain is working much better, but then if you, like, objectively score cognition, it's actually worse.”

“So this study, they took older and and younger expert and amateur pianists. So so you have, four groups. Right? Old and young, expert and amateur. And what they found was that when they were looking at complex skills related to piano playing, the older and younger well well, the experts outperformed the amateurs, I as you might expect. But the older and younger experts, and so, like, the the younger experts were in their twenties and thirties, the older experts were in their fifties and sixties. They performed just as well as each other.”

“But then when we do these big studies looking at what determines, or what predicts how well their brains function later on in childhood, the biggest predictor or the most important factor is the home environment. And there are different ways to to measure this, but it's basically then related to socioeconomic status, reading, education, nutrition, all that kind of stuff that happens in home is, at home is more important than what happens in the hospital. So, like, even if you had an imperfect start to life, the the environment you go back to is the most important thing.”

“However, lactate gets straight into the brain through monocarboxylate transporters, the same transporters that take ketones into the brain and switches on the production of BDNF. So lactate seems to be this key, like, messenger from, like, more intense exercise through to the production of stuff like BDNF in the brain.”

“So you see that aerobic training or interval training seems to benefit the hippocampus and memory function. Resistance training seems to particularly benefit the white matter of the brain, which is kind of in the middle of the brain. That's where all the myelin is. That's responsible for fast connections and some of our more complex cognitive functions. Resistance training improves the structure and function of the white matter and with that improvements in things like executive function.”

“When you look at, like, brain volumes, you again, you see something similar. So lots of studies now done in the UK Biobank where if you're averaging up to one UK unit of alcohol a day, which is eight grams of ethanol, which is about half of a US standard drink, which is 14 grams of ethanol, If you're averaging that amount, no real effect on brain volume or dementia risk. If you're drinking more than that, brain volume start to decrease and dementia risk starts to increase.”