I have to start with a warning and that
is that if you stay in your seats right
now your brains are going to be changed
forever the activity there’s going to be
caused by this talk in your brain is
going to change the activity of your
brain cells that is going to send
signals deep into the nucleus of each
cell it’s going to cause your DNA within
your cells to be read differently to
create new proteins they’re gonna change
the membranes of your cells those cells
are gonna change their structure and the
way you think is never going to be the
same again you some we’re excited than
scared that’s good because this is
exactly what’s happening all the time
the only thing that’s really changing
now is that we’re learning so much about
how the brain works that we are gaining
the capacity to change how our brains
work by design we are actually starting
to know what we’re doing what this does
is it creates a very strange loop and
that strange loop is that when we can
think in ways that enable us to change
our thinking it means that we are going
to be creating a future in which the way
we think is unimaginable to us today so
I think that is bringing on to us the
next stage of human evolution we’re
changing the way we thinking we’re
thinking is going to change the way we
think
forever after what I’d like to talk to
you about today is well what can you do
if you’re given the tools to be able to
manage your own brain and create it in
your own design what are you going to do
with it and that’s really the big
question this is a beautiful picture I’m
sure most people know this is the human
hippocampus and cross section
it’s really spectacular and one of the
spectacular things we’ve learned over
the last couple of decades is that we
used to think that the total number of
cells we had in our brains was fixed
pretty much at Birth if you lost them if
they died
tough luck you’re not gonna get any more
of them but now we know especially in
certain regions of the brain like the
human hippocampus long associated with
learning and memory functions that cells
can actually grow we can stimulate them
to develop new cells and even more
incredible you can see there are lots of
nice little tendrils going up there
they’re rich neural connections within
the hippocampus and throughout the rest
of the cortex and what we’ve learned in
the last twenty years is that the
capacity for our brains to change the
number of connections is even more
dramatic and it uses a process is
referred to as experience dependent
plasticity a great neuroscientist named
Donald Hebb once said cells that fire
together wire together so if you
exercise these brain cells get them to
fire together you can actually create
new neuronal pathways you can form new
synapses and in fact this kind of
exercise can actually beef up parts of
your brains like the hippocampus it’s
actually amazing how much we’ve learned
about the brain that we can create brain
processes in the laboratory I don’t know
how many people know exactly what this
is there’s a great donut shop in West
what’s called Stan’s Donuts
so the best guests I’ve heard so far is
that this is one of the sprinkle
doughnuts from Stamp not true that is
memory in a dish memories created in a
petri dish cells were put into the petri
dish provided with the right chemical
medium provided with the right
electrical stimulation the cells reach
out to each other form connections and
truly remarkable thing is that we know
the kind of ingredients the kind of
stimulation to apply to that cell medium
that once you stimulate one cell it’ll
connect to others and it will stimulate
those and keep active for a period of
time that is memory so here we have
memory in a dish what are we going to do
with this kind of knowledge how are we
going to go forward knowing that we can
actually create memory in the laboratory
and ultimately we’re going to be able to
do this in our own brains well what if I
told you that driving a taxi was one of
the most mentally stimulating forms of
human activity yeah that it could change
your brain permanently and forever this
looks a little bit like another one of
those brain images with all kinds of
tangled neurons and synapses but it’s
actually a map of the London City
streets imagine that your job is to know
that map well enough that you can figure
out how to get from say Big Ben to the
Isle of Dogs even if there’s traffic and
Westminster Bridge is closed
how are you gonna do that it’s a pretty
awesome feat being able to manage all of
that map and some colleagues including
Elinor McGuire at University College
London thought you know these cabbies
are mastering such a rich visual spatial
map it must be changing their brains and
she had the tools to do it so she
decided to get a bunch of cab drivers
and throw them into the MRI scanner and
see what happened to their brains sure
enough and again I know all of you are
familiar with the little red spot on
that brain is the posterior segment of
the human hippocampus right it was
bigger in the taxi drivers than it was
in a match group of other healthy people
the structure their brain was actually
bigger in the region that is widely
thought to subserve visual spatial
memory process
but this leaves us with a chicken-egg
problem is it the case that people with
big posterior hippocampi just are good
at driving taxis so they’re naturally
drawn to it say I have a big posterior
hippocampus I’m gonna go with the cab
driver that makes sense right but we
can’t rule out given the data that she
had from this one cross-sectional study
could it be that all the activity and
exercise of learning those routes is
actually what caused the hippocampus to
get bigger so Catherine Woollett
colleague of Eleanor’s did another study
where she longitudinally examined taxi
drivers got people before they enrolled
in the 2-year course to learn the city
streets and then study them again
afterwards and what she proved is that
it’s the work it’s the hard effortful
work of acquiring the knowledge of those
London city streets that led these
hippocampi to get puffed up bigger and
moreover the amount of growth in the
hippocampus was correlated with how hard
they worked how many hours they spent
doing the exams that shows us that the
old adage no strain no gain is probably
true when it comes to exercising your
brain cells you have to actually work
them hard you have to push yourself to a
point of desirable difficulty you don’t
want to work too hard so you quit but
you want to work as hard as you can
comfortably that’s how to change your
brain but you think well what could go
wrong with that right
but could there be any adverse effects
well what catherine decided to study in
this was whether or not learning the
london city streets could generate other
kinds of gains transfer to other
cognitive skills so she picked another
kind of a visual spatial learning and
memory task the learning of a very
complicated figure and she had people do
that pre and post and she found that
indeed the training impacted the ability
to do this other task and the impact was
negative people were actually worse
after they learned along the city
streets on doing another what you would
call near transfer tasks of ability to
learn visual spatial complex information
it was almost as
by learning the london city streets
people had filled up their hippocampus
and couldn’t get any other stuff so what
this shows is that we can exercise our
brains we can develop changes in brain
function and structure we can improve
and certain activities but we have to
consider there may be costs think about
going to the gym how many people have
ever gone to a gym that’s a place where
they have weights and that kind of stuff
yeah now you notice what I did is I
actually used both arms what if you went
in and just exercised one arm or just
did curls you could develop a really
impressive left bicep now that would be
fantastic if you were a left-handed arm
wrestler perhaps but not if you’re a
swimmer or not if you’re doing any other
sport so we really have to think about
this as we gain the methods to change
our brains got to think about what do we
want to change why do we want to change
it and what do we want to change it for
now when we think about what are the
options for changing our brains I think
we have to start with what mom told us
this is my mom that’s me
I was cute once and my mom told me you
got to exercise you got to eat well
including vegetables you got to sleep
and then you got to socialize I was just
at a fantastic talk yesterday by Michael
Greene who is sitting in our audience
today and Michael highlighted that
socialization is now recognized by the
Surgeon General as being more helpful to
your health and to your brain I predict
and it is more valuable than stopping
smoking so this message that we all need
to learn to love each other it’s
probably one of the key things that our
moms told us and I’m sure many of you
tell your kids and your grandkids if
you’re lucky enough to have those but
you didn’t come to hear a brain
scientist to talk about stuff your
mother could have told you so what I
want to talk to you about is the kinds
of things that you can do now to modify
your brain and one of the first low
hanging fruit activities
is brain training exercises you can
easily go online in fact it’s hard to go
online and not see advertisements for
brain training exercises that you can do
you can play these games what we’ve
learned from now a lot of study is that
yes you can change certain functions
working memory functions that’s the
ability to keep things in mind long
enough to use them like remembering a
telephone number long enough to to dial
it memory of the kind that is used to
recall shopping lists when you’re in the
store processing speed the ability to do
certain kinds of tasks quickly also
certain language and visual spatial
functions you can beef up those
functions and in almost every study
that’s been done what we see is that the
regions of the brain that are mediating
and responsible for those activities
actually get puffed up and you can make
them bigger so that we know we know you
can do but what about other things what
about electricity I present to you what
is to my knowledge the earliest form of
electrical stimulation applied to the
brain this is the electric catfish
torpedo electric as’ which was used by
the Roman Emperor Claudius his
physicians grew boniest applied directly
to the forehead
to cure headaches later in the 11th
century it was used as a treatment for
epilepsy again by being applied to the
scalp very effective a treatment
modality a little slimy that was a
problem and now we have a lot more
respect for fish rights and so it’s not
not recommended but you can if you want
go online and get the plans go into your
garage and with common household
supplies make for yourself a
transcranial direct current stimulation
to your brain now I don’t recommend that
everyone rush off to do this you have to
be very careful if you switch the poles
of the battery so that you got plus and
minus confused it could have bad effects
if you apply it to the wrong spots in
your brain it could have bad effects but
done properly and now in the research
laboratories around the world we’re
getting more and more evidence that
there are ways that this technique can
lead to improved cognitive ability and
most remarkably in this experiment done
by a colleague Adam green he stimulated
people to have increased creativity
following stimulation to this region of
the brain which you all recognize as the
frontal pole region creativity and the
solution of novel anagram problems was
enhanced and people are able to identify
new analogies in a way that they were
not able to before
they were able to increase the search
space of possible solutions in a way
that’s been linked to higher levels of
creativity amazing huh
but that’s the kind of stuff that’s in
the research labs today where is it
going in the future
nanobots nanobots just refers to really
really small robots things that are so
small that now there are robots that can
take atoms and make molecules out of
those what that means is it’s easy to
create these kinds of robots that we
could inject into our bloodstream and
that can then go to target organs and do
a whole range of things that are
probably useful and really cool like
cleaning out your coronary arteries
going into your brain capillaries and
getting rid of stuff they’re going into
your brain cells and getting rid of the
plaques and tangles that are associated
with Alzheimer’s disease those would all
be good things right I’ve also always
wanted to learn French I’ve never been
able to master it what if I could inject
nanobots and they could go and remodel
the neural connections in my temporal
lobe and enable me to have a command of
French would that be cool is it creepy
yeah for every one of these amazing
utopian fantasies there’s an equal and
opposite dystopian future so I just want
everybody to think about that before you
inject the nanobots read up on gray goo
covering the earth I’m not gonna say any
more about it but self-replicating
nanobots can lead to a lot of gray goo
very fast so please be careful with
nanobots don’t rush out to inject them
if we can do all these amazing things
with our brains it brings back the
question why why do we want to change
our brains and for what
and what I’d like to describe briefly is
this distinction as we pursue happiness
between cadonia brief and fleeting
happiness that comes from gratifying our
immediate needs and eudaimonia a term
most people probably not familiar with
but which refers to the sustained
happiness that comes to living a life
with purpose and meaning and I think as
we decide how we want to manage our own
brains we wanted to determine what is
the purpose what are the values that we
really want to exemplify if we align our
actions with the values that we treasure
then that will make a huge difference
for our future so I’d like to leave you
with three words that I think exemplify
what are components of the path to how
to manage your brain with some guidance
and that is think of the balance of your
training activity don’t end up with a
left bicep that’s over inflated or a
left hippocampus that’s over inflated
think about all of the spectrum of
engagement social interpersonal exercise
diet memory working memory attention
having fun these things need to be
balanced and and used in equal equal
equal components in a long language your
goals effort must be exerted if you want
to change your brain keeping on top of
your effortful performance and pushing
yourself as far as you can go is clearly
associated with higher levels of
satisfaction happiness and also is going
to remodel your brain most effectively
and finally always asking yourself the
why why am I doing this what is the
purpose where am I going and why do I
want to be there with these ingredients
I think you all can manage your brains
optimally for empowered aging so with
that all thank you very much for
listening
[Applause]
is that if you stay in your seats right
now your brains are going to be changed
forever the activity there’s going to be
caused by this talk in your brain is
going to change the activity of your
brain cells that is going to send
signals deep into the nucleus of each
cell it’s going to cause your DNA within
your cells to be read differently to
create new proteins they’re gonna change
the membranes of your cells those cells
are gonna change their structure and the
way you think is never going to be the
same again you some we’re excited than
scared that’s good because this is
exactly what’s happening all the time
the only thing that’s really changing
now is that we’re learning so much about
how the brain works that we are gaining
the capacity to change how our brains
work by design we are actually starting
to know what we’re doing what this does
is it creates a very strange loop and
that strange loop is that when we can
think in ways that enable us to change
our thinking it means that we are going
to be creating a future in which the way
we think is unimaginable to us today so
I think that is bringing on to us the
next stage of human evolution we’re
changing the way we thinking we’re
thinking is going to change the way we
think
forever after what I’d like to talk to
you about today is well what can you do
if you’re given the tools to be able to
manage your own brain and create it in
your own design what are you going to do
with it and that’s really the big
question this is a beautiful picture I’m
sure most people know this is the human
hippocampus and cross section
it’s really spectacular and one of the
spectacular things we’ve learned over
the last couple of decades is that we
used to think that the total number of
cells we had in our brains was fixed
pretty much at Birth if you lost them if
they died
tough luck you’re not gonna get any more
of them but now we know especially in
certain regions of the brain like the
human hippocampus long associated with
learning and memory functions that cells
can actually grow we can stimulate them
to develop new cells and even more
incredible you can see there are lots of
nice little tendrils going up there
they’re rich neural connections within
the hippocampus and throughout the rest
of the cortex and what we’ve learned in
the last twenty years is that the
capacity for our brains to change the
number of connections is even more
dramatic and it uses a process is
referred to as experience dependent
plasticity a great neuroscientist named
Donald Hebb once said cells that fire
together wire together so if you
exercise these brain cells get them to
fire together you can actually create
new neuronal pathways you can form new
synapses and in fact this kind of
exercise can actually beef up parts of
your brains like the hippocampus it’s
actually amazing how much we’ve learned
about the brain that we can create brain
processes in the laboratory I don’t know
how many people know exactly what this
is there’s a great donut shop in West
what’s called Stan’s Donuts
so the best guests I’ve heard so far is
that this is one of the sprinkle
doughnuts from Stamp not true that is
memory in a dish memories created in a
petri dish cells were put into the petri
dish provided with the right chemical
medium provided with the right
electrical stimulation the cells reach
out to each other form connections and
truly remarkable thing is that we know
the kind of ingredients the kind of
stimulation to apply to that cell medium
that once you stimulate one cell it’ll
connect to others and it will stimulate
those and keep active for a period of
time that is memory so here we have
memory in a dish what are we going to do
with this kind of knowledge how are we
going to go forward knowing that we can
actually create memory in the laboratory
and ultimately we’re going to be able to
do this in our own brains well what if I
told you that driving a taxi was one of
the most mentally stimulating forms of
human activity yeah that it could change
your brain permanently and forever this
looks a little bit like another one of
those brain images with all kinds of
tangled neurons and synapses but it’s
actually a map of the London City
streets imagine that your job is to know
that map well enough that you can figure
out how to get from say Big Ben to the
Isle of Dogs even if there’s traffic and
Westminster Bridge is closed
how are you gonna do that it’s a pretty
awesome feat being able to manage all of
that map and some colleagues including
Elinor McGuire at University College
London thought you know these cabbies
are mastering such a rich visual spatial
map it must be changing their brains and
she had the tools to do it so she
decided to get a bunch of cab drivers
and throw them into the MRI scanner and
see what happened to their brains sure
enough and again I know all of you are
familiar with the little red spot on
that brain is the posterior segment of
the human hippocampus right it was
bigger in the taxi drivers than it was
in a match group of other healthy people
the structure their brain was actually
bigger in the region that is widely
thought to subserve visual spatial
memory process
but this leaves us with a chicken-egg
problem is it the case that people with
big posterior hippocampi just are good
at driving taxis so they’re naturally
drawn to it say I have a big posterior
hippocampus I’m gonna go with the cab
driver that makes sense right but we
can’t rule out given the data that she
had from this one cross-sectional study
could it be that all the activity and
exercise of learning those routes is
actually what caused the hippocampus to
get bigger so Catherine Woollett
colleague of Eleanor’s did another study
where she longitudinally examined taxi
drivers got people before they enrolled
in the 2-year course to learn the city
streets and then study them again
afterwards and what she proved is that
it’s the work it’s the hard effortful
work of acquiring the knowledge of those
London city streets that led these
hippocampi to get puffed up bigger and
moreover the amount of growth in the
hippocampus was correlated with how hard
they worked how many hours they spent
doing the exams that shows us that the
old adage no strain no gain is probably
true when it comes to exercising your
brain cells you have to actually work
them hard you have to push yourself to a
point of desirable difficulty you don’t
want to work too hard so you quit but
you want to work as hard as you can
comfortably that’s how to change your
brain but you think well what could go
wrong with that right
but could there be any adverse effects
well what catherine decided to study in
this was whether or not learning the
london city streets could generate other
kinds of gains transfer to other
cognitive skills so she picked another
kind of a visual spatial learning and
memory task the learning of a very
complicated figure and she had people do
that pre and post and she found that
indeed the training impacted the ability
to do this other task and the impact was
negative people were actually worse
after they learned along the city
streets on doing another what you would
call near transfer tasks of ability to
learn visual spatial complex information
it was almost as
by learning the london city streets
people had filled up their hippocampus
and couldn’t get any other stuff so what
this shows is that we can exercise our
brains we can develop changes in brain
function and structure we can improve
and certain activities but we have to
consider there may be costs think about
going to the gym how many people have
ever gone to a gym that’s a place where
they have weights and that kind of stuff
yeah now you notice what I did is I
actually used both arms what if you went
in and just exercised one arm or just
did curls you could develop a really
impressive left bicep now that would be
fantastic if you were a left-handed arm
wrestler perhaps but not if you’re a
swimmer or not if you’re doing any other
sport so we really have to think about
this as we gain the methods to change
our brains got to think about what do we
want to change why do we want to change
it and what do we want to change it for
now when we think about what are the
options for changing our brains I think
we have to start with what mom told us
this is my mom that’s me
I was cute once and my mom told me you
got to exercise you got to eat well
including vegetables you got to sleep
and then you got to socialize I was just
at a fantastic talk yesterday by Michael
Greene who is sitting in our audience
today and Michael highlighted that
socialization is now recognized by the
Surgeon General as being more helpful to
your health and to your brain I predict
and it is more valuable than stopping
smoking so this message that we all need
to learn to love each other it’s
probably one of the key things that our
moms told us and I’m sure many of you
tell your kids and your grandkids if
you’re lucky enough to have those but
you didn’t come to hear a brain
scientist to talk about stuff your
mother could have told you so what I
want to talk to you about is the kinds
of things that you can do now to modify
your brain and one of the first low
hanging fruit activities
is brain training exercises you can
easily go online in fact it’s hard to go
online and not see advertisements for
brain training exercises that you can do
you can play these games what we’ve
learned from now a lot of study is that
yes you can change certain functions
working memory functions that’s the
ability to keep things in mind long
enough to use them like remembering a
telephone number long enough to to dial
it memory of the kind that is used to
recall shopping lists when you’re in the
store processing speed the ability to do
certain kinds of tasks quickly also
certain language and visual spatial
functions you can beef up those
functions and in almost every study
that’s been done what we see is that the
regions of the brain that are mediating
and responsible for those activities
actually get puffed up and you can make
them bigger so that we know we know you
can do but what about other things what
about electricity I present to you what
is to my knowledge the earliest form of
electrical stimulation applied to the
brain this is the electric catfish
torpedo electric as’ which was used by
the Roman Emperor Claudius his
physicians grew boniest applied directly
to the forehead
to cure headaches later in the 11th
century it was used as a treatment for
epilepsy again by being applied to the
scalp very effective a treatment
modality a little slimy that was a
problem and now we have a lot more
respect for fish rights and so it’s not
not recommended but you can if you want
go online and get the plans go into your
garage and with common household
supplies make for yourself a
transcranial direct current stimulation
to your brain now I don’t recommend that
everyone rush off to do this you have to
be very careful if you switch the poles
of the battery so that you got plus and
minus confused it could have bad effects
if you apply it to the wrong spots in
your brain it could have bad effects but
done properly and now in the research
laboratories around the world we’re
getting more and more evidence that
there are ways that this technique can
lead to improved cognitive ability and
most remarkably in this experiment done
by a colleague Adam green he stimulated
people to have increased creativity
following stimulation to this region of
the brain which you all recognize as the
frontal pole region creativity and the
solution of novel anagram problems was
enhanced and people are able to identify
new analogies in a way that they were
not able to before
they were able to increase the search
space of possible solutions in a way
that’s been linked to higher levels of
creativity amazing huh
but that’s the kind of stuff that’s in
the research labs today where is it
going in the future
nanobots nanobots just refers to really
really small robots things that are so
small that now there are robots that can
take atoms and make molecules out of
those what that means is it’s easy to
create these kinds of robots that we
could inject into our bloodstream and
that can then go to target organs and do
a whole range of things that are
probably useful and really cool like
cleaning out your coronary arteries
going into your brain capillaries and
getting rid of stuff they’re going into
your brain cells and getting rid of the
plaques and tangles that are associated
with Alzheimer’s disease those would all
be good things right I’ve also always
wanted to learn French I’ve never been
able to master it what if I could inject
nanobots and they could go and remodel
the neural connections in my temporal
lobe and enable me to have a command of
French would that be cool is it creepy
yeah for every one of these amazing
utopian fantasies there’s an equal and
opposite dystopian future so I just want
everybody to think about that before you
inject the nanobots read up on gray goo
covering the earth I’m not gonna say any
more about it but self-replicating
nanobots can lead to a lot of gray goo
very fast so please be careful with
nanobots don’t rush out to inject them
if we can do all these amazing things
with our brains it brings back the
question why why do we want to change
our brains and for what
and what I’d like to describe briefly is
this distinction as we pursue happiness
between cadonia brief and fleeting
happiness that comes from gratifying our
immediate needs and eudaimonia a term
most people probably not familiar with
but which refers to the sustained
happiness that comes to living a life
with purpose and meaning and I think as
we decide how we want to manage our own
brains we wanted to determine what is
the purpose what are the values that we
really want to exemplify if we align our
actions with the values that we treasure
then that will make a huge difference
for our future so I’d like to leave you
with three words that I think exemplify
what are components of the path to how
to manage your brain with some guidance
and that is think of the balance of your
training activity don’t end up with a
left bicep that’s over inflated or a
left hippocampus that’s over inflated
think about all of the spectrum of
engagement social interpersonal exercise
diet memory working memory attention
having fun these things need to be
balanced and and used in equal equal
equal components in a long language your
goals effort must be exerted if you want
to change your brain keeping on top of
your effortful performance and pushing
yourself as far as you can go is clearly
associated with higher levels of
satisfaction happiness and also is going
to remodel your brain most effectively
and finally always asking yourself the
why why am I doing this what is the
purpose where am I going and why do I
want to be there with these ingredients
I think you all can manage your brains
optimally for empowered aging so with
that all thank you very much for
listening
[Applause]
Please follow and like us: