43. Optimizing Brain Health and Aging with Dr. Andrew Hill Part I

this week on The Wellness empowerment project we speak with Dr Andrew Hill on all things brain health cognitive decline lifestyle factors nutrition habits all of the things about how you can improve your brain health let's dive [Music] in welcome to the wellness empowerment project I'm Trish and I'm Julie we are nurs is exploring holistic healing and wellness practices to empower you to be the leader of your own health join us as we try out new things or as we call it weird and have some fun along the [Music] way hello welcome to the wellness empowerment project today we are speaking with Dr Andrew Hill he is the founder of peak brain Institute and a leading neuro feedback practitioner and biohacking coach for clients worldwide he has lectured on psychology neuroscience and gerontology at UCLA's Department of psychology where he received a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Peak brain Dr Hill provides individualized training programs to help you optimize your brain across goals of stress sleep attention brain fog creativity and athletic performance he is the host of the head first podcast and continues to do research on attention and cognitive performance welcome to the wellness empowerment project Andrew oh thanks so much for having me guys it's nice to be here thank you for joining us Dr hell after reading that bio it made me really think of my own parents as they're coming up in age I'd really like if di do brining Health especially as we get older I feel like there's this misconception especially with the older generation that we just accept that we have cognitive decline as we get older I don't believe it's true I'd like to know what your thoughts are on that and what people can do yeah it's not inevitable that we have cognitive decline there are some things that dip with a function of age or trajectory things that have this life course shift we often know about the body stuff so there's this concept of sarcopenia starting age 30 there's this long slow multi-decade shift where you drop bone density reduce muscle density reduce water Mass but gain fat mass balance there and that's the sort of body-based Aging stuff we're most visibly aware of and we're focused on often there are some brain things that tend to happen like that cortical thinning happens at a few percent per year after age 30 or 40 we get other phenomena that are accumulations of everything from wear and tear to Lifestyle factors nutritional factors trauma sleep disregulation things do build up and do take us our Optimal Performance Off the sort of peak place we can be but just like bone density or muscle mass those are trajectories and tendencies of the system you can work against them a lot of the goals of modern gerontology modern aging is not infinite life or fixing aging it's not a disease model of Aging it's the idea of quality of life life in your years not so much years in your life there's this concept of compression of morbidity you'd like to only be ill right at the end for a second or two right before you die and the rest of the time you'd rather be spry and excited and not having pain and having tons of energy so we're getting better at that I think this there is a generational you alluded to this a generational perspective about how we view aging and think about how different it has been over a couple of generations our parents have a certain amount of people that are 60s and 70s have a certain amount of physical uh engagement these days and health generally but their parents at that age I would argue were actually not quite as robust and their parents you go back two three generations and there's a different type of Aging aging seems to happen a little faster there's more consequence there's less Modern Health Care there's again a concept in gerontology where the population pyramids the amount of young people medium and and older people starts off as a pyramid in as societies develop civilizations develop and as we get better and better at eliminating the cost the costs of infectious disease the costs of childbirth death the pyramid starts to regularize and we end up with this column where you have people as many young people as old people and then we have things like the baby boom which is a lump in the middle of that coln that travels up and the echo booom which is my generation Gen X the next little lump that travels up that column but the causes of Aging are starting to be addressable in many ways certainly the disease aspect causes we're still not able to completely address or even really treat sometimes the big three or four diseases of Aging that involve the brain those would include all of the sort of Alzheimer's type dementia phenomena of which there are few and then all the parkinsonian phenomena of which there are few they all have disease process type stuff then we have cancer and diabetes aspects of and Vascular aspects of brain stuff they all do create problems specific pathologies but you're not guaranteed to get any of them and many of them you can steer those trajectories dementia even Parkinsons may not be a disease certainly dementia it's not a a disease process that you get it happens to you in a week it's 30 years of that trajectory changing the changes we do see in the brain with normal aging and some of the stuff that accelerates into pathological becomes tissue loss the amount of brain cells starts to reduce a little bit especially in some of the areas involved with the body and awareness of the out the outside world the sort of physicality of the space you're in we lose processing speed through some myelination changes that it builds up a myelination but as the cell bodies drop away get less connectivity we get a change in speed there you see reduced activity in the brain and a slower response in the brain to the same stimulus something called the p300 which is the positive wave that happens about 300 milliseconds after you see something you're noticing or you're interested in or is popping out for you and that p300 gets reduced in height because there fewer cells firing and it slows down in time it happens a tiny bit later and you can see that change every decade from age 30 from 30s 40s 50s up through 80 it just gets a little bit blunted and a little bit slower every decade unless you do some things there's good work showing this good work initially by a scientist named Lazar I think she was a grad student initially when she published but now she has a lab that does a lot of this work she found that meditation will offset age related cortical is a area in the side of the brain sort of the the junction of the frontal and temporal loes called the insula which is about body awareness to some extent and feeding and smoking and putting things in your mouth and a bunch of stuff the insula thins out and the lateral sides of the frontal cortex really quite thin out quite a bit with aging unless you meditate I I I I estimate about 20 minutes a day is probably enough based on a bunch of studies to offset age related cortical thinning and you can potentially build more brain it doesn't mean that you have to have started it 20 years ago you could start it now but there's a direct correlation with how much you've meditated lifelong and how much you've spared you sidestep that cortical thinning that just tends to happen with age it's like adding some bone density your muscle mass there's a metabolic reservoir uh a health Reservoir You're Building when you do things like meditation in this case for your brain and the body and the brain are a little hard to change as we get older and older plasticity does dip a little bit it doesn't go away ticity is still really high lifelong that's what learning is regulatory stuff requires plasticity to be there but it does slow down a little bit the average 60 or 70y old is making about 700 new brain cells new neurons every day but somebody who's a few decades younger it's making several thousand brain cells a day of course the brain cells can still reorganize pretty much infinitely and create new connections so the numbers aren't that important it's that speed that cortical interconnectedness the the thinning that seems to be the big issue these days were not only do we have a different perspective on Aging like my parents go out and they're super active and their parents A Little Less in their parents a bit less in terms of a late stage of life to become more older and sedentary nowadays we're taking things that used to be Medical Treatments and were're bringing them into your hands you can look at your triglycerides and go oh I better back off on the ice cream whoops it's an obvious feature and you can do some of that stuff now with regards to your brain you can look at the brain's resting activity and see how fast your alpha waves are if they're slower than the average person your age your idling speed your processing speed is a bit dippy if that spread spreading out throughout the hemisphere you're going to have a hard time handing off information throughout your mind that's going to produce delays and recall little tip of the tongue phenomena and hunting for words and hunting for names I'm picking on that feature of our brain because in aging people are often concerned that little senior moment the delayed recall the I know that person's name I know you just told me something that kind of stuff is actually not memory believe it or not it's speed memory structures are likely intact with that little brief information retrieval stuff you've lost memory true age related cognitive memory features that are the ones you worry about when you lose episodic memory first person experiences are the ones that are true memory structures degrading but if you're losing words and names and can't quite find that person's speed actually it's handoff you're popping the car into gear it's popping right back out as you try to apply pressure and that's a trainable thing it's usually a function of the brain slowing down often there's a sleep regulation or an amount of deep sleep you're not getting anymore that's making the brain be like a car driving around with the E braake rubbing so this's this drag on all the power you have you have the power but it's not well synchronized you're brute forcing a little bit and some of the resources don't feel quite as reliable you can take control of a lot of the stuff so meditation will thicken up the cortex some of the things we used 20 30 years ago for medications have come to the sort of consumer level this age related or aging supporting pro-aging neut Tropics there's some medications that used to be only by prescription that are now supplements that help support things like that processing speed or that myelination there's a compound called citicoline or CDP choline which improves processing speed and seems to actually change how cells make their cell membrane how they incorporate choline how they can use choline that really helps with transmission and processing speed and you feel it so this what used to be an aging medicine 30 40 years ago is now in that supplement or neut Tropic pharmacopia we can access to as consumers we can go do brain Imaging we can go do blood tests we can look at our methylation analysis and figure out if we have different you know B vitamin needs or dopamine support needs around what we're seeing there so I I think that the it's almost an embarrassment of riches the amount of data we can now get about ourselves is a little bit hard to manage and it's hard to use 20 years ago 30 years ago maybe 50 maybe 100 We Believe doctors they were the the top of the mountain these days doctors are great but they have to be right you go to them for answers I think there's this other mode we should be in a little bit which is exploratory which is looking at data which is constantly learning a lot a lot of what I do is to teach people to understand their brains through this kind of data and when you do that when you show someone their Alpha Speed spreading out and explain oh it's a speed of processing thing and you still see really solid executive function and all the other features are quite intact then you like oh you're having trouble with your deep sleep it looks like yeah that that seems right to you okay that's why you're having word finding issues and they be breathe a big sigh of relief because it's not the Alzheimer's that their mother had or something also for anyone listening if you're worried about memory stuff and you're below about 55 or 60 even very unlikely you have to have a familial genetic form of something going on and you're to have true Alzheimer's at a young age at a below mid-60s showing up if you've got speeder processing issues delayed recall hack your sleep hack your stress meditate it's a big deal sleep changes throughout the life course it starts off regulating one way very early stabilizes and then degrades again a little bit the amount of deep we get is fractured the amount of stages go way way up as we had a a good older we start going back into that multiphasic sleep as late Elders the same way that very young kids do so that's actually a big deal managing the Sleep Quality these are all things we can do at any age but there's a bunch of circadian cues that the brain will you know pick up from the outside world to help synchronize all the clocks those include things like not eating before bed to avoid suppressing growth hormone release because release of melatonin as the day gets later also suppresses pancreatic insulin release completely you have this insulin drop at the end of the day which is part of what creates snacky Behavior oh I have insulin to release let me put some fuel in my storage but it's evolutionarily beneficial not so beneficial when there's carbs and and and refined Foods everywhere because we have this rich source of Highly rewarding food we can't quite store at the end of the day appropriately you go to bed with high blood sugar no growth hormone none you just skim the surface of sleep all night you run hot you never have a resting heart rate that's low body temperature never drops you have this metabolic loading phenomena that presses it takes the Circadian rhythm and pushes it Forward by a few hours not eating before bed allowing a fasting window to creep in at the end of your day is really useful it's the number one circadian queue from the outside world it's more powerful for setting your clock than when you sleep than anything else than light than screens the most powerful exogenous queue is food timing so eat in the time zone you want to live in otherwise it's really hard on your body and brain the cortisol insulin stuff doesn't cycle properly next rule get up early seven days a week now Elders certainly have no trouble with this but people below about 40 45 sometimes their circadian stuff is off and they get away with it but they're not getting enough deep sleep they're not well timed to the day they're in they're always sliding past their own clock essentially and one of the signs of that is not waking up rested or not waking up cleanly or smoothly at the right time hacking your morning routine becomes super important and getting up early seven days a week no later than an hour after Sunrise to get the the small light cue we can get and then when you first get up before you eat and before become sedentary go for a walk or do some yog or some stretching do a little bit of low-key exercise to burn off some fuel to create some energy flux before you start fueling shoveling energy into yourself bu a quick packs but westerners especially tend to eat late at night sleep too little only get up after hitting the snooze bar six times work out after work hardcore which is fine that's the time to work out hardcore when corol is actually at his lowest in the afternoon or early evening but you don't want to go do your CrossFit at 6:00 am. sorry folks you want to do your CrossFit at 5 6 p.m. 4 P.M you want to do in the morning your your yoga you're walking your Tai Chi your bring your spouse really lovely cup of tea from the place they like that's three blocks away stack your morning routine but the idea is to think of a minimal viable practice like what can you squeeze in in the morning that doesn't feel like you're squeezing it in it feels like self-care you get up what don't you skip you get up you hit the can brush your teeth can you do five minutes of yoga can you meditate can you go for a short walk what is that thing that becomes part of the practice not part of oh I got to get my workout in because just like exercise the routines that work are the ones that you do not the ones that are necessarily perfect there's some advice for hacking your circadian to get the most out of all kinds of things but especially aging you just gave us a ton of information I want to pick no apologies necessary but I do want to pick apart some of what you just said because and I'm going to show my age a little bit I'm also a gen xer when I went to nursing school in the mid to late 90s really what was taught to us medical professionals was your brain was fixed the conversation around really brain health is what you're driving at here and it's complicated there are so many different factors that involve brain health and that actually there is a lot of things that you as an individual can do to impact and improve your brain health dramatically yeah so much so much only about a third of our experience in the brain is genetic from my opinion it's about the about my take on the rest is environment shaping all kinds of learning the brain's insanely plastic I can get you a better brain way faster than I can get you ABS I guarantee it for most people unless you already got abs the brain loves to change and certainly some of the features now yes there are things that are fixed and I went to grad school a few years after you probably finished up uh nursing I was doing some classes to prepare for that around that time and that's right then in the mid- late 90s that's right when they're figuring out wait a minute we still make brain cells cuz before that it was like know you stop at age 15 or something no actually your whole life and more importantly the remapping of existing connections is nearly Unstoppable so every neuron can make multiple arms and connect to multiple neurons and let's just ignore for a second the idea of recurrent connections the same neurons talking to the same neurons which does happen let's simplify our equations and think about just the number of neurons can each talk to each other neurons raise the power of neurons Let's ignore G cells which are computational and do have a an information flow and Vascular neurovascular coupling which is information ignore all that just number of neurons rais the power of the number of neurons that number is larger than the estimate of the atoms in the universe there's more information density available to a brain to store than there's information possible you're never going to run out of information storage the brain's not limited in any way there's case after case across the literature past 100 Years of looking at the brain people having major problems in their brain tissue removing chunks or having major blowouts and oddly recovering doesn't happen most of the time time but it shows that there's this ability of the information density the architecture of the brain to suddenly change to adapt we were right we were taught properly that many things don't change really well things like Vision visual Fusion for instance or language the reason that you know I have a very subtle East Coast accent is because I only heard the majority of this language until age 8 and after age eight I my ab hear new phones or nine maybe for a boy to hear new speech sounds will be gone largely that's the Bas of accent language features such as hearing the language sounds ends up being locked down if you have your eyes closed for the first six months of Life you'll never see properly the brain will never develop that visual tissue again and motor stuff if you blow out a bit of motor tissue and your hand is because you've lost that bit of brain to unclench it it's really difficult to take motor tissue and retrain it you can do it it changes very slowly but it's really hard it's meant to lock down a little bit and then there's the other stuff the regulatory stuff the stuff that's meant to change that tissue is balanced between resource demand and the environment and a bunch of deep regulatory features and it's always tuning if you can put your thumb on the stuff that's meant to change it changes really quickly that includes all of the anxiety factors all of the features of anxiety perseveration rumination social insens hypervigilance you can see these things in a resting brain and they're meant to adapt they're meant to change in response to the environment's demands so let's take the executive function things sleep things sensory social these were all meant to change speed of processing stability the brain's meant to regain stability to suppress seizures suppress migraine when these features show up when you have suffering or symptoms or goals in these areas in attention stress sleep these are actually things that you can learn to shape take control over and make Progressive change a lot of change over a few months we already know this but let me give you a little perspective on how our brains change and how these adaptations might not always be ideal even though they make sense we've got the singulate cores the front and back midliner anterior and posterior singulate and they're switching systems at the intersection of stress and attention now largely the front of the brain is about the inside self the back of the brain is about the outside world and the singlets follow that rule and the anterior singulate holds holds things in your internal environment things you're thinking about caring about what matters to you what you're holding in your mind and the posterior singulate does outside world evaluation watch the road heads up careful but we need both of these we're always using things holding things and evaluating what we should Orient to always and yet if we learn the world's not especially safe or predictable those areas cramp up pretty hard and we start ruminating with the one in the back getting caught in a threat sensitivity and evaluation of the possibility of danger if our mind is steel trap and hyperfocus maybe the front one cramps up and we have brilliant Focus but a touch of OCD and we tend to have songs in our head or bite our nails or have actual OCD but these are not disease processes these are normal circuits natural resources that have cramped up like a muscle that's so strong that it's gotten a bit spasmed and it can't let go and the posterior singulate does that in to to in response to threat the same way your lower back does it in response to a car accident cramps up so you can walk away so you can deal with the sudden need to accommodate a different level of demand or threat and it's successfully adapts briefly but then it has some trouble later on it's still cramped up and your posterior singulate will then be looking for Tigers all the time wait danger okay okay dude I'm just sitting here reading a book is it a book about tigers no I'm just reading a book in the bath is it other water Tigers here the brain tends to get latched on to the possibility of threat because it's trying to help you identify what you need to pay attention to and if you missed danger once you might have gotten lucky but you're probably not going to Miss Danger threat at a high level twice game over and unfortunately humans can imagine all kinds of things as threatening and many things are but we can also catastrophize and latch on and give things strong negative veilance when they're just things that on pure objective appraisal might not have as much have as much threat things like things that cause procrastination for instance they're really stressful to do that project but we can existential level threat when procrastinating and resisting something it's probably not that level of consequence we have but the same circuits might ruminate about procrastination and now we have a stress response so the point being you can learn how this stuff works and get into it it starts to change your relationship with your resources the same way you might look at your blood panel or your bone density or a functional strength assessment or a sleep sleep tracker or something helping you know if you're getting enough deep sleep Etc they're all toward the idea of taking control and figuring out how you work and you can do these things pretty reliably Dr hell thank you for all of that I wanted to to go back to especially when we spoke about Alzheimer's and Dementia because that something that my grandparents had I hear my mother bring it up oh I may get it now and having that thought and fear um associated with it I really loved when you said that really the genetic piece is only a third yeah of our ability of getting that so that really I think is that two-thirds of it we have in our own control and we be very empowered to do we talked a lot about making sure we get our sleep in getting activity in first thing in the morning meditation but the other piece you also really spoke about was we need to do the right things that are needed in order to move ourselves from point A to point B we do have this information overload that we have access to right now and especially with our Elder generation I'm all more on the xenial side my younger Gen X my parents are still in that older generation as well where would they start with trying to use all these different biof feedback features that are out there yeah and to figure out where they need to go or where they are and where they need to go in order to improve their own brain health yeah that's a great question it's not just about brain health whenever you're trying to think about taking control of some suffering or some transformation you could do almost anything and there's lots of things that might work I think the perspective of going after your own health the same way you might go after your Fitness exploratory iterative getting some support but really focusing not so much on the definitions and the momentary stuff you're doing but really focusing on the goals a lot of what I do when I'm talking to people about how their brains work is I'm showing them their features maybe their posterior singlet hot and saying oh wow your lifeguard looks like a little bit up in the air and watch the road do you have some threat sensitivity oh you do oh that's frustrating but the person usually understands that they know it's true they know why seeing the resources can just knowing how these things work can suddenly change your perspective on it your suffering hasn't shifted but it's a lot harder to be overwhelmed or ashamed or guilty when you understand how this works you see your broken shoulder on an X-ray you aren't mad at it it hurts it's frustrating and limiting but it gives you some perspective and then you work around when it comes to the brain we're so focused on this idea of labels and diagnostic perspective and the diagnosis don't map to the resources real well you are not your diagnosis and the diagnoses are not your brain they're a particular description of how things are falling over at the intersection of society and your regulatory ability that's really what DSM is it's looking at that disregulation level and it's really about difference from typical and how successful you can be in a bunch of cognitive and emotional things it's that grading it's not really tied to the level of the resources I would say for someone like your mom who's concerned about age related phenomena there's a bunch of things you can do yes only a third of your stuff is genetic in the case of dementia we're thinking about the primary genes are things like apoe right and you have the apoe gene two copies of it and the 44 variant is the one that makes you most likely to oxidize fats and develop the sort of Alzheimer's prone tendencies in the brain if you have APO I think it's 22 you're much more likely to oxidize the fats and get cardiovascular and aerosis stuff turos sclerosis but the 23 or the 34 versions are relatively benign in terms of increased risk factors but knowing if you have 44 doesn't mean you get Alzheimer's it just means you're going to oxidize fat a little bit more aggressively and you're going to be have a tendency for this age related glycation products to to be produced and the sticky stuff to be built up okay now you probably should go a little bit lower carb and higher protein maybe think about developing some perspective on how your insulin how your ketones work maybe you should develop a really nice muscle mass sync as you hit 60 so that when you hit 80 You' still got some Bank going on in terms of fluctuating blood sugar and fluctuating you know energy levels and mitochondria Reserve that you've built up and then you can also demystify it your mom's fear is probably a bigger deal than the actual problem certainly now it is if she's not experiencing symptoms of memory the concern is a big deal and it tends to get in the way tends to be a luming thing for some folks unless you have the precin and Gene you're not going to get Alzheimer's in your 50s maybe not even your 60s now you might if you're a football player or there's other repetitive injury type of phenomena the other ways to get to alzheimer's type phenomena dementia type phenomena the classic Alzheimer's takes 20 30 years maybe more and it's a trajectory phenomena so you can actually look look at things like your blood sugar your homocysteine your cortisol and you can look at the factors that are driving this as a scientist Dr Dale bzen who did a first a bunch of papers and case studies and then later developed a testing program a metabolic Health testing program called Apollo Health they're really great they look at the 37 factors that drive dementia for mom was like Andrew I'm really worried about the fact that my mom had dementia how are you I'm having trouble with names oh that's not dementia you got to get your sleep hack though let's look at your sleep but to put your mind at rest or Andor to steer yourself in the right direction let's go look at find an Apollo Health provider do a blood draw look at those factors you're at risk for address them maybe you need different hormonal support maybe you need different antioxidant support some methione in to offset the homocystine some particular B vitamin to lubricate your MTHFR variants you can dial this stuff in and take the heat the fuel right off the fire when regards to these neurod degenerative phenomena that I think are often in that dementia landscape so you can do a lot here I would say there's all the diet and exercise stuff they're huge exercise changes the brain not just diet exercise changes the brain adds plasticity adds Mass to the brain so does having a better diet so does meditating you can improve your processing speed with supplements improve your processing speed with meditation sleep hacking you can also sidestep hopefully some of the big drivers of Risk by doing metabolic testing that covers an awful lot of the landscape and now it's more about what is happening with the changing landscape of agent performance because 2030 years ago and we didn't have all the tools 50 years ago didn't have all the tools we have now and that's accelerating so next year the year after we're going to have twice as much on hand as we had last year in terms of medical papers and and and stuff to inform us how to use all this I think that one of the this is funny we're talking about a gerontological population I think we're going to get a lot of benefit from uh ultra high technology shortly because the amassed amount of literature and also the computational the modeled drug Discovery the small molecule modeling and math to figure out small molecules and drugs for certain unknown or or or rare diseases with unknown idiology that's starting to accelerate aggressively right now from what I can see and I think we're going to start seeing everyone and and maybe rightly so is mad at AI for scraping the content of human existence and training us up on Art and politics and and everything else that's definitely a thorny issue but I'm very excited for AI to finish or to digest enough of PubMed enough of the literature on health and wellness so when a new paper comes out that has translational functional impact for somebody their health Avatar goes oh hey we think we found a weird paper that might be related to you and that might meend this supplement on these genes you have and I think that's where we're going is right now we rely on get a little bit of skilled people to help us guide if you want to learn your brain I can show it to you but it's a little complicated and right now for the next 5 Years it'll probably take someone like me to teach you your brain maps to show you how your brain works on a a resting EEG but at some point and I think that the elders are people that are older now people that are maybe 70 now and and above 75 80 I think if they can hang on for another five years or so we're going to start seeing this phenomena that Ray kwall calls this Singularity which I think is a bit silly that the idea that lifespan starts to expand faster than illness does that's probably never going to happen from my perspective as a somewhat conservative uh gerontologist the goal is not immortality but we might end up at 120 reliably and looking good and feeling great we might be able to to work on some of the appearance stuff the skin the connectivity tissues those are the big things that actually matter for Aging for most people it's the connectivity of tissues you could have better collagen aging if you could lengthen telome get ne another cycle there's the hack limit 30 roughly 30 divisions of sematic cells and then you've lost the shelace cap on the genes and they stop dividing as a protection for cancer you want you don't want to have unchecked division so the body has this the cells have this way of not growing forever great but that means that when we're 50 and 60 we have tissues that can't replicate and clean itself up becomes procancer unfortunately this is called antagonist IC plot tropy is the geological term where you have stuff inside of you forms and shapes and adaptations that serve one purpose that's Pro then maybe maladaptive and the haick limit the the telier is a little bit of that where you first get it as a protection against cancer but then later on it becomes pro- cancer so I think if we figure out how to and we're starting to get some sense as length and telr which is a anti-aging approach that plus tailored individualized medicine that's actually able to use the past 200 years of human science not just have one skilled doctor or gifted healer somewhere who knows how to do the one thing and you happen to find them once that the democratization of information is complete with regards to our own medical and and health and wellness stuff I think we're going to be in a very different place with regards to flattening that trajectory staying in a place where we are aging not just gracefully but we're actually getting better we're actually getting smarter and stronger and better looking as we get older even now yes some of the appearance stuff changed but not everything gets worse there there's reaction times changes there's strength changes grip changes all kinds of things that that degrade with aging then you have things like sematic knowledge and word knowledge that actually always goes up borrowing something like Alzheimer's you actually have increased word production semantic knowledge category knowledge it just never stops going up so if we can fix a few of the small things that seem to be trajectories more than hard limits I think we'll get another 20 years of like healthy human life and I think the next Century we'll live roughly to 100 most of us like now it's 80 I think we'll get at 20 years most of us without it becoming only the rich and famous get that only folks that can get PRP injections and micronutrient design diets I don't think we need that I just think we need to apply the stuff that we know how to do now that we've known how to do for 50 years a lot of the things we're finding now that are healthy are things we knew kind of for the past ancient human history like flavonoids are the new thing in biohacking they seem to have this really strong lymphatic pumping and drainage kind of thing and the lymphatic system is really under focused on in terms of health we think have circulatory system and immune system lymphatic system is both it seems to be involved with diseases of circulation diseases involving lipids metabolism now we're figuring out the flavonoids seem to cause a nice lymphatic action so apple a day keeps the doctor away or keeps the doctor from getting his bread apparently it flavonoids seem to be huge and we're going to be finding out more and more of these distilled actionable translatable Neuroscience things as we move on and they become something you can do and not something that you just have to read about in a journal and hope you can get access to in 10 years I think we're going to see a much faster translation into the marketplace of all these things so positive optimistic Dr Hill this has been an incredible 30 minutes I know you have so much more to tell us and to tell our listeners going to pause us here and divide this up into two episodes so stay tuned for next week's episode while we start to talk about technology biof feedback all the things related to brain health thank you for listening to the wellness empowerment project and we'll see you next week [Music] thanks for joining if you enjoyed this episode please follow subscribe and share with a friend want to learn more about a specific topic drop us a line on our website and we can explore it deeper with you [Music]