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May 16, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
49:33
Edition 543 - James Goodwin

Professor James Goodwin on the secrets behind the human brain - and, maybe, how to make it work better...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is definitely the unexplained.
Well, I hope that life is treating you well here in the United Kingdom.
We've had some more of the coronavirus COVID restrictions released and we're looking forward to June when supposedly others will also disappear.
We're also being told by the government in the United Kingdom that there will be a full public inquiry into the events of the last year or so and the handling of the coronavirus here in the United Kingdom.
So, you know, a lot of people are going to be wanting that to happen, in particular, the relatives of those who died during that period.
I think there are some questions that need to be put and maybe answers got before we can put this terrible, terrible event in all of our lives behind us.
What do you say?
But we'll see how that goes.
That's politics.
We don't talk politics on this show.
Not now, not ever.
And as Andy Williams used to say on his old TV show when I was a little boy, not now, not ever, never.
I think it's probably better that way.
You know, just let them get on with it, squabbling like rats in a sack, as they used to say.
Okay, the guest on this edition, somebody from my radio show this time that I thought you might like to hear.
I got some good feedback when this was broadcast, so I wanted to put it here in perpetuity, as they say on the podcast.
James Goodwin, leading brain health expert, Professor James Goodwin, has written a book called Supercharge Your Brain.
In it, he's got a ton of facts that you may never have heard about the operation of your brain, my brain too, and how you might be able to improve that is also connected.
And certainly a big part of this book that he's written, Supercharge Your Brain.
So Professor James Goodwin, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained, thank you as ever to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work on these shows.
Basically, getting them out to you, which he's done for years and years and years, and maintaining the website and making sure that everything moves and proceeds as functionally as it possibly can.
Functionally is a great word, isn't it?
If you want to get in touch with me, go to the website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link, and you can send me a message from there.
Tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
And always very keen to get guest suggestions in particular or just general thoughts about the show.
If you want to tell me a story that is your story that maybe you've never told before, then always good to hear from you at the home of the unexplained, my website, theunexplained.tv.
Okay, let's get to the guest then on this edition.
And as I say, this was originally broadcast on my radio show about a week or so ago, James Goodwin.
Professor James Goodwin, all about the secrets of your brain, that piece of meat between your ears that controls everything you think and do and are.
We're going to speak with Professor James Goodwin, Special Advisor to the Global Council on Brain Health.
He's written a book called Supercharge Your Brain, How to Maintain a Healthy Brain Throughout Your Life.
But there's an awful lot to talk about around that subject.
He's online to us now.
James, if I may call you James, thank you very much for doing this.
Howard, it's a pleasure to be on your show and actually a privilege to be able to share some of the latest unexplained phenomena about the brain being explained because the brain is, as we can read, the most complex entity in the universe.
And neuroscientists are only just beginning to get to grips with it, I have to say.
Yes, the brain is an enigma, isn't it?
Because we, even up to this day, although we're understanding more and more about it, there is still so much that we don't.
There is indeed the director of the Brain Institute in Seattle in the United States, Christian Koch, said we know more about the brain of a worm than we do about the brain of humans.
And the worm he was talking about had about 300 cells and 7,000 connections.
We've got 86 billion cells.
And some of those cells have got up to 200,000 connections each.
And if we stretch all the connections in the brain end to end like a fine wire, it would go all the way from your brain to the moon and back.
That is an astonishing statistic and definitely one for a pub quiz, if nothing else.
But this is a real ballpark ordinary man's question.
That's why I'm asking it, I guess.
It's very hard to be able to connect when we see autopsies and when we see diagrams like the ones that you've got in your book supercharge your brain.
When we see pictures of the brain, it looks like a piece of meat.
It looks like a sort of octopus style thing.
And it's very hard to believe that something that is a piece of grey matter, as they always called it, could generate all that it does.
We're a long, long way Howard from understanding how we get from the chemistry and the electricity, if you like, in the brain and our complicated thoughts and emotions.
I don't think there's been much progress in that.
There's been a lot of theorizing about it.
So on the one hand, you've got neuroscientists who understand all the electrical changes in the brain, how the cells work and how they're connected and so on.
And on the other hand, you've got philosophers who talk about the mind.
There's still a vast gulf between them.
So that is a hugely unexplained area.
Having said that, neuroscience has made some very profound advances in the last 20 to 30 years.
And some of it very frightening.
So for example, scientists at Yale took a pig's brain after death and kept the brain alive.
Now they treated it chemically so that there was no transmission within the brain.
But what they did was, was to keep those cells alive.
So it meant that after the death of the animal, the brain was still functioning.
Moreover, other neuroscientists have grown little tiny mini brains about five millimeters across, which will sit in a glass in vitro, as we say.
And the frightening thing about that is, let's Not have a conscious experience in the brain of that pig?
And do we know whether there's any consciousness in those little mini brains?
And even better, Elon Musk and others, he founded Neuralink.
This is all about, ultimately, Bluetoothing the brain because he's been able to connect up the brain to a computer which has been able to read some of the electrical activity in the brain.
It sounds magical, doesn't it, when you read about it?
You know, there are those who are a little uneasy around some of the ethics of all of this, and they're thinking we're getting out of our depth, perhaps.
But the kinds of improvements in life that it could make, for example, to people who have disabilities may potentially be enormous.
But it's very hard to make the connection between something that sits outside your head, generating signals, and the fact that those signals are readable and may be translatable into something that may make something else happen, if you see what I'm saying.
I do.
And I contemplate that mystery, I won't say on a daily basis, but frequently, and often ask myself, what's the origin of my feelings and my emotions, and how are they being translated into my thoughts?
Now, feelings and emotions we know quite a bit about.
Physiologically, hunger and thirst and the drive for sex are emotions because they change behavior.
And those emotions rise within the brain into our levels of consciousness, which we know is in the cerebral hemispheres, the frontal lobes, as we say.
And those rising feelings and emotions actually generate thoughts.
One of the great secrets of human success is that we're able to use our thoughts and our feelings together in order to make a very, very dynamic existence that we have on the planet.
Interesting.
James, the thing that is hard for so many of us, though, to understand, to contemplate, to even get a grip on is the brain is not only the place where what we do is generated, but it's also the place where who we are is generated.
You know, the conscious aspects of your personality.
It's very hard for a lay person like me to understand how such a complicated thing, which is unique and individual to each of us, can reside essentially in a piece of meat.
Yes, and indeed it does.
And scientists have an expression, no consciousness in the absence of organic substrate.
What they mean by that is no one's ever been able to demonstrate the existence of any consciousness or conscious being without a brain or without organic matter.
And that's one of the fundamental tenets of brain science.
Our understanding of the brain arguably started in 1848 in an accident on the Burlington Railway in Vermont, where an engineer called Phineas Gage suffered an accident.
And the accident blew a tamping rod six feet long through his left cheek from below and out through his eye and out of his head.
You would have thought no one would survive that.
Actually, Gage did, but he was no longer Gage.
Before, he'd been reliable, personable, a great leader of men, wonderful person whose company to share.
And then he became profane, irascible, raging in fits of abuse.
And that alerted doctors at the time, physicians, that we no longer relied upon the humours which the Greeks ascribe personality and character to, to explain our personality, our character, and our temperament.
You know, it actually came from the grey matter from the brain.
Since then, of course, it's all history.
We know that our thinking, our feelings, our thoughts are all generated by this bag of salty water.
And that's actually what it is.
It's a bag of salty water folded multiple times to fit inside our cranium.
And the walls of that salty bag are only five millimeters thick.
But within them are these 86 billion neurons, as we call them, or nerve cells, and these kilometers, miles of white matter connections.
It is more than miraculous.
It is just amazing.
I don't think there are actually words within my brain that would describe it and what it does.
And of course, injuries to the brain, as you say, can change the nature of the person.
So sometimes we'll find that people who have traumatic events happen like mini strokes and things like that, they can be medically minor events that people survive and come through.
Not that anything like that is ever really minor, but the effects of them, maybe something like, what if they call it, a TIA, a transient ischemic attack.
I know people who've had those.
Sometimes they change a little after that.
Yes, they do.
And I read a book about the life of the surgeon in London.
I'm searching for his name.
You may remember the book.
It's called Do No Harm.
And in there, he relates the case where they went into the person's head in which there was a tumor.
And the brain had done its job.
It had sealed off this tumor.
It was about the size of a small golf ball.
And they easily removed it.
And all the tissues of the brain folded back around it as if it had never existed.
And they sewed up the head, put the patient back in intensive care.
And he was fine on the first night, fine on the second night, woke up after his third night's sleep and promptly died.
So there'd been almost no damage to the brain.
It's just the brain had not suffered well the insult of the invasion of the surgery.
And many neurologists will say, show me a head injury and I'll show you a change in personality.
We know it's that sensitive.
And I've known one or two neurosurgeons, and I've said to them, Do you ever think that if you go half a millimeter to the left, you remove the person's sense of humor?
And they said, Oh, yeah, we're exceptionally conscious about the dependency of who we are on that grey matter within our skull.
You said half a millimeter, really that little?
It can have profound effect.
Half a millimetre is more than some of the size of some of the major nerve fibers in the cranium.
So absolutely.
And as you say, these small transient ischemic attacks leave scarring in the brain and can actually result in changes in demeanor and in behavior.
They're what they are, mini strokes.
But they can sometimes have effects that won't be noticed perhaps by the wider society.
But people who are close to the person who's perhaps had that may well notice some difference, and it isn't something that rectifies itself.
But it seems to me that the brain does have a capacity in the face of onslaughts and intrusions and all the rest of it, to want to rewire itself.
That seems to be innate within the brain, this desire or this inbuilt program to reconstruct.
Sure.
Physiologists call that neuroplasticity.
It's the capacity of the brain to recover from trauma and indeed to adapt itself to changes in circumstances, challenges and stress.
And your listeners might wish to know that in 2019, an amazing discovery was made, reported in Nature, which is the world's most prestigious journal.
A team in the University of Madrid found that new brain cells were found in the brain or are made in the brain throughout life, right up until our ninth decade.
And of course, that flies right in the face of the received wisdom, which was you're born with a set number of brain cells.
There's plenty of redundancy.
You just work your way through them as you get older.
And by the time you get to 100 years of age, if you're fortunate enough to get that far, you're running on empty.
Now we know that's not the case.
And that's really great news for everybody because it means that the brain can revitalize itself as we get older.
And it's a myth that we decline rapidly with age and that it's inevitable and that we can't do anything about it.
We now know that we can maintain the functioning effectiveness of our brains right up until our last years.
And we don't necessarily have to suffer decline.
And this is what my book's all about.
It's about the practical measures and about what science has revealed will enable us to stay sharp for all our lives, basically.
And would you, and we'll get into talking about those in our next segment, but would you describe those as being things that, you know, people who have quite a busy schedule are comparatively, compared with athletes and people like that, fairly sedentary?
Are they things that even people like me could achieve?
They are.
The great news about these modifiable risk factors, as we call them, is that many of them are not only not onerous, but they're enjoyable and they're entirely within the remit of the average person.
One of the big principles I found in reading the research was it's not the single things that matter.
There's no silver bullet.
It's the single things that you do every day over the course of a lifetime that matters.
And James, just before we talk about supercharging your brain and more specifics about what's in your book, a lot of people have come to terms with aspects of their brain not functioning the way that they would hope it would during this period of lockdown.
Now, I have been in isolation for a very long time.
It's been a year that I found extremely difficult at the end.
At the beginning, it seemed like, you know, it was fine.
I could take charge of my own life and nothing to worry about.
You know, I could be fine.
But as time has gone on, I've found that not only is there the propensity towards being depressed by all of this, which I'm quite happy to admit that I have been, and there are many, many, many other people who have been too, but also for strange artifacts to show themselves, like difficulty with memory.
If I tell you last night, I was watching an old episode of Dragon's Den, and I was trying to remember the names of the original dragons, you know, including Duncan Bannatyne and Theopa Fetis, people like that.
And I could see their faces in my head.
Of course, it's a new team of dragons now, apart from Peter Jones and Deborah Meaden.
But I could see the names of the original team, or the faces rather, of the original team, but I couldn't remember them.
And I tried and tried and tried, and in the end, I had to give my brain a jog with my computer.
And of course, there were the names.
Why could I not remember their names?
There's no reason why the brain should remember names.
It remembers faces.
And the reason it remembers faces is because faces carry meaning.
And the brain doesn't want to overtax its memory capacity, if you like, by trying to form memories of meaningless items.
The brain makes 35,000 decisions a day, and memory is vital to all that decision-making.
Memory is so important that you have to remember the words at the beginning of the sentence so that when I finished it, you got a meaning of it all.
And memory is not what people think.
There's an experiencing self and then there's a remembering self.
And the remembering self constructs memories afterwards.
The memory is not like a video recorder that captures all the meaningless details around us.
It selects the items or the features of our experience in order to form a memory and then records it later.
So, this business of not remembering names to faces is quite common.
In fact, there was a study done in Edinburgh University published a few months ago, which shows it's just as common in youngsters as it is in older people.
We just get embarrassed by it and more worried about it as we get older.
And you mentioned lockdown.
Do you want me to just say a word about lockdown?
I'd love you to, because especially at this time of night, we're going to have a lot of listeners who, like me, have been affected by this.
Yeah.
Well, there are three pillars to our brain health, which have been embedded in our brains over 1.5 million years of evolution, perfecting how they work together seamlessly to make us who we are.
And those three are executive functions, so that's reasoning, learning, decision-making, all the higher functions which we use on a daily basis.
The second is emotional control.
Emotional control is very, very important.
Nature has embedded positive emotions within us and negative emotions within us.
And it's balancing those which enables us to use our executive function properly and to have a sense of well-being.
But the third one is social cognition.
We are absolutely hardwired over 1.5 million years when hunter-gathering first arose to seek and connect with the company of other people.
And frankly, and this is a personal view, if you wanted to devise a plan to damage the health of the nation, put people into lockdown.
And it's indisputable the effect that damaging social cognition will have on brain function, actually on general health.
So I can give you a throwaway line which your listeners will love, and that is loneliness, this chronic experience of being socially isolated, it's a subjective experience, is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day or drinking a bottle of gin a day.
And there are two massive studies.
One study was a review of 3.4 million people in order to come to that conclusion.
And not only that, it's a risk factor for cognitive decline and even Alzheimer's disease.
Good lord.
So what you're saying is that what I've experienced and a lot of my friends have experienced, this decline in being able to quickly recall things.
I mean, I think I've got a pretty, doing what I do, I've got a pretty fast brain and I've got a lot of experiences and a lot of stuff that I have gathered over the years.
And I was always, until recently, extremely good at recalling it.
And now I can see, for example, another stupid entertainment example, a picture of Jim Carey.
And, you know, I know it's Jim Carey, but I can't put a name to the face, which a year ago, I think, before lockdown would not have been the case.
But maybe I'm making that extrapolation just because I'm looking for it now.
Our acuity of thinking will show a decline over the years.
But it's how steep that decline is.
And some elements won't decline.
Some elements will get better.
So something we call crystallized intelligence, which is actually the formed knowledge that we have, gets better with age.
That's how I can maintain my position against, my intellectual position, against bright young students who've got extremely quick minds.
Because my crystallized intelligence is vast.
And our crystallized intelligence goes towards what we call cognitive reserve.
So you and I, Howard, will be using the depth of our knowledge, experience, our education, and the challenges we've had over our lives to counter the declines that we have in our fluid intelligence, which is the part which does decline a little bit.
But it's not inevitable that we go to the point where it affects our daily lives.
So we have a miserable existence.
We can't remember things.
We can't use numbers or words properly.
We can't remember ideas or concepts.
And even with Alzheimer's, as we know, it gets to the point where you don't even recognize other people.
Now, it's not inevitable.
Now, there's a paper, there's a paper published in the Lancet magazine by Jill Livingston.
I should say journal, not magazine.
And she found that 40% of all the cases of diagnosed Alzheimer can be prevented.
And she identified 12 of these modifiable risk factors that we mentioned earlier.
Isn't that interesting?
My father was in a care home in Southport, in Merseyside, Lancashire, depending on which way you look at it.
In his latter years, he'd been a police officer, sharp as attack, right up to his last day.
He read the Daily Mail cover to cover every day.
Knowing that I was a news person, if I arrived there to see him, he would quiz me on the contents of the paper and he would know more about it than I did.
He could remember when he was in the patrol cars.
The guy that he most liked working with, I think, was a guy called Cyril Pearson.
And he remembered every detail about working with Cyril Pearson decades and decades ago.
But something that happened maybe an hour or so ago, he may forget.
So he would ask me when I arrived, have you had something to eat?
He was always concerned about me, God bless him.
And then he would ask me an hour later, have you had something to eat?
And he'd probably ask me three times in the process of the visit.
And so it seemed to me that portions of his memory, portions of the working of my dad's brain, and this is a common thing, I'm sure, were in absolutely perfectly functioning order.
He could go into huge detail about investigations that he did in the police patrol cars with Cyril Pearson, but he would forget something that happened last week.
Yes, the neurochemical basis of our higher intellectual processes does slow down as we get older.
But the main principle is that we can put our boot on the throat of aging and we can slow it down to the point where we minimize it.
There was a paper published again in Nature, Nature Journal by Professor Ian Deary from Edinburgh, who showed that only 25% of the change in our thinking skills across our life is due to DNA.
75% is due to our environment and to our lifestyle.
That's phenomenal news for us.
That means that the ordinary things of our lives, we can change them in such a way that we maximize the maintenance of our brain and the way in which the brain works over the course of our life.
This idea that we're going to decline into dementia and that it's inevitable has actually got less currency now because of what we know.
Is it true that the more that you do and the more active in terms of your involvements, you know, if you're a writer, if you keep writing into your 80s, whatever, the more connected you are, the more your brain is going to stay functional.
Yes, there's a large degree of truth in that.
And psychologists have pointed out there are certain activities which they called cognitive stimulating activities.
These are activities that involve new learning, that challenge the brain.
So it's not so much doing a mind game or Sudoku or crosswords or a puzzle.
That simply exercises a few circuits necessary for the completion of that activity.
It's all about learning new stuff.
And one of the great ones is learning a language.
Research has shown that people who are bilingual or that people who are on a learning curve with a new language have benefits transferred to their general functioning in life mentally because of that learning activity.
Another great activity to learn is dancing.
And the more rigorous, yes, the more rigorous the learning process and the more complex that the dancing is, the better the transfer is.
Psychologists call it far transfer.
So near transfer is if you use a mind game on your computer or your handheld device or you play Sudoku, there might be a little bit of spillover into your everyday life, but not a lot.
There's certainly no far transfer so that activities quite unlike the mind game won't benefit from that mind game.
But these cognitive stimulating activities, they show that far transfer.
They're all in my book and there are loads of them.
So learning any new skill, learning juggling, for example, or painting, anything that challenges the brain is going to slow down that process which you notice in your father.
So it's use it or lose it.
It's just like exercise.
You know, they say, lockdown has made me a bit stiff and achy, I have to say, and I'm trying to get out on the bike as much as I can.
It's the same with the brain.
One of your segments in the book, one of your sections, chapters in the book, is Bugs in the Brain.
This is page 82.
And it seems from this that although we see adverts all the time for eat this particular kind of yoghurt and increase the diversity of the flora in your gut to make you feel healthy, apparently that goes for the brain too.
One of the most amazing recent discoveries about the brain was made in 1998 by a scientist called Mark Light in Minnesota University.
And he found that by changing the bacterial content of the guts of a mouse, he used a pathological bacterium called Campylobacter.
He found that it made the mice more anxious.
And then that was followed up by And that was a deduction from their behavior.
And some years later in 2011, a repeat experiment was done by others.
And they put lactobacilli, another form of bacteria, into the guts of a mouse.
And that made anxiety go down.
So this was an emerging literature, emerging science, that the guts contain these trillions of bacteria, and these bacteria are influencing the chemistry of the brain.
How interesting.
So I should carry on with the probiotic yoghurt then.
Well, the evidence for that is not so certain, but what we should do is use what we know to maintain the health of the bacteria in our gut.
And before I tell the listeners how to do that, another finding that was made is that one of our happy hormones, the hormone that creates good emotional balance in the brain called serotonin, only 10% of it's made in the brain.
90% of it is made by the bacteria in the gut.
And most people have problems with this.
We all know what's in the colon, the large intestine.
We all know what's in there.
Undigested food remains and trillions of bacteria.
It's very unpleasant.
But that is a superb pharmaceutical factory, millions of years old, which is serving the chemistry of the brain and producing our well-being.
Isn't that interesting?
And we know the link between the gut and the brain.
You know, those of us, and again, I don't mind admitting this because I'm one of millions, thankfully.
You know, I'm in good company.
But, you know, I've had IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, for years.
And that is something that has a direct correlation with the state of your mind.
And I know that when I'm under more stress, the chances that I'll get a flare-up, perhaps after the stress, interestingly enough, are increased.
And I just, I accept that now as being part of my life, and it has been for 25 years.
So I know that's how it works, and I don't worry about it.
But that link that we don't think about between what happens in your gut and what happens in your head is definitely there.
Yeah, the bacteria in our bowels have an enormous impact on our feelings, on our emotions, on our personality, and even on our thinking.
There was an article produced in Nature again in 2012 called Mind-Altering Microorganisms.
And now the search is on to unwrap the secrets of the chemistry of the bacteria in our bowels to produce interventions, which We call psychobiomes, substances which will change the state of the mind.
And we know that things like autism, obesity, Parkinson's, IBS are all associated with an imbalance of the bacteria in our bowels.
We have got to look after them.
Prebiotics, probably better than probiotics.
Prebiotics are food substances which feed the bacteria in our bowels.
So James, what about the impact then of the way that we live our lives, the things that we do on the health of our brain?
It's remarkable, Howard, over the last 25 years or so, what's been revealed about our lifestyle.
And I can talk to you about exercise or about diet or about our social life or about our well-being.
But I'd like to start by talking about new findings on sexual activity and brain health.
Really?
Okay.
Yeah.
There was an experiment carried out in 2010 at Princeton University where male rats were introduced to female rats who were receptive.
And for both the rats, the male and the female, the experience was stressful.
Their stress hormones rose.
And what they found was that if they introduced the male rat regularly, every day for 14 to 28 days, it sparked off neurogenesis in the brain.
So regular sexual activity with a familiar female was actually generating new cells in the brain.
How interesting is that?
I mean, look, taking us back to lockdown here, and not wishing to put too fine a point on it, for an awful lot of people in this country, that's been less than possible over the last year.
So are you saying that that will have had for human beings an impact over this last year of lockdown?
I'm saying that frequent, regular sexual activity with a partner you know and you have a close emotional relationship with is beneficial to brain health.
There seems to be a threshold of once a week.
So in the book, I talk about being proactive in terms of your relationships with your partner and not letting things drift.
So sexual activity is a really important rejuvenator of the brain.
And the great news is that in that rat experiment I talked about, Howard, the older rats benefited the most.
I find that just absolutely wonderful.
Well, I'm sure there's a way to summarize that, but I think they probably take me off the air if I did.
And the level of regeneration in the brain and the older rats reached that of the young rats so that they reversed aging by the frequency of sexual contact they had with that other partner mouse.
And this was not just rats and mice.
There was a big experiment done in 2018 in Australia by Professor Mark Allen.
And he looked at 6,000 people over the age of 50.
And indisputably, those who had frequent sexual intercourse and frequent ejaculation had better memories than those who didn't.
And again, the milestone age was 60.4 years.
So the effect was greatest the older you got.
And since then, we've had experiments done at Coventry and Oxford.
Haley Wright at Coventry University 2019.
Big samples, 6,800 people found that those with regular sexual activity were better at their maths and were better at their reasoning and were better at their memory.
It's absolutely astonishing.
Well, I'll take on board what you say and I'll try to work on it, James.
Thank you for that.
What about sleep then?
Everybody always used to tell me when I was younger, you know, if you want to pass your exams, you've got to make sure you had plenty of sleep.
Sure.
Yeah.
One of the great myths, Howard, is that as we get older, we need less sleep.
The truism is that our sleep changes as we get older.
So it's harder to fall asleep.
It becomes more fragmented.
So we rise out of sleep more easily and we maybe wake up one or two times during the night.
But we still, even at our oldest ages, need seven to nine hours sleep in 24 hours.
Not per night, in 24 hours.
So you can make up for this fragmentation by napping, but you shouldn't nap for more than about 40 minutes.
If you do that, you ruin the sleep drive.
One of the molecules is called adenosine.
And if you sleep for more than 40 minutes during the day, the levels of adenosine that should provoke sleep later in the day aren't there.
And therefore, you set up this vicious cycle of failing to sleep at night properly and falling asleep during the day.
And it sets into this vicious cycle of sleeplessness.
Right.
So there's like a lot of things in our lives to do with our health, there is an optimum balance about sleep.
There is.
And what the listeners should know is that the absence of adequate sleep creates inflammation in the body.
Now, inflammation is an interesting concept.
We all know that if we have a bee sting or we bruise our finger, it gets red, it's painful, it swells and so on.
And then it resolves and it heals.
Well, as we get older, there are changes in the DNA, which mean that that acute inflammation isn't resolved and it becomes chronic.
So if I measured the inflammatory molecules in the blood of someone aged 18 to 30, they would be much lower than if I measured them in someone aged 60 to 70 or 70 to 80.
Now, we've got to try and keep this inflammation down throughout our lives.
One of the ways is to get adequate sleep because The absence of sleep is inflammatory.
And again, I could measure the inflammatory markers in the blood of people who sleep well, and they mean much lower than those who've got sleep problems.
And there's a lot we can do to improve our sleeping experience.
One of them is called sleep hygiene, and that means going to bed at the same time every night, every night, even the weekends, and waking up at the same time.
The moment you start to mess around with that, and you have erratic habits, inconsistencies of all kinds, late working, staying out late, and all this, that really starts to break up the sleep cycle, actually 25-hour cycle of sleep rhythm that we have.
Isn't that interesting?
For most of my radio career, I did news and I did breakfast.
Stations would want to put me on the morning breakfast shift.
That's the one that catch the listeners.
That's where I used to work for years upon years upon years of that.
And it's only in recent years that I've moved across to doing late-night talk shows like the one that we're doing right now.
And I've found that, in fact, I still find it difficult to do that because my entire body and my mind was set to the idea of being able to race out of bed at 4 a.m., get to work and be absolutely functional 100% on the radio at 6 a.m.
You know, my life was absolutely geared to that.
From the age of 21 onwards, they always put me on breakfast.
So doing late nights like this has been a hell of an adjustment.
But can you make adjustments like that?
We can, but it's limited and it gets more difficult as we get older.
So for example, the swings in the rhythm of sleep become compressed.
So the roller coaster is easier.
It's more compressed as we get older.
When you're younger, the roller coaster are big highs and big lows.
They're more vigorous.
Now, changing those waves, if you like, becomes increasingly difficult as we get older, which is why we should pay attention to managing our sleep once you get past, let's say, 30 or 40.
And these are lifetime-long issues.
So that if you lead a dissolute life for many decades, you're going to have real problems when you get older.
Okay, I hear what you say.
But because of that, and just I'm sure a lot of other shift workers can relate to this, because my entire body and mind for decades of my working life, ever since I started work, was geared up to breakfast early morning, being on the radio 6 a.m. for your first news bulletin or whatever you were doing.
You know, I can, in fact, I can still do that.
If I have to get up really early in the morning to go on holiday, remember when we used to be able to go on holidays in those days?
I can still beat everybody else and be more alert and on it at half past four in the morning than most other people because I did it for most of my life.
Yeah, sure.
There'll be a learning effect in the way in which you drive those rhythms.
But your capacity to survive the ill effects of a disturbed rhythm gets less as you get older.
I'd like to mention caffeine, if I may.
Oh, dear.
That's my downfall, by the way.
Yes, well, my advice would be, it's fairly generous advice, would be don't drink coffee after lunchtime.
Some sleep experts would say don't drink coffee after 10 a.m. in the morning, but that's a single issue scientist who does nothing else but study sleep.
I'm much broader in my approach than that.
And I would say that along with everything else, there needs to be some moderation, notwithstanding the chemical effects of caffeine.
But if you drink two cups of coffee after, let's say, two o'clock in the afternoon, you're still going to have 100 milligrams of caffeine floating around in the brain at 10 o'clock at night.
And that really is going to disturb the sleep mechanism.
So that's my advice to people.
Another one would be, don't use the bedroom for anything other than sleep or sex.
Don't have your office in there.
Don't have hobbies in there.
Keep the bedroom for sleep.
And that conditions the brain, if you like, that this is a sanctuary where only sleeping takes place.
Should you have pets in the bedroom?
Not if they disturb your sleep.
Have pets in the bedroom if they don't disturb your sleep is the answer.
And what about electronic devices?
There's a lot of research that suggests that electronic devices or even devices that have blue LED lights on them, I've got a few of those, are not a good thing to have in the place where you sleep.
I have to say that where I sleep is I've got an internet radio connected, my phone's charging, I've got a DVD player, a television set, radio's galore.
So I have all of those electromagnetic forces around me.
Yeah.
Well, 50 years ago, technological change began a change in the sleeping habits of our lives.
And by technological change, I'm talking about blue light.
Now, because of something that's called the Raleigh effect, as the sun rises in the morning and comes through the Earth's atmosphere, blue light enters our eyes and serves to wake us.
And that's been a signal for millions of years in human evolution.
And then the sun sets, the spectrum entering our eyes turns to red.
So what do we do?
We turn on our tablets and turn on our mobile phones and turn on our laptops.
We'll watch the TV till very late at night.
And what is that doing?
It's shining mega amounts of blue light into the eye, convincing the brain that we're still in the early hours of the morning.
And this is something that is a big factor in the sleeplessness of modern life.
Modern life is almost a ghastly insomnia experiment where everything around us, constant noise, constant lies, constant activity, working at all hours, the 24-hour internet environment is all very, very damaging to our peaceful sleep routine.
And if we have to remember that we are animals, we are creatures, just like the birds outside my flat.
If I turn a light on at 2 o'clock in the morning, which is before they get up, this time of year, they're getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning.
I hear them.
But if I turn on a light at about 2 a.m., they will start to tweet and Twitter.
And then they'll realize it's still dark and they won't know who to blame and they'll go back to sleep.
But, you know, we are creatures just as they are.
We are.
And in order to have a very well-informed view of our health, we have to consider our evolutionary history because all these mechanisms are embedded in the brain.
And we're not going to, you can't uncook what's cooked and you can't un-evolve what's evolved.
And these mechanisms are there for a hugely important reason.
Survival of the human species.
So they're embedded as a priority and we're not going to shift them now because of our modern lifestyle.
Modern lifestyle is, you know, post-war really.
And as a result of that, it's playing mayhem with our physiological mechanisms within our body.
But there are ways to deal with this, and some of them are explained in the book.
And I just have to say, for common sense and regulatory reasons, if you feel that you have any problems with your sleep or your health generally or your brain or anything, please, your first port of call needs to be your GP.
But there are many useful and interesting reflections in this book.
One quick thing, James, if I may ask you this at the end of this.
Just a thought about those who are researching and speculating at the moment that consciousness, that thing we talked about at the beginning of this discussion, might be external to the brain.
Do you think that there could be any mileage in that?
Well, in scientific or philosophical terms, I'm what people would call a reductionist.
And that means that it's the biological and chemical processes within the body that generate all the attributes of human life.
That's my view.
And that's not to say that I don't think that spirituality and the perception of extra-human deities is a flawed concept.
That might appear to be a contradiction.
But in dealing with our human biology, to my mind, the mind is the production of living processes of the cells.
And once those cells stop being alive, my mind ceases.
And that's this reductionist view.
To my mind, and to many others, it's organic.
And I'm not sure that we're going to find the evidence that consciousness exists outside of that infrastructure of the brain.
Well, isn't that interesting?
Professor James Goodwin, Supercharge Your Brain is the book, How to Maintain a Healthy Brain Throughout Your Life.
And we've also talked about the workings of the brain.
Not a subject that we get into that often on this show, but really fascinating when we do.
It's published by Bantam Press, and as they say, it is out now.
James, thank you so much for your time.
It's been an absolute pleasure, Howard, and I hope that the listeners have derived some benefit from our conversation.
Fascinating stuff.
I don't know whether I can do any of those things to improve my brain functioning.
I don't know whether I've got the discipline, and I really should.
But I tend to bury myself in my isolation, and I don't do a lot of the things that I should do, that I know are good for me.
And I really do have to do those things.
And I wonder how many of us that goes for.
What do you say?
Quite a few, I think.
Okay, still sunshine here.
Spring still continues.
This is all very good news.
So, more great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained Online.
Until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained, whatever you do.
Please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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