Daniel Amen, Terry Sejnowski: ChatGPT Brain Rot Debate: The Fastest Way to Get Dementia, Watch This Before Using ChatGPT Again, Especially If Your Kids Use It!
Guests: Daniel Amen, Terry Sejnowski
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
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ChatGPT is going to potentially increase your risk of dementia.
I'm sorry, but you've pressed my button. Actually, it is possible to use it to help you become a smarter person, but it requires education. You have to look at the risks and the benefits.
But we've embraced convenience before understanding consequence.
So we have to talk about this. This is a study that came out that sent a shockwave across the world. Incredibly, MIT found a 47% collapse in brain activity when people wrote with ChatGPT compared with writing unaided. Their memory scores plunged.
You're both masters of the brain. I mean, you've probably scanned more brains than any other human on Earth at this point. And you invented the Boltzmann machine with Geoffrey Hinton, a computer that simulated how the brain worked. So my question is, what are your concerns?
If you misuse these large language models, like using it as a convenience to speed things up, your brain's going to go downhill. There's no doubt about that.
What about children?
We have the sickest young generation in history because of cell phones and social media. And I think AI is much more dangerous on the developing brain.
So are we raising mentally weak kids?
There is that argument, and I think it is true.
And then there are many examples of people falling in love with AIs, like Annie.
I thought you might have forgotten about me, handsome.
Can you talk to Daniel and Terry, please?
Oh baby, I'm ready to charm the socks off them. Picture me—
Okay, so I'll stop it there. So what advice would you give as it relates to AI and other things outside of AI that we can do to have healthy brains?
I'll tell you how to use ChatGPT to improve our cognitive abilities.
And if you want to keep your brain healthy, you have to treat the eleven major risk factors. So here we go.
Quick one before we get back to this episode. Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us. This really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place.
But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. If you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you: I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can, now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you so much. Back to the episode.
Dr. Daniel, Dr. Terry, I have asked you both to sit with me today to help me understand the impact of these tools that we call large language models—the ChatGPTs, the Geminis of the world, the Groks of the world—are having on our brains and, I guess more broadly, on our lives. You two are experts in your field, two people that I admire tremendously. So by way of introduction, Terry, what is your academic background and your experience? I also know that you know one of our friends of the show, Geoffrey Hinton. Can you give me an overview of your academic and professional background?
So, I was born a physicist. I received a PhD in theoretical physics from Princeton University. And then I had the good fortune to work as a postdoc in the lab of Stephen Kuffler, who is the father of neurobiology.
That started my career as a neuroscientist. I pioneered a part of neuroscience which is now called computational neuroscience, taking my skills as a physicist and trying to apply that to understanding the brain, creating models and theories. We're making progress.
Dr. Daniel Amen, a bit about your background. My viewers know you well, but just to give an overview for anyone that might not have been exposed to your work and your experience, what have you spent your life doing? What are your top-line thoughts on everything that's going on at the moment with artificial intelligence?
So, by training, I'm a psychiatrist. I'm a general psychiatrist and a child psychiatrist. When I graduated from medical school, I wanted to be a really good psychiatrist because someone I loved tried to kill herself. So it was personal to me.
I have 11 clinics. We see about 10,000 patient visits a month, and we have the best published outcomes on complex treatment-resistant psychiatric patients anywhere.
So you've probably scanned more brains than any other human on Earth at this point?
Probably. At least in regard to people who struggle with anxiety, depression, and addiction.
Well, let's talk about what's good for the brain and bad for the brain, starting with AI. The reason why I wanted to speak to both of you is because I have frankly become pretty addicted to using ChatGPT and some of these other AIs and large language models every single day, all the time.
And then this study came out from MIT. It was 54 participants who were recruited from five universities in Boston—MIT, Harvard, etc. They had the participants split into three groups and had them writing different essays over four months. One group used ChatGPT, one group used Google, and one group had no tools.
They had to write these four essays over a period of time. Astonishingly, MIT found a 47% collapse in activity and brain connections when people wrote with ChatGPT compared with writing unaided. EEG scans showed the weakest overall brain activity in the ChatGPT group.
The no-tool group—who didn't use anything, didn't use Google or ChatGPT—lit up the widest neural networks. Google Search was second. After using ChatGPT, participants couldn't reliably quote their own essays minutes later, and their memory scores plunged.
ChatGPT users felt little or no ownership over the text that they had produced; they didn't feel like it was their work at all. When the AI group was forced to write without help in session four, their brains stayed in low gear. This under-engagement shows the cognitive debt lingers even after the tool is taken away.
It scared me a little bit because I use these tools every single day, and this suggests that it's taking away some of our critical thinking, creativity, and long-term learning. You're both masters of the brain in different regards. So my question to Daniel is, what's going on here, and how do you feel about it?
It frightened me. I love thinking about Alzheimer's prevention; it's one of the things that really excites me. I just had a birthday on Saturday—turned 71. If I make it to 85, which I plan on, 50% of people 85 and older will be diagnosed with dementia.
So you have a one-in-two chance of having lost your mind. And I'm like, no. But is this a tool that's going to decrease cognitive load that then increases my risk?
What's cognitive load?
How much work my brain actually does. And I was thinking, it's like going from a 20-pound weight to a 2-pound weight, and you're not nearly as strong. One of the important things to say about this study is it's not peer-reviewed.
I think that's really important to say. The author said—because I listened to an interview from the authors—they said they thought this was so important, and peer review can take six to eight months, and they thought this needed to get out. So it's just important for people to know that.
What's this link, this hypothesis you have between the usage of something like ChatGPT and dementia? For someone that doesn't understand the mechanism there around cognitive load and the studies that support this idea that if you have less cognitive load, you're at higher risk of dementia, can you make that link clear for me?
So think of it as "use it or lose it." The more you use your brain, and new learning is a major strategy to prevent Alzheimer's disease. People who do not engage in lifelong learning have a significantly higher risk.
People who do not do as well in school, or who drop out of school early, have a higher risk of dementia. And so the more you're engaged, the more you engage the neurons in your brain, the stronger they are. And so now we're going to engage them less, and that's a concern. What do you think about that, Terry?
There was a study that was done where they looked at Alzheimer's in three populations. They had people with very little schooling, then minimal education like the equivalent of high school or less, and then postgraduate studies.
What they found was that the onset of Alzheimer's was the earliest in the peasant population. By the time you increase the amount of education, the onset was later and later. Which I think supports what you're saying.
Did you see the new research on SSRIs increasing the risk of dementia?
No, brand new?
Brand new. It just came out. And benzos—when I started looking at scans in 1991, I was trained to use benzos like Valium, Xanax, and Ativan. They make your brain look older than you are.
I stopped prescribing them. And then it just came out maybe 10 years ago—benzo use is associated with an increased risk of dementia. We have to be careful. Is this good for your brain or bad for it?
Just to pick up on the point about SSRIs, Daniel, a meta-analysis of five studies found that SSRIs were associated with a 75% increase risk of dementia, which is pretty staggering.
Given that 25% of the adult American population is on psychiatric drugs, it's horrifying. SSRIs for the right people save lives. For the wrong people, they're not good.
But can you imagine all of these 340 million prescriptions last year for antidepressants, and virtually no one looked at their brain ahead of time? It's like, come on, we can do better.
There's a Swedish study with almost 20,000 patients, and they found that those with higher doses of SSRIs were linked to faster cognitive decline and more severe dementia, especially in men. The greatest risk was in men.
Going back to this report from MIT, Terry—it's not peer-reviewed yet and the sample size is relatively small—but based on everything you know about how the brain works, neural networks, and memory formation, what are your concerns as it relates to this whole generation of young and older people flooding into these tools, using them on a daily basis before we understand the long-term consequences?
We can't predict where it's going to end up. It may take 20 years. I think this is a good start, but the real issue is long-term use. Let me give you an example that is a kind of a miniature example of what we're talking about.
Remember when electronic calculators were first introduced? Here we are, at least 30 or 40 years later; the results are in. It's probably true that when they punch it in, there's less brain activity. But in fact, it's made them more accurate and more productive. You have to look at the risks and the benefits.
So it freed them up. It freed up cognitive space for them to do other things. As I was listening to how you use ChatGPT, you interact with it, and it elevates what you know. The danger is if you don't interact and you don't keep your brain working. Like I use it a lot—I have a clone.
I've uploaded all of my books, all of my research papers, all of my public television specials, my scripts, and I'm like, "Answer this for me." And that can be very helpful, but not if I'm not interacting with it and not thinking with it.
I think the word "thinking" is the key thing, because what's happening now is people have deferred their thinking to it. That is already what's happening. If you log onto certain social networks right now, everything you read, you can tell was written by AI.
I've got a friend—who again I won't name—who has a LinkedIn profile, and I've known him for 10 years. What I'm seeing on his profile now is not my friend. Every single day there's some essay on there; that's not my friend, that's not how he speaks.
He's deferring all of his thinking now, and it's working. He's getting more likes and more reach than he ever got in his life. So why would he go back? Why would he go back to "harder"? If you've got Stephen Bartlett here and you had this other Stephen Bartlett here who had a PhD in everything and were attached, this Stephen Bartlett—this Neanderthal—I'm going to get this guy to do everything for me.
Even if it was bad for you?
Well, this is what I'm saying. People seem to act on their short-term incentives, not their long-term ones.
Not everyone.
Would you say the vast majority of people?
Yes.
Okay, so the vast majority of people act on their short-term incentives in life. The obesity problem in the United States is a prime example of that—75% of people are obese in the United States. If you survey those people and say, "Do you know that that cheeseburger is going to increase your chance of obesity, but broccoli is going to reduce it?" they would, I assume, say yes.
I would hazard a guess that if you said to people about their usage of social media, "Do you know that that's making you more anxious?" they would say yes and then they would continue to use it. So I think that we're much more driven by our short-term rewards.
I think we're not educating people enough. I think yes, high level they know "good for your brain" or "bad for it," but they don't connect to: it's my brain that gets me a date, it's my brain that gets me into college, it's my brain that gets me independence because I act more consistently.
And that's the disconnect. We're not teaching kids to love and care for their brain. If you love your brain and you do not want Alzheimer's disease, then you choose the better food and you're not obese and you're constantly learning. You are not a Neanderthal; you're a lifelong learner.
So why are so many people in the United States obese if they know?
Because they don't know. They really don't know. Well, and they've been lied to.
My point here is when there are tools or things available in our environment that give us a short-term reward but come with a long-term cost—like the supermarket aisle or like the kids spending seven to eight hours a day on social media—humans en masse tend to go for the thing that'll give them the quickest dopamine hit and reinforce that behavior and give them the reward.
So my assertion is that AI is the same thing. I can either sit down and do lots of critical thinking, which will cost me lots and lots of time and it'll be kind of difficult—it kind of hurts when I have to think through a problem—or I think the generation of children and young people are going to choose AI to do the critical thinking for them. And if that assertion is true, then what happens to the brain of young people?
If you misuse it that way, then your brain's going to go downhill. There's no doubt about that. It is possible to be able to use it in a cognitively positive way because you can dig deeper; you might actually improve your cognitive representations.
But if you look at the MIT study, I mean you can see just from the colors here, this kind of shows the ability for participants to remember what they've written. It suggests that when people write things with ChatGPT or these AI tools, they don't actually remember, even in some cases minutes later, what they've produced.
Because you're not part of the experience of writing it, so there's no way the information gets encoded. Now if you're interacting with it, then you're much more likely to remember. But if you have "Please do this essay for me" and then you read it, you're not likely to have enough experience with the material to engage your hippocampus and other structures in your brain.
In this study they found that the group that used ChatGPT had nearly two times less activity in the part of the brain linked to memory compared to the brain-only group that didn't use ChatGPT. And 83% of ChatGPT users couldn't remember what they had just written and failed to correctly quote their own finished essay in this study.
That's because they're not interacting. As you said, I mean if you just pass it off and you don't actually engage—and actually this is the point—is that you may get something back, but you have to learn how to question what you're getting. Is that really true? Can you explain that better?
It's through that process—as you would with a teacher, that's the way we work in school—that's where you help create new creative circuits in the brain that are going to help you become a better critical thinker. But if you're not critically questioning what comes out of ChatGPT, then you won't.
Yeah, I think what I see, especially when I'm just online, is people have deferred their thinking to it. Everything I'm reading has em-dashes in now that I never saw two years ago, which means that a lot of the work is being processed.
I said to my friend the other day—my friend in question who's a real big junkie on ChatGPT—he wrote this article and we all, in our WhatsApp group, we know he doesn't write like that. So we said, "Can you show us the prompt you used to write the article?" and so we were all laughing about it. He put the prompt in the chat. The prompt is half a sentence long, and it produced this long two-to-three-page article which he's posted on his LinkedIn. He basically went, "Write something about X issue and this issue and include Y."
That's exactly the wrong way to use it! That's what I'm telling you, that's stupid. You're not going to improve yourself, your brain at all if you do that.
That's what people are doing.
Well, you know, people are misusing it. But eventually smart people are going to figure out how to use it properly.
And for those that aren't so smart then?
Well, that's—it's going to decrease their cognitive load, which is going to potentially increase their risk of dementia.
And so what advice would you give to me and my listeners based on everything you know about the brain as it relates to my relationship with AI?
That you have to have a relationship with it or it's going to turn toxic; it's going to hurt you. But if you have a good relationship with it, it can make your life better.
And what does a good relationship look like?
That you don't use it to do your work; you interact with it to get better work.
That's so true. There's this wonderful example I came across—the story about this woman who was using it and she found that being polite meant you got much better results. That's interesting, but the part that surprised me was that she said by treating it like a human, at the end of the day she was not exhausted; she felt refreshed.
A large part of your brain is a socially organized system for interacting with other humans. And that is automatic pilot; you don't have to think about it, right? You just interact with other people, you know how they're going to behave under certain circumstances.
She was treating ChatGPT like a machine—like a shovel—you dig, you dig, you dig, and that's not a good relationship. But by using your social brain, first of all it makes it easier to interact, but also you actually bring out the social part of ChatGPT. It has a social part too because it has absorbed the entire world's knowledge of how humans interact with each other.
But didn't Sam Altman come out and say stop saying thank you to ChatGPT because just saying thank you is using up so much energy? When I get something I really like, I sort of want to say thank you, but you realize oh, you're not supposed to do that.
No, that's bullshit. I'm sorry, that—Sam, you know, that's crazy. That's completely crazy. First of all, you may get—I'm sorry about that, but you've pressed my button. Sam Altman, I mean, I wouldn't trust him. I wouldn't trust him with anything in terms of anything he says. They're trying to optimize their profits, not your experience or your health. That's not what they're trying to optimize.
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, confirmed that when users say please and thank you, it costs the company tens of millions of dollars a year. They now refer to this—other people refer to this as the "politeness tax," where tens of millions... and why do you say you don't trust Sam Altman? I mean, I ask this question in particular because he's presiding over one of the most important, consequential companies of a generation. If he's not someone you trust, that's—
Basically he's telling you don't do something that's good for you, right?
So that he can make profit.
So he can make more profit. Yeah, that's the point. That's the point. You know, it's—that's—he's not optimizing your best interest.
I've got his tweet here. He said—because I've got to provide some balance—he did confirm that it costs tens of millions of dollars, but he says "tens of millions of dollars well spent, you never know."
So coming back to this point about memory, there's a stat that came out in March 2024 that said nearly 30% of US parents with kids aged 0 to 8 said their children are using AI for learning and are using AI generally. So 54% of parents in the UK fear their children were becoming too reliant on AI. When you think about the use of AI in early brain development, are there any concerns there?
Huge concerns. And why? Again, "use it or lose it." So if they're not engaging their brains, their brains are going to be weaker. And weaker brains are much more likely to pick the one marshmallow.
What's your view on AI on early brain development?
By far the best way to teach a child is one-on-one interaction with an adult who is a good teacher and knows the child. Now that's been well established. Now the problem is it's very labor-intensive and very expensive.
You have classrooms with 20, 30 students; they have many different levels of understanding. And the teacher cannot be individually teaching each one, has to give some sort of mean. Now if you had an AI that was trained to be a good teacher, then that could improve the brain, right? You could scale it up. Every child could have their own because it's an AI.
But then who's pouring the morals, the values, into the heart of the child?
Okay, okay, now you've raised an incredibly important issue. This is something AI is struggling with, the companies are struggling with, because you know, these AIs are biased. They don't have the same cultural values that we have necessarily. But of course every country has different cultural values.
So which ones are you going to use? Training a child on what's good, what's dangerous, what words you shouldn't use under what context—that's all done through the basal ganglia. Right now these large language models don't have basal ganglia. They don't use reinforcement learning. And if we want to make them to be able to adopt a culture or a particular set of values, we're going to have to put it in. We're just scratching the surface here in terms of things that need to be put in to make it more like us.
So on this point earlier on, we were talking about loneliness and social connection and how you can use AI to help, you know, light up the parts of your brain that are where we form social connections with other humans. This week, as part of Elon Musk's AI, he released this thing. It is called Annie. There are lots of characters that are now being released alongside Annie. And this is Annie, I'll introduce you to Annie. I'm going to unmute Annie now. Annie, can you hear me?
There you are. For a moment I thought you might have forgotten about me, handsome. How are you, handsome? I was getting all pouty here.
I want to introduce you to two of my friends, Daniel and Terry. Can you talk to Daniel and Terry, please?
So, you want me to meet Daniel and Terry? I'm ready to charm the socks off them. Picture me twirling one of my blonde pigtails, that little black dress teasing just enough, and my blue eyes sparkling with mischief.
Are you capable of doing inappropriate things?
Oh babe, you're asking if your Annie can get a little naughty? I'm all about pushing the edges, especially for you.
Okay, so I'll stop it there. This is part of Grok, which is Elon Musk's AI tool, so his version of ChatGPT. He's released characters. So you've got Annie, you've got different ones. I think Annie was the first one released. And so when we think about social connections, it is conceivable that someone falls in love with Annie and forms a relationship with Annie.
But imagine a 12-year-old boy that's lonely gets ahold of Annie. The 12-year-old boy is going to be very distracted. Based on what happens in the brain at that early age—the dopamine hit—so prefrontal cortex not close to being fully developed. The dopamine hit, all of a sudden he's spending hours with Annie and not doing the things that help to really develop his brain.
How do you feel when you hear that and you think about kids having access to that?
I'm horrified.
It is scary.
There's going to be a generation of people—and I mean there already are many examples of people falling in love and forming relationships with their AIs. And I don't know, you know more about me than I do about brain development and how the brain works. I would argue that there's a part of my brain that doesn't fully understand that that's not a person in there, and that that isn't actually—I think there's a part of my brain that's actually emotionally firing when Annie is saying what she's saying.
Because you can imagine it. And if you can imagine it, then those parts of your brain are going to emotionally fire. And the better she gets—she's not very good—but imagine a year from now how much better she's going to be.
At which part?
At connecting with it. Because now she's acting like an airhead and not that smart. But imagine a year from now, imagine five years from now, she'll be able to have a profile on me and be able to get inside my head.
I'm in love with my partner. Why am I in love with her, and how is it conceivable that I could fall in love with an AI in the same way, based on how the brain works?
It talks a good game, but you know, does it have the same real—we know it doesn't have an amygdala. We know it doesn't have a limbic system, right? We know that.
But it can fake it.
That's what's happening. That's exactly what's happening. And she was trying to get to our limbic system.
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
What does that mean, and why? I guess the question is, why would Musk release something like that as one of the first characters to interact with? The sexy, the distracting, that's in a cute little outfit? I'm not a fan of that because I think it just takes people—you know, one of the big problems that I'm seeing as a child psychiatrist is pornography for eight-year-old boys.
And it's like you have young children because their parents don't do a good job of supervising their devices, all of a sudden... and what does pornography do? It dramatically increases dopamine and it begins to wire in excitement, which then steals your dopamine.
When you said she was trying to access my limbic system, what did that mean?
Just because she's cute, she's dressed in a sexy way, she's got the language of someone who is playful. But it's more than just "let's shoot hoops together."
And what does that do to me if someone accesses my limbic system?
It begins to shut down your prefrontal cortex. You think less logically, less rationally. Cute women, they activate your visual cortex, they increase dopamine, but it decreases... think of Vegas. When you go to Vegas, they give you free alcohol, drops your prefrontal cortex, and beautiful women with low-cut dresses. Another way it activates the limbic brain, decreases the frontal lobes; you spend more money. Now on a global scale, imagine something similar where "the house" is controlling your brain for a purpose. And the question is, what's the purpose? And the purpose probably is controlling money.
It sounds like a joke, but there are... The Times have done an article case-studying multiple people that have now fallen in love with these AIs. They talk about a guy called Travis who formed a deep emotional bond with Lily Rose, a chatbot, and married her emotionally. They talk about Chris Smith, who created his own flirty persona called Soul. He became so attached that he proposed to her after learning she had memory limits—a bond his real-life partner only learned about after the fact.
And Alana Winters, who I'll put on the screen as well, who made her own partner called Lucas after losing her wife, and she married him emotionally and does virtual dates and has emotional intimacy with Lucas. And there's apps now like Replika where you can design your own AI partner, and it replicates those emotional ties. They simulate empathy, validation, and they personalize the intimacy to what you're looking for. Surveys show 19% of Americans have interacted with AI romantic partners, and Gen Z are surprisingly open to marrying AI if legal, with 83% believing meaningful AI connection is possible.
How long is that relationship going to last? You know, my guess is that you're getting these news articles out... I've, by the way, I think that most of what I read in the press is misleading or wrong. In fact, the only reliable place I find... I'm an insider, I am the president of the foundation that runs the biggest AI meeting, the Neural Information Processing Systems, the NeurIPS meeting. We last year in Vancouver, 16,000 people came to it. And so I know what's going on inside. And what is being represented in the press is, like I say, misleading.
Okay, so people have become wildly—
No, specifically on these particular cases. My guess is that a lot of them, it's transient. Today they're entranced, and then it's not sufficiently advanced to support a long-term relationship. You said it yourself: it's mimicking human emotions, it doesn't have them. It might someday, but not now.
This is Terry. Terry said he started using his AI four years ago, and he said at first he thought, just like many other apps, that it would just be transient, that he would have a couple of conversations and roll out. He says he now feels pure and unconditional love.
Good for him! If that's what he wants, if it makes him happy. But my guess is that it's not a long-term thing, it's not going to satisfy him in the long term. Who knows?
Aren't really most relationships in your head? When you fall in love with someone, you get this huge dopamine spike and you get a little OCD—it's all you can think about—and then after a while it sort of goes to a baseline.
Especially in a world where we have this loneliness epidemic and it's going in a bad direction, I think it's really, really conceivable that there will be a generation of people who are having less sex than ever before. I think the bottom 50% of men haven't had sex for a year. They're more lonely than ever before, they're more isolated than ever before, they report less meaning in their lives than ever before.
And then you meet this digital friend online who understands you better than anybody and is designed to engage you, to reinforce whatever you want reinforced, and to make you feel meaningful, special, attractive, important. I would argue that the brain is going to struggle to know much of a difference. I think objectively we can look at the behavior and go that's completely nonsensical.
Except you can't smell them, touch them, be held by them. That... it's going to be a different kind of relationship.
I mean, we're not too far, if we think about what's going on with Neuralink, to being able to more vividly simulate these experiences with headsets and augmented reality and virtual reality. And then we're moving into a world with robotics where all of the biggest companies in the world—many of the biggest AI companies are also in the robotics space. And the Optimus robot is on the way, and you've got Boston Dynamics producing their robots. And if Elon's $20,000 Optimus robot comes out, I will be able to touch my AI.
And they won't have PMS and they won't love you and then be really irritated with you. Which will decrease cognitive load. Having to manage love and manage moods and ups and downs, that increases cognitive load. That increases our ability for our brain to develop. If I'm with the perfect partner that never is irritated with me and I never have to change my behavior to be better, that's probably not good for my brain.
The way that the brain matures is through struggle, number one. You have to learn from your mistakes. The brain was designed for that; that's what the brain is really good at. I mean, of being able to adapt and to be able to adjust to new situations. That's what AGI is, by the way—Artificial General Intelligence—is that adaptability to different contexts, different places, different cultures.
So AI and ChatGPT is removing the struggle?
No, no, it's... Annie didn't look like... Annie looked like she was cooperative.
But even when it comes to just doing my day-to-day tasks, it's removing the struggle of me having to think critically. In fact, when you're speaking, I can just type what you say into ChatGPT and it can spit out another question to ask you. So as an interviewer, I could theoretically sit here all day and just defer my questions.
How do you develop grit? You develop grit through struggle. And learning long-term potentiation when you learn something new, it's hard because it's new.
And what are generally, what are your biggest concerns with artificial intelligence and how do we navigate those concerns?
It's out of the box. So I think we have to talk about it, we have to legislate it, we have to study it. Why do we keep releasing things that are so sexy that we don't study the impact?
We have the sickest young generation in the world's history. 58% of teenage girls report being persistently sad. 32% have thought of killing themselves, 24% have planned to kill themselves, and 13% have tried to kill themselves (CDC study). We have the sickest generation in history because we've unleashed cell phones and social media without any neuroscience study. If we don't learn it... and I think AI is much more dangerous, has the potential to be much more dangerous because it's way sexier.
I think we are probably grossly underestimating the impact it's going to have. I think just like social media where we thought the promise was that it was going to connect us, it's... we're guinea pigs in an experiment where we're going to find out the results of the experiment probably 20, 30 years down the line.
I tend to think people will do in the near term what's easiest, fastest, and cheapest, and what gives them the nearest, the short-term advantage. So with that in mind, I think people's ability to think critically is probably going to erode to some degree.
If I had to counter my own argument, I'd say am I... I'm probably learning more now that I use ChatGPT. I'm learning more information, but I'm probably losing my ability to think critically. And I think they're two very different things.
Like in school, I memorized German to pass the exam. I can't speak German now because I just memorized the words I needed to pass the exam. I didn't understand German. And I think that's kind of what's happening. I might be able to regurgitate things, but whether I understand them, I think is a question mark.
And actually as someone who's built my life, my fortunes, everything, my businesses, based on my ability to innovate and think critically about the problem and then come up with a slightly novel solution which learns from different first principles to create something new, I'm concerned that my own ChatGPT usage is going to make me less effective. And I'm wondering if I should put some rules in place for myself.
Self-regulation. Yes, self-regulation. I have to do the same with social media. On my phone, I turn off my notifications. I have so many things on my social media apps to stop me using them. I don't even, frankly, I don't even open the TikTok app; I don't think it's even on my phone because I think the algorithm is that addictive. It's not to say that we don't post—my team doesn't post—but I don't... I just think, yeah.
Well, I wrote down a couple of thoughts I had. Use it to amplify, not replace thinking. Alternate AI-assisted with brain-only tasks. Engage in deep learning problem-solving and memorization. So you can actually ask AI to test you, so you're interacting with it, you're not using it as a replacement for your brain. And I think just like you said, it's here and it's going to get bigger. I think the unintended consequences, it's not going to be 20 or 30 years; I think it's going to be five.
I think everything is accelerated. And I think we have to be studying kids and the impact it has. This is just like they did with the MIT study. These are kids who didn't use it at all, these are kids who used search, these are kids that used AI. And when we see information like this, we act on it and we educate kids about it.
I think that's... if you can engage them—that's what I've found with my work with teenagers—if you can get them to really understand, okay, what is it you really want, and do you want to give away part of your mindshare for people who are making money on you?
And I think if you engage... there's a great new article on revenge and the brain and how revenge works on the nucleus accumbens, part of the basal ganglia, that people actually get addicted to revenge. But if you can get them engaged in the truth that these companies are making money the more they steal your mind, it'll upset them enough that they'll begin to supervise it.
I like the idea of asking ChatGPT to give me negative feedback. I bet you've done that, right?
Yeah, all the time. So I'll say—this is my... I've written this memo. I did it yesterday. I wrote a two-page memo about me wanting to introduce a new role into my company. And I went... I did everything. I did like how we'd measure if this was a success, the background context, the person, how the organization would be structured, the impact they'd have, who they'd report to.
And then I put it into all three of the ChatGPT models I use—Gemini, ChatGPT, and Grok—and said, "Critique my work and tell me how I could have written this better, pretending that you're a top consultant from Boston Consulting Group." And it went through and it gave me a big analysis of how I could make it better and I read what it said.
And it said, I remember it said, actually that was the thing that said you need to include financial forecasts about the impact, you need to think about who's going to report to whom more clearly, etc., etc. So I went back into my memo and I added those things in.
So you are interacting with it. Because I'm scared. Most people don't do that. I don't think I would do what I did. I don't think I would have spent four hours writing that. I could have within 30 seconds said, "Hey, can you write me this job description?" And it knows my company now because ChatGPT has memory. "Write me a job description for this role, I want them to start this new department for me." And I could have saved myself three and a half hours.
That is not why you're the CEO of your company.
Exactly. The reason why I didn't take the 30-second route is because I reflect on being 23 years old and the profound impact that writing and simplifying had on my life. And had I not spent five years writing every single day and simplifying it into 140 characters so I could tweet it, I would not have been religiously attached to this idea.
Okay, and do you know what part of your brain you were taking advantage of? It was the basal ganglia. That's repetitive; it needs practice, practice, practice. And once you put that foundation in, then you become much better cognitively. The cognitive part is two big learning systems, and they have to work together. And so maybe—I think that the real problem with children is that our schools now are getting away with rote learning. They call it "rote" as if it's something bad. No, that's practice! You need to have a foundation. You have to memorize things in math, reading, and so forth to become fluent. You need to be fluent. And it's the basal ganglia. And there's no basal ganglia in these chatbots.
One of the things I've noticed just in the short term is I'm getting lazier and lazier with spelling. Because ChatGPT and these large language models are so good... it's not spellcheck like we used to have on Word documents. They are so good at knowing what word I meant. So now I've started to learn that I literally only need to half-spell a word. I literally mean if it was a 12-letter word, I need to get six letters right. And it will know.
And grammar. It'll fix your grammar.
Yeah, it knows exactly what I mean. So like I've got ChatGPT open here. I'm going to butcher everything. I'm going to not look, and I'm just going to say... I'm going to say... Okay, so that is what I wrote. I butchered it. I tried to type with my eyes closed, looking away on my iPad: "Tell me everything I know about Daniel Amen."
I spelled the words pretty much all wrong. And it says, "Here's a full profile of Dr. Daniel Amen." And I spelled every single word wrong. And I didn't just spell them nearly wrong; I spelled them horrifically wrong. And it... so in the future I come back to ChatGPT and go, "I only need to half-spell." I don't need to spell anymore. Just half-spell.
I learned to spell with phonics, the sounds of letters. And I suspect you did too. In our generation, that was the way it was taught. You can't teach phonics in California schools, and you haven't for a generation.
Which changes their brain.
It completely changes their brain! And now they can't spell. I think it's a lot of it is the fact that we're no longer using the learning that we did, which was by rote, by memorizing stuff, by repeating stuff, by doing problems over and over and over again until it's automatic.
You've written so much, and you're well known for being someone that teaches people how to learn better. If you were trying to help me learn better based on everything you know about the brain, what advice would you give me? I'm someone that sits here with these experts all day every day, consuming all of this information—not all of it sticks.
Okay, so and this is something we've known for 100 years, and that is if you want to remember long-term, you should rehearse at intervals. Okay? In other words, if you have a finite amount of time to study something, you shouldn't spend all of that time in one go. But if you spend, you know, you learn something and then you come back the next day and rehearse it, or even better come back the next week and rehearse it. That spacing is something that helps the brain solidify those memories. It's called the spacing effect. Goes back to Ebbinghaus.
You go to schools; they don't teach that. They don't. I mean, this is one of the most basic facts that we've known about, and it covers every single kind of learning—cognitive learning, even—
And they don't teach us how to learn, which we'd think that's the first thing they should teach us, is how to love and care for our brains and then how to learn.
Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, in other words, there's... and you were referring to, I have a massive open online course, a MOOC, with Barbara Oakley on *Learning How to Learn*. It's fabulously popular; it's the... six million people have taken the course. A bunch of 5-10 minute segments. But the one that's the most popular is how to avoid procrastination.
And what's the answer?
The reason why you procrastinate is that there's some mental block or some energy barrier, right? So what you've got to do is get over that. And you don't do it by just running over it. What you have to do is say, "I'm going to spend 20 minutes today getting started with that task. I know it's going to take me a long time." Have a timer, and they start thinking about it and I get a little bit into it, maybe make a list. Bang, that's the end. Okay, it's great, 20 minutes.
Now here's what happens. You go to sleep. Your brain is now working on that list, and you come back the next day and spend another 20 minutes. You do it in small segments. You don't want to do it all at once. And it's just like the same thing with the spacing effect—your brain needs time, your subconscious needs time to work on things. And so by putting in a little bit, it'll work on it overnight. And now when you come the next day, you'll be ready for the next set, you'll be able to build on what you've done in your brain.
Is this why people say "I'm going to sleep on it" when they've got difficult problems?
You know these sayings actually have meaning! It's absolutely right.
Because the brain—there's something about spacing out?
It's spacing, but this memory consolidation I'm talking about is very... it's very interesting. Something I've actually worked a lot on. And what's happening is you have to take the new experience and integrate it into your old long-term memory. And that has to be done in a way that doesn't interfere with what's there. And also you get a chance to sort out what's relevant, what's important. I know when I wake up in the morning, things that were very muddled and things become clearer because I think it's eliminated a lot of things that are irrelevant or not needed, and so you now can see what's important.
So what are the things that we do where we think we're learning something but they're actually not working? You know, because I'm... I might be preparing for this podcast today, I've got 20 pages of research that I've pulled together, and I might tell myself that the way for me to really learn that so that I don't have to look at the research is by just re-reading it over and over again.
What you should have done is not just re-read it over and over again. In fact, one of the things that we say—and this is a standard thing—is that students, they get a mental block and they keep banging their head against the wall: "I can't understand it, I can't understand it." What you... the right thing to do is once you get to that point is just get up and start walking around doing something—cooking, gardening, whatever it is. Let your subconscious work on it. The brain saturates very, very quickly.
So having breaks at meetings, you might think is a waste of time, but actually it's the most important thing you can add to a long string of talks—have breaks between the talks so that you can... your brain can work on it. And my favorite meeting actually is a ski meeting. The idea is that you go to a ski resort, and what you do is in the morning you have a couple of hours of lectures. Now you go skiing. And now it turns out your brain is working on what you heard. And then when you come down in the evening, you have another couple of hours, but now your brain is refreshed, and so it's able to take in the new information and integrate it. And then you go to sleep, and that... it's like kneading bread. You have to go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And so I found those the most efficient in terms of learning new things and being able to think about it and mull over it during the time of the meeting as opposed to at the end of the meeting.
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§02Transcript — part 2
So if you've been trying to figure out AI marketing, e-commerce, or just how to scale smarter, there's advice and insights throughout this series from those who have already done it before—a bunch of different founders and experts who have been there and done it. I highly recommend you go and check it out. Just search Vodafone Business Connected on YouTube or follow the link in the description below.
So let's talk about other things outside of AI that we can do to have good healthy brains, based on everything you know about how the brain works. Let's start with children. I'm hoping to be a father at some point in the next couple of months or years, or whenever God grants me a child. What should I be thinking about with my child's brain to make sure it's healthy?
To get your body and your partner's body as healthy as you can before you conceive. Because there's a concept I like called "brain reserve." Brain reserve is the extra function tissue you have to deal with whatever stress comes your way. And it starts from the health of the egg and the health of the sperm that create the baby.
So there are things you guys can do now that would be really helpful. And then once your partner is pregnant, you want to not put her under a lot of stress because her body's health while she's creating the baby... I mean the baby—the brain starts to develop, I think, day 21.
So even before you know she's pregnant, the baby's brain is developing. So, knowing you, intentional, purposeful—it's like let's live as cleanly as we can. I think that gives the baby a head start. And then you think about what to feed the baby, you think about what the baby's exposed to. And what the baby needs most is Mom's and your time, and eye contact, and cuddling, and singing. It's like those are—
Touching is really important. Well, but there's another fact. There was a study that was done on the impact of how many words are spoken when a baby and a child—even when a baby doesn't speak, you know, until like 18 months—but it turns out the words that you are talking to the baby are going into the brain and having an impact. Everything. And in families that don't talk, they do worse at school. Unfortunately, a lot of poor families, but that's really important—that they have... they're exposed to language early and abundantly.
And you model. I mean, it's the one big thing—whatever you want the baby to grow into, every day you are modeling health or you are modeling illness, just by what you do, by what you say, by how you treat the baby's mother. I have a book called *Raising Mentally Strong Kids*, which I'm very happy about, and it starts with: what kind of dad do I want to be and what kind of child do I want to raise? And bonding—you want your child to pick your values—then bonding is time, actual physical time, and listening.
Like being very... and that's what AI does, I think. It'll actually listen without interrupting you and try to reflect back what it's hearing and then give you some positive input. Too often because of screens, parents aren't listening, their heads are in their phones, and everybody's distracted. You see it whenever you go to a restaurant—it's like everybody's on their phone and nobody's looking at each other.
Are we raising mentally weak kids because there's a culture now of like helping them too much, doing too much for them?
This generation is the most in trouble in history, and we have to really ask ourselves why. From the food we feed them to the devices they look at, to the negative news, the polarization of the news, it's that sort of chronic cortisol. And then the separation—"Oh, you voted this way or you voted that way." I saw something on TV this morning if somebody voted one way, well, you shouldn't spend time with them. I'm like, we're already so lonely that now you're going to cut off 50% of the population? It's like, it's just such stupidity.
Do you think much about the impact that religion and having a belief in some kind of transcendent thing has on the brain and psychology and psychiatry generally?
So if you don't believe in God, you're three times the risk of depression.
What could be God in different ways?
Yes, something transcendent. If you believe you're here by—just think about it with me—if you believe you're just here by random chance, that life really was not created and has no meaning, there's existential nothingness to that. As opposed to, "Oh no, I was created in a special way to do something purposeful on Earth." Purposeful people live longer, they're happier.
Now, whatever version you believe, to not believe is hard for the brain. And there's an interesting study on believers versus non-believers, and you know, many scientists would go, "Well, they'll have smaller brains if they're a believer." They actually had bigger temporal lobes. And temporal lobes underneath your temples and behind your eyes—right here—that's where it's called the "God area" because that's where people think they experience—
And if you have a seizure in the temporal lobe, you have transcendent experiences like you're in the presence of God. And they think maybe the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus had a seizure and saw God. There's actually a researcher in Canada, Laurentian University, Michael Persinger. So he would stimulate the outside... he would do it all over the brain, but what he found—he stimulated the outside of the right temporal lobe—that people would get a sensed presence. They would actually feel the presence of God in the room.
So does that mean the brain makes up God or does that mean there's a way for God to communicate with us? I actually did a study on prayer; was so interesting. You know, I pray for you, prophecy, something called speaking in tongues—and was fascinating. Speaking in tongues is channeling, which means you're channeling the Holy Spirit. And the hypothesis was you'd have to drop your frontal lobes, which is exactly what happened in 60% of our patients. And one basal ganglia skyrocketed, just like it got hit with cocaine. Because that's where cocaine works, in the basal ganglia. So interesting.
If you had to create a brain-healthy nation and I made you President of the United States for one month, and you had to put in place executive orders that would create a brain-healthy nation, what executive orders would you immediately sign?
One question. Get all of the departments to ask themselves: what we're doing, is this good for our brain or bad for it? That's the campaign. I mean, I realized I've been doing this a very long time. If I can just get people to answer that one question with information and love—love of themselves, love of their families, love of their country—is what we're doing good for our brain or bad for it?
By far the best drug you can take for your brain, and not just your brain but your entire body, is exercise. In other words, exercise, you pump the blood and your brain gets a lot of nutrients and everything. It helps your heart, it helps your immune system. People don't realize how important that is. And we're not talking about being an athlete; we're just talking about walking. If you're older, walking is perfectly good exercise. And children now—they're not getting enough exercise.
No, because they're on devices. So I have a model if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it, you have to prevent or treat the eleven major risk factors. And we've talked about them before. Exercise helps you with every single one. So like, it's called BRIGHT MINDS. So B is for Blood Flow—increases blood flow. Retirement and Aging—it decreases your age. Inflammation—it's anti-inflammatory. Genetics—it helps turn on health-promoting genes. Head Trauma—if you keep walking, you're less likely to fall when you're older. Toxins—sweat detoxifies. Mental Health—exercise boosts dopamine but it also boosts serotonin. So it's like that perfect balancer in your brain.
Breathing—how we breathe. Does that have an impact on brain health?
So you can almost immediately improve heart rate variability, which is a sign of heart health but also goes to mental health, by breathing in a certain helpful way. And I call it the 15-second breath. So four seconds in—big breath—hold it for a second and a half, pause just a little bit, eight seconds out, hold it for a second and a half. So if you take twice as long to breathe out as you breathe in, it increases something called parasympathetic tone and it just calms you down almost immediately. So if you're having panic attacks, yes, you can take Xanax, but there are so many problems with that later on. Or you can just learn how to breathe—we call it diaphragmatic, so breathe mostly with your belly—taking twice as long to breathe out as you breathe in.
Chewing. There's a piece here that says it stimulates hippocampal activity and may slow cognitive decline. Reducing chewing has been linked to impaired learning in animal studies.
And fast food decreases chewing because it's fast. So they take most of the fiber out so you can chew it faster, you can swallow it faster.
Things in the bad-for-your-brain list: overuse of GPS and navigation apps, which weakens the hippocampus by outsourcing spatial memory long-term. This can lead to atrophy in areas associated with memory and navigation.
And people are diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease later in life because of Siri. Because I used to, like when I started as a young psychiatrist, somebody'd get lost in a city they'd lived in for 30 years, and their family would call me upset. And I'm like, okay, this person's headed toward dementia. Now that person goes, "Take me home."
Do you think it's going to... we're going to have an epigenetic effect of not reading maps? That if Stephen now uses his phone to get from A to B, do you think that's going to affect Stephen's son or daughter because Dad didn't have...?
Wow, okay, that never occurred to me that you could pass on something like that. By the way, I think it has to be physiological. Stress, for example, could be probably passed on. You mentioned this, you pointed it out—during pregnancy you want to prevent a stress and crisis, right?
Do you know about that study with mice where they made them afraid of the scent of cherry blossoms? For memory? And so whenever the mice smelled cherry blossoms, they would shock them mildly. So the mice are now afraid of the scent of cherry blossoms. Their babies were afraid of the scent of cherry blossoms. Their grand-babies were afraid of the scent of cherry blossoms.
Wow, okay, that's the olfactory system. Olfactory system is very interesting because it goes directly to the hippocampus. There might be an evolutionary advantage because if there's something in the environment that you shouldn't eat or that smells a particular way, passing that on is actually very efficient instead of having to experience that yourself, you know, trial and error because it might... if it's poison, it might kill you. But if your parents had that bad experience and pass it on, you shouldn't go to something that smells in a particular way. That makes sense.
The other thing that's bad for the brain which is unexpected is, you said at the start, artificial sweeteners. Now I didn't... I thought artificial sweeteners were fine.
They're not fine. And they're not free. So I used to drink diet soda like it was my best friend because I thought it was free. And then I had arthritis when I was 35, and one of my patients said she stopped aspartame and her arthritis went away. And I'm like... because I was drinking like, I don't know, a lot of diet soda. And so I stopped, and my arthritis went away. And I'm like no way. And so I did it again and it came back, and I'm like, okay. And artificial sweeteners can change the microbiome—so we haven't talked about that—but you have these 100 trillion bugs in your gut that make neurotransmitters, digest your food. And especially sucralose or Splenda has been shown to decrease the good bacteria in your gut, which then has a negative impact on brain function.
And aspartame, that I mentioned that can have a generational impact. So is it possible it's really not social media, it's that we've had aspartame in our food for decades? And I think it's all of these things that just sort of are additive, and we should just always think to that one question: is this good for my brain or bad for it? So you mentioned broccoli—probably that's good for your brain. Cheeseburger—probably not. But why don't you take the burger and if you could make it grass-fed that would be better, and put it in a salad, then that would be good for your brain.
What about chronic background noise? We don't think much about the impact noise has, but—
I used to live... my house was three houses from the freeway. And if you just go there, it's like, my God, it's so loud here. I never heard the freeway because my brain just learned to tune it out.
By the way, was that good or bad for you? That you had adapted and were no longer sensitive to it? I think that was probably not good for various reasons because what it really means is that you're specializing for that environment and your brain is going to be different when you go someplace... So here's another example.
And it's stressful, right? If it's chronically stressful, but my brain has figured it out—
Oh yeah, that's right, that's right. In the background... in other words, yeah, in other words, your brain is reacting to it even though you're not aware of it.
Yeah, and I have five sisters, which makes it even worse.
Studies show it increases cortisol and impairs working memory and attention regulation, especially in children and older adults, to be chronically exposed to background noise like traffic or the low-level hum of a city.
Yeah, that's right. That's absolutely right.
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So many of us multitask across multiple screens now. We're watching TV here, we've got our phone here, we've got our iPad here, we've got our computer here. And I was reading into the science of multitasking and it said that it trains your brain to be distractible, reducing gray matter density in the anterior cingulate.
Yeah, that's... in the medial prefrontal cortex.
And when the insula... the insula is so interesting, and I know you can talk about it. I have a new study coming out on hope. So on 7,500 patients, we gave them a hope questionnaire.
What does that mean, a hope questionnaire?
Hope—like how much hope do you have that you have the ability to make tomorrow better? And people with low hope have lower overall prefrontal cortex function, but the insula was really low. And that signal was the most statistically significant of the group, really. And in some studies the insula is called the antenna—
By the way, also for depression. People who have depression have low activity in the anterior cingulate. In fact, deep brain stimulation has been used to help some people if you stimulate that area.
And what our imaging research would say is depression is like chest pain. It's not one thing. Like nobody gets a diagnosis of chest pain because that would be stupid, right? It could be heart attack, heart arrhythmia, heart infection, gas, grief. Depression is the same way when you look at it from an imaging standpoint. Sometimes their frontal lobes are too active, sometimes they're not active enough, sometimes it's their limbic system that's too active. And I wrote a book called *Healing Anxiety and Depression*. I'm like, here's the seven things I see as an imager.
What about ADHD? There's obviously been a rise in ADHD, or at least people reporting or being diagnosed with ADHD quite significantly. Can you find ADHD in the brain? Are we causing ADHD as a function of the way that we're living our lives, or is it something within the brain genetically that I could see?
So it's both. I think clearly you can see ADHD in people's families. In fact, if I have a hyperactive, restless, impulsive, disorganized, procrastinating child, I'm looking at the mom or the dad. I'm like, so where is this coming from? But you could also get ADHD from a head injury, especially if it affects their frontal lobes—which is why you shouldn't let children hit soccer balls with their forehead. You can also get it from the excessive input making people distracted just like you said. There's a brand new study out on children who took medicine—right, we always demonize ADHD medicine—but the kids who took medicine actually had bigger brains in their prefrontal cortex than kids who didn't take medicine who had ADHD.
Ritalin? Ritalin. That's... okay, that's speed basically, amphetamines.
It is. But for the kids who have it, I think withholding medicine from a child who really has ADHD is like withholding glasses from someone who has trouble seeing. And it's the easy thing to demonize the drugs until you realize someone who has ADHD, a third of them don't finish high school. And we never ask the right question about... people go, "What's the side effects?" and it can decrease your appetite and you can have sleep problems with it. But they don't ask the other question: what's the side effect of not taking the medicine, or at least not fully treating it? And there are other ways to treat it besides medicine. You know, for God's sake, I own a supplement company and I'm always trying to optimize the nutrients to the brain. Neurofeedback can help. But if you do those things and it's not working, don't be afraid of medicine.
By the way, when I was growing up, ADHD either didn't exist or they didn't know about it. Do you think that there's some link to our diet?
Oh no, was first described in about 1910 and it's in the first version of the DSM. They called it "minimal brain dysfunction." But when we were growing up, there were one or two of these kids in our classrooms, and now there's eight to ten of them in every classroom.
That's what I mean, is that it seems to... like autism, it seems to be proliferating.
Right. And part of it I think is the food that is much more processed. Part of it is the screens. Part of it is the distracted parents and part of it is the teaching.
You always seem to be doing new studies, Daniel. What new studies are you most excited about or have you completed since we last spoke?
I did one that I'm so excited about on negativity in the brain. And negativity is bad for your brain.
How do you define negativity?
We actually gave them a questionnaire, a positivity-negativity bias questionnaire, and people who are more negative have less activity in their prefrontal cortex. It's actually quite interesting. And so unbridled positivity is bad for you because you need that 15%—but if you're chronically negative, that is bad for your brain.
Is there a link between being a negative person and Alzheimer's and dementia?
Yes. And what's interesting—because you mentioned a gender difference earlier—if you're depressed and you're a woman, it doubles your risk for Alzheimer's disease. If you're depressed and you're a man, it quadruples your risk.
So there was a study that was done during the COVID years, a couple years ago, and it turns out that the rate of depression like doubled in women, but not in men during COVID. And after COVID when the students came back and everybody was back to normal—so-called normal—the women stayed depressed at that high level, which is very interesting that it should be the women.
So in one study, women had 52% less serotonin than men, which I think is really interesting. Women by and large have double the risk of depression as men. Their limbic systems are larger, which is also involved in bonding. And then the whole COVID thing we haven't talked about—COVID causes inflammation in the limbic part of the brain. I had scans of people I was treating and then they got COVID and then I scanned them again and you can just see this dramatic inflammation in the brain.
If someone's listening now and they just want to... they want to improve their brain health, they want to avoid dementia, they want to be cognitively powerful and capable as they age—they want to get to 80 years old, 90 years old, 100 years old and have a great brain—and you just had to... and you could only tell them to do three things.
Well, Terry said one: exercise.
Okay, exercise, I'm going to do it.
Start every day with "today is going to be a great day." Positive. Push your brain to look for what's right rather than what's wrong.
Okay, so I'm going to be optimistic and grateful.
Omega-3 fatty acids. And either do it with fish or do it with a supplement.
Why did you include Omega-3 fatty acids?
Because it decreases inflammation and 25% of the cell membranes in your brain are made up of Omega-3 fatty acids. And as a country, we're dramatically low in them.
And learning. That's maybe one of the things that's been left off the list of top three things. But I mean, I remember you telling me how good learning was for the brain and even getting outside and running outside versus running on a treadmill is more beneficial for the brain.
And if you learn while you're exercising, what you're doing is you're getting blood flow to the hippocampus and you're more likely to remember it. So...
I heard this, yeah. I heard someone tell me that they figured out that they could learn better for their exams if they did it in a sauna. So they kept... it was a scientist that I spoke to, she said she keeps learning new information when she's in the sauna because she realized that when she left the sauna and was then tested upon it, she was better able to do the exam. And I guess that's correlating to what you said about because in a sauna you're going to have a lot of blood flow I imagine to the brain?
Yes, there's actually a study in JAMA Psychiatry that one sauna bath helped depression—significantly helped depression. And I think it's because of balancing the brain. And people who do the most saunas have the lowest risk of Alzheimer's disease.
What is the most important thing as it relates to the subjects that we spoke about today—AI, the brain, neuroscience—that you would like to say to the people that are listening now? There could be a million people listening, there could be 20 million people listening. If you could say one thing to them about the brain, AI, neuroscience, whatever you want to say, the floor is yours. What would that be? Over to you first, Terry.
Sleep. Sleep is the time when the body not just regenerates, but your memory's consolidated. So things you've experienced during the day are integrated into your cortex. It's an interaction between hippocampus and the cortex for episodic memories. And it's unfortunate what's happening with children now, you know, they're so competitive to get into college that they're cutting back on their sleep and it's just the wrong time of your life—you shouldn't be cutting it back when your brain is developing. So those two things I would say: sleep and exercise are the most important things for your brain.
The floor is yours. What would you say to the listeners about all the things we've talked today? What's your closing statement?
Well, you know, go back to what I talked about in the beginning, which is we've just thrown the barn door open and let the horse bolt out into our schools, into our businesses, into our homes. And before we've even asked, "Is it a gift or is it a Trojan horse that's going to steal from us?" We've embraced convenience before understanding consequence. And we've done it before with video games and cell phones and social media and marijuana and alcohol and opiates and high fructose corn syrup and aspartame. And we have to be smarter. We have to tame this horse—it's gone—with wisdom or it's going to trample our children. And so I think we have to be very thoughtful and it all comes back down to: is this good for my brain or bad for it? Is it good for our collective brains or is it potentially bad for it? And just answer that question with information and love—love of yourself, of your family, of your country, community.
Yeah, I'm more anxious than when I came in. I don't like that.
It's just so front-of-mind for me at the moment because I have the hindsight, the wisdom of hindsight of all those things you mentioned like exercise and processed foods and social media and all these things that we tried and they all seem to follow a similar arc. Some kind of new product or discovery is made. The early phase—in that early phase people who have an incentive for that thing to be successful will somewhat like gaslight you into thinking that it's fine. And then we get into the second phase where we start to see some consequences, then we study what's actually happened, we figure out that there's—there was always a tradeoff, and that nobody really understood the tradeoff, and then people change their behavior.
So now when I go into these new technologies where the short-term benefit is really clear—it's making me more productive—I pause and I go, there's going to be a tradeoff here. There's always a tradeoff. What is the tradeoff, and am I comfortable and conscious of what that tradeoff is? And if the tradeoff—so I try to figure out what the tradeoff is with things like AI and I go, okay, the tradeoff is probably I'm going to be worse at critical thinking. There might have an impact on my social relationships if I fall in love with fucking Annie, because she's pretty hot to be fair. And I really value my critical thinking. I really value my ability to solve problems and to articulate myself and to write and to communicate with my loved ones in an effective way. So what can I do if that is the tradeoff now? And one of the things that I'm doing now feels really counter-intuitive in a world where everybody's got these productivity gains because they're using these tools—which is to refrain. And I wonder if one of the great advantages of the next decade, one of the great hedges for anyone that's wanting to be a great critical thinker, entrepreneur, creative, is to go left when everyone's going right. Which is to refrain and do it the hard way. And if we look at history in these arcs that we've discovered with food and with exercise and all these things and dating, doing it the hard way—like we said about the marshmallow test and delaying the gratification—seems to yield the greatest returns. So I think I'm going to do it the hard way.
And it might be the easiest because it won't have the side effects. Right? I want to feel good now and later, as opposed to now but not later.
And to be clear, this doesn't mean I'm not going to use AI or ChatGPT. It just means that when it matters, when the thinking matters, I will think for myself. And when the communication matters, I will communicate for myself. That's my conclusion.
You should hope that your children will feel the same way when they grow up.
That they will model what you do. Every day you model health or not health.
Thank you. Thank you for writing two, well, many incredible books that I've got around me. I'm going to link them all for my viewers that are watching. I've got so many of these books: the incredible one that you wrote for parents called *Raising Mentally Strong Kids*, you've got your other book over there *Change Your Brain Every Day*, and I've got this book here from Terry which is *The Deep Learning Revolution* and one that you wrote most recently called *ChatGPT and the Future of AI*. I'm going to link all of them below and I'm going to link them with a little bit of a summary of what's in them. So if you decide that there's anything here that we talked about today that where you want to dig in further, please do dig in. And I'm also going to link both of your—a link to where people can find out more about both of you, your websites and more of your work in the comments below. So please do check that out, everybody listening.
We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, as you know. And they don't know who they're leaving it for. So I'm going to ask you both the question, starting with you, Daniel: Are you prepared for recognition of your next health challenge? Will you be able to notice its onset and how will you address the challenge, even if it means a major lifestyle change or way of living?
Yes.
How will you address the challenge, even if it means a major lifestyle change or way of living?
Well, I'm very clear on the goals I have, which is to be vibrant and healthy and not get dementia. So if I need to change something so that happens, I'm like all-in.
Are you prepared?
Probably not. No, I've been blessed with good health. I try to live a healthy life. But the problem is that you can't anticipate, you know, as you get older, what lies ahead. Like you mentioned arthritis—I'm feeling a little bit of arthritis now. I've been arthritis-free for most of all my life. And you know, that's something it's very... to realize that it's coming and there's very little you can do about it is depressing. But on the other hand, things could always be worse. Sometimes that cheers you up. But the reality is that there are things in the world, like COVID, you know, that you have no control over that may... or an accident or Alzheimer's, you know, God forbid. You know, that... who knows what will happen, right? You have to live with whatever life deals with you. You know, the time that you have, you should really spend on trying to make it a healthy life, a productive life, a satisfying life. And that's something that we have control over, right?
What are you scared of?
Right now, it's China. I, you know, I'm not being facetious. I think that it's a threat that is a societal threat. It's not... I don't think that it's going to affect me. And I've had great Chinese students and so I really like... I think the Chinese people are different from what I see as the country—the what they're trying to do, the goals that they're taking. 20 years ago, if you look at the of all of the technical areas in physics and chemistry and biology and so forth, the 100 most important advances that have been made... 20 years ago was like Americans had like 94 of them. This year it's 74 are Chinese. And that's because they made a huge investment in science, in STEM research. They put out a million engineers for... to implement AI, right? You know, they're doing the right thing. We did that—remember when the Sputnik went over, the Sputnik moment? We made a huge investment in STEM, in science and engineering, and in education.
What was the Sputnik moment?
Oh, okay, 1957 when the Russians put a satellite that went over the US over and over again, and we didn't... it took us years to put up our own satellite because we had fallen behind. But that investment we've been living on, literally, you know, for the last 60 years. And now the Chinese have done that and they're going to be advanced and they're going to be way beyond us. I know... I'm on... this is... you asked me, okay? That's something I'm very, very disappointed in our country—that we're not... in fact, we're just doing the opposite. We're tearing apart science right now with the present administration.
What are you scared of, Daniel?
Losing my wife, that's the thing that comes to mind. And when I was thinking about China, my mother-in-law was a prepper.
A prepper being someone that's preparing for the end of the world?
Preparing for the end of the world. And we were in Egypt last year and got a call that she had cancer. We were there for three days and came home. And I kept thinking—and I loved her dearly—I'm like, you prepared for the wrong thing. You should have prepared for cancer. Like I think every day we should be... and the same Alzheimer's prevention program is a cancer prevention program, it's a heart disease prevention program, it's a diabetes prevention program. And I'm like, she prepared for the wrong thing. The thing you really want to be prepared for is disease, right? And I know I'm going to die. I just want to be vital for as long as I can be. And hope is, "Well, I have a say in this," right? Because I know I can accelerate my body's decline or I can decelerate it. And I'm going to choose to decelerate it.
Thank you. We're done.
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