by Dave Asprey
Over the years, I had grown accustomed to being fat, often in pain, and unable to perform certain physical activities. But my one saving grace had always been that I could think. I may have been obese and socially awkward, but at least I was smart. Developing the equivalent of an aging brain threatened my entire identity, not to mention my sense of security. After all, I relied on my brain to earn a living and put a roof over my head. So the prospect of being unable to perform cognitively was terrifying on a profound level.
This was a turning point. Knowing that if I didn’t figure out how to fix my brain, I wouldn’t have the future I desired, I was determined to do whatever it took to repair it.
While I was clearly far too young to be experiencing symptoms of cognitive dysfunction in my twenties, the truth is that mental decline shouldn’t be considered “normal” at any age. There is no good reason why any of us need to experience impaired cognition as we get older, but it is so common that we jokingly refer to instances of forgetfulness as “senior moments” instead of calling them out for what they are—symptoms of dysfunction that are also precursors of Alzheimer’s disease and senile dementia.
Even if you are still young and aren’t yet experiencing any cognitive problems, it’s a good idea to take action to prevent brain degeneration before it starts. As a bonus, doing so will also improve your cognitive performance right now. While you may not feel the effects of lengthened telomeres immediately, you will notice right away when you have more brain energy. It’s the Bulletproof feeling of being able to really bring it without trying too hard. Your performance can be as effortless as it is effective.
You probably won’t start experiencing “senior moments” until you’re forty or fifty (or maybe just really hungover), but it’s possible to feel the effects of cognitive dysfunction much earlier. When I interviewed Dale Bredesen, MD, an internationally recognized expert in neurodegenerative diseases and the author of The End of Alzheimer’s, he told me that people are typically diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a full twenty years after the underlying pathophysiological process begins. Since some people are diagnosed at forty, this means the physical problems behind this killer can start as early as age twenty. It also means senior moments in your forties may be an indication that you’ll be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in your sixties. The Four Killers take time to do their work.
This isn’t frightening—it’s a weakness you can exploit to beat Alzheimer’s. You have two advantages: The development of Alzheimer’s is slow, and we’re getting better at seeing it earlier. There’s a lot you can do to improve your brain function right now and for the long term. Who knows what my brain function would be like now if I hadn’t intervened twenty years ago? We’ve been led to believe that whether we get Alzheimer’s or senile dementia is up to either genetics or the luck of the draw, but that’s just not true. The same interventions I used to reverse my cognitive dysfunction can reduce your risk of developing Alzheimer’s and help you think and perform better at any age.
NEUROFEEDBACK FOR DUMMIES
Long before I got worried enough to get a SPECT scan, I could feel that my brain didn’t work the way it should. It was a nebulous, hard-to-put-my-finger-on feeling, but I knew that a spark was missing. I felt slower than I should have been. Luckily, some of my friends in the anti-aging community knew about a new modality of brain treatment called neurofeedback that was almost completely unheard of back then. They helped me find radically effective practitioners and treatments that I otherwise never would have known about or had access to. One of the people they introduced me to was a Bay Area chiropractor who also performed neurofeedback treatments.
I had no idea what to expect at the first appointment. Pictures ran through my mind of a big facility with blinking lights, men in white lab coats, and maybe something from the set of Tron. When I arrived, though, I found a humble office with a fish tank and a beaded curtain separating the lone treatment room from the waiting area. In the waiting room, a young boy whom I did not know was autistic walked up to me and started screaming at the top of his lungs while he ran in circles around me. It was not what I was expecting from my first neurofeedback experience.
When I was called into the treatment room, I sat in a converted closet as the doctor glued two small electrodes to my scalp using sticky white paste that didn’t wash off easily that night. He was preparing me for a test called an electroencephalogram, or EEG. At the time, doctors used it almost exclusively to diagnose epilepsy, sleep disorders, and other brain abnormalities by measuring electricity coming from the brain without actually getting an image of the brain itself. I would not be looking at a picture of my brain to see what was wrong with it; instead, the idea was to show my brain (and me) what it was doing with real-time feedback. I was excited to become awesome at self-regulating.
While wearing the sensors, I played a primitive video game and watched the electrical patterns of my brain on a screen. Every time the phone rang in the office, I could see the EEG going crazy. “Do you see that spike?” the doctor asked. “That’s your fight-or-flight response. You go into panic mode when a phone rings.”
The fight-or-flight response is a hardwired survival mechanism that activates the sympathetic nervous system, causing your body to release stress hormones such as cortisol so you can run or fight and to send blood flow away from the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in high-level decision-making. It makes sense that a loud noise such as a phone would activate the fight-or-flight response. The sympathetic nervous system can’t distinguish between an innocuous sudden sound like the ringing of a phone and a real threat like a nearby explosion. In the case of an actual threat, you don’t want a lot of activity in the prefrontal cortex, because this would lead to overanalyzing instead of acting. To survive an attack, you want to start running instead of standing still while you weigh the pros and cons of running.
But you do want to be equipped to weigh the pros and cons when it’s just a phone call (or an exam, or even a stressful email, for that matter) activating your fight-or-flight stress response because you haven’t learned to control it! And nothing will make you older faster than out-of-control stress. My fight-or-flight response was being activated far too often, which is not uncommon in today’s stressful world. And it’s pretty hard to hone your concentration or improve your decision-making skills if your brain is constantly and easily panicked. Neurofeedback can help you learn to self-regulate so your fight-or-flight response isn’t activated quite so easily.
Over the next several weeks, I returned for regular neurofeedback treatments and worked to rewire that stress response so my brain no longer felt like it was constantly under threat. Neurofeedback appears passive, but it is actually hard work. Your brain responds to visual and auditory input by changing its electrical output as it learns to self-regulate. I could feel some subtle changes and see on the EEG output that the sound of a phone ringing no longer caused as large a spike.
When I went in for my sixth treatment, the same young autistic boy was in the waiting room. This time he walked up to me, looked me in the eye, and said, “Hi, my name is Bobby.” I was floored. He exhibited such a dramatic transformation that it still stands out to me twenty years later. I thought to myself, I must have this technology at home! What superpowers will I be able to develop when I understand everything in my brain?
As a result, I have owned a collection of EEG machines since 1997. Neurofeedback technology is now much more effective and affordable, yet for advanced work there’s nothing like working with a trained clinician to help you gain control of your brain—or even upgrade it. Neurofeedback is also commonly and effectively used to help patients heal from trauma and symptoms of anxiety and depression. It is now available in most major cities at clinics that charge about as much as a massage for an hour of neurofeedback, and there are even home units available.
My encounter with Bobby proved to me that our brains are capable of profound change. I’m walking proof of it, too. Despite having had s
erious brain problems, I now have a hippocampal volume that is in the 87th percentile for someone my age. As you read earlier, that part of the brain typically shrinks as you age, so I have at least held the line on that form of brain aging and have likely improved on where I was in my twenties. I have also increased my IQ and even my working memory.
But Bobby and I are not unique. We are all capable of forming new neurons and new connections between neurons at any age so your brain can continue learning and growing. This is called neuroplasticity. A scientist named Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2000 when he proved that the brain is capable of reorganizing itself by forming new neural pathways throughout a lifetime. (Previously it was believed that the brain was not capable of doing this past your mid-twenties.)
After all this work, my resilience is higher than it’s ever been, my stress response is low, and I almost never have to search for a word that won’t come to mind. It’s so unusual that when I do, I can easily trace the reduced brain performance back to something in my environment or a food I ate that caused inflammation and impacted my brain function. In other words, it’s not age that causes these things to happen to us—it’s the accumulation of cuts that keep our mitochondria from working at full throttle.
To fully understand the connection between inflammation and brain dysfunction, you need to understand the role of microglial cells, which you read earlier are the immune cells of the brain. Neurons get all the press, but they don’t work without the microglia. Previously you read about amyloid plaques that build up in the brain when misshapen proteins clump together. The microglial cells are supposed to help clear out those amyloids when they develop in the brain. But when excess amyloid plaques develop, microglial cells accumulate around them, releasing more and more inflammatory compounds in an attempt to clear them away.1 These microglial cells are trying to heal the brain, just as immune cells create inflammation to heal the body when it’s been injured. But when this becomes a chronic condition in the brain, it damages neurons and leads to neurodegenerative disease.
Chronic inflammation in the brain from bad food, chronic stress, heavy metal or toxic mold exposure, infections, or circadian disruption also leads your microglial cells to create too much of a protein called progranulin (PGRN).2 High PGRN is associated with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), tumors, and all kinds of bad stuff that will keep you from ever becoming Super Human.
The good news is that you can avoid many of the cuts that cause inflammation in the first place. According to Bredesen, the biggest risk factors for developing Alzheimer’s disease are chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, and exposure to toxins. These are all environmental factors, not genetic ones! And it’s much easier to hack your environment to avoid Alzheimer’s than it is to try and reverse it. With the techniques I’ve honed over the last twenty years, I have learned to experience far fewer cuts and successfully reverse my cognitive dysfunction. And when I do take a hit, I know how to counter it so my brain is back up and running at full speed as quickly as possible. The resulting resilience is something I am counting on as I work to live beyond a hundred and eighty.
In addition to neurofeedback, I’ve found that the most effective interventions for preventing and reversing cognitive dysfunction fall into three main categories: light, food, and drugs. Since we most recently discussed light in the previous chapter, let’s start there.
SHINING A LIGHT ON THE BRAIN
Even today, most conventional doctors will not recommend pointing a laser at your brain, but those in the anti-aging community have been doing just that with great success for years. After using laser therapy on my whiplash back in the 1990s and experiencing such profound effects, I began researching other ways to use light as an anti-aging tool.
Deep in the corner of the young Internet I discovered a man who had experienced cognitive dysfunction of his own and found a way to hack it. He started a Yahoo group to share his discovery. At the time, there was no research supporting the safety or efficacy of using infrared light on human brains, but there were studies showing it increased blood flow in animals. That was enough for this guy to create his own high-powered infrared LED device, which looked like someone had hand-soldered an LED and stuffed it in a pill bottle with a hole in the lid, because that’s basically what it was. He sold a couple hundred of them through the Yahoo group and wrote about his experience shining the invisible LED light down the middle of his brain for two minutes a day and dramatically improving his brain function, focus, and mood. For him, the risk-reward equation made it worth it to test the laser.
I liked the idea, so I bought one of his devices and used it for two minutes every day on my forehead and the back of my head. It literally felt like someone had flipped a switch in my brain and turned it on. Everything was easier. I was used to pushing so hard all the time, but now I felt as if I was being pulled. That device became one of my most treasured possessions because it made my brain work better every time I used it. I still have it in my closet, even though today I have much better brain LED devices in my labs.
Now I understand that the infrared light from the LED restored mitochondrial function when I focused it on parts of my brain, creating more energy that I was able to use to think clearly for the first time in ages. Today there is plenty of research to show that infrared LEDs and lasers can effectively treat neurodegeneration by stimulating mitochondrial function in the brain, therefore increasing cellular energy production.3 Lasers can even directly benefit neurons that have been functionally inactivated by toxins.4 This may very well be why laser therapy was so helpful in healing my brain from all those years of toxic mold exposure.
Since infrared light can penetrate through muscle and even bone tissue to reach the brain, it’s quite effective at providing a number of brain function benefits. In the past few years, doctors have used infrared lasers to treat strokes, traumatic brain injuries, degenerative brain disease, spinal cord injuries, and peripheral nerve degeneration.5 And long before you develop symptoms of those degenerative diseases, it can enhance brain function in normal, healthy people.6
But only twenty years ago, it was considered nearly pathological to even consider shooting a laser at your brain. That didn’t mean it was any less effective, though. Remember the guy who created the device I used? About two years after he started the Yahoo group, he wrote that his brain was now working so well that he was going to go to medical school. A week later, he deleted the group and all its postings, likely because he was concerned it could lead to liability issues after he became a doctor. There isn’t a scrap of information about it online anymore. It’s ironic to fear talking publicly about the very tool he used to get through medical school. I have no idea where this guy is now, but I hope he’s somewhere helping people turn their brains back on. He definitely helped me.
Before you grab a laser and start shining a light on your brain, please keep in mind that light therapy is incredibly powerful. If used incorrectly, it can hurt you. I once fell asleep with an infrared light shining on my leg and woke up with a second-degree burn that took six weeks to heal. But much scarier was the time I decided to try my early LED brain device to hack the language-processing part of my brain.
It always bugged me that I suck at hearing the nuances of other languages, especially after I married Dr. Lana, who speaks five languages fluently. So I used the device on the left side of my head over the brain’s language-processing center for two minutes. For the next few hours my speech was completely garbled. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t talk normally. I was scared shitless (that’s the technical term) until my normal speech was restored, because I made my living in part onstage teaching audiences about the future of technology. That is the risk part of the risk-reward equation. By going slowly, I avoided long-term problems. Who knows what would have happened if I’d stimulated my brain for an hour?
We know a lot more now about how to safely use these therapies. Many years after I became an early adopter of lase
r therapy for the brain, I attended the Near Future Summit, an event focusing on innovation that’s frequented by the TED crowd in San Diego. They wanted to mix it up that year, so they hosted a pajama party for big-name venture capitalists and other conference attendees. Apparently, unicorn onesies were in vogue with VCs at the time. Meanwhile, not knowing about the party ahead of time, I asked my assistant to order something on Amazon for me to wear. She got a full set of red silk Hugh Hefner–style pajamas. Great.
Somewhat embarrassed, I sat down next to a neuroscientist from MIT who had neglected to wear pajamas in favor of regular clothes. She had given a speech earlier that day about using a very simple light therapy to reverse Alzheimer’s disease. In her research, she discovered that lights that blink forty times a second can break up amyloid tangles in the brain. Her goal was to install flashing light panels in all nursing homes, something I expect I’ll live long enough to witness.
It’s only now that are we beginning to see well-funded research for these technologies. In 2016, MIT researchers demonstrated that LED lights flickering at a specific frequency could substantially reduce the amount of beta-amyloid plaques in the visual cortex of mice.7 Not only did this treatment cause the mice to produce fewer amyloids, but it also invigorated microglial cells, the immune cells in the brain that are normally responsible for destroying amyloid plaques.
