Having limitless brain power was once thought impossible. But a recent study shows that people in their 90’s can actually make New Brain Cells. On the show today, Bob Gilpatrick and Rollie Culp discuss the New Science of Neurogenesis and the importance of keeping your brain healthy and active to avoid neurological disease and degradation. They also identify natural ways to keep your mind sharp, discussing brain supplements known as Nootropics that can help elevate neurological function so you can stay on your A game. Join in the discussion to learn how you can achieve limitless brain power, all the while increasing brain health.

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Achieving Limitless Brain Power

How To Increase Brain Health

Welcome, everyone. I’m here with Rollie Culp. Rollie, how are you doing?

Good, Bob. How are you doing?

Great. This is going to be a fun show to do here. The whole issue of brainpower and Nootropics is something that gained a lot of attention when the movie Limitless came out with Bradley Cooper.

That’s a good one.

People started asking, “Is there such a thing as a limitless pill?”

It starts a lot of people searching for stuff like that if it existed online.

It turns out there are pills that people can take that do boost your brainpower. Just to let people know how we’re going to do this. We’re going to first talk about what causes a depletion of your brainpower as you get older. There are many different reasons and factors to consider, and then we’re going to talk about what you can do about it.

I’m sure you knew this, but I don’t know if you guys out there knew this. Did you know that a couple of years ago, we thought that as people got older, they stopped making new brain cells? The production of them stopped altogether. A study done by the University of Madrid shows that humans can make new brain cells up until their 90s, which is cool. Before then, we didn’t think that was possible. One of the cool things is it lets you know how important brain health is and the creation of healthy brain cells is. It shows that even though we can make new brain cells up until our 90s and older maybe, the production of them slows down significantly as you age. You’re going to want to make the healthiest brain cells that you can. As we make new brain cells, as healthy as you can make them is key. That’s part of why we wanted to go over what causes more degeneration and what we could do about it.

Limitless Brain Power: We know that aging is one of the reasons for your brainpower to fade. Not because you can’t make new brain cells, but because you’re not making as many.

This new science of creating new brain cells is referred to as neurogenesis. Neurogenesis is the creation of new neurons in your brain. Not only that, but you also make new connections. They say that you want to wire neurons together and your brain is a vast network of neurons that are connected in these intricate patterns. Even into your 90s, you can create new connections and you can learn new things that require you to make new connections. As you use new skills, continue on with your puzzles that you might want to work on, and things like that, you can end up having a powerful brain for a long time throughout your life.

We know that aging is one of the reasons for your brainpower to fade. Not because you can’t make new brain cells, but because you’re not making as many. The healthier, the better. What are some other things that people deal with that make their brainpower fade over time?

With age also, people get what’s generally classified as dementia. Dementia is people losing their ability to focus and concentrate. A lot of times, it’s associated with short-term memory and even long-term memories. I worked for a long time in nursing homes where there are a lot of people with dementia. We did a lot of research in the field of dementia in nursing homes. As people got older, their circulation would become less efficient. They would have what they call vascular dementia, which can be caused by the general diminishment of circulation or it can be caused by a whole series of ministrokes or impingements or blocked arteries.

What they’re blocking are oxygen and nutrients. Mainly oxygen, that’s what causing those strokes and things like that.

Stroke is normally caused by an occlusion where there’s a blockage of a particular artery or a group of capillaries in your brain that starves that part of the brain of oxygen and will kill off brain cells. That’s dementia in general, whether it’s Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, Lewy bodies dementia, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is concussion induced dementia.

A lot of football players are going through it. Professional wrestlers that I know of have dealt with it. It’s a serious thing. You don’t realize the long-term effects until it’s too late in a lot of cases with CTE.

That’s a cause. We can talk about that too because inflammation is a precipitating factor in the symptoms of CTE. Also, toxins are a big thing. Human beings absorb toxins from the air, food and water through our skin. People need to have a strategy for detoxifying their body regularly or it’s going to also cause problems with your brain as it’s going to cause with the rest of your body. Too many pesticides are bad for your brain. The other thing is poor diet. A lot of people will start to diminish their brainpower from eating too much sugar and too much processed foods.

A lot of the time, that is because a lot of the processed foods don’t have a lot of nutrition.

Not only that, but they have inflammatory compounds in them from trans fats. Different preservatives also cause inflammation in your brain. Inflammation in your brain can be caused by many things and it’s a big reason why people have trouble with their brainpower as they age. Not only what you are eating like sugar and trans fats, but what you’re not getting enough of, which is particularly vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin. People aren’t out in the sun as much. Lack of vitamin D has a profound effect. Other nutrients as well are important.

Perhaps one of the biggest things is anxiety. If you were to go to a memory course to improve your memory, the first thing the instructors do is teach people to meditate so they can calm their anxiety because nothing blocks your ability to learn and remember more than anxiety. There’s a lot of anxiety in this day and age. Here we are in the beginning part of 2021. We’re just coming through everything that happened in 2020. People have a lot of concerns and a lot of anxiety. We’ll talk about some ways to do that. As you know Rollie, we did a whole show on anxiety techniques.

Specifically, how to manage stress and anxiety during these trying times. Real quick aside about the anxiety. What you said about nothing blocks your ability to learn more than anxiety, that is true. I have a daughter and she’s in school. She doesn’t have an anxiety issue, but there are times that if she doesn’t quite feel sure about the test that she’s taking, she’ll get anxious and she will tell me, “I have a real hard time focusing because I’m anxious.” What we do is we created a thing, SchoolTestPrep.com, with a character named Johan. We put a video up there that shows people, kids in particular, how to use our tapping technique that we use a lot on the show to help calm test anxiety.

What you’re helping to do is interrupt that pattern of anxiety and plug in a new belief that you don’t need to be anxious anymore and that you have the answers. It’s just the idea of the test that’s got you elevated. I wanted to bring that up because my daughter couldn’t finish school in 2020, but then when she started up, we waited about a semester to have her go back. That whole time being out of school creates general anxiety because you haven’t been there. Just the thought of going back creates anxiety and then having to take the test and things like that. We’ve been dealing with it well. We’ve been using a lot of not just the School Test Prep information, but tapping itself and then the ultimate mind-calming exercise and the head circles that we always do has helped considerably. It’s proof that it happens even with kids.

Kids are affected by poor diet as well. Children, like adults, have to have a good balance of bacteria in their gut because a lot of what’s happening in your brain is related to your gut. Your gut has a series of pathways where the food that you eat, particularly fruits, vegetables and supplements like resveratrol, curcumin and things like that act as an activator to the DNA, the bacteria that are in your gut. This then stimulates the creation of metabolites that can further trigger human DNA for the creation of proteins. A lot of what it ends up making are the precursors for your neurotransmitters. To feel calm and happy and not be in an anxious state or a depressed state, you have to have a balance of norepinephrine, dopamine and serotonin in your brain. A lot of that depends on the veracity of your microbiome in your gut.

We’ve heard a lot about that. They refer to it as the brain-gut connection.

Last couple of things, Rollie, in terms of the causes, one is hormonal imbalance. If people are having an imbalance of hormones, they’re not going to be having a good day. Typically, a woman who is going through menopause and is getting hot flashes and there’s a hormonal imbalance. Similarly, if you have adrenal exhaustion or if you are low in testosterone, you’re going to have a hard time focusing and concentrating. The last thing is the creation of energy itself. Your brain, even though it’s small in comparison to your body, uses a disproportionate amount of energy. You have to produce energy in the Krebs cycle, which is a metabolic pathway inside your mitochondria, the little powerhouse in your cell. They’re in charge of making adenosine triphosphate, your molecule of energy, and your brain needs a lot of that. If in general, you’re low in energy because you aren’t taking in the right nutrition to stimulate the creation of ATP, then you’re going to have a problem with brainpower.

From what we know about the brain, there’s a lot of electricity and electrical connections that go there, so you couldn’t do that if you didn’t have the energy I would assume.

The electron transport chain is powering your brain for these neurotransmitters that we’re talking about. For example, serotonin is created and it’s like these metaphorical little BBs of serotonin and they have to fire across a synapse into a receptor cell. That receptor cell, when the serotonin arrives, triggers another metabolic pathway that ultimately results in you feeling alive, awake and happy. There are reasons why you might not be able to have that happen. One is have you made enough serotonin?

Limitless Brain Power: There’s a direct neuronal connection from your quads to your brain, and the stronger your quads are, the better your brain is going to function.

It is made from tryptophan, which you have to trace the whole metabolic pathway. Ultimately, it relates to nutrition. You also have to have that little BB of serotonin to move across the synapse, this transition bridge and arrive. If you have too little serotonin, too few receptor cells or not enough electrical potential to get through the synapse, then you’re going to have low brain chemistry. This can relate to both depression and anxiety and certainly, your capability of functioning at a higher level. The things that human beings do being able to read, write, communicate, create and execute isn’t going to be effective.

The way you describe it, it seems like depression and dementia would look similar if you looked at them that way.

Often, people who have do have dementia get depressed also. Quite often, people who are depressed also exhibit signs of dementia. You want to be aware of that because it’s hard to tell which is which and which is causing the other. You want to be aware and open to the fact that dementia could be depression, which could be fixed by getting rid of the sugar, getting rid of the processed foods, and making sure there’s enough vitamin D and vitamin C.

We talk about all the things that cause it. One of the best things that I know that I’ve heard and I’ve read about that you can do to keep your brainpower functioning is to use it. Use your brain like muscles. You got to work them out or you lose them. One of the things that I remember reading a couple of years ago was like, “A people who do brain teasers and puzzles and read into old age, their brain health is always more functioning and better at a higher level than someone who doesn’t use it.” If you don’t use it, you lose it. One of the simplest things we could do is pick up a book.

We talked with David Spinelli in our show called All About Fitness With David Spinelli. He was talking about how he’s trying to read a book a month. We’ve had plenty of time with COVID. If you weren’t working, pick up a book. If you’re retired and you want something to do, pick up a Sudoku book and figure out those numbers. Keep that fresh because it’s easy to sit in front of the TV and let the TV tell you what to do and all that. Think for yourself and that’ll help out that.

In addition to that, physical exercise is going to help with your circulation. Particularly exercise you do for your quadriceps muscles, the muscles in your legs.

You were saying they have a connection.

There’s a direct neuronal connection from your quads to your brain and the stronger your quads are, the better your brain is going to function. Any type of exercise should include resistance exercise, whether it’s just your own bodyweight or against stretch band or weights where you’re doing deep knee bends. They don’t have to be deep knee bends, but knee bends of some type where you’re squatting up and down until you feel your legs are well exhausted, then you’re going to have much stronger legs.

That’s funny you say the quads. I must be smart because I used to play hockey and I was a goaltender. All you do is go up and down on your quad. Maybe I got hit in the head too many times. That might offset the strength of my quads.

Speaking of CTE, it is Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, which they refer to it as concussion disease. People that have had concussions, whether it’s from an accident or people that have had constant concussions from playing football, soccer, hockey. Particularly people that have been in battle or in a war. The explosions cause the equivalent of about 30 concussions all at once because your brain rattles in your head when there’s an explosion nearby. People that are military and retired military are susceptible to CTE unless they keep their inflammation down.

I didn’t think about that, but that’s right. An explosion is the same thing as getting hit in the head with a baseball bat or something.

It’s way worse. Rollie, you mentioned hockey. A number of years ago, there’s a famous hockey player that had a severe concussion. Around the same time, there was a famous football player who had an extremely severe concussion. Both of them were out and they couldn’t play anymore. They were not recovering from their concussion. They ended up going for neuro biofeedback treatment, which is a highly sophisticated technique where you put a leather helmet on your head and has all these sensors that are measuring your brainwaves. By having a skilled neuro biofeedback therapist there, they can help change the brainwaves that are going on in various parts of your brain and the symptoms of the concussion will go away.

What’s happening is the blunt force is not only causing bruising in the brain, but it’s somehow locking in a brainwave pattern in parts of your brain that’s not supposed to be that brainwave pattern. With neuro biofeedback, you can train that part of your brain to go back to the way it was before. Both of these athletes were able to go back and perform. One of them, the football player, set a major record in the first game that he went back. Without using their names, they did recover and they were all star–players that were able to get back to play from using that technique.

The other thing that’s important in relation to CTE, there’s a study that shows that people can have the potential for CTE, which is the inflammation in their brain, but if they’re able to keep their overall inflammation down both in their brain and in their body, they won’t exhibit any symptoms of CTE. If you have a concussion plus inflammation, you can have CTE, but a concussion without inflammation, no CTE. There are many things you can do to reduce inflammation all throughout your body.

We talk about this a lot because inflammation is the stem of almost everything.

We had a whole show on free radicals and inflammation. In general, the easiest way to do it is to stay away from inflammatory foods, which are sugars and the processed foods. The other is to ingest compounds that are anti-inflammatory like superoxide dismutase, trimethylglycine, glutathione, some proanthocyanins, and the A C E vitamins. Minerals like selenium and zinc are all anti-inflammatory.

There’s turmeric, as well as ashwagandha. Resveratrol is helpful. Resveratrol polyphenol type lignans with the SDG in there is a powerful antioxidant too. That can help lower inflammation throughout. The less inflammation, the better.

For every aspect of your life, if people want to know about that, how to go about getting all those compounds together in an easy-to-use little kit system, you can let us know. The other aspect of that is for your body to have good circulation, you have to have an adequate supply of phosphatidylcholine and arginine. When you get the right type of health system that you can use, you can address all those issues. You can improve your circulation and you can reduce your inflammation at the same time with a two-minute type of easy-to-use nutritional intervention that you can just use first thing in the morning. One of the best things you can do for your brainpower is to feed your brain with good fats like omega-3s and medium-chain triglycerides from coconut oil and palm oil. It’s good for your brain. Of course, things that help with the circulation and things to help with the Krebs cycle because we talked about needing enough energy.

Energy for the synapses and the serotonin.

You need to have B vitamins, Coenzyme Q10. With one health system, you can have all those in the same health system and address the Krebs cycle energy-making system as well.

Get your good fats and your vitamin D. It’s all in one complete easy to use place instead of twenty different pills trying to guess.

At the same time, a system like this can also give you the right probiotics so your gut-brain connection can function properly. The other thing is going back to Limitless, there are Nootropics toward the mind. Pills usually and sometimes powders or sometimes liquids that have a specific positive benefit for your brain. You can get a range of products. Some of them are what we call the Clarity Factor, which has a number of different compounds in there together. It’s a stack. It includes phosphatidylserine, St. John’s wort, etc. When you put together a stack, it’ll help many different aspects of your brain. There’s another well-known nootropic that’s called NeuroFuel. It combines coleus and artichoke as an active ingredient.

That one has a proprietary formula, doesn’t it?

Yes. You can get it from us, but it’s someone else’s patented formula. It’s effective for upregulating a neurotransmitter called c-AMP, which floats your other neurotransmitters up in equal amounts so you don’t get an imbalance.

Limitless Brain Power: A study done shows that if you don’t get sleep, your brain physically shrinks.

Do you know who I heard uses that? The people over at SpaceX.

The SpaceX scientists and the Tesla scientists use this to enhance their brainpower for their intensive sessions of inventing and engineering

Think about it as you’re getting a rocket to land upright, so it’s got to be focused for that.

Here’s another thing, Rollie. The use of pulsed electromagnetic fields.

We talked about how the body is created on the Earth and the Earth has these fields.

The pulse is coming from the core of the Earth. The core of the Earth is rotating and the Earth is rotating, creating motion and it’s magnetic, so it’s creating electromagnetism that’s coming up. It’s affecting our bodies in a positive way, including the dilate our capillaries so that the blood can flow to all the tissue in our body. There are new devices now that have a power supply that produces those waves that are coming from the core of the Earth and you can hook it up to a mat. Lie on the mat a couple of times a day for eight minutes and you’ll increase your circulation by almost 30% using those PEMF.

We talked a little bit about this with Ann on the show we called The Importance Of Circulation For Your Health.

There is evidence in studies and a lot of anecdotal evidence that people that use these mats can dramatically improve their cognition, especially if they have some type of dementia, particularly vascular dementia. By expanding the capillaries wider and more frequently, you’re able to get more blood to the brain, more oxygen, and more nutrients like phosphatidylserine will get to the brain.

While we’re talking about astronauts, NASA uses the PEMF phenomena on astronauts when they get back from space because when they’re in zero gravity, their body is away from that pulse-field from the Earth, so their circulation doesn’t work as well. I don’t know if we’ve talked about it before, but astronauts lose muscle while they’re up there because there’s no resistance. When they get back, to get their body back into shape, one of the things they do is re-expose them to the pulsed electromagnetic fields because they’ve been out too far away.

It’s a true and effective device that people can talk to us about if you’re interested in getting one for yourself.

We do have information on that. You can call us at 1-800-861-4609. Just like on the show, Ann is the guru on that. She helps us here. You can ask her if you want to know more about that.

The other thing is this whole concept of state-dependent memory. We talked about the anxiety aspect. This is important for people to be able to manage their anxiety. We had talked on the show about anxiety. We talked about the device called Inner Balance. Inner Balance from the HeartMath company is the device that you clip on to your ear. We’re going to do a whole show just on that.

What we’ll do is we’ll bring the ones we have and we’ll use them. I’ll do some editing magic and I’ll show you what it looks like as you use it and scorecards afterward.

Essentially, what it’s doing is it’s helping you to reset a metabolic pathway in your brain that goes from your frontal cortex to your heart muscle, which has about 40,000 neurons in your heart muscle, neurites. That signal comes to your heart. Your heart rate variability changes based on what it’s being told, and then it sends a signal of one type or another to your amygdala, which is the seed to your brain which is deciding whether or not everything’s okay and we need to be under stress. By using the HeartMath device, it’s gamified where you get some feedback as to how well you’re doing with sinking your breath rhythmically and focusing on gratitude.

Gratitude is the key.

They say that the average person in the United States is of the opinion that everything is okay only 5% of the time.

There’s 95% that we’re going crazy with anxiety because we don’t think we’re okay.

Sometimes it’s sub-awareness. You’re not even sure you’re doing this, but your heart rate variability is the key to knowing whether or not that’s happening. It’s a window into this metabolic pathway that you wouldn’t otherwise have without the device. With the device, you can now sync your breath rhythmically and focus on gratitude. What happens is your heart starts to beat differently. It now sends a different signal to your amygdala. Your amygdala will calm down. It’ll vibrate differently and it sends a different message that it sends through the hippocampus and gets a boost to the frontal cortex.

The frontal cortex goes, “It seems like everything is okay.” It sends a signal to your heart muscle and it goes, “Heart muscle, everything’s okay.” Your heart begins to beat differently. It signals your amygdala and signals your frontal cortex, and now you’ve broken the loop that you were stuck in of everything is not okay. By focusing on gratitude, that’s the opposite of everything is not okay. You’re getting feedback from the device, which has a transponder that’s communicating to your cell phone and you get to see how you’re doing staying in focus.

You get a whole readout of the chart and it gives you the ability to see where your spikes come and where they go. If you do a short session and you recall what you thought, you’d be like, “That’s right.” Right in the middle of me thinking about this is if your phone rings. I noticed if I’m doing it and my phone rings, and I forgot to turn it off. When that rings, I turn it on and it’s got a spike up in it.

Your body and mind are sensitive to each other. It’s interesting to use this. This thing only costs $159. It’s an amazing investment.

The insight they gave you into your own health mentally and heart-wise are invaluable.

This relates to what we’re talking about with state-dependent memory. What it means is that if you’re in a particular emotional state while you’re learning something, reading a newspaper, I’m feeling nice and calm and I’m going, “These are the ten points.” You now are going to ask me to give them back to you and there’s a consequence if I don’t. If I don’t tell you these ten points in order, there’s going to be an electric shock. Now, there’s anxiety and you learned it in a calm state.

You’ve been expected to remember it in a state of anxiety and you can’t do it because what you learned is dependent on the state you were in where you learned it. The idea is to learn in a calm but alert state and to deliver it back or reiterate the information back in a calm and deliberate state. There are a couple of different things that can help you with that. One is the HeartMath that we talked about, the Inner Balance, and the other is the Emotional Freedom Technique.

As Rollie mentioned, we created a character named Johan. His nickname is Ja-Ja, by the way. He is an animated character that Rollie created and together, we created a script for him. Ja-Ja has a mom who’s kind and smart and she teaches him things, and then Ja-Ja goes to his stage where he does magic tricks and he teaches his friends. In this case, the website, School Test Prep is Ja-Ja teaching these children how to use the Emotional Freedom Technique to never get nervous when they’re taking a test. Essentially, what he’s doing is he’s helping with state-dependent memory by helping these children be in the same emotional state when they take the test than they were when they learned the material.

We showed you the example. You learn it in a calm state, and then you’re told to regurgitate it or there’ll be consequences. I don’t know about you, but I’m a little nervous too.

This is important information to know for your children but also yourself. If you’re working at a business or you’re working for a company, you’re expected to perform certain things. It’s good to be in this calm but alert state for as much time as you can. For some people like air traffic controllers, this is required. They have a lot to remember and they have a lot of digital executions to perform. They have to find this balance in their state so that they can perform important tasks.

It’s for kids but it works with the same principle.

Adults can use it too. Rollie, lastly regarding brainpower, the issue of sleep is important. You could do everything else that we talked about, but if you’re not able to sleep through the night and get into REM sleep, you’re going to have trouble remembering things. The reason is it’s just the way the brain works. You learn things during the day and when you go to sleep, what you consider to be valuable or necessary for your survival, you’re going to transfer into long-term memory. There’s a little section of your brain called the dentate gyrus. It’s a little quarter moon-shaped piece that begins to vibrate in theta waves when you’re in REM sleep.

At that point, it’s choosing out which memories to make long-term and it’s sending them to the part of your brain that has long-term memory. That’s why it’s important to get sleep and to get good REM sleep. The PEMF device we mentioned has a program for sleep that is putting out pulsed electromagnetic forces in variable cycles throughout the night. That is facilitating the various stages of sleep, including REM sleep, and you can improve your memory by using a PEMF mat to lie on because it was calculated by the scientists what types of waves were necessary to facilitate this.

You’ll probably sleep a lot better too.

If you do it in conjunction with a good sleep aid that has some melatonin in it and a little bit of vitamin D, some B vitamins, and some other things, you can combine that with the PEMF device and you will improve your memory by using that technique.

There was a study done that shows that if you don’t get sleep, your brain physically shrinks, so remember that. Sleep, take care of your brain, make sure that the brain cells you’re creating are healthy ones, and make sure you got the right comprehensive nutrition, not just for the brain but for circulation. It all relates to one thing, inflammation. Get something that’ll get rid of the inflammation and make the other things work better.

That’s about it for this episode. Rollie, thanks for joining and being part of it. Thanks for all the post-production work that you’re going to do when we’re finished with this. Rollie is a sound engineer and also great with the computer programs that do the production that makes this show look better in the end. What you are seeing is not the original production. Rollie uses his magic to fix it up so you won’t see any of the times when we stumbled.

If we were perfect, we’d have nothing to strive for, so don’t forget that. Keep that in mind as you go through. We appreciate you. Don’t forget to call us with any questions, LiveForeverYoungRadio.com. Any of the previous shows we mentioned will be there. That way you can go get caught up on what you might have missed. Bob, this has been great.

Thanks, Rollie, and thank you, everybody. We’ll see you at the next show.

Important Links:

• Show on anxiety techniques – Past episode
• SchoolTestPrep.com
• Show on free radicals and inflammation – Past episode
• SpaceX
• The Importance Of Circulation For Your Health – Past episode
• Inner Balance
• All About Fitness With David Spinelli – Past episode