larry king now we exercise our bodies why not our brain and do the right diet exercise supplements mental side we have been able to demonstrate.

your. welcome to larry king now this will be an extraordinary session of brain fitness urging industry but it's not just put the brain to the roles you know trish and stress and exercise have on the health of our brains and what fit gray matter will do for you down the line joining us to discuss the topic dr daniel amen the physician psychiatrist. and we're on the world's foremost experts on brain imaging his latest book is a plan about a deep two week. leave through religious prevention

health and. anomic for a must start with you overall what is brains that you find brave you with michael worries and we think of so brain how very big only be very emotional and big step would be the functions required to thrive in today's society so it's hard to not get your own working memory it was you know. i'm going to see here maybe shortly

court i believe that we need to be happy people i'm happy workers you said that we know the brain is more flexible and more plastic than ever we thought possible what is what is that plastic mean. it means we have. what there is you know we are going down is going to group these drugs are on time soon or rain you know we are is not really not going to be in the right direction that gave me your quote is saying that you are not stuck with the brain you have that you can make it better how do you make the brain better well we're really excited so at the m. and clinics we actually look at your brain we've done a almost ninety thousand brain scans and what we get really excited is if you've had a traumatic brain injury or you've had a stroke or. a toxic exposure doing the right thing diet exercise supplements mental exercise we have been able to demonstrate you can

make it better you are not stuck with the brain you have but you want to have a sense of urgency because as dr small knows alzheimer's disease actually starts in your brain years before you have any symptoms what role do genes play. the brain they do but not as many as most people think so it's about thirty percent of your illnesses are related to your genes but more is related to your behavior you have more power than most people ever thought possible douglas lawdy exercise the brain people do it every day by playing sudoku puzzles crossword puzzles or you can do it online we've studied people searching online for the first time and find that it can become a tremendous brain exercise one of the challenges we have is that we're exercising

our brains willy nilly we're not doing focused after exercise and it's important to focus because there are memory training programs that we've developed at u.c.l.a. that we put forward in our books that actually help people improve their memory right away and you can have sustained effect. yes for many years we don't think of it in the terms of physical exercise plays a role in the brain that's probably the most important thing you can do if people do nothing else after this broadcast i hope they will start getting some kind of a robot conditioning every day and they don't have to become triathletes maybe twenty thirty minutes of brisk exercise it gets your heart to pump oxygen and nutrients to your brain cells and it actually gets your body to produce something called b.d.n.f. brain derived neurotrophic factor which gets your brain cells to sprout branches and they actually talk to each other better and it doesn't take much so if you walk a mile a day they compared people just a mile a day they had more gray matter in their breath so exercise in many ways is the

fountain of youth for an end as is all of this new this discoveries about the brain are we learning new things all the time not one of these you got to really knew both how it was the boat and these things are easily just a dream now he's proven he's one of the well i'm sequenced pretty guidelines and i can fully agree with one of the what demir on the jury where talking about the importance of i robot exercise and important to some of the right types of mean exercise i mean many highly hears from the body board didn't get a few people who don't understand it is not going to be one more good robust will or one more so those who would not there's is nobody beat the real effort has to be outside our comfort level until i repeat you don't want these exercises i want brings benefit not you know one more good rebuttal or the big fear and all of this shit agree that damon is dimension of no question we know alls on result dimentia

people wouldn't think about this problem well i saw fear when i lecture and say who wants to live to eighty five or beyond and most people raise their hand fifty percent. people will be diagnosed with alzheimer's or another form of dementia by the time they're eighty five this is really an important scary issue and does gary and i were talking about before as your weight goes up the size and function of your brain goes down and with two thirds of us overweight one third of us obese it significantly increases the risk of dementia we need to get serious about getting healthy which is what we did at saddleback church with the daniel plan we actually sign the church up it's of huge church. health and pastor one called me because i've climbed the term the dinosaur syndrome based on this research as your weight goes up the size of your brain goes down so dinosaur big body little brains i know

ricky is overweight though as he is but he's lost sixty pounds and he got hooked because he didn't want to be a dinosaur overall start with you what do you think the lumosity this is a growing in it i hear that commercials all the time they use brain exercises. where the converter to what we need to be not even to not be easy to do one more quarter of zero zero or one more sudoku for people who already have done a million a gram you know more should be going to bring more nobody more of our ideal in talent god is good for people by we have to understand the expectations on don't believe god bring games i'm going to treat on timers so you have to be part of or a more holistic instead of you know we were discussing to small is it true that some video games can increase intelligence there have been some recent studies showing that you can train a form of memory called working memory where you hold information in mind just long enough to use it so if you call directory assistance you get

a phone number you dial that number that's working memory you won't remember that number in ten minutes well you can train that kind of working memory and it turns out that effect transfers to what we call fluid intelligence a person's ability. to solve problems and to reason in a complex manner and that effect is seen not just in young kids but in people who are middle aged and older people as well can you stave off old summers dr ayman i mean if you got it you got it right well no there will be factors. so if you want to prevent alzheimer's disease you want to prevent all the risk factors that are associated what have you know sweep the early stage then there i think in our experience and we have before and after scans to demonstrate you can slow the progression the problem without simers is most people never get a functional imaging study and so other things can cause out's can cause severe

memory problems whether there's too much pressure in the brain depression can look like a masquerade it it's just really important i think that's what we do in amman clinics as we look at your brain and i think way too many people are diagnosed with alzheimer's disease when it may in fact be something else that could be treated to small this is a scan of someone's brain before and after searching the internet we're going to put this up on the monitor tell us what we saw you through this so this was a study we did a few years ago where we had two groups of older people one group had never searched online those of the net or internet naive in the other group had internet experience the internet savvy and you can see in the upper left hand corner those blue areas in the net naive and of individuals that shows you what their brains look like when they were reading a book page when those people searched online for the first time if you just shift over you can see in red it's the same pattern and the internet savvy people the

same pattern when they read the book page but when the internet savvy people searched online look at the activity more than two fold increase in activity and actually when we took those internet naive people we had them search online for just an hour a day. if for a week we saw highly significant increases in activity so you can train the brain even an older brain to search online and actually stimulate those neural circuits what does nutrition play in brain health your tradition is you you are what you eat and you think what you eat and as dr ayman mentioned we have an epidemic of obesity and overweight so we have to help people manage their weight better we have to get them to eat more omega three fats from fish nuts and flaxseed less omega six from red meats and milk products we've got to emphasize those anti-oxidant fruits and vegetables which protects your brain from oxidative stress associated with aging imagine what food has to do with the brain by your brain uses twenty five percent

of the collar ease you consume and food is either medicine or it's poison so if you're eating a high sugar high simple carbohydrate diet that is pro-inflammatory and inflammation is one of the major causes we think about this disease and depression so diet are best testimonials of them and clinics actually comes when we get people to eat right these have been tight as brain foods fact or fiction blueberries blueberry great brain food very high and have taliban exclude berries non-organic blueberries hold more pesticides in almost any for other way doug different and as you support the idea of food in the brain fully nutritious your soup laments that we are going to go in order to permit what i eat more is going to go down to about nutrition or not your whole is extremely important salmon salmon great brain food specially wild salmon rich and omega three fats of

a coddles god's butter. it's great. blue green algae blue green anything that is blue green anything that is colorful is going to be good for your brain common ground another very potent anti ox. it has polythene o's we're actually testing pomegranate juice and pomegranate extract we think it helps the brain any supplements you recommend you know i recommend everybody take a multiple vitamin and fish oil and then get their vitamin d. level checked low levels of vitamin d. brand new study out just yesterday associated with brain atrophy so those are the three that i like but by them as opposed to dr fernandez the prettiest brains i've ever seen a name and clinics we've seen ninety thousand of them taking co different want to counter that when we see it already did have ended years make feast that got an exercise maybe based on working memory training how to regulate your stress we see

more get a beat and done do you go below one degrees it was you beat effect on these was reported by your huge eight study buddies two thousand and ten when you didn't go be do so with the results we would all love to see when we have been going to break the tie well you know i think i'm i'm in the middle somewhere you know we actually did a positive ginko study but there is a medication that works one of the issues is timing because a medicine might be helpful say in moderate to severe all timers for a temporary period but doesn't seem to work in mild stages or in a pretty symptomatic stage coming up the case for meditation why the ancient technique may play a role in modern brain health that's next. very

hard to take. that. plenty . of. i've been calling oliver oh fernandez a doctor he's not a doctor but i want him to be a doctor and i run the show and i'm the king and you are the oliver over now and as

and. being very very small and daniel in our guess would discussing the brain what is stress and definite negative stress is the enemy of memory and many brain functions we know that chronic stress in animals will actually shrink they hit the camp of memory centers if if you take a human volunteer and you inject that volunteer with the stress hormone cortisol it temporarily wipes out learning and recall now that the key word is temporary because we can help people lower their stress levels and some of the studies we've done at u.c.l.a. we found remarkable changes in neural circuitry as a result of simple things like meditation doing tight she needs breathing at his first cause depression or depression cause stress well can go both ways a little stress is good you actually need in fact the don't worry be happy people die the earliest from accidents or preventable illnesses so i thought my job as

a psychiatrist was to lower everybody's stress and then you know after about twenty years i realize what i really need to do is raise some anxiety so people make the right decisions but what we're really excited about is meditation fooled us we thought meditation would actually lower brain function it doesn't it activates the most human thoughtful part of the brain which is the prefrontal cortex oh yeah i mean we see remarkable increases in neural activity as a result of meditation you only have to do it six ten minutes a day and you see those changes over oh do you agree with that your own little don't aggress do progress but here's how many days are we are going to is get on i'm we going to stick with our movement leggy yoga it's not for me to say one of the challenges. we see in our studies with meditation a lot of westerners don't like to meditate they get antsy they don't like to sit around and they prefer something more active like tai chee which is sort of

a meditative movement but it has a physical element to it the brain is much more actively involved in all phases of hope than we think right you know what if mental health was really brain health when your brain works right you work right and i think it's one of the things psychiatry is done a really bad job de stigmatizing that what our image and work has really shown us is that bipolar disorder a.b. the autism or physical brain problems and when you optimize brain function they do better we're going to put some scans up in the monitor and damon oh won't you tell me about the scans is this healthy or unhealthy bring to it so this is actually the scan of a twenty two year old mixed martial artist so someone who came to the clinic he had been in many fights but depressed temperamental suicidal his memory was not good and which see the image on the left is spect scan of the study we do and the holes indicate areas of severe low blood flow to his brain we're talking about

supplements in the last segment on multiple vitamin c. and a brain boost that included ginko and some other things too and a half hours later we saw overall increased blood flow to the brain and his cognitive scores were better now if he's going to get continue to get kicked in the head if the supplements aren't fix and all these football players and all the sort of him you were covered from that absolutely we've always to study so we've done the world's largest study on active and retired n.f.l. players we've put sixty five of them on a brain smart program eighty percent of them showed improvement not only in blood flow but also in cognitive function we're really excited about the idea of rehabilitating. brain trauma of roy you recommend a holistic approach to brain health where yes and no meaning yes holistic might also need to be personalized so that they may be viewed well because there's too

many options too many things that we can do so it's important for that person to know what these might grow and what these my priority i'm numb all of the oak's years and it will get and we get more and more options to find a one dot com be more relevant and more important i'm definitely we believe we have made good on bigger affairs memes down here people identifying what bees they're more important priority try to be a little encouraging here are we making advances in dimension all sides we are i mean it's slow i mean we've made tremendous advances in brain imaging and biomarkers i mean today we can actually see the physical evidence of all timers disease in living people we never saw that before so we could detect the problem earlier we've got some new treatment trials so there have been new drugs developed to try to clear out from the brain some of the abnormal amyloid plaques and other things you have any thoughts as to what causes it well there are certainly a lot of theories and in some situations we know the cause of very rarely there's

a genetic mutation the causes the disease but more often than not it's a combination of genetic factors and lifestyle factors that contribute to the disease and i think that can empower us because we're beginning to learn about modifiable risk factors that are under our control recent study from u.c. san francisco estimated that fifty percent of all time or cases worldwide could be attributable to these modifiable risk factors however only ever think we'll see brain health advances much in say cardiovascular health as advanced yeah i'm going to take ten twenty years to pray to god to not we the huge brewers encourage us to grow our health but that is the current frontier and where we see hundreds of sign be used were. why been working on many many be friend approaches to make you would progress let me just mention one very important thing which is that maybe cage only is always going to be part over the solution but that's

a dream and we seem one more clear than noninvasive options i don't want to be us important if not more hours maybe days on so we need to start working with doctors on here care professionals on patient groups so they don't wait for a green my dick be open or they might pick mitigation by the appreciate noninvasive options under still doing them today please see the day when people will exercise their brains as often as their size their bodies of course an effect on people already are doing that today we see a lot of interest i'm on active baby boomers and also my own parents whose kids have learning difficulties like eighty eight d. so it's already happening if we just go revelant and mainstream what is in e.g. helmet it's a helmet we don't have some stone stores that mr e.g. i could be the m t now the technology was very expensive and you had to go to a doctor or a university no it's becoming consumer friendly so some of these helmets are

becoming two hundred three hundred dollars so it won't be very interesting to see how people use it or music game and all as a size nutrition stress manager does all of that change the structure of the brain yes we think over time i mean the study we do is a functional study but we've actually seen research where if you improve the blood flow to the brain ultimately you're also going to improve the gray matter and the structure but you can't just you know so many people you can't just do crossword puzzles that's like going to the gem and doing a right bicep curl and then leaving you want to think about exercising your whole branch and my favorite exercise besides table tennis because as exercise coordination exercise while you're thinking is dancing. learning new dance steps works in interesting part of the brain called the cerebellum which is totally connected to the judgment front part of your book we have some video questions for

you from some young viewers about technology in our brains the first is elise singleman a senior at the university of southern california. activities sally hawkins. and tess and i mean that you are going to concentrate and. so this is a challenge because what happens is that young people and even older people are multitasking they're using their devices they're not focusing attention they're actually pain partial continuous attention because they're waiting for the next being and buzz from their device so they are developing a form of attention deficit there's even been some discussion maybe we're becoming a more autistic society we're not connecting face to face so we have some concerns on now on the other side of it there actually has been a recent study where a certain video game was used where they found that older people could increase their multitasking ability by playing this video game in fact the eighty year olds

were able to multitask to the degree that an untrained twenty year old could there's actually study sponsored by hewlett packard the people who sort of get addicted to their email and video game and being online lose i.q. points over a year so i think brakes are a good idea to become addicted you can become addicted to it where you're always as gary was saying waiting for that next buzz to happen we have some social media questions michel more ahead on twitter wants to know what happens to the frontal lobe during adolescence stop the small of the you know the frontal lobe is actually developing during adolescence and from birth through adolescence there's a process called pruning where in sixty percent of the neural connections are pruned away so the idea of use it or lose it is probably more important when we're young. then when we're older bryson arts facebook. do we store all the information we see in our minds now in fact our minds sort of filter things out so that we

are only paying attention to what we think is the most important thing so two people can look at exactly the same event and come away with different ideas on what happened amanda mensa ensiferum i've had anxiety for eighteen years now been on every sort of medication it either stops working or doesn't work at all is ever going to be a test to tell which bed is the right for which person well that's why we do imaging i mean psych how would you ever know what's going on in an anxious person's brain unless you actually look so functional imaging is going to be a huge part of the future of psychiatry so you're not thrown darts in the dark if people are we learning more over time where's it going brain fitness so there is this one point i wanted to make we did break people it is not really be an absence of us namers so when we see a way people don't dream repeat most eagerly want to maximize their performance today on the lead they brought on by we see many boomers want to do better pianist

tuesday productive do we want to have a long career as you have learned to be able to drive safely on to how great congress these are we going to barnard their friends to it tended to trainees repeat myth he said i would go back to the functionary be it on how to delete disease as moses hard we see the young the fitness centers of exercise and is it hard to get them interested when you're twenty five years old in brain you know it is an actual we just did a study with the gallup poll organization and we found that young people did have memory complaints about fourteen percent of them were that we also found that the older you get the more likely you are to live a healthy lifestyle the older you get for it is probably one of the. reasons may be that if you don't live a healthy lifestyle you're not going to live to old age and also when you get older you notice the negative impact of smoking and being overweight and drinking too

much do we learning more about the criminal brain you know the criminal brain is a sociopathic brain these are people that have no sense of guilt the lie all the time how do we explain that you know i think part of it is genetic and a part of it is going to be environmental many times sociopaths you just can't cure them so we published the study with ninety murderers and what we found significantly lower frontal lobe function and other researchers have found the same thing i mean this is just such an important the front part is such an important part for empathy learning from the mistakes you may focus salo through we're going to do a lot more on this thank you all very much alvarado i made you a doctor you are now no longer a doctor. thanks to my guests dr daniel amen dr gary small and our old fernandez for more information on our panelists and to learn more about how to optimize your brain check out our blog at kings things dot or adoptee remember you can find me on

twitter at kings things and we'll see you next i. should have you with us here on t.v. today i roll researchers. are forced.