The Daria Hamrah Podcast
Do you want to change or simply improve your life? Take your business or your personal relationships to the next level? Have you ever thought why change is so difficult? Ever wondered how people become successful and we just call them "lucky". The Daria Hamrah Podcast gives you Dr. Hamrah's personal insights and pathways to his successes and what he calls "true happiness". Featuring interviews with some of the most successful entrepreneurs, authors and experts in their field, he shares their insights into what he calls the "Secret of Life".
The Daria Hamrah Podcast
Unlocking the Brain: Insights from Neuroscientist - Dr. Sarah McKay
What if you could understand the science behind why your teenager seems impossible, why habits are so hard to break, or why menopause affects your thinking? Dr. Sarah Mackay, an Oxford-trained neuroscientist and founder of the Neuroscience Academy, joins us to demystify the complex world of the brain with warmth, wit, and scientific precision.
This conversation upends common misconceptions about brain development while offering practical insights for everyday life. Dr. Mackay takes us on a journey through neuroplasticity—the brain's remarkable ability to change throughout life—explaining how this process underpins everything from habit formation to teenage rebellion. She shares evidence-based strategies for behavior change that work with your brain's natural tendencies rather than against them, like "habit stacking" to make new behaviors stick.
We explore fascinating research on sex differences in the brain, revealing how both biology and social factors shape cognitive development across cultures. Dr. Mackay offers a refreshingly balanced perspective on "brain fog" during menopause, acknowledging the complex interplay between hormones, sleep, stress, and societal expectations. Perhaps most valuably, she emphasizes the profound importance of social connection for cognitive health, suggesting that meaningful relationships might matter more than trendy biohacks or optimization techniques.
Throughout our discussion, Dr. Mackay's compassionate approach to aging and body image resonates deeply. Her insight that "there are no mirrors in nature" provides a powerful reframing of how we view ourselves as we age. Whether you're navigating parenthood, midlife transitions, or simply curious about how your mind works, this episode offers both scientific substance and genuine wisdom about embracing the brain's natural evolution through all life stages.
Dr. Sarah McKay links:
IG: @drsarahmckay
X: @drsarahmmckay
website: https://drsarahmckay.com
Tweet me @realdrhamrah
IG @drhamrah
All right. Hi everyone, welcome back to the Daria Hamra podcast. Today we're going to dig deep, beyond the skin and beyond aesthetics right into the brain. I'm joined by someone whose work I've admired for years Dr Sarah Mackay, an Oxford-trained neuroscientist, best-selling author, science communicator and founder of the Neuroscience Academy. Sarah has this incredible ability to take the complex science of the brain and turn it into real-life, digestible insight. So, as someone who works with people every day who want to look the way they feel, this episode hits home for me. We'll talk about everything from neuroplasticity to baby brain, to why teens think that parents are the worst and as a parent of two teenagers, I'm really interested in that part and, yes, even body dysmorphia and in the age of social media. So let's dive right in.
Speaker 2:Sarah, before we, first of all, welcome to the show and thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule. I know you're doing a podcast tour, you're going on a bunch of gigs this year and first of all, tell me, how do you find time to do all of this? You know I'm already struggling, as is You're writing multiple books, you're on almost on every podcast that I see, you're actively involved in the field and you're a mother to two children that are teenagers. How do you do all of that? Just give us a. Is there a hack? Is there a tool? Is there an app for it? How do you do it?
Speaker 1:If my husband heard you ask this question, he would laugh his head off. It's smoke and mirrors. I wrote my books last year, so this year what I'm very, very busy doing is not a lot. I'm just trying to ride the wave of having done a lot of work over the last few years, and this year I am just, as I say, I'm sort of taking a sabbatical, and that I'm not trying not to write, I'm trying not to create, I'm just trying to Me time.
Speaker 1:Not necessarily me time, not continually be on the hamster wheel of of creating and writing and striving, which?
Speaker 1:I've done for about 50 years, um, just just having a bit of a bit of time out. So this year has been very, very chill and very relaxed. Actually it just looks like I'm busy because I'm going on a lot of podcasts. My boys are teenagers now, so they're in their final year. My oldest son's got just a few weeks left of high school and my other son's got two and a half years left, so you know they're pretty self-sufficient. Now I work for myself.
Speaker 2:So Ari, would you.
Speaker 1:You know, it probably looks like I'm busier than I am. Let's let's be honest.
Speaker 1:My husband brings me a cup of coffee in bed every morning, and that is one of the greatest little pleasures of my life and that's why I'm thinking he would laugh if he um heard you ask me how I do it all, because he does a lot. I married well. He's a legend and I think that that's probably part of it. Plus, I try not to take too many things too seriously, I just try. I turned 50 at the beginning of the year. I've got friends who never made it this far.
Speaker 2:For your birthday. Welcome to the club.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm just trying to have a good time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it looks busier than I am, honestly from what I can hear, it sounds like you're living a dream. Is that true? Is that safe to say oh?
Speaker 1:sure, I don't know. Do you have any regrets? I know we're getting deep regrets about life, regrets about life or regrets about taking a year to just hang out? I have no regrets really.
Speaker 2:It's too early to judge the year I've taken off. Yeah, it's too early to judge that.
Speaker 1:Gosh, no, zero regrets. I've had the best year ever. Do I have any regrets? No, I don't think so. Sometimes I feel like there's sliding door moments when you look back on your life, where you know life could have taken on a completely different trajectory, but for a moment. But I suppose part of what we do is we create an identity by telling ourselves stories about how we ended up where we are and I'm quite an optimistic, upbeat person, and I'm quite an optimistic, upbeat person. So I feel like perhaps, if there are regrets, I've told myself or I've woven a narrative around that story and either turned it into a joke or turned it into a story about how I got to where I am. So no, no regrets. Perhaps I had have been a little kinder to myself when my boys were little, because that was a really hard grind, but I didn't know then what I know now.
Speaker 2:Well, I think we all did that. I mean, that's just, no one took us through motherhood or fatherhood school. I mean, I think that's part of life. But were you a person that got out of her comfort zone very easily, without overthinking things? Or were you someone that was more looking towards safety, security, and just liked to keep things within the walls of, I guess, comfort?
Speaker 1:I never felt unsafe walls of, I guess, comfort. I never felt unsafe. I've had an incredibly fortunate upbringing and childhood with a lot of love and safety and security, so I never felt like I had to seek that. I just had always had the assumption and perhaps always do that the world is safe and secure and I never felt like I was trying to like. If I look back to like my teenage years and early 20s, I was very ambitious in that I wanted to do as well as I possibly could. It wasn't necessarily in competition with other people and I grew up like my mum and dad left school when they were both 15 and I'd never met anyone who went to university in my life until I went to university, except my family doctor and my dentist, who happens to be married to each other, and me and my best friend, who's now a psychiatrist we joke. When we were growing up one of our friends dad's was an engineer, so we also knew him who'd gone to university. So I never felt like I was trying.
Speaker 1:I was out of my comfort zone because I hadn't really quite a naive view of the world, but I knew what I liked to do, which was study and learn, and I really enjoyed that. So that was really what drove me. It wasn't about feeling safe or uncomfortable, it was just about doing what I enjoyed doing, which I still do now. And I guess part of that's coming from a very happy childhood, but perhaps without very so. My parents were not ambitious, but parents whose focus was on me and my sister, not on the world around us, and I guess that's probably shaped a little bit of who I am now still, and I guess that's probably shaped a little bit of who I am now still. And then I just quite like neuroscience still, and I always say that my career, I suppose, has been about, oh like reading neuroscience papers and doing a bit of research and then finding what's interesting and then telling other people about it. It's not very complicated.
Speaker 2:And you're doing an amazing job to something that's so scientific and abstract and explaining it in a way, communicating it in a way that the layman easily understands and can apply. So you have this just innate ability and not many have it, especially scientists of a concept that is very abstract. Now, how did you even get into neuroscience? And also, if you can explain to our listeners what is neuroscience actually and how did you get into it? Because you got into it in a time where I don't think you know we're exactly the same generation, where I don't think you know we're exactly the same generation. To be honest, when I went to university, I didn't even know about neuroscience. I knew about neurology, but I didn't know about neuroscience per se, and now it's actually a very popular field in medicine and science.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks first of all for the compliments on how good I am at explaining this. But I wouldn't argue it's not innate, it's. You know, 30 years of a career, you know you learn a little bit along the way about and having a lot of conversations with people about neuroscience, particularly the last 10 or so years that I've been teaching neuroscience.
Speaker 1:I've learned from my students how to talk about the science with them. So that's an iterative learning process on my part, not something that's just in me. In terms of how I got into neuroscience, well, I always have the book next to me when I do a podcast, because people often ask me about it, and you'd probably be familiar with this book from our generation?
Speaker 2:Of course, of course. Yeah, the man who Mistook His.
Speaker 1:Wife for a Hat by Olly Sacks.
Speaker 2:Yes, I actually read it in German. You know, I went to school in Germany, I was born and raised in Germany, and I remember that there you go.
Speaker 1:Yes, 1993, psych 101, canterbury University, new Zealand. That's in the town of Christchurch where I grew up and we were told to read this book. And I switched universities the following year because Otago University, dunedin, new Zealand, had just put together a new degree, discipline in neuroscience. And I remember talking to a friend of mine who went on to do dentistry down there and I said, oh wow, I was thinking of I really love this biology and psychology idea and I remember talking about it with him in my first year at Canterbury and he said, oh well, otago's putting together a degree in neuroscience. I think they'd formed it that year. So I switched universities and I also really wanted to go to that university because it had a really great student vibe and I've always wanted to just go away to college, live in halls, have that student life, so it was a good excuse really. So I headed down there and then was in that first cohort to degree to graduate with a degree in neuroscience and I'm still in touch with some of the people from that year.
Speaker 1:One of my closest friends did a postdoc in the US and then went to work for PubMed for many, many years, sadly just got replaced by AI, which apparently is not doing as good a job as the actual brains and the humans indexing the journal articles. But that was really. It was reading that book, but that was really. It was reading that book. And for those who don't know, oliver Sacks was a neurologist who writes these amazing case studies. He's a fantastic writer and communicator as well as a neurologist who wrote up the unusual case studies of the things that go wrong with how people think and feel and behave when something goes wrong with their brain. And I was just captivated, and that's been and I'm still captivated today. And then I, yeah, just carried on. I was very fortunate and I went off overseas, as all Kiwi and Aussie kids did back then. They still do now. After my university degree in New Zealand, we called it our OE. Do you know what the big OE is?
Speaker 2:Yes, of course, yeah, the big overseas experience. Yes, yes.
Speaker 1:I don't know whether they still use that language now in New Zealand. I haven't lived there for a long time.
Speaker 2:Well, they use it in England. Yeah, you go on, your big OE.
Speaker 1:Or they call it a gap year. Sometimes if you go after high school. Yeah, sorry, no, go ahead I was just going to say so I went traveling and when I was overseas traveling then I was going and reading. I was actually living in Edinburgh working in a pub and I was picking up the nature Back in the days with nature and science. That would actually come in the magazine form which I still do prefer.
Speaker 1:And I was reading the classifieds in the back, looking for PhD opportunities, and I saw that the Welcome Trust was funding four-year studentships to do a master's and a PhD and they were offering them at Cambridge, ucl and London and Oxford. So I went and interviewed in all of them. Actually, I ended up with the Oxford spot and didn't go and interview for the Cambridge one because I thought, oh, oxford seems like quite a good choice.
Speaker 2:You don't want to do that. You don't want to ruffle any feathers.
Speaker 1:Well, it was pretty and coming from this little Kiwi kid who grew up in the eastern suburbs of Christchurch with parents who had never been to university, it was pretty wild to end up in Oxford.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you made a huge leap. Yeah, it was cool, not just to any university.
Speaker 1:But again, because I didn't have imposter syndrome, it wasn't invented. Then I just landed there and thought, well, this is pretty cool. I'm going to meet some new people, drink some beers, party a bit, do a bit of neuroscience yeah whatever. I loved my time there. It was really fun and I met my Irish husband who was studying economics, and then we moved to Sydney and just carried on what then?
Speaker 2:we moved to Sydney and just carried on. What made you move to Sydney?
Speaker 1:We were. I got to the end of my PhD. My husband was working in London in financial services as an economist and we thought, well, where else in the world should we live? He's, you know, Irish and Kiwis travel. And then we wrote down a list of really cool cities in the world we'd like to live in, and Sydney was on that list. And then he made some inquiries with someone that he knew who worked in the company he was with, and they said, oh, we've actually got a position here now. How soon can you move? And we were like, oh, let's go to Sydney. And he told his Irish mother we'll go to Sydney for a year and that was in 2002. And then we came here and we were like Sydney, Australia the northern beaches, where we live is perhaps one of the better places in the world to live. We're very fortunate, they let us in and it's our home.
Speaker 2:I have a cousin actually that lives in Sydney, so I haven't ever been there to the island, but it's on my bucket list, it's just. Yeah, it's been. Um, I just have to find a time, but I'm not. How did he get adapted and climated to the sun down there, your husband coming from ireland?
Speaker 1:lots of sunscreen, yeah, um annual skin cancer checks, I mean, and I grew up, I mean I'll probably be worse off than him because I grew up in New Zealand and we didn't really start wearing sunscreen until maybe I was about 10, 11, 12. I grew up, you know, with my skin peeling.
Speaker 2:I think at our age sunscreen wasn't invented. Yet I think it wasn't invented.
Speaker 1:They started a skin cancer campaign called Slip, Slop, Slap, which everyone from my age would. I'm not going to sing because I can't sing.
Speaker 2:What year was that? Do you remember?
Speaker 1:I can't remember it was late childhood, early teenage years perhaps Slip, Slop, Slap, which was slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen, slap on a hat, and then they added slide on some sunglasses to try and bring the skin cancer rates down. But I have an annual skin cancer check now just to keep on, and I've had a few little things burned off, but nothing major. Most people I know have.
Speaker 2:To that point I think people associate. Still, I think sunscreen is somewhat of a it's not a misnomer, but it implies only half the truth because people are associated. At least I'm trying to re-educate my patients that sunscreen is not just to prevent sunburn, it is also to prevent aging of the skin At the same time.
Speaker 2:The sun is so important for us for ourselves because it has very valuable infrared component. The invisible part of the light that is so important for our mitochondria, for our cellular function, our brains and our mood, has so many benefits that finding a middle is just so hard to educate the patients.
Speaker 1:People don't seem to like to find a middle these days, do they? And I think, growing up in Australia, we have a very different attitude towards that, because every single person has the experience of if you don't wear sunscreen and you're outside you get severely.
Speaker 1:Well, no, it's not skin cancer. You get severely burned very, very easily. So there's not really an either or about whether you should be wearing sunscreen because you absolutely have to. Everyone knows what happens if you don't. The balance then is that does not mean that then you stay inside and never go in the sun. It's how to spend time outdoors safely. Um, you know, wear sunscreen, wear the protection, don't have but don't avoid the sun, and most Aussies don't. I mean, we're pretty outdoorsy, sporty people.
Speaker 1:Kiwis too, I kind of consider myself a bit of both now, but you know the conversations now. Of course, as we know, you're frothing at either side. It's either black or white and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. And the sunscreen argument seems quite ridiculous to people living in this part of the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, very true. So let's change gears here a little bit and you know I want since I wanted to get an idea for the audience to understand what the word neuroplasticity means, because a lot of what we're going to be discussing kind of will refer back to that so getting some definitions set for the audience so that we're talking about the same things and they kind of understand it. So let's start with the basics what does neuroplasticity actually mean and how can understanding this help people who are trying to reinvent themselves or change change for the better break out of their shell and do something different, whether it is through health therapy or whatever that may be lifestyle change? Can you explain neuroplasticity in that context for our audience?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, I kind of see them as somewhat different conversations, sort of behavioral change. But I'll talk about neuroplasticity first, because I think it's very easy to conflate the two and think, because one happens the other automatically will.
Speaker 1:Staticity is simply an umbrella term to describe the many various mechanisms and ways by which the brain changes, and it does that while it's learning and also during development. So there's a lot of different ways a brain can change and a brain can learn, and a brain can grow, and a brain can be altered by experience. And under that sort of umbrella is I mean, if you kind of think about a brain changing, what do we mean by that? We can zoom all of the way in, which is what I kind of like to do. We've got to zoom all of the way in and take a look at individual neurons and connections between neurons that we call synapses, and how they might change in terms of structure and function in response to some experience that the organism or the human is having and we know quite a lot and a great deal of detail about how connections between neurons change in response to experiences and a lot of this underlies what we might call learning.
Speaker 1:So remembering what you did earlier in the day, or if you pick up a book at night, you can remember what was happening as you were reading that book. So your brain has retained that information and to retain that information it has in some way had to have changed, whether it's changed structurally, how the structures of whole neurons or perhaps neural pathways change. So we might see during very early in utero and childhood development we see the explosion in numbers of new neurons. You're getting neurogenesis happening, so new neurons are being born and we could put that under the guise of plasticity. How much neurogenesis is happening in an adult human brain after adolescence is debatable, but it's probably pretty minimal. And if it does happen it's only happening in very specific parts of the brain, most likely the hippocampus, which is involved with learning and memory. But whether or not those new neurons are part of the learning process in an adult human is debatable, because we know that most learning happens at the level of the synapse.
Speaker 1:We could look to see, we could look at a more kind of gross or not microscopic level but say you were to put someone's brain in a brain scanner and image it. We could look to see. Does the structure of a whole brain change to areas of cortex get thinner or thicker as you acquire a new skill? Do we see subcortical nuclei so deep below the cortex? Do we see changes in the structure of whole nuclei In human brains? It's pretty minimal. We couldn't pop a brain in a brain scanner and say, hey, you've learned a new habit, therefore your striatum is bigger. We don't often see and we can talk about pregnancy and adolescence, because that's a little bit different. We do see large structural change and that's why it's hard to talk about plasticity, because there's so many things that can change. And then we could also-.
Speaker 2:It's a broad term.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we could put a brain in a brain scanner and a functional MRI or some type of brain imaging that looks at patterns of activity and how networks interact and communicate, and we could see these networks shift in response to experiences we have, whether they be hormonal shifts in our body or perhaps learning something new, as you're learning to master a new skill like how to shoot a hoop or something in basketball so we could see how networks shift and alter in response to experiences. So under this big word neuroplasticity, which is almost kind of taken on quite like kind of a mythical kind of meaning, there's many, many, many levels of organization in the brain, from changes in currents across a membrane to changes in brain structure. Does that mean, then? The next kind of thing is, which was the second part of your question so does that mean, then the next kind of thing is, which was the second part of your question.
Speaker 1:What does that mean in terms of behavior change and in terms of, you said, therapy as well, which is perhaps something different, because you might be trying to address a problem and I would say that is.
Speaker 1:I mean, we might take a different approach, just teaching a kid how to learn to read, or a child learning to walk, or perhaps learning to regulate emotions, or perhaps learning a new habit. It's probably easier just to think about learning a new skill. What do we see happening in a brain when you're learning a new behaviour or learning a new skill? And we see changes all the way from the level of you know the kind of the currents within an individual neuron, the firing rates of individual neurons, synapses, all the way out to maybe broad-scale changes in how networks interact, and we can see that play out. But simply because we can see it happen, when it does happen, doesn't mean it's easy to change. There was a meta-analysis that came out, I believe. What year are we in now? I don't know, because I'm getting my years confused.
Speaker 1:No, whether it was 2023 or 2024, was this broad-scale meta-analysis that looked at behaviour change across both individual health behaviours where people were trying?
Speaker 1:to improve health or more on a kind of a sort of a public, sort of societal level. And they looked at things like, say, vaccination campaigns or trying to get people to change habits for environmental reasons. And if we just look at the individual behavior change for health because I think that's kind of most meaningful for us it was looking at can we tap into mindset, can we look at motivation, can we look at teaching people new skills? And it kind of ranked almost the different ways we can look at behavior change and it found the most powerful way to help someone change was to look at habits, and this is both habits that someone may have formed that are preventing them from behaving in a new way, or teaching someone a new skill or behavior that then eventually becomes habitual. And habits are really a really kind of fun way to think about brain plasticity, because habits come about via you performing a particular behavior over and over and over and over again.
Speaker 1:It's very similar to motor learning, like learning to ride a bike or learning to shoot a hoop or any kind of motor skill, performing a particular behavior enough times that your brain kind of goes, and this is what brains consciously think. But this is sort of a loose metaphor the brain goes. Well, that skill is so important I am going to move it down into a region of the brain called the striatum where I store my automated motor skills and behaviors so that that behavior just rolls out in response to a cure or a situation, because I want to free up cortex. I want to free that up for learning something new or reacting or responding to change in my environment. I don't want to be consciously thinking about performing that behavior. And so if we think about learning to ride a bike, you know you learned whatever age you learned to ride six, seven, eight.
Speaker 1:You had to figure it out and learn how to ride and you were showing hair and you balanced and you wobbled and it probably took all of your learning and thinking and motivation and emotion regulation and then eventually you learned how to do it. But you don't need to be motivated to remember how to balance on a bike. You don't need to work through that kind of the steps or the strategies to remember how to ride a bike, you just know how to ride a bike. It's become stored as an automated behavior, um, or and habits. Habit formation is, is, is very similar, um.
Speaker 1:So whether you brush your teeth every morning you don't usually nowadays, most of us you would hope don't have to I'm gonna brush my teeth today. It's gonna work up the motivation to do that right, and then when I do it, I have to remember the steps of how to do it. In fact, I say to people not only is the act of brushing your teeth, what we would habitual, so probably too is the motor movement, the way you brush, move your brush around your mouth. So next time you brush your teeth, think about the way you're moving your brush around your teeth, like what's? What way are you doing that? If are you doing that, you probably do it the same every time. Yeah, yeah, and that's great because it frees your mind up to think about something else. It's a system. You have a system in place.
Speaker 2:But to me the hard part is not creating a habit, it's to initiate a habit.
Speaker 1:To start, because you have to start it, To start something new Once you start it it becomes much easier.
Speaker 2:So I try to re-educate a lot my patients on also health and wellness, where I have to re-educate them about changing their lifestyle, whether it be exercising more, eating more, mindfully picking their diet as opposed to just eating what's in front of them.
Speaker 2:So those are habits that they have to create, but to initiate that change and back to what you started saying is does it get more difficult to learn a new habit or start a new habit the older we get? We say always you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Is that true or is that some sort of myth within that context?
Speaker 1:That's a very interesting question. I think it's always easier to learn when you've got a younger brain which is more plastic, but it is probably domain specific, so it probably depends.
Speaker 2:What does that mean exactly?
Speaker 1:That means. So if we think about learning to ride a bike when you're five years old, about, uh, learning to ride a bike when you're five years old, sure, motor, you know you're, you're still in the process of um, learning motor skills and refining those parts of the brain which would be involved with and by motor I mean movement the control of your muscles compared to learning to ride a bike for the very first time when you're 65, it's probably going to be a whole lot harder.
Speaker 1:So that's what I mean by domain specific. I think the key to changing habits is to understand are you performing a behavior that you no longer want to perform or are you trying to learn a new behavior? That all comes down to, if there's a behavior that you're performing that you no longer want to, that could be part of your health. Say, um, what's an unhealthy habit someone might have? Um, like, maybe they have like eating junk food like a massive bowl of ice cream after dinner every night. So what's?
Speaker 1:the cue for late night meals or late night meals, there's always a cue or a trigger or a situation which means that that behavior rolls out. And so you've got to identify, when it comes to behavior change, are you performing a behavior you no longer want to, and therefore, what is the cue or the situation that causes that behavior to just roll out without thought or motivation or much emotion whatever, and then can you change that cue or situation. If it's a particular person that you see that always causes a particular thought pattern to roll out, can you avoid that person? Perhaps you can't avoid that person.
Speaker 2:It triggers you for some reason.
Speaker 1:It can't eliminate that person from your life, can you remove the cue? Because if you remove the cue or the situation, then there's nothing prompting the habit. If you cannot remove the cue or the situation, you can't move house, move job. Moving house is a really great time to implement new habits and behaviors and this has been quite well studied because you're changing all of the context in the situation you're in. When you move to a new house. The first evening you're in your new house and it starts to get dark. You don't know where the light switches even are to go and turn on the lights, right as you've lived in that house for a few years and it starts to get dark, you're not having to think about where the light switches are to turn the lights on right. So context is incredibly important and it's a great time to implement new behaviours is when you move house, because you've changed context. So you've got to figure out is the behaviour I'm doing one I don't want to do, or is there a new behaviour I want to implement but say I can sort of stack it on something else I already do?
Speaker 1:So my husband recently he's always got to, you know, putting his back out every now and then and that's where he kind of stores his stress he went and saw the physio and the physio is like well, I need you every day, I need you to be doing leg swings and I need you to be doing squats. And so then the physio is like and this is classic behavior change sort of strategy. Do you make coffee every morning? My husband is like and this is classic behavior change sort of strategy. Do you make coffee every morning? My husband's like yeah, he's got his fancy coffee machine. And the physio says okay, well, will you turn your machine on?
Speaker 2:and then, when you stand there, do your squats, do something, do your leg swings. That's actually what I do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're stacking a habit onto something Because you're always going to have your coffee right.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Because coffee is a habit, but there's also caffeine in there which is addictive, Although coffee is probably one of the few substances we can become addicted to, and doesn't you know, you don't drink too much.
Speaker 2:It's actually good for you. It's actually quite good for you. It's a lot of studies on there. We just think I love my coffee.
Speaker 1:You know up to three cups, you're good I get so excited when I go to bed at night. I'm one of those people. I can't wait to go to bed because I get my coffee, and then I sit up and bed. My husband brings me the coffee after he's done his squats, and so this is so to change your behavior.
Speaker 2:Can we stack onto a behavior?
Speaker 1:we are already doing. And then what? And so you've got a prompt. And then great advice and, but then you've got to then roll that behavior out and then that's what's hard, is doing the behavior enough times so it feels good and it feels rewarding that your brain's going to go. Okay, I'm just going to do this automatically.
Speaker 2:So that way it turns into a habit.
Speaker 1:But that's not always necessarily. That's easier than said than done. It depends on how rewarding and engaging that behavior is. So a great example here we can talk about teenagers, right.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:So how many times would you have to tell a teenager to clean and tidy their room and put their clothes in the washing basket to be washed for them to automatically do that without being asked?
Speaker 2:You just set off a trigger in there. I don't know yeah.
Speaker 1:Like weekly for five years. They probably still won't do it right. Because there's. It's perhaps not very fun or rewarding or exciting for that behavior for them to become a habit. But how, how long did it take them? You gave them one of these things and, um, how long did it take that for their behavior to become habitual? Because this is like way more engaging and you get so much reward from that behavior, it becomes a habit to use it very, very, very quickly compared to cleaning and tidying their room. So there's no set number of particular repeats for that behavior to become habitual. It's all mixed up with how engaging and rewarding and fun that behavior is for you to repeat well, I think it goes back to dopamine, right?
Speaker 2:um, maybe you can tell us a little bit what dopamine does to our brain, because you know you, you pointed out this thing here and for the listeners we're holding up our cell phones and talking about teenagers and talk to us a little bit about how the reward system in the brain works and why. Basically, the principle of what you just said.
Speaker 1:So dopamine is? I like to think of it as a learning molecule, Essentially what it does and all our brains are doing. Let's just take a step back from dopamine. All our brains are doing and interesting I think our immune system is quite similar to our nervous system is it is learning by experience. It's experiencing all of the stuff that's happening in our body and the world around us and making meaning of it and going, huh, that was useful, I'm going to do it again next time. Or huh, that sucked, I'm not going to do that. And part of that process of learning and understanding what was great, so I will do it again, and what sucked, I'm not going to do that ever again is that process of learning.
Speaker 1:And one of the neuromodulators, which is the molecule, dopamine, which has released its synapses. There's not actually that many dopaminergic neurons in the brain. There's quite a limited number. But we've got neurotransmitters in our brain and the two main ones are glutamate and GABA and they actually do all the heavy lifting and all the work and most of the synapse communication. And then we have neuromodulators, which are far more famous and I always feel sorry for glutamate and gaba because they do the work, but neuromodulators the neurons that make them. They're far fewer in number but they have a kind of a broader kind of effect and that that it's almost. I think of them as like an old-fashioned radio, like what we grow up with. You know, you had your treble and your bass and you could dial up and dial down. I don't know what you do now. You just press play on Spotify or whatever, and neuromodulators almost kind of allow you to dial in or dial out, or they amplify or minimize the signaling of glutamate and GABA.
Speaker 1:And one of the roles of dopamine as a neuromodulator when you have an experience is you go oh well, that was really cool, I enjoyed picking up that phone, and so you've got dopamine. Kind of it's almost it's. Neurons with dopamine are tonically active, which means they're not on or off, they're always kind of firing away. And when something happens that you really enjoy, it goes. Loads of dopamine is kind of released. And that something happens that you really enjoy, it goes.
Speaker 1:Loads of dopamine is kind of released, and that's a learning cue. And so your brain goes huh, that experience was quite good. And that means next time, in anticipation of that experience, before it even happens, dopamine is released to remind you that that was quite good and that kind of drives you forwards to want to do that again. It doesn't. You don't get the reward. Once you've done that behavior a few times, the dopamine is released almost in anticipation of that. So it's like the coffee we're going oh, I'm looking forward to having the coffee. It's not necessarily the drinking of the coffee, it's the anticipation it's the dopamine.
Speaker 1:But dopamine, because it's tonically active and this is really important.
Speaker 1:It's like a guy beating a drum or a drummer it could be a girl as well, A drummer there's always a da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and that's really great because it means it can go faster, but it can also go slower.
Speaker 1:And dopamine, when you experience something that you really do not like or it's a bit of a letdown, dopamine kind of signals a bit of like disappointment or that sort of sucked, and that means next time you think about that experience or an anticipation of that experience, you're like oh, you're almost kind of, instead of moving towards, you're kind of moving back and not wanting to engage in that again, because dopamine has also signaled disappointment. It's not just reward, it's actually learning. It's like what worked, I'm doing it again, what sucked, I'm not going to try that again. And that is a very interesting thing to think about, particularly if, say, you've got kids who have really negative experiences, say in education. My 15-year-old son is studying Macbeth at the moment and he's got an essay on Shakespeare too, and there's perhaps not many 15-year-olds who are loving writing their comparative essay on Macbeth and the pursuit of happiness.
Speaker 2:Those were my nightmare in high school. Oh my God.
Speaker 1:Everyone has been, and my oldest son, who is very academic but a bit of a, he likes to think he's quite sigma, he's quite a cool guy actually has decided he likes Shakespeare, I think, just to wind his younger brother up, but has been an amazing coach on trying to coach his younger brother up, but as being an amazing coach on trying to coach his younger brother through this essay writing. And then the four of us were in the car this morning driving to. I dropped my boys off at school and my husband off at the ferry, which the four of us are hardly ever in the car anymore. You've got teenagers that doesn't happen.
Speaker 2:And then I was like isn't?
Speaker 1:it great, the four of us are in the car. And my husband says I know. And then I was like, isn't it great? The four of us are in the car. And my husband says what can we talk about? Let's come up with a topic. And my oldest son says let's talk about Macbeth. And of course he just did that to piss his younger brother off Jokingly, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:No, he's like me and my husband. Let's talk about Shakespeare and my youngest son's going. I hate Shakespeare and that's because he's had these experiences of Shakespeare, which is hard, it's hard to get your mind, you can't kind of get through it, and very few kids, I think, get to the other side where they go. Actually, they like the grind, they like the learning curve.
Speaker 2:See, I feel it's too early because in English we had to do Reed Macbeth and that was in Germany. Actually, here in the States they canceled it because they said it's sexist or racist, I don't know what. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:You can look at it within, but I think you look at it within the context right the woke society in the U S that that shifted the pendulum towards the other side.
Speaker 2:But in Germany I had to read Macbeth in English, which was our yeah, yeah, the double challenge. It was a double challenge. I hated it because I just didn't understand it. I was 15. I was chasing girls. I just didn't understand why I my brain wasn't even wired.
Speaker 1:You sound like you, sound exactly like my son.
Speaker 2:I hated it. It was torture. It is torture.
Speaker 1:And because there's no reward around that.
Speaker 2:But why is it part of the curriculum?
Speaker 1:Because I think it's a really good. It's very good to understand English.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in college. No, I disagree, because in Australia you don't go in and do everything in your first year of university.
Speaker 1:That's true, I think it is really good to be intellectually challenged and to be-.
Speaker 2:I guess yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1:They were not going to go down that path in Germany, because the German academic curriculum is so intellectual and intellectually rigorous.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I think we need to challenge kids. We perhaps just need to teach it in new and different ways. And if you've got a great teacher and you get all the way through that process and you understand the themes, you understand, you learn about the language, you learn about the figures of speech and you can see how those themes are still current today. But that process of getting there doesn't feel like a lot of fun, and so the brain is going that sucked, I don't want to do it again. That really sucked, I really don't want to do it again. So there's no motivation to want to repeat the behavior. So you're moving away from that and essentially so. We've just used Macbeth here and Shakespeare as, and you're still a little bit troubled by your experience. Whereas I loved Macbeth, I thought it was awesome. I love that play, it's my favorite but that's what the brain is doing. All it's doing is learning.
Speaker 2:It's interesting. I want you to kind of tell us a little bit about the difference between a male and female brain, because I remember all the girls in my class around that age first or second year of high school, when we're doing Macbeth and also in German literature, where we're doing the German literature all the girls were hyper-engaged, like they were the ones that were raising their arms. They had usually the better grades and for us at least for me and other than several one or two boys it was just much harder. We weren't that interested. Is it because the maybe teenage female brain develops a little faster, matures faster, and so because they had a better understanding, they would comprehend things better, they got more engaged and we were just not mature enough yet, even though we're the same age. How does that differ between the two genders at that age?
Speaker 2:So there's kind of two questions there, just like the male versus female brain and then the teenage brain.
Speaker 1:So I'll come back to talking about broad scale sex differences in the brain but I will just say, yes, brains go through puberty too in the brain. But I will just say, yes, brains go through puberty too. But what we see and there's a bit of it's like girls are more mature than boys and part of what we would see in classroom behavior is partly that.
Speaker 1:but it's also that's the kind of the social expectation, whereas girls have been socialized and you know happier to kind of sit in class and engage and put their hands up whereas the boys are a little bit slower to do that, and I see every and I've told this story a number of times as well when I go to my son's high school prize giving every year the first, and they're in high school for sort of six years.
Speaker 1:we don't have middle school here so from sort of 12 through to 17, and the girls are getting getting the first prize, first-in-class prizes probably 70% are girls sort of years 7, 8, grade 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. And then we start to see the switch, and in that final year it's the boys are topping that.
Speaker 2:Is that a maturation shame? Is that maturity.
Speaker 1:Is that testosterone?
Speaker 2:Is that social?
Speaker 1:Because that was exactly my story, yeah, and, and you see that, and I think that there's so many pieces to that like. Firstly, I will say we see brain maturation and during um puberty and adolescence tracks alongside pubertal stage versus chronological age.
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 1:So we see you could have an early maturing boy with a more mature stage of brain development than a late maturing girl. So again we've got standard distribution curves of everything, including pubertal development. So on average a group of 1,000 girls would go through puberty about a year or so before a group of 1,000 boys. But you'll have kids at either kind of end of that. So perhaps that's part of it. Girls have also been socialized from a very, very young age to kind of behave in ways that are a little bit more appropriate to the classroom, and that starts quite young. But we do see these different trajectories in terms of, say, maths achievement and and childhood with girls is slightly less than boys. And is that to do? You know how much of that is socialized versus biological the trajectory and I have a question on that.
Speaker 2:If we can come back to that too, yeah, so we've got, we've got a couple of things you've put.
Speaker 1:Can you put the pins in these?
Speaker 2:things. Yes, I will, I will.
Speaker 1:I've put the pins, I'm looking around for a pen to write notes, to remind myself to cover these off.
Speaker 1:I'll remind you yeah, and it's interesting because I suppose we've got that maturation aspect. We've also got the social kind of environment the kids are in and how girls are socializing in adolescence and how boys are socializing in adolescence. Boys are socializing in adolescence and we know once testosterone enters the picture there's that kind of social hierarchy and jostling for position that boys and males across all species do. We see that across all cultures there's that and it's much more good-natured, whereas girls aren't socialized and perhaps have less of a biological drive to be as hierarchical as boys are.
Speaker 2:Is that an evolutionary biology thing?
Speaker 1:Perhaps I don't know enough about it, and this is just my observation. But my oldest son said to me I said oh well, what's happening with the girls? He said oh well, the girls who used to be first in class in year seven and eight aren't now and all the boys are kind of working their way up. And he said all the girls are too busy fighting with each other. This, they're becoming more socially complex and they're not wanting to compete with each other, whereas the boys are happy to compete and happy to have to compete for rankings in ways that the girls aren't necessarily, and so that's like a combination. There it's hard to say is that all biological? How much is testosterone? How much is socialized in ways that the girls aren't necessarily? And so that's like a combination.
Speaker 1:There it's hard to say is that all biological? How much is testosterone? How much is socialized? It's always going to be a complex mix of the two, and often what we see is boys just muck about for a lot of high school and then right at the end of high school in Australia at least, when it really counts then they kind of lock in and then they study to get the grade to get into the university course. So how much of that is nature. How much is nurture? Is it mother nature? Is it the patriarchy?
Speaker 2:It's going to be a combination, as everything to do with the brain and behavior is Well I mean, if you go back millions of years and you see how, even in the animal kingdom, how males and females behave.
Speaker 2:I mean, of course, a lot of our behaviors have to do with hormones, the social ranking and status even in the animal kingdom, and I think, from an evolutionary biology standpoint, is how things evolved.
Speaker 2:You know, when the female in the animal kingdom or the women in humans, when they bear a child, you know their brain is their entire focus is on protecting the child and raising the child, and so all the biochemistry in their brain is basically, from an evolutionary standpoint, just geared to focus on the child, to protect the child and raise the child.
Speaker 2:And back in the days when we were cavemen, you know, I'm sure there were a bunch of women with a bunch of children, protecting them, feeding them, raising them, just like in the animal kingdom. And then, even though with the lions is the, the females that go hunting, but then the males would go and, you know, hunt or protect the tribe and then come back with food. How much of that do you think has to do with how the neurochemistry or, um, our brains have evolved, because we're talking about millions of years, we're not just talking about the patriarchy, or because we're talking about millions of years, we're not just talking about the patriarchy, or we're not talking about the past, I always say is it Mother Nature or the patriarchy?
Speaker 1:I think there are, across cultures and across species, sex-based differences in terms of behavior, particularly when it comes to child-rearing, because of course mothers get pregnant and bear the young and mammals we feed are young. But some mammals are not alloparents like humans are, whereby we raise our children at groups. You know, you've got a cat who has kittens in the wild. She needs to go and hunt and gather food to bring that back for her own kittens. She's not got someone else doing that for her, so we've got. When you go through your pregnancy and then have your babies, there are very species-specific behaviors which emerge as part of the maternal brain which determine which behaviors you need to do to keep your babies alive.
Speaker 1:A dolphin's behavior is going to be very different from a herding animal's behavior from a hunting and gathering animals from a predator's behavior Typically whatever that mother needs to do to keep her babies safe and alive, she's going to get better at, and then that means her attention will be less focused on other types of behaviors. I just want to get back to, before we talk about the maternal brain, the sex differences question, because that's really quite.
Speaker 1:I used to not like talking about it, but now I'm really happy to talk about it because I feel like the data has emerged to kind of give us insight into answering some of these questions, because we've got more data now so we can say with more certainty various things. But also, I've been thinking a lot about the brain for many years now, and when we look at a brain there's so many different things that we can measure about that brain. If we were to look at a difference between a male brain and a female brain, what we really should be doing is looking at like a thousand male brains and a thousand female brains and we are able to do that now with biobanks and data sharing et cetera. But to get a metric of a brain to compare to another brain, there's a thousand different things you could measure. You could look at the overall size and shape of a brain. You could look at various subcortical nuclei and look at their size and shape. You could look at counting neurons. You could look at receptors. You could look at neurotransmitters. You could look at what does the brain look like in a scanner in response to a particular stimulus. What do the networks look like? How do they change across puberty, across other reproductive life? You know experiences in females. You could look at susceptibility to disease, to mental health risk. You could look at particular types of behaviours. You could do a battery of cognitive tests. You could do 15 different types of cognitive tests, and so you've got thousands of different metrics and some of those measures.
Speaker 1:If we looked across male and female populations, you would see sex-based differences and some of those metrics you see no differences whatsoever. Sometimes people talk about a mosaic and that you'll see some differences in some metrics and not in others. And when we do see a sex-based difference, typically if we look across populations as overlapping standard deviation curves, you've not got blue and pink. You know blue brains over here and pink brains over here. You're looking at quite subtle statistical differences.
Speaker 1:And if you do see these statistical differences, the question then is what contributes to that? Is that 100% biology? Is that all down to XY, xx chromosomes, testosterone in males, sex you know hormones in females or is it down to perhaps something a little bit more like you know reproductive life experiences in the female, or is it completely socialized? Does it all come down to sort of experiences you have by virtue of growing up, male and female? And there's a couple of fascinating studies that have come out in the last couple of years, some of them within the US, looking at between states, and some of them globally, looking between countries. So one of the studies was in the journal PNAS 2023-ish I believe it came out, and they were looking at brain structural differences between males and females in different countries in the world. So it's mri looking at the structure of the brain and people in early midlife, so like late 20s, early 30s, so past, you know, adolescence, early adulthood so basically mature brain yeah, an early mature brain and looking to see based on the gender equality within that country.
Speaker 1:So equality of education, equality of employment, equality of environmentally enriched experiences. And they ranked all of those countries and so countries like, say, the Nordic Scandinavian countries, very high gender equality and this study, I believe Turkey, brazil and I'm not sure what other countries Turkey and Brazil ranked quite low and India ranked quite low in gender equality and the differences between the male and female brains were greater when there was greater gender inequality and were more similar when there was gender equality. The male brains were pretty similar everywhere in the world. It was the female brains in countries with more gender inequality that were kind of deviated.
Speaker 2:And then what does that mean? Is that like are we interpreting it in a good way or bad way, or neutral?
Speaker 1:Well, I don't think it's good or bad. What it's saying is that it's not just biological sex which is contributing to the differences that we always see.
Speaker 1:When we see a difference between a group of males and a group of females, it's always going to be a combination of both.
Speaker 1:So here we're seeing gender inequality made the differences greater because there was less enriched we would call it an enriched environmental opportunity for girls in education and then in employment, and then perhaps the stress of gender inequality in those parts of the world.
Speaker 1:And similar studies have been done looking at not just and that's looking at brain structure. So in the last year or two studies have been done within the US looking at equality of opportunity within different states in the US, looking at people in their 80s and 90s and so casting back to what their early lives were like and which state in the US they lived in and the states that had the greatest equality of opportunity for people when they were in early life and going through adolescent and early life development and off the top of my head I can't remember it was a state like Connecticut, I believe, that had greater equality. The people in those states in the 80s and 90s had better cognitive health and a lower risk of dementia than people who'd grown up where there was less equality of opportunity, which I believe and I can't quite remember.
Speaker 1:I think it was Mississippi and I'm not from the US, so I'm just kind of imaging a map in my mind where there was greater inequality for people now in their 80s and 90s.
Speaker 1:So we've got biological sex, but we've also got the experiences that you have by virtue of the biological sex you are. Gender is something different, because gender is. We could use gender to describe the experiences that we have based on the biological sex we are. So we would talk about gender equality or gendered experiences. But then gender now is also used to describe the feeling that you have about your biological sex and whether the feelings that you have match with your biological sex. And we can't image that because that's a belief or a thought process about your biological sex.
Speaker 2:We're staying within the context of the biological definition of sex.
Speaker 1:But your biology determines the life experiences you have, but it depends where in the world you are. So are you going to compare the brain of a woman who's 80 years old, living in India, with the brain of an 18-year-old living like my son, living in Australia, with every kind of advantage given to him, just by virtue of the fact of where he was born, they're going to have vastly different life experiences. So the only thing that's it's not only biological sex, that is driving that.
Speaker 1:It's an experience of a lifetime that's also driving those differences. So it's so. It's fascinating to think and talk about.
Speaker 2:And when some people say, yes, there are sex differences and other people say, no, there are not, some people say it's all mother nature, some people say it's all patriarchy it depends which measure you're looking at, which one you want to pick out and then study and then say what's driving that of course and it that's very interesting because really, I mean it totally makes sense our brains are, um, the sum of our biology, of of our experiences, of what we went through. All of those things take an effect, and that's something you talk about a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, biology and biography.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:And then also expectation. And then also, you know, because we're humans, we've got whether we call it mind, or whether we call it thoughts or whether we call it expectations, we've got what's happening in our biology, we've got our life experience, but we're filtering that through and creating a narrative and an identity and making meaning of that and that's also influencing, then, the outcomes and the experiences that we have, what we believe may happen. Well, you know, what we tune our attention into can also alter, you know, alter that experience that we have.
Speaker 2:So let me ask you a question, and this is probably difficult to answer because it's like asking was it the chicken or the egg? What is an introvert and what's an extrovert? Can you turn an introvert into an extrovert and vice versa? I can imagine vice versa is probably easier. But how much of it is again going back to the question, how much of it is biology? How much of it is how you were raised? How much of it stems from childhood experiences, how you were raised, perhaps what you experienced as a child? Do we know anything about that? Because, as you said, the brain is as far as neuroplasticity, has the biggest plasticity in what I heard you say in a podcast during the first five years of your life. And so how much of that has to do with being introvert versus extrovert? Is it from the day you were born? Is it written in your genes?
Speaker 1:I don't know anything about the science of introversion and extroversion, so I can't answer that at all. Sorry about that yeah. I don't know much about that.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's kind of more in terms of personality science and I'm not that familiar with that so I wouldn't want to say but any kind of behavior is going to emerge like, as I said, as a combination of your biology and your biography.
Speaker 1:It all stacks up In terms of when our brain's most plastic.
Speaker 1:So if we think about brains developing loosely from the back to the front, and if we think about what's at the back of our brain in terms of our cortex as our visual system, and so we know that that's developed and patterned up and starts to see in the experiences that we have, as we see wire up the visual part of the brain and that's almost the first part of our cortex to develop. And that's what I actually did my PhD research on was development of visual cortex and what drives the development and the wiring up of patterns, of connections in that part of the brain. And then, if you move a little further forward in your brain, you've got like hearing and you've got language and you've got sensory input, you've got motor and movement and then finally the frontal parts of your brain are more involved with things like social cognition cognition, executive function, emotional regulation, planning, judgment, reasoning, and we see this trajectory of brain development and the emergence of behaviors and skills across development from birth all the way through to late adolescence.
Speaker 1:And so we see these kind of windows of plasticity sort of open and close off more or less close off, depending Vision will close off much earlier and much firmer than, say, your ability to regulate your emotions, which is a bit fuzzier around the edges in terms of that window opening and closing. And by plasticity that means that the experiences you have are often fundamentally required to guide the wiring up. So the experiences you have are going to determine what that brain kind of functions like later in life. Language is a great example of that and we now know how and I don't know whether it happens everywhere in the world but certainly in Australia babies are screened for hearing loss before they even leave the maternity ward and the hospital.
Speaker 1:Because if they are born deaf and no one picks it up until they're three, four or five, the language centres of their brain have kind of reached the limits of experience-dependent plasticity and it's that much harder for those brain centres to be able to learn and change and grow. So we've got that kind of trajectory of plasticity. The changes that we see during adolescence are these kind of more frontal lobe functions, and that doesn't mean that those parts of the brain are not working, or the terms I hate when people talk about the teenage brain and adolescence are like it's undergoing renovation, or it's half developed or it's not fully developed. And we are so dismissive and derisive towards teenagers learning those skills. We should be enabling them to learn these skills. We're nurturing.
Speaker 2:We should be enabling them to learn these skills. We're nurturing. We should be nurturing them.
Speaker 1:And we say so when teenagers perhaps make decisions which might show lack of judgment or planning. We go oh well, it's because their brains are half developed. They will eventually develop by the age of 25. We would never speak to toddlers going oh well, they can't pronounce that word correctly. I suppose by the time they're five their brain will be developed and they can speak clearly or look at them falling over while they learn to walk. I suppose their brain's half developed.
Speaker 2:We wouldn't dream of that.
Speaker 1:We are so mean to teenagers. Well, what we should be doing is ensuring Maybe it's because they're mean to us.
Speaker 1:Well, they are.
Speaker 1:But there's a reason for that, right, Because part of what we need brains to do and the owners of those brainsorientation, which is necessary for them to kind of develop their own identity and make their way out into the world and they need to be focused more on their friends than on their family that type of input from outside of the family nest, the family home, to guide and wire up those parts of the brain and leaving the family nest requires bravery, it requires courage, especially when you first start stepping out.
Speaker 1:It's quite scary and the flip side of that sometimes is almost too much courage, too much sensation-seeking, and we might call that bravado. But teenage brains need to be sensation-seeking because they need to be driven to try something new and different than what they've always done at home as kids. They need to be sensation-seeking and part of that involves a lot of the sensation-seeking and perhaps risky behaviors and silly things that teenagers do. And no judgment to anyone out there who's a parent, because I've got teenage boys and I've seen some wild and crazy things go on as they are sensation seeking and that's not because their brains are half developed and they are stupid until they're 25 or they don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 1:It's just the drive to seek sensation and yeah I hear sensation and tribal approval, while you were doing that.
Speaker 2:I actually heard an evolutionary biologist talk to that topic, saying that when you look at the animal kingdom, for example, lions, the young, adolescent lions, that's why they even attack the pack leader or their own father in you know, in term, in so that they can move up the hierarchy.
Speaker 2:But the reason why they become or start turning on their own pack and hating it is just so that they can leave the pack and join a different tribe and so they don't co-populate in their own tribe from a biological standpoint and behavior is also embedded, so that the teenager, just like you said, will obtain the courage to go out and make new connections and learn new stuff in order to develop the brain.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they're probably moving towards new and interesting sensations and people and experiences, but there's perhaps also a bit of moving away from.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you don't co-populate. Yeah, 100%, so you get more variety of genes.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and the brain requires those types of experiences, and that's all part of identity formation as well. And even if we look at the stories that we tell ourselves about who we become as we are becoming young adults or as we're becoming parents or later in life, we've constantly got these narratives and these stories that we're telling as we create ourselves, and we can see the emergence of the meaning that we make about the stories we tell about ourselves through adolescence too.
Speaker 2:Certainly certainly.
Speaker 1:And that's the becoming of an adult. So we talk about adolescence, becoming of an adult. So we talk about adolescence, and I think we so often default to talking about dysfunction and talking about the things that they do wrong, instead of understanding that their brains are Well, humans love to be judgmental.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we just love to be judgmental. That's just a societal issue that we have. We love judging things.
Speaker 1:And they're at their peak of learning and that I don't love shakespeare, yeah, but that's okay, we're. So you know this. The studies that have been done, looking at risk taking, for example, and you can get you know, there's this really well-known study where they where they got kids, teenagers, into the research lab and they got them to play like kind of a driving game, like kind of a chicken game, and the more risks they took, the more points they got them to play like kind of a driving game, like kind of a chicken game, and the more risks they took, the more points they got. And when they were driving by themselves, the teenagers took no more risks than when an adult did. It was only when they had their mates looking over their shoulder, kind of egging them on to take more risks.
Speaker 1:So, they're well able to make judgments and take risks, but the sensation seeking and the tribe approval and the and the sense of belonging that comes from doing something a little bit edgy um is outweighs the sense of decision making.
Speaker 2:If my boys are listening, just drive alone. Don't have your friends in the back seat.
Speaker 1:I think, yeah, and I mean, I don't know what it's like in the us, but here we've got quite strict rules, and in New Zealand as well, when you go off your learner's license, here it's called being on your provisional, your P's, and you have a P on your car. There's quite strict rules about how many other people you're allowed in the car after a certain time. You're only allowed one other person after 11 pm in the car with you et cetera.
Speaker 1:And that's exactly because of that, because when they're by themselves they don't typically make as silly decisions as when they're in a group. And that's all normal and natural and healthy, I think. But we tend to be so brutal and we've fixated on this idea about 25. A lot of the brain development happens kind of during puberty. I just think we need to flip the script.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what is up with that? Because you know what does it come from.
Speaker 1:Because it doesn't like get to 25. And then it's mature and you become this complete mature.
Speaker 2:I know people my age. They behave like 12-year-olds. I behave like an 8-year-old sometimes, so I don't buy into all of that.
Speaker 1:I totally agree with you, but why?
Speaker 2:is it that they say the male brain, especially the frontal lobe, the part of the cognition, doesn't fully mature up until age I don't know 27 or whatever that age is, and why is it?
Speaker 1:different than the female brain.
Speaker 1:Well, I haven't heard that it's any different from the male or female brain. It's just typically and males have also got, you know, the added bonus of and testosterone is pretty wild in terms of development. I've got teenage boys in the house. I have this newfound respect for how it creates these bodies and these brains and these behaviors. So there is more risk-taking that we would perceive as risky in young males, and there has been and there is in every culture. But then females also engage in, you know, like falling pregnant is perhaps one of the riskiest things that you can do as a female in terms of mortality and in terms of health. But we don't tend to think of the risks that girls and women take in the same way as we do with boys and men. So there's a bit of the social perception of what risk is the age 25,? There's lots of different theories out there. I think it's just one of these ideas which has kind of taken hold and become popularised and we see a trajectory of development from, you know, in utero life the whole way through, and we see different skills and behaviors and cognitions peaking and waxing and waning at different ages.
Speaker 1:There's some really cool new research which has just come out from a friend of mine here in sydney university more an irish who's a cognitive neuroscientist, sydney University, more an Irish who's a cognitive neuroscientist who is looking at measures of behavioral and cognitive flexibility. So how flexible are you in your thinking and your behaving, how more or less set in your ways are you? And the most flexibility is around kind of your mid-40s to your mid-50s. So actually we peak in some things at this age, which is great news, right, because typically we valorize and only talk about the kinds of cognitive skills that we're probably quickest and sharpest and fastest at and like, say, you know, late teens, early 20s.
Speaker 1:We seem to think that those are the skills that matter the most, perhaps in the workplace. You know that quick fire memory, problem-solving thinking, but other types of skills that we get better at through life, wisdom. You know you've got a lifetime of experience. That's guided you. Wouldn't you rather you know if someone was doing surgery on you and your face, you'd probably want one of your contemporaries versus some young gun who's 22? Right, just because I've got a quick memory, wouldn't you want someone experienced and wise with judgment?
Speaker 2:yeah, in our profession we say when um the in our profession as a surgeon, we really reach our peak around age 50. So yeah because you have a ton of experience and you're not old yet. You haven't fallen off the other side yet, where you know maybe your eyesight or your I don't know stamina, or your hands are maybe shaking. Yeah, yeah, yeah, your fine motor skills mid-40s to mid-50s. That's our prime decade, and it's because of that you have experience, perspective and still you're on top of your game.
Speaker 2:But talk to me about let's get back into the 60s, 70s and further. Let's talk about brain fog.
Speaker 2:This is a topic that it's become a buzzword on social media, especially as it pertains to aging, whether hormones, especially in women with menopause, or even with men, or as a component of aging in general. It's affected most middle-aged to older population. Can you kind of talk to us a little bit about what causes brain fog, because I heard you talk a lot about that, the common denominator when it comes to brain fog. Really, to me, all things lead back to how much sleep we get and how much of a quality sleep we get, whether we're in menopause, whether we're getting, quote unquote, older, so forth. How much of it has to do with the, whether it's hormonal issues or other habits, or is it like a biochemical thing, or is it just the aging of the brain? That's how the cookie crumbles.
Speaker 1:Well, I think brain fog is probably one of those words, but, like, stress needs some-.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it doesn't get vaguer than that.
Speaker 1:We need a bit of words German's quite good for that or context, yeah, yeah, we need.
Speaker 1:I suppose we've got brain fog in pregnancy and motherhood. We call baby brain. Depending where you are in the world, people with ADHD have brain fog. You've gone through chemotherapy, you just missed a few nights sleep, you've drunk too much, whatever it's one of these words which is, I mean, you would know, in medicine. It doesn't have a formal definition.
Speaker 1:It's a colloquial description of symptoms that someone would bring to a doctor and say help me out, and it's most often like but I am 50, I am a 50 year old female, so my entire algorithm is geared towards sending me information about menopause right now as if it is this looming catastrophe, and I'm not finding it particularly catastrophic, um, but you know, I'm perhaps doing a lot of things to avoid the catastrophe, at least not the expectation and the mindset around the information, because social media is an active ingredient. The information we absorb is an active ingredient, in our experience too. So, yeah, I think we need better words for brain fog In terms of brain fog around in female menopause which is I suppose where I'm most familiar with it.
Speaker 1:You use the term chicken and egg, and I think that's quite true. We don't know whether brain fog feeling like you can't remember or not being able to find words, and for me particularly it's names of people. But then sometimes my husband can't remember names and I've been with male people my age.
Speaker 2:One of my mates the other day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I used to be really quick. I'm just a bit slow. I was with a mate the other day and we were walking along a river and there was a sunken mattress in the river and he said, oh, look at that mushroom. I mean mattress. And I knew he meant mattress when he said mushroom, but it kind of looked like the color of a mushroom. So I know why he said that and I'm like he's not menopausal, so it's not just Campy.
Speaker 2:That was a good guess.
Speaker 1:This is the thing, chicken and egg. Is it directly due to rollercoastering hormones of menopause or the loss of hormones after menopause? Or is it some knock-on impact that the changes in hormones are having, perhaps on our sleep or perhaps on network reorganization? So we see, as brains mature, go through midlife, instead of there being very specific, defined brain networks activated while we complete tasks or try and remember a name or a word?
Speaker 1:We see more integration between networks. It's almost like the brain goes hey guys, we need more neurons to get this job done, so let's teamwork so as we're going from segregated networks to more integrated networks, is it that? Is it? And one thing that I think people forget when they're talking about brain fog across menopause is if we're now including perimenopause and people are now saying, well, I'm getting perimenopause symptoms in my early 40s, we could be looking at 10 or 15 years of brain aging as well, until we get to the other side of menopause.
Speaker 1:So we've got natural brain aging happening during that time. So we don't know whether it's directly due to hormones per se that is directly impacting the function of neurons, or if it's disrupted sleep, or if it's a combination or a kind of a complex web of lots of factors, which it's probably going to be a complex web of factors, because everything to do with the brain always is. I will say some studies that have been done looking at trajectories of women going through, and we really need more longitudinal studies. We follow large groups of women through so we see the various trajectories and the individual variation, because not all women are the same. And right now, because there's been neglect within this space in terms of education and research, we're only hearing the worst stories because we're trying to like dial up the interest in this space. We can't just go on. Many women are fine. That's not a very interesting story. We'd see women with different trajectories going through. So some women will go through the perimenopause and menopause and don't notice a thing. Some women might go through and I'll probably put myself in this space, being 50 and let's say I'm still perimenopausal, with slight changes in verbal recall and it's typically around words because women are typically if we looked at a large population of women and men men might be slightly better at some aspects of mathematical reasoning or spatial rotation. Women on average might be slightly better at verbal recall or kind of word games, say, and some women might just see a slight dip during perimenopause in terms of remembering words or names or just blanking on words, and then they improve once they hit menopause. Other women, you know, kind of like almost a perfect storm of perhaps terrible sleep, other types of health issues, perhaps out of control, vasomotor symptoms which can't be managed very well. So we typically see kind of a constellation of symptoms there. And do we see those women always improving? Not necessarily, but they might not necessarily keep declining either. So there's different trajectories of women and different experiences women are having going through perimenopause.
Speaker 1:I think because we've talked so much about brain fog right now, my concern is that, as I say, this is also an active ingredient in an experience. You'll go looking for it and then you will notice it and then you might make the experience feel worse than it otherwise might be. Added on top of that right now about the only tool that we have for perimenopause and menopause is to add in some more hormones. We've got menopause, hormone therapy, or still called HRT, in many parts of the world and all we can do is just keep adding in some more estrogen and progesterone, and maybe testosterone, if you want to.
Speaker 1:That's never going to mimic that brain ovarian conversation that we've had throughout our lives, which is like a feedback loop where there's this constant conversation. That's very well regulated. All we can do is just kind of throw some estrogen in to the system and hope that that will help. And when it comes to cognition, we don't always necessarily see that helping. If it's helping someone treat vasomotor symptoms, hot flashes, night sweats and they're sleeping better, we might see an improvement, but not if perhaps they've got depression alongside that. So it's very complicated. I think that give us another 10 years, we might have some more sophisticated ways of thinking about and understanding about what's going on here Right now.
Speaker 1:it's all very blunt tools.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I think you broke it down beautifully because it is a multifactorial thing and I don't think anyone it even would make sense to be able to narrow it down to one thing, because nothing is just one thing, you know.
Speaker 1:No, nothing is yeah.
Speaker 2:It was never one thing that developed your brain, so it can never be just one thing that affects your brain, you know, and so it wouldn't even make sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I think that they're not the stories that you know. The charismatic solutions of one thing sells a story right, and that's not like you say. It's never one thing. People want it to be one thing. The one tool that we have when we're having this conversation about women in midlife Besides, of course, the boring advice about exercise well and eat well and sleep well and try not to get too stressed is to use HRT, and it's a very blunt tool and right now it doesn't seem to be despite what you may hear otherwise the only answer for cognitive health.
Speaker 2:And it's certainly not, it's just a tool. Yeah, it's certainly not.
Speaker 1:It's not a tool. The data again, despite what many people may hear, is incredibly mixed in terms of how it's going to impact longer-term brain health, dementia risk.
Speaker 2:Certainly.
Speaker 1:It's very, very mixed data. It's not preventing dementia, it's not causing dementia. We've got studies saying both and I often think about dementia risk or risk for any health on one of those old-fashioned scales where you've got weights that you put on either side and you've got risks on one side and protective factors on another and sometimes you can't do anything about some of these factors, Even simple habits like alcohol consumption, that can affect it.
Speaker 2:You could have your hormones perfectly regulated. You could have perfect lifestyle habits as far as sleep, diet. You put alcohol in the mix.
Speaker 1:it just shifts the whole balance of weight, especially when it comes to brain and maybe it depends how big the alcohol. I mean, are you drinking a bottle of wine every night or are you going? Out and having a glass of wine with your friends once a week and having a laugh.
Speaker 1:So you know, you've got the social impact there and I think with HRT in particular, menopause hormone therapy right now we don't know the size of the weight and which side to put it on and there's a few little weights going on either side. That's tipping the scales one way or another and then we've got like our sort of our genetic risk underlying that. We've got our genetic makeup and it may be that there's different trajectories of people depending on their genes and maybe that's going to be altered by their early life experiences, including how much education they had in early life. All of that's going to send different people off on different trajectories of aging.
Speaker 2:They actually did an epidemiology study on looking at the demographic status, education status, wealth status of different various population and their biologic age and their all-cause mortality and you could clearly see a huge difference just populations from different socioeconomic status that have a complete, higher all-cause mortality, different biologic age, and so all of these affect and that proves the point that there's so many factors involved in how we even age, and to me, brain aging or health, is part of aging, it's just like any other cell.
Speaker 2:If your skin ages, your heart ages, your lungs age, your brain will age too, and vice versa, so it's so multibacterial, and so that's why I always chuckle when there is these influencers coming say you have to do this, and if you do this this will happen, and I'm like, really, if it was just that easy.
Speaker 1:If it was that easy, it would be that easy and I always joke. I say there's the gut brain people and the hormone brain people and the sleep brain people and the cold bath boys and the socioeconomic factors and there's all of these different factors and the brain's just like. Well, I'm just in the middle here, guys, taking on board all of this data from all of these different sources throughout a life, and you know what I'm within an ecosystem and you know what the risk with that is.
Speaker 2:Sarah and I've. I see that trend. People get so confused and when people get confused, guess what they do? They won't change and they won't do anything.
Speaker 1:So we're really scaring them of making that, changing those habits that you say that they need to do yeah uh to to move the needle yeah, and and wellness has become very pious. It's not very. It's not much fun either. I think people feel like it's boring, isn't it?
Speaker 1:perfect, these perfect bros who do absolutely every single thing to, to, to change the needle and and, and we know what's actually going to change the health of a population more than are you going to take your ice bath or not. Actually, you said socioeconomic status and poverty is the greatest predictor of longevity. Look at Queen Elizabeth. She perhaps is such a great example of someone whose health span and lifespan were both long and great. But she was born into massive socioeconomic privilege. She had access to kind of every privilege that that anyone that as possibly ever had in terms of health and well-being. But she was socially connected, she was intellectually stimulated, um, she had four kids when she passed.
Speaker 1:She was in her 90s, but you know she was working up until a couple of days before she died. Yeah, I remember Her life was very and she probably didn't drink as much as her sister did. Your sister drank and smoked all that time. But I mean, you know, there's also people who drink and smoke, and you know the oldest ever living woman, jeanne Calment.
Speaker 2:French lady smoked until she was age 117 or something. Those are genetic exceptions. Those are genetic exceptions. That's the thing. That's a genetic exception.
Speaker 1:We can try our very best. I just think what is missing is a little bit of fun and joy along the way.
Speaker 2:Human connection is so important.
Speaker 1:People are being very pious and very boring. I think I don't want to spend my whole life trying to optimize myself. I want to have a bit of a good time along the way.
Speaker 2:I totally hear you. I went through all the phases. Now I've gotten to that point where I'm trying to find the balance, because you have to have fun living. That doesn't mean drink a glass of scotch every night or a whole bottle of wine every night. That's not what I mean by having fun.
Speaker 1:There's other fun ways to have apart from alcohol. The key is moderation. Yeah, I drink alcohol. The key is moderation. Absolutely the key is moderation. Yeah, I drink it and I think for me it's social. It's great fun to go and have a drink with my mates. It's one of my favorite things to do go out with the girls, have a laugh, um, and that's okay. So what do you do for your health and what do you do for your health and wellness?
Speaker 2:where are you right now in your life? How do you find your balance? Uh, kind of walk us through your weekly routine. Do you have, if you have one?
Speaker 1:Well, coffee in the morning and beer thanks to my lovely husband.
Speaker 2:He's getting a lot of credit, man.
Speaker 1:Well, he deserves it he deserves it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wow, it goes a long way. A cup of coffee goes a long way.
Speaker 1:I live in perhaps one of the I would say it's probably a blue zone the northern beaches of Sydney, australia. It's a very healthy, wealthy, has a very high well-being index.
Speaker 2:And what makes it that I think everyone is very healthy, wealthy, outdoorsy, very accessible.
Speaker 1:They can literally go and rank. You can rank each suburb based on well-being index. We're by the sea. We have a very fortunate world in which we live here, so it's very easy, when everyone else around you is living a life like that, to live in a way that's healthy. So, yeah, it's great, I love it.
Speaker 1:I try, I mean, and I have stresses in my life. I have teenage sons and I have aging parents and all of those things, and I try my best to regulate my stress, occasionally perhaps when I shouldn't, with alcohol, but whatever. I quite like a jigsaw puzzle too as a way to calm myself down. I try and go to the gym or do exercise almost every day. So I lift weights two or three times a week, I do pump classes, I do Pilates, I do ocean swimming, my boys sail and surf, and I enable them to do that as much as possible.
Speaker 1:I've got a really cool set of hilarious friends the same age as me. I'm in a musical theatre group with some of them. I can't sing or dance, but we just have fun. I have lots of very loyal friends from early childhood who I'm in touch with, you know, if not every day, easily every week, and I, you know, I eat pretty well, but every now and then I'll eat too much chocolate. I try to just follow all of the things but try not to achieve perfection, because that's boring and I protect my sleep almost above and beyond anything else. So I'll have a couple of cups of coffee in the morning. I won't have any more the rest of the day, and I try to never do anything except when I'm teaching some of my courses. Sometimes I teach from 7 until 8.30 and I do not like that because then I can't get to sleep easily afterwards.
Speaker 1:So, most of the time, I'm in bed by 9, read my trashy books, and then I usually sleep pretty well.
Speaker 2:Interesting, Any anti-aging tips for the brain that you can give us. Are you actively based on your knowledge of neuroplasticity and brain anything you actively do and make part of your habit to slow down the car that's driving towards the cliff? When it comes to neurodegenerative disease and prevention thereof, Any tips you can give us, or would you just say you know what?
Speaker 1:Besides being very thankful, for living where I do here in Australia and my ecosystem is pretty great. I would say sleep, but I've always been a good sleeper and so I try and protect and nurture my sleep, and I have been. I only just started wearing a Fitbit. I didn't want to get an Apple Watch because I didn't want to constantly have interactions.
Speaker 1:I know I got rid of mine, but I have a Fitbit now and I have been paying more attention to, you know, my resting heart rate and trying to peak heart rate a few times a week. I've been trying to pay a little bit more attention to those metrics, without obsessing over it.
Speaker 2:It's very easy to get into that obsession.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you, but also because I think it's a bit boring to be obsessed over things like that. It's not that interesting, but I'd keep an eye on it. So that has perhaps encouraged me to be a bit more. But I've always been pretty good at going to the gym. Actually, I just got told by the gym the other day I've done 225 pump classes in the last couple of years. That's lifting weights to music Good job. So there's that, and then there's this sort of the. As I said, I've got this great ecosystem I live in. But the social side of things I purposefully and actively try to engage and interact socially with other people. And what I wanted to do for turning 50 this year was we're having a big party in a couple of weeks, me and my husband. He's also turning 50. We're invited, like far too many people, it's going to be a rager. It's going to be awesome.
Speaker 1:But, we also went around the world to have dinner with friends, so we wanted to just engage with people that we know and love, that we've had in our lives for many years, and so that's perhaps more important to me than almost anything.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of research on that, on connections, on social connections and anti-aging and neurodegenerative disease.
Speaker 1:And there's being actively socially engaged, which I think there's being alone, and there's loneliness. And we know loneliness is the perception you can be surrounded by people but feel lonely. So there's that perception which is not great for your mental health and your overall physical health and brain ageing. And then I think when you get into late life, the social isolation there's the loneliness of that and the stress and the knock-on effects on metabolic health et cetera that that would have. But then having someone to help you get to the doctor or, you know, encourage you to eat good meals or encourage you to exercise we see that with older people become very set in their ways and don't have the support systems around them to enable the kind of healthy behaviors and and things that they need.
Speaker 1:So those are those aspects. Right, I'm not at that point, but I've got people in my life who are that I need to lend a hand to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, beautiful, beautiful set. Actually, I just noticed I would love to close it because this was such a beautiful thing to close it with, but I forgot to ask a very important question. I don't know whether or not it's something you can actually answer, because it's something that's very near and dear to me and I deal with on a daily basis, and I just wanted to pick your brain on it, no pun intended, on social behavior, especially when it comes to body image and body dysmorphia in teenagehood, and then I see another peak in middle ages with the transition of that.
Speaker 2:Is there anything in your field as far as brain development that has been researched or can be explained, or does it go more towards into the behavioral sciences?
Speaker 1:I think it's more social. And I'm 50, and I'm constantly fighting this because I have not had Botox, which you can tell and I'm not going to. But gosh, it's a hard daily battle internally, especially if you're a Gen. Xer you grew up because you, I suppose, like what you said earlier, you've got patients who don't look the way that they feel and you look in the mirror and you see your face.
Speaker 2:It's the first thing they tell me.
Speaker 1:And you start to see your mother and you're like I don't want to look that way when I still feel young and that's a really hard.
Speaker 2:It's almost like a cognitive dissonance.
Speaker 1:It is. I did another podcast recently and I was like, oh my God, I look fat and jaundiced. It's just like the lighting and the angle. It's really weird. I didn't even want to share it but I was like I had to. I was like I look terrible and then I'm trying to get into my people aren't? I'm not a model. I have a very good friend who's a model. I'm not a model, I'm a neuroscientist. People might just be interested in what you're having to say, not what you look like, but it's a really. For me it's. It's a daily, not a battle. But there's this wonderful um woman here in Australia who won. Her name is Gina Chick. We have the same kind of literary agents and she won Alone Australia here a couple of years ago. And she's just this goddess, this Amazonian woman who is so wise. And she said this phrase, which I repeat to myself all of the time we are of nature and there are no mirrors in nature. The closest thing that we could see in nature as a mirror might be like a.
Speaker 1:You look into a pool of water and even that's ripply and blurry and we spend so much time on screens and looking at ourselves and reflecting back and that's so unrealistic and I'm determined.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we compare, especially with social media and younger and teenagers, they constantly compare each other.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're comparing, and it doesn't get any better when you get older, despite the positive aging influences which are out there who are all beautiful anyway. So I would like a really non-classically beautiful midlife influencer to be out there talking.
Speaker 1:So I don't know about the neuroscience of that. All I can just say is my personal feelings about that. But I often then think about all of the women in my musical theatre group. And we're doing all that, when we have our performances and we spend a lot of time in our underwear and we're changing, we've got our Spanx on and we're all just laughing at each other and thinking we're all in our 40s and 50s and when does the body image stuff fade away? And we're all going oh, maybe it never will. The only way around it is to laugh about it.
Speaker 2:That is such a great attitude.
Speaker 1:I love that and I also feel liberating, such when I see my other friend. Most of my friends who I grew up with I'm still very close to around the world. None of them have done anything to their faces. They're not we're not Botox users, we haven't had any work done, and I just feel such tenderness and warmth when I see their faces aging like mine because I'm like we're all. It just makes me feel very Home.
Speaker 2:Like you know them.
Speaker 1:We know them. Oh God, it makes me feel really weepy. It's really weird. It's like we've all aged together and there's something really beautiful in that.
Speaker 2:Yeah it's a connection.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but there's a cognitive dissonance there when you do stuff on social media and you're constantly looking at your face.
Speaker 2:I hate that. It's because it has two parts to it. I could speak to it, but what you're saying is beautiful, because when you see someone's face that is unaltered, you can see how they lived. And so when you said, that is because you lived with them, you know everything about their lives. And these are memories that you guys cherish, which creates this bond and you don't want that to be altered. It's almost like you don't wipe, you don't want the part of the your common history to be wiped out by wiping out the wrinkle.
Speaker 2:And yeah, I've never thought of it until you just said it and it just became so clear to me and yeah, and I'm not surprised why you got a little watery, because this speaks to the emotional impact.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you and we're all turning 50, so many of my friends, because these will be school friends and it's like we're all in the same place now and we've all got teenagers who are leaving high school and going off to university and we're all having to, like, retell us, you know, recreate a new identity. You go through matricence when you become a mother and there's such an identity shift and every time the world moves under your feet, you have to, and it might not for many years. It's just like motherhood. You're a mother and you've got all of those years, those primary school and high school years, where your day-to-day life is reinforcing the story that you're telling yourself about who you are, and then it shifts again, forcing the story that you're telling yourself about who you are, and then it shifts again. And I think so.
Speaker 1:Perhaps that's what midlife is about is just being wise enough to tell a new story about yourself. And if you've got other people alongside you who are looking the same as you and my old friends look the same as me lots of women in sydney, don't? Perhaps? Lots of women in Sydney don't? Perhaps lots of women in lots of parts of the world don't, and but they're not who I grew up with and are growing old with, so perhaps I should not think about it, and I just always think there's no mirrors in nature, there's just each other.
Speaker 2:So I love that.
Speaker 1:That's the reflection I should be looking at.
Speaker 2:I love that. That's something that I really take very seriously, I take to heart. I try to give my patients Trust me. I decline so many patients that come. They want to make so healthy attitude that I see it so rarely now. Maybe because it's of my industry, the people that come to me, I don't know. But even when I look around in our society, especially here in the United States, and I know it's different in Europe and I think Australia is probably more similar to Europe than it is to the US, I don't know just from hearing you talk and maybe I'm biased because I don't know many New Zealanders or Australians, but it's definitely a much, much, much, much healthier way of going by it than constantly trying to keep up with the Joneses and with your other.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wouldn't mind one of those facelifts that you're seeing on social media all the time. I always look at myself in the mirror. Yeah, I mean, oh well.
Speaker 2:So there's nothing wrong with turning back the clock. I tell my patients right you want to turn back the clock a little bit. That's fine, but you don't want to alter the way you look, you know turning back the clock meaning how it was, maybe 15, 20 years ago and that's a very healthy attitude.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know. It feels very silly and shallow. If it's all about looks, because really it should be about what's underneath that? Haven't we been telling the girls, the teenagers that yeah, but you know what?
Speaker 2:to me it is much deeper than that. To me, it's more about self-esteem and self-confidence. It's not any different than putting on lipstick. It's styling your hair, wearing a certain dress or putting some jewelry on. It's not any different. We do that just so we feel better, and maybe lifting your brows or getting rid of some wrinkles. I don't personally see it any different, and even in my patients I treat cleft lip and palate children that were born with facial deformities. The psychology in them is the same. They just want to look confident in their skin. For them it's. They want to look confident, they want to blend into society. They don't want people to stare at them as soon as they see them. It all is about self-confidence and self-esteem and I believe, having in this business for 20 years, I think the key for everyone is to find their happy place and not to worry about how others judge them and also not judge others for what they do, because you know who cares.
Speaker 2:I mean, at the end of the day if you're happy and content, more power to you, and there's no right or wrong way you know. So, um, this was such a mind-opening conversation, sarah, I can't believe this was probably my longest podcast actually.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm very long-winded, so I'm not surprised, yeah, but this was very mind-opening, actually, pun intended. Your work to me brings so much clarity to the chaos people feel, especially about these terms that we discussed, like brain fog or brain development versus plasticity, especially when they're going through changes. They don't really understand. So thank you for reminding us that our brains are built for growth and not just you know decline, not just dysfunction and decline.
Speaker 2:Right, and so I really appreciate that, and please tell people how they can find you. Look you up online and tell us about your recent books that you just wrote and where people can get it road and where people can get it, because I think they're such valuable insights.
Speaker 1:if someone wants to dive more deeper into our conversation. Yeah well, my website is drsarahmckay M-C-K-A-Y, or McKay, as you might say, in the US dot com, and so I teach a lot of professional development courses in applied neuroscience and brain health, so I've still got a few of them this year, if people want to join in them. And I've written well, I say, three and a half books. So I've written two books on women's brain health the Women's Brain Book and Baby Brain, which is about pregnancy and motherhood the Women's Brain Book. I've just written a second edition update, so there was the 2018 version and then the 2025 version, which just came out about a month ago.
Speaker 1:So, much has happened to women's brain health is no longer a niche. And then I've also written brain health for dummies. So the four dummies, that yellow and black iconic brand that you might have Excel spreadsheets for dummies or dog training for dummies. There's brain health for dummies, and that was fun to write because the whole point is it's not pious and super serious. It's kind of fun and entertaining and I got to use lots of dad jokes and silly little turns of phrase in it and so you can buy-.
Speaker 2:Should we give your husband some credit for that?
Speaker 1:A hundred percent. He always gets all of the thanks him, the boys and the dogs. The two women's health books you can listen on Audible Globally, spotify, anywhere where you buy audio books. There's different versions of those books available in different parts of the world depending on publishing jurisdictions. Someone in the US wants to pick them up, be my guest? Brain Health for Dummies is available everywhere.
Speaker 2:Wonderful. Thank you so much, sarah, and for everyone listening. If something in today's episode sparked an insight shared with a friend or someone navigating the same stages of their lives, and if you want more of Sarah's wisdom, check out her books, like she mentioned, and her online academy. Remember beauty starts in the brain. Until next time, take care of your mind, your body and your story. Thank you and good night everyone. Thank you, sarah.
Speaker 1:You're welcome.