BrainHQ Academy: How Your Environment Affects Brain Health
hello and welcome everyone we’re so glad that you could be joining us for our webinar today my name is Stephanie and I’ll be one of your co-hosts for today’s webinar now the webinar today is a part of our larger brain HQ Academy Series where we can talk about the Neuroscience behind different various topics now today’s topic is how your environment affects brain health let’s take a look at the agenda for today so shortly after this introduction we’re going to go ahead and do an activity
that we’re calling sound pollution Story Time more on that when we get there following that Dr Henry manka is going to go ahead and give a presentation on the topic now Henry is a frequent flyer here within these webinars but for those of you who haven’t met Henry yet Dr Henry manka earned his PhD in neuroscience at the University of California San Francisco and that’s where he studied brain plasticity with our co-founder Dr Michael marzinek he’s been running the show here as the CEO of closet science since 2011.
following Henry’s presentation we are going to be joined in discussion by Dr giodi Mishra which we are so excited to have now Dr Mishra is a cognitive neuroscientist and founder of the neural engineering and translation Labs or neat labs for short at UCSD now her lab innovates Technologies for scalable brain health mapping and precision Therapeutics meat Labs conducts research across the lifespan of both local and Global communities now Dr mitra’s research emphasizes scalable Tech solutions that can help address.
Important issues including sustained psychological health and well-being as well as resilience in the context of climate change which we are very excited to talk to her about she also co-directs the University of california-wide climate change and mental health initiative so Jody we’re so glad that you could be joining us today following the discussion between Jody and Henry we’ll go ahead and open up the floor to live q a from you all the audience so if at any point during the presentation you’d like to ask a
question you can click on the Q a button on the zoom control panel and a new window will pop up type in your questions there and then we’ll do our best to answer as many of those questions as we can when we get to the Q a section at the end of the webinar now the last thing that I wanted to note is that today’s webinar is being recorded and it will get posted to our YouTube channel in the coming days if you’d like to be notified when that video goes live you can go to youtube.com brainhq and subscribe there
in order to receive an email notification when that video goes live all right so. I’m going to go ahead and switch over to our activity now all right so the activity for today’s webinar is a fun one that we are calling sound pollution story time so uh fun one right um so Henry is going to read off a short story about a little bird named chirby after the story is finished we’ll give you all a short quiz via a poll here on Zoom uh now while he’s reading you’re going to hear some noise and sound
effects in the background and that’s by Design just listen as best you can uh and more on why we’re doing that after the story ends all right uh so Henry go ahead and take it away whenever you’re ready sounds perfect and of course Stephanie the reason that we’re doing this is that noise pollution is a form of environmental pollution and we can’t pump bad air to your laptop nor would we want to and we certainly can’t shoot pesticides to the internet here to your laptop over Zoom where we want to but
noise pollution is something we can try out a little bit so I’m going to dive into the story are you ready see ready ready okay once upon a time there was a little yellow bird named trippy who lived in a big city chirpy love to race his friends and play hide and seek but more than anything else he loved to sing but the noise of the city was so loud sometimes that he could barely hear himself think the cars honked the train screeched and the people shouted sherpy had almost given up trying to sing over the sounds of the city but one day.
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hirpy was playing hide and seek with some friends in a big park there were beautiful trees a few ball fields Gardens and plenty of playgrounds Kirby saw a group of children having fun at a nearby playground and he noticed that he could actually hear the children laughing and talking they weren’t being drowned out by the city’s house turkey was so happy to hear this and he landed on the springs and started to sing and forgetting about the game of Hide and Seek the Louis nolenberg’s second silver
illicitly admired his songs turkey was finished singing the children clapped and cheered chirpy was so happy that he had found a place where he can sing without being bothered by the noise of the city remembering the game of hide and seek he quickly sought out his friends and excitedly told them about the playground the next day all of chirpy’s friends went to the playground to sing together chirping his friends were so happy to have a place safe place to live and sing they continue to sing every day and
their singing brought joy to everyone who heard it and you can hear a little bit of chirpy there at the very end all right Stephanie fantastic um all right so let’s go ahead and launch uh our little pop quiz here for you all so there are three questions uh first one what color is chirpy is chirpy yellow blue or red uh what is trippy’s favorite activity does he like playing hide and seek singing or racing as friends and where did the children first hear chirpy uh was he calling to the infirm a tree was it at the Ballpark or
was it on a playground um so it looks like many of you already started submitting answers which is fantastic since there are three questions here in this pool you might have to scroll down to see all of the options um but yeah it looks like the answers are coming in great here uh now Henry do you want to maybe talk about why we created this activity the way that we did sure you know uh as I sort of mentioned of course noise pollutions form of pollution and you know if you’re hearing someone talk like I was telling. The
story if a lot of other noise is happening you know that’s going to interfere with your brain’s ability to process those that speech and if your brain can’t process that speech correctly in the first place it’s going to be hard to understand it it’s going to be hard to pay attention to it it’s going to be hard to remember it and if you’re brain HQ users you probably know about that because there are a lot of exercises brain HQ designed to improve how your brain processes speech but we
do this because this is a short-term form of noise pollution and we’re going to talk a little bit about the difference between short-term noise and the long-term effects of noise pollution this is kind of a cool way to start off by making us all realize that well noise has an effect on brain function and uh and even perhaps brain health yeah absolutely and it looks like we can kind of see that actually a little bit here from the results of the poll uh I’ll go ahead and that since it looks like the majority of people have uh
joined in here um and I’ll go ahead and share the results so first question what color is chirpy uh this was mentioned at the very beginning of the story and then once during a very loud portion of the story uh chirpy is yellow um and we can see that maybe there was some confusion there uh maybe because the slide was a little bit misleading in the bird that I have on the slide is red but a lot of people also voted for red uh now what is trippy’s favorite activity um again sort of getting clouded by all
that extra sound in the background um but his favorite activity is singing uh and then where did the children first hear chirpy um it was on the playground he went to the playground where they were playing and then sang for them there um so we can see from these answers that um you know not every answer was consistent just because there was all that extra background noise that was sort of funneling up our brain our brain processing uh speed there and we’ll talk about what happens if your brain gets followed like that for a long period of
How TO Climate Change and Global Warming
time as a result of noise in your environment all right Stephanie shall I grab the screen share yep go on ahead all right wonderful so I’m going to take off where Stephanie left off and dive into how your environment can affect your brain health and you know of course if you’ve been coming to these brain health academies over the months you’ve learned a ton around hey the actions you can take in your personal life that influence your brain health right we’ve talked about the role of diet and how it can improve
brain health and of course the role of exercise and we’ve talked about the role of sleep in building a stronger more resilient brain and even the role of stress and or or avoiding stress in your brain’s health and of course the role of social interactions which is so important for brain health and if you’re here you’re probably a brain HQ user you’ve probably heard a lot from us around the importance of brain training and building brain health but these are all things that you can do kind of in
your immediate life they’re all things that are kind of under your control that affect your brain health and when we talk about the environment well these are things that are perhaps much broader and in some sense that are outside of our immediate control that can affect our brain health and we’re going to talk about three things today um in particular we’re going to talk about the role of noise and noise pollution in brain health we’re going to talk about the role of environmental pollution and in particular pesticides
in brain health. We’re also going to talk about the role of air pollution which is such a current issue with wildfires in my home state of California and more recently on the east coast and what those might be doing to Barbarian health over time so let’s start off by talking about noise pollution you know these poor guys with these loud speakers and you know the first thing to say about noise pollution is well we already of course know that loud noises can can break hair cells and cause hearing loss you know
this is Pete Townsend the legendary guitarist of . The Who known for you know getting up on the stage and windmilling and uh you know playing as loud as they possibly could and um you know what we’ve recognized over time is well that damages the hair cells that are in your ear that actually convert the vibrations in the air that are sound into the neural impulses that convey that sound information to your brain you know this is a picture of those hair cells and on the top you know each of these little u-shaped sort of shapes that you see is
a group of these hair cells that are devoted to again converting those sound waves into neural impulses and and here’s a that’s an image of those hair cells after they’ve been damaged due to loud noise exposure and you can see they get floppy and they fall over in some cases they’re gone entirely and that’s that’s why we can have hearing loss just as we get older and our hair cells wear out or in Pete Townsend’s case he had hearing loss and tinnitus when he was relatively young because of this loud
noise exposure he’s actually gone on to form a non-profit that helps educate musicians about noise exposure and hearing loss now that’s an acute form of hearing loss right you’re at a rock concert or maybe you’re Pete Townsend and you’re running the rock concert and you’re going to have loud noise for an hour or two and and hey that can cause some damage but what about a different kind of noise pollution what kind of noise pollution where it’s not so loud that it hurts us but it’s just kind of
ongoing noise that comes from well living in the modern world and that have an effect on brain health well you know here we’re going to turn the clock back a little bit and uh and ask that question and this was asked in a very interesting Way by a group of scientists both at the University of Oregon and of the State University of New York and they did they took advantage of what one might call a natural experiment so what we’re looking at here is a very famous set of apartment buildings in Manhattan
called The Bridge Apartments in Manhattan and one of the reasons they’re famous is that it’s kind of an interesting place to build an apartment building you can see it is built literally on top of a huge freeway that connects Manhattan to the rest of New York and you know it probably seemed like a good idea when they were building this apartment building this was an efficient use of space after all but it costs a lot of complaints over time you know you can imagine if you you lived in this apartment building you might.
Complain about the pollution for the cars and you might complain about the noise well that did happen and caused a lot of discussion but these scientists went and did some science based on this and in particular what they realized is that hey the noise was going to be highest down here on the lowest floors because that’s where we’re closest to the cars and the noise was going to be quietest up on the upper floors so they went to the building and they worked with the residents there and they actually tested more than 50 kids who
lived in the apartment buildings and some of them lived at the top with the least noise exposure and some of these kids lived at the bottom with the moist most noise exposure and what this study found was that the lower the floor that the kid lived on the more noise from traffic as you might expect but then these kids had the lowest auditory performance scores and in particular they tested them using a test that you might know from brain HQ they gave them various confusable words and if you’ve done exercises like to-do list.
Training or you’ve done exercises like sound replay you’ve heard brain HQ give you words that kind of rhyme and are a little bit confusable and mixed up well the closer these kids were to the ongoing noise of the traffic when they were tested in the lab again without traffic noise the lower their auditory cognitive skills were and the lower their auditory performance scores were the fewer words those kids knew which of course was made a challenge for them at school so this is really one of the first demonstrations that noise
pollution itself could affect brain performance in this way and even brain health but the question of course at that point what was why and you know at the time scientists thought well maybe this had to do with attention and distraction right these kids were being raised in a noisy environment maybe they just didn’t pay attention as much when their parents or other adults were speaking to them because of the traffic noise and so there were these sort of psychological or cognitive explanations for what was
going on and no doubt that’s to some extent true but it turns out that this kind of noise actually directly affects brain organization and brain health and for this we turned to experiments that were done by positsciences co-founder Dr Michael mersnick and collaborators of his at the University of California San Francisco and what they looked at was well what happens to the brains of in this case rats who grow up in noisy environments and I’m going to show you two kind of schematic images of rat brains and we’ll
talk a little bit about how the brain develops uh in a very young animal or equivalently in a very young person so here we’re looking at a schematic of the surface of the brain of a baby rat this rat has really been born relatively recently and we’re looking at the auditory parts of the brain the parts of the brain that respond to sound and what this color coding tells us is well blue areas respond to low sounds like the low notes of a piano and red areas respond to high sounds like the high notes on
the piano you can see that there’s a big area that responds to sound and it’s only kind of well organized and this cross shading here shows us areas that kind of just respond to a lot of sounds and there’s even parts of this auditory region of the brain shown in white but respond to any sound at all and that’s very typical for young animals or young people when we’re born our brains are kind of noisy and disorganized then if we those researchers looked at a rat who had grown up a little bit to
sort of the equivalent of a Teenage rat one might say and now when they look at the organization of the auditory parts of the brain it’s beautifully well organized here are the low notes shown in blue here are the medium notes shown in yellow here are the high notes shown in red there’s an organization that looks well very much like a piano going from low to high and then they ask the question what if this baby rat grew up in a noisy environment kind of like those kids in that apartment and so they had these rats and they just kind of
played some staticky noise in the areas. Where the rats lived for the days and days and days as the rats grew up and then when they looked at those young rats who were raised in noisy environments they saw something kind of incredible which is the rat auditory brain never actually grew up so to speak that noise actually the development of the brain so that the brain of the young rat which should have been well organized for hearing rap sounds was still noisy and disorganized as if the rat had never really heard
much in the way of organizing sounds now that’s pretty interesting from a brain health perspective to see that noise exposure like this can dramatically change or or impede the organization of a key part of our brain and it raises a very natural question we know that these kinds of noisy information processing in brains when the brain is not well organized and doesn’t respond quickly and accurately well we know that these issues actually lead to cognitive impairment in humans you know as people get older if they
start to develop cognitive impairment well you can see that information processing in their brains is not terribly well organized also so that made scientists Wonder well does exposure to this kind of ongoing noise lead to brain health problems in older adults as well and in fact that turns out to be the case researchers uh looked at this in a number of studies I’m going to mention one here that was actually done close to my hometown I live in San Francisco this study was actually done in Sacramento and these researchers looked at more
than 1600 older adults who lived in Sacramento and they studied them for nine years which gave them the opportunity to see well who might go on to a diagnosis of Dementia or Alzheimer’s and who might have a healthy brain and what they also did is they looked at everyone’s home address and they calculated well how much traffic noise occurs at that home address you know are you living next to the intersection of a freeway and your noise from trucks all day long and all night long or do you live in a big house
that’s isolated off in the woods where maybe you’re only going to hear the noise of Nature and babbling Brooks and what then happens to brain health well they saw something amazing and a little bit scary which is that the more noise a person was exposed to over the nine years that were being studied the higher the risk was of dementia so this little white triangle here shows people who experience the least noise if you experienced a bit of noise your dementia risk went up a bit and if you experienced more than about 70 decibels
of noise in an ongoing way your dementia risk was actually about 20 percent higher than people lived in the quiet now how much noise is 70 decibels of noise not like hearing your washing machine if you’ve been out to a longer batter maybe you have laundry in your house so it’s not enough to hurt your ears you know it’s not like going to hear Pete Townsend playing a Who concert but it’s just kind of the ongoing constant noise of traffic like that and it seems like what might be happening is that’s
leading the brain you become a little bit noisier and more disorganized and as a result increasing the risk of Dementia in this population of people so that’s one way that our environment can affect our brain health and in this case not in a good way let’s take a look at a second example you know here we looked generally at dementia and Alzheimer’s but another question people asked a while ago starting in the 90s was well are there environmental risk factors that are associated with Parkinson’s
disease in particular now you may know that Parkinson’s disease is often thought of as a movement disorder people who get diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease can have a Tremor where their hand tremors as they try to do things often they have problems getting up out of a chair or walking and in general they have problems initiating movement and for a long time it really wasn’t clear why people thought well maybe it’s just random it’s bad luck maybe it’s genetics people have certain bad genes
that lead into Parkinson’s but in the early 90s a group of researchers at the University of Kansas took a very close look at this and they looked at people who had Parkinson’s and who didn’t and who lived in rural environments and lived in urban environments and they kind of compared and contrasted them to see well what similarities existed and what differences existed and they identified three main sources or difference between people who seemed like they were more likely to go onto Parkinson’s and people who were less
likely to go on a Parkinson’s first difference that they identified was what they called a rural living Factor people who lived on farms people who reported that their main source of water was well water and other things like that we’re at elevated risk for Parkinson’s that’s a pretty big surprise the second thing they noticed and this is their language not mine was that this factors related to what they call being a man increase the risk of Parkinson’s and they were thinking of things like
smoking and drinking but in particular they noticed that people who worked in agribusiness had an elevated risk of Parkinson’s now at that time it was mostly men who had worked in agribusiness because this was back before women were frankly allowed to do very much of this kind of work so that was an interesting factor and then the third factor that they noticed quite clearly was that exposure to pesticides people who were exposed to applying pesticides in fields more than 20 days per year had an increased risk of
Parkinson’s and this was pretty interesting result because in fact you can look at all of these things and think well they’re kind of United by pesticide exposure you know if you’re drinking well water even if you’re not exposed to pesticides directly well it can creep into well water sources if you’re working in agribusiness the same kind of thing and so this raised the question well are some of these pesticides actually an environmental hazard that’s related to brain health it turns out that certain pesticides do
seem like they damage the neurons that are involved in Parkinson’s disease and so to say a few words about that you know here is the side view of a rat brain here this is the front and this is the top of the brain and this is the back and the neurons that are involved in Parkinson’s disease they’re a very interesting set of neurons the main body of the neuron is located here towards the bottom of the brain where the spinal cord comes in but they send projections all over the brain and these neurons are very active
because of course they’re involved in movement control and that means they need to build a lot of things to keep themselves going and that means they need to use a lot of energy in order to keep themselves working and it turns out that two of these most common pesticides one that’s called paraquat and one that’s called Road known you know the way they work is they actually inhibit a cell from using energy now they do that really well in insects which is why they are great pesticides and they do it not very well
in people which is why these were generally thought of as safe but scientists now think that even though these have minimal effects on a cell’s ability to use energy because these cells that are involved in Parkinson’s disease use so much energy that you know. There is a low risk but nonetheless a meaningful one that exposure to these pesticides damages these cells and over a long period of time increases the risk of Parkinson’s disease and lo and behold when scientists went down to investigate this they found a
strong Link in this case these are scientists who worked with What’s called the agricultural health study this has about 85 000 Farm Workers primarily located in Iowa and North Carolina and these scientists identified about 115 went onto Parkinson’s and 383 who were very similar to the same kind of job um you know were the same age the same gender the same education level but who didn’t go on the Parkinson’s and they looked for differences between those populations and what they found out was
a big difference was how much they had been exposed to these two pesticides paraquan Road known and in both cases the relative risk of developing Parkinson’s disease was about two and a half times as high for agricultural workers who had been exposed to these uh these pesticides quite a lot now these are only risk factors Parkinson’s isn’t that common you know if you’re a lifetime risk of developing Parkinson’s is maybe one or two percent while exposure to these pesticides means that your risk was maybe three or four
percent it’s not a death sentence it doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to go on to Parkinson’s disease but it does seem like it is an environmental risk factor that elevates the risk of developing this brain health problem so let’s talk about one more kind of environmental risk that’s related to brain health and here we’re going to turn our attention to recent defense actually um this is a view from my house in San Francisco uh it’s a picture that I took on September 11th uh in the year 2000 at
noon and hey normally San Francisco is quite beautiful at noon in September blue skies and you can see the ocean of the trees and my family will always remember this day as the day in San Francisco where the sun simply didn’t rise I remember I was working at home because of course it was during the covet emergency at around 10 o’clock I looked out the window and wondered why it wasn’t daytime yet my daughter and I walked up nearby Hill and took this picture and what was happening of course at that time is we were experiencing
extreme Wildfire events in California and a tremendous amount of wildfire smoke had blown into San Francisco and because it was foggy that smoke had been dispersed across the fog and the Sunshine coming through the fog was you know then then dispersed in this very kind of weird orange pumpkin like sky that lasted all day long and if you’ve been following the news you’ve seen that’s happening on the East Coast this year this is actually a picture of my hometown I grew up in Washington DC uh and this was taken on
June 7th around noon and what we’re looking at here is the National Cathedral which is one of the most beautiful buildings in Washington DC and on this day it could barely be seen because there was so much Wildfire smoke and if you’re following the news you probably saw that that smoke came down from Canada where they’re experiencing these high number of wildfires so we’re brain scientists one wonders well does this have effects on brain health we of course know it has effects on respiratory health and on asthma and
on all kinds of things like this but how about our brains well to answer this question you know we might ask well what’s what’s in air pollution exactly like when we see that sort of smoke and Haze what are we talking about well there are a lot of potential sources you know here I’ve mentioned of course wildfires but there’s air pollution that comes from industrial you know work from factories and other things that come up there’s air pollution that comes on from cars driving around there’s even air
pollution that gets caused by burning gas in our homes like gas stoves and there’s all kinds of types right there’s carbon monoxide which of course is poisonous it very much of it builds up in our house there’s ozone there’s heavy metals like lead there’s particulate matter and this just means a little tiny you know particles that are left over from from burning think of like soot and so forth there’s nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide but let’s talk about particulate matter in particular now for a long time people
thought well how much could this matter it’s just little bits of stuff maybe it gets into your lung but how much damage could it do your brain but it turns out that these tiny particles actually can have a pretty Direct on brain effect on brain health you know they’re called PM particulate matter 2.
5 that refers to how big they are we’re talking about particles that are much smaller than a human hair but a couple things happen as these particles get into your body first of all they cause an inflammation response across your body your body attacks them just like you’ve been infected by a bacteria or a virus and raising your body’s inflammation levels well that causes all kinds of health risks including heart attacks but causes brain health issues as well but even more interestingly it seems like these very tiny particles can move
across the blood-brain barrier and that’s a system in your body that normally defends your brain it means that stuff that’s in your blood that might not be so good for your brain well it’s not permitted to enter the uh. tThe vulnerable tissue of your brain but these very tiny particles seem like they can move across the blood-brain barrier they probably damage the blood-brain barrier as they move across it meaning your blood-brain barrier becomes more leaky and other toxins can enter your brain and these particles can actually
carry toxins into your brain like maybe there’s a little bit of lead attached to this particle so normally lead is kept out of your brain but it leaks in a little bit during these events so what happens to your brain if you’re exposed in a long-term way to this kind of particulate matter well a group of scientists in Korea actually asked this question and they worked with almost a thousand people living across urban and rural regions of Korea and again they were able to study them over a period of six or seven years
and they were able to figure out well how much air pollution existed in their neighborhoods over this period of time and again some of them live close to factories and some of them lived out in the countryside and what they found was kind of amazing these are images of the brain now and these red and yellow areas are areas of the brain that are less thick they seem like they’ve been thinned out in people who have relatively High exposure to this kind of air pollution this kind of particulate matter and that seems to
suggest that breathing it in this way as well as causing breathing difficulties or asthma is directly affecting you know the thickness of our brain and how well our brain works and one more time we can ask the question well if that happens over time does that affect our overall health does that affect our risk of dementia and in this case a group of scientists worked with the Women’s Health Initiative that actually worked with women all across the country and there have been many many research Publications that have
come out of this but in particular these researchers identified about 3 600 women where they had genotype data and they also had data from their pollution exposure over time based on where they lived and once again and you’re probably starting to get the sense of this now they found out that this kind of pollution increased the risk of dementia if they looked at women who were in areas with low particulate matter and compared them with women in areas of high particular matter there was more than 80 percent increase in the risk of
having cognitive decline and almost a 70 percent risk in going on the dementia so that ongoing exposure in the same way seemed like it caused those brain health problems so you know that’s a lot of maybe slightly worrisome news right noise pollution pesticides air quality problems you know these all are are attacking our brains in various different ways and and often there’s not a lot we can do about that right we might live near uh near uh they’re a freeway or we might have wildfires come over our our life what can we do about
it well you know two things so first of all everything that we’ve talked about in other brain health academies that’s good for the brain you know diets and exercise and sleep and stress reduction and social contact and then brain training all of these helps builds a brain resilience and having a more resilient brain unto itself can lower a brain’s risk for having these negative outcomes of noise and air pollution and pesticides but it turns out that actually being in nature itself can be good for cognitive function and so here
here’s another natural experiment that was done by scientists in an apartment building these are the Robert Taylor homes in Chicago this is an old picture of them and uh you know they look like big Urban apartment buildings but one interesting thing about them is well some places you might live in these apartments have better views of greenery in nature and others you don’t see anything around it’s green you just see concrete and researchers here they actually evaluated 145 women who lived in these apartment buildings across 18
different buildings and it turns out half of them had kind of better views of greenery from their apartments and half of them well had worse views of greenery from their apartments and it turns out that the people who lived with better views of greenery who experienced nature more in that way they actually had better attention spores and as a result they had lower levels of conflict in their life and that tells us that hey man there are those risk factors that are out there but also just nature itself and experiencing nature can be
good for our brands and I’ll wrap off with that thought many scientists have the Viewpoint that um spending time in nature can actually restore our brain health there’s an idea called attention restoration Theory and the idea is that by being out in the world and seeing things like these beautiful blowing winds through this grass it engages our attention but it doesn’t demand that we act on it or think about it and this provides some good input for our brain without overwhelming our brain and in that sense
can lead to better cognitive function better brain health and a better life so uh uh in that sense the environment has those risks that we talked about but I would never want anyone to think that being out in nature wasn’t good for their brain because of course being out in nature is great for our brain so I’ll stop there for a minute then Stephanie all right sounds good thank you so much Henry for the presentation uh let’s go ahead and have a geody if you want to go ahead and come back on camera
uh Henry you can go ahead and reintroduce Jody for the discussion well first of all it’s great to have you here Jody uh we had that wonderful introduction for you but uh probably nice to say that you’re also a posit science alumni and uh we have the pleasure of working together for a number of years when you’re at positive science many formative years of positive science and also actually working on um aspects that you touched on today so delighted to have this conversation with you well um absolutely so of course when you were
here at posit science you were working on attention training you you ran a kind of a revolutionary study on brain training and kids with ADHD I know that you’re still working on attention and brain Imaging and all kinds of cool stuff like that in your lab at UC UC San Diego but you’ve also developed this broader issue around the environment and and brain health and before we talk about some of those specific issues I wonder if you might just sort of tell us how did your research interests kind of expand in this way yes I think it actually um started at the time that I was working at positive science and an incredible aspect of attention is that we have this yin yang sort of a push-pull between um what we need to pay focused attention to the goal of our tasks versus what is distracting information and that distracting information needs to be suppressed and that can be noise and that’s um the the noise pollution that we get from our environment and also as we age as our signal processing gets poorer those distractions can you know get
worsened in our brain’s ability to handle distractions get worse over time and so um with um you know leadership from Dr marzinek Who heads the the scientific decision division at brain HQ we thought a lot about training these abilities on how to enhance these process processing of distractions and at the same time you know this you mentioned ADHD I was working on aspects of ADHD that also collide with other aspects of human development um such as in kids who come from under nurtured environments um it shows symptoms of ADHD so you know
you’d imagine that they do not have the the right typical environment that we are used to growing up in and then while I was doing that work I started looking at Family environments and from that kind of broadening out to community environments in the climate around us and so that’s how this work evolved but definitely posit has a big role to in that well it’s an incredible expansion of your research interests and um really interesting to think about how we sort of moved or how you moved from the sort
of the personal about how ADHD might affect a kid to all the environmental risk factors that might contribute to the brain health of that kid so uh well hey let’s talk about wildfires in particular now that’s something that we’ve both experienced here as California uh residents and of course in the news right now because of the the Canada Canadian wildfires and all this news from the East Coast so um uh tell us a little bit um uh you know how did you start to get interested in wildfires in particular as
a risk factor for brain health well wildfires were definitely you know as you know they were happening in our communities and that we could actually see the smokes and and in our in our cities and um my work in the field actually started by chance I was definitely interested in studying aspects of um climate change but the um the the work did not begin until my son one day came up with a penny drive and said that we are collecting donations with pennies for a wildfire which was actually um the campfire study uh came out from.
The campfire was unfortunately the deadliest fire in California that happened in the paradise area in 2018 and as soon as I heard about the penny Drive I actually called up uh people in that area who were leading the penny drive and we had long conversations about the mental health uh impacts that people were suffering from and what they were telling me was quite distressing and it was anecdotal so we decided that we would actually try to quantify this scientifically because um this you know extreme weather events
that we’re seeing at high frequency in which wildfires are also part of that we’re we’re not used to that and so how is the mental health being impacted in that context we there’s actually not that much work in that field and we thought it would be a good um Avenue and opportunity to go in and do a community-based study well that’s uh that’s that’s an incredible story starting with your your kid and bringing you on to this whole new form of research now you know you and I are both neuroscientists we we
know that mental health and brain health are really kind of two sides of the same coin and they’re deeply related I think a lot of people might sort of hear well gosh you know a person might go through a wildfire experience of course they’re going to be you know kind of stressed out about it or they might feel quite quite depressed if that events have happened but I know that you’re thinking about this you know in just in those psychological terms in those mental health terms but also in terms of brain
health terms so so what did you see from your study and then how did you how did you think about the relationship then between that Wildfire exposure and brain health risks yeah so we it led actually a series of studies in the first study we were looking at the psychological effects and this was nearly a thousand person study in the paradise area and we saw that very clearly if we look at symptoms of distress such as post-traumatic stress disorder or depression or anxiety they can be about threefold two to three-fold
what we observe in the regular non-exposed communities and um the first work then led to new work that we ended up doing with um a sub cohort of these individuals and about a hundred percent study where we were looking at aspects of brain health and cognitive health and we went in to the communities doing brain recordings not um MRI recordings like you showed it because sometimes MRI can be very expensive to do but there are other Technologies like EEG where you can measure brain waves at a much more you know cheaper and scalable fashion so we
went on went in with that and we did find that people who had been directly exposed to the wildfires were very much different in their brain function than people who have never been exposed we actually saw a grade that um people who were directly exposed were most impacted versus people who are indirectly exposed indirectly exposed individuals are those who have witnessed the Wildfire event in their Community but they have not suffered any personal loss such as you know family members being hurt or property laws so the
indirectly exposed individuals were somewhere in the middle and then they’re the non-exposed Californian residents again what we found very much relevant to some of the work that you’ve shown with the auditory pollution we and um what we found was that the the Wildfire effects were actually um making our distractor processing poor so the ability to process conflict was being highly impacted and people were performing at 20 percent less a performance level than controls and um and when we go on to look at brain
function some of the frontal executive functional areas were actually performing um at a highly alert or hyper aroused state so this happens actually in a threat response where if everything in our environment is very threatening to us then the brain tends to put a tag that everything could be relevant so it’s trying to over process info information and it’s thus constantly hyper aroused it leads back to the theory and the most terrible thing has happened and so the brain thinks well something terrible might happen again I
need to be a top alert right exactly exactly and you know in the short term so in the acute term and after the fires I think this kind of a response can be very adaptive it can help you take you away from danger what we worry about as um scientists and and then also clinicians is that these effects when they last chronically in the long term that can really impact uh health and well-being and I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to look at this or not but do you think those effects are going to sort of wear off or do you think they’re
going to be sort of more hesitate to say permanent Jody but sort of maybe the more longer term rewiring or or changes that have happened to brain health as a result of both the traumatic experience itself and as a result of the you know the actual you know the inhalation of all this particulate matter and toxins and God knows what was going into the air so is this something that we think you’re going to be looking at in these in these pure people five or ten years from now or do you think hey they’re going to
bounce back pretty quick I think it’s really important to look at that we haven’t looked at it longitudinally but we’re making those efforts and includes getting the funding to do that kind of work um it’s important because this is a different kind of trauma we’re talking about it is not like going to um like a war zone and and getting impacted by trauma once post-traumatic stress it’s climate trauma it’s something that we might experience on a yearly basis especially vulnerable communities especially here in
California it doesn’t seem like it’s gone we had a good year this year because we got some rain but it doesn’t seem like it’s changed our long-term kind of prognosis for these kinds of fires yeah so I think long-term adaptation is definitely something we need to look at in terms of brain health at the same time My Views always remain positive because our brains are plastic and we as humans find ways to um you know learn from our environment and this and the services that we have and the stimuli that we give to our brain to
have you know bounce back and really have um positive outcomes in the future so I think with proper support um individuals in our communities can have better brain health well I mean you raise a really interesting point you know there’s a lot of things as as I mentioned in my talk that we can do in our individual lives to build better brain health whether that’s exercising or eating a brain healthy diet or doing brain training some of the issues we’ve talked about today seem you know so broad right I I
can’t really control whether or not it’s going to be a smoky day in San Francisco right I can’t really control the fact that many people including myself Drive in San Francisco but as you look about these sort of both narrow issues and broader issues I mean one of the things you think that we as a society might be thinking about doing I mean I have to look back to the early 70s you know we passed the Clean Water Act we passed the Clean Air Act because we saw these negative effects that pollution was
having on our bodily Health are there things you think we should start to be thinking about doing in a societal level around around our brain health and what we should be thinking about to reduce these risks of uh pollution on our brain health yes absolutely I think um there needs to be new policies around this there is currently actually an act in Congress that’s called the community mental wellness and resilience act and this is part of the um Biden administration’s climate change and Equity efforts and um these kinds of
efforts are meant to provide greater Mental Health Care access and resources especially to our most vulnerable communities living in zones where such aggravated weather events happen and this includes wildfires in California but say on the East Coast they’re not just wildfires but hurricanes and and other such events may also be aggravated by climate change so we definitely need more resources and having such mental health support can alleviate symptoms in in the long term so supporting that act we can actually do that as individuals
and as organizations um and so I’d really encourage people to support that kind of policy making well I I like that thought because I I don’t want people to think that we just have to sit back and let these things happen to our brains there’s things we can do locally and perhaps the societal level to help on that and uh Hey on that optimistic note I have to ask you about a whole different topic it sounds like your kids have been very influential in uh in your work and I know that’s true for me as well whenever I talk to about
brain science and brain health new ideas come up for me but you’ve taken that quite a bit further and I saw that just recently you had a book came out called the little brain um and it’s a children’s book about brains tell me uh tell me and everyone here what what led you to strike out in this direction and write a book in that sense and how does a neuroscientist write a children’s book anyway well yes it’s been a really interesting Journey Henry thanks for um asking about it so the little brain
is really a journey about learning uh from a child’s perspective a child you know and starts out with um many dreams and they want to do many different things and so how do they achieve that and how do they focus down on their actual goals and um so this is just their journey through life and um in that Journey they meet a brain scientist and they have conversations um and we talk about uh the key aspects of learning and what it takes to learn well which are some of the things we discussed today how do we pay attention
better and um you know part of that whole process is also sharing with others you know in the end we actually learn a lot from discussing these topics with other people and so so the book just goes through a journey of this child and all the things that he does um as he grows and is able to um get to the goals that he has and um yeah like you said you know my family and my kids were definitely a part of the inspiration for me to sort of translate the work that I do on a daily basis which can get very technical and
full of jargon to something that they can you know take and you know process and potentially feel inspired by um and so yeah I think it’s gotten a good reception and um I think it’s it’s a great book actually to have new learning conversations so when kids are trying to have challenges um around learning you know those challenges are what we are really are you know Great Moments where we grow as individuals and um and how do we have uh you know positive conversations around that I’ve heard a lot of parents said that the
book helped with that so yeah sense to me helping kids understand hey what is the role of their brains they’re navigating these challenges and then how can they change to navigate them better is wonderful well uh that’s amazing you’ve done so much everything from the details of building cool cognitive training exercises to the complexities of running clinical trials to this broader work around brain health and the environment to writing a book that’s all amazing Jody the bad news for you is that means I’m going to give you all the
hard questions now that are coming from our audience because you’re so talented and can address them Stephanie I’ll try to help of course you will we’re getting some pretty interesting questions here Stephanie I see one or two but do you see one or two you want to kick us off with yeah absolutely um so I think I want to start by circling back to the topic of sound pollution a little bit here we have a couple of people who have written in asking about whether white noise is okay to listen to what about
people who listen to TV in the background all the time what are sort of the effects of that over time or that kind of exposure over time on the brain wow well that is a good question there’s sort of one question around just watching some TV but I’ve been in a lot of households where the TV’s just kind of on all the time in the background you know kind of regardless of what you’re doing cooking dinner or talking you know Jody Jody what do you think about that kind of ongoing kind of background noise
as you put it when you were thinking about your experiments and attention yeah I think you know we can also draw from some of the work that you presented today I think this kind of uh noise whether it’s white noise or TV noise is not good for us if it’s um being run you know 20 hours a day into 20 hours a day even if you look at um the rodent experiments that you showed some of those manipulations were done with pretty much all day noise exposure so we what we want to remember is that we want to do things in
moderation of course you know if um you like white noise to sleep in um and you’re doing it for short periods of time um I don’t think there’s evidence to say that that may actually affect your brain poorly so I think it depends on the dose of these noise factors I think that’s that’s almost certainly right and um but putting something out there that you’re requiring your brain to ignore all the time you know it kind of adds an extra load to your brain and can interfere with processing so
uh so the right amount is probably the right answer on that front yeah um now speaking about uh continuing talking about noises um a lot of people have written in asking about tinnitus having that internal noise that internal mechanism in your brain um can you talk about uh any risks that having tinnitus may lead to later in life yeah do you want to take a swing at that Jody or should I say a few words I know that there are a couple Eddies that have that there’s a non and it is related to dementia and about
three percent of individuals with tinnitus will develop that but it seems small but it’s still um came out as non-significant in studies but you know Henry you’ve done work in this domain too yeah I I certainly you know my take on the first of all tinnitus is very complex and confusing literature we still don’t understand terribly well the root Neuroscience that underlines that I generally think of tinnitus is coming on more due to like that kind of acute noise exposure right again Pete Townsend from The Who legendary for for having
developed quite problematic tinnitus not because he had low noise all the time but because he had very loud noise you know for certain Focus periods of time so in the same sense that hair cell loss seems to come from that perhaps uh perhaps tinnitus as well I’m not particularly aware that just being around traffic noise or things like that over long periods of time and can lead to tinnitus but you know Jody if you showed me a study at some point that said it did I wouldn’t be that surprised right if we think of that background
noise is slowly leading to these problems in brain health and resilience well once your brain starts to have those kinds of resilience problems your risk for all kinds of things whether it’s cognitive function issues whether it’s dementia I would be at all surprised if putting your brain in that risky compromise State led to an increased risk of tinnitus as well that’s a great question all right and so we have a couple of people concerned about the well-being of a first-line responders firefighters and
such who have seemingly the most exposure to wildfires in these sort of dire situations has there been any or have there been any studies conducted on firefighter population specifically and um if so are is there any sort of tracking of adverse effects on their health and well-being I think that’s definitely a very vulnerable population I have not seen studies of brain health in this population what I have seen is that our communities are very much aware of uh the vulnerability of our firefighters so some of the things that Henry talked
about um in the end such as nature-based Solutions and having um a stress-free engagement with the natural environment those kinds of initiatives are being worked out for our firefighters especially in the Wildfire zones to help them with their mental well-being and resilience building yeah you’re absolutely right and we should think about helping them bounce back in that way right if a firefighter was to you know I don’t know twist a knee during during a firefighter rescue right we would give that person rehab we
would help them bounce back in their physical health and we really need to think about their brain health in the same way if they’re exposed to a lot of these pollutants during their fire they’re experiencing these very stressful events we should be giving them tools to help them have their brain health bounce back but that’s some time in nature whether it’s tools like something like brain HQ or physical exercise other kinds of things like that the other thing I’ll add to it is I am aware of some first studies that looked
at First Responders after the 9 11 attacks in New York and of course many deleterious uh Health consequences on on those those folks and of course how heroic right rushing into these burning buildings at risk of their life and um you know issues that come up around lung health and various things like that but there have been some issues around brain health as well suggesting that some of these exposure to these toxic events of being in the world trade our environments may have caused some longer-term brain health issues for that
population as well so I’d like to see us as a society taking care of everyone who’s in vulnerable brain health risks for that reason yeah absolutely um now we did just mention in that answer um you know having that positive exposure to Nature um having uh having that um somebody had noted the uh screen that you had Henry specifically that was sharing that you know Wheat Field blowing in the wind um would they they were asking what a nature background or a slideshow um like on a TV or on a PC um you know give some sort of benefit of
a good view uh similar to those you know people in those uh apartment buildings that may or may not have had a good view of greenery outside their window um is what are your thoughts on that ah what do you think Jody something better than nothing or just having a screenshot of it mean you don’t actually go out of Nature and enjoy it will find every opportunity to go out in nature that’s definitely beneficial when you don’t have that I think there have been a couple of studies that have looked at nature breaks
um that are still computerized breaks and they are more helpful than um say taking um a phone break so I’d say yes take time to you know at least engage in one sense which is the visual sense in this case in a in a natural environment when you go out on in actual real nature you’re engaging all your senses and so it’s a much more impactful and positive experience but but yeah something better than nothing I agree I’m always in this something is better than nothing agreement myself taking some breaks
enjoying some pictures enjoying uh perhaps thinking about being outside but but don’t let that be enough for you right if you can get out on the weekends or take a walk after work or go outside during lunch that’s even more helpful I can’t help but be reminded by uh the uh Washington State Department of parks on Twitter yesterday said that it was important for brain health that once you work for 20 minutes at a desk you should take a 20-minute break and be in nature and then you should go live in the woods
for 20 years afterwards that would be the Washington department of parks ideal braid health I don’t know if all of us can do that but I appreciate it their ambition look if you set up a Wi-Fi router in the woods I’m there if you have the Wi-Fi router in the woods you might not be getting the brain health benefits of the woods that’s also probably no problem I did not think this was great once you can get Facebook there I don’t know it’s good for you anymore sure um all right so I think we’re gonna go
ahead and start uh wrapping up the webinar here um but I do have a slide with some information about uh geody and her book I know quite a few of you have been asking about um Jody’s book um so you can see a little bit more information on the screen now um so the book is called the little brain um you can find it on Amazon and other uh other uh uh what’s the word other booksellers uh I am sure um and uh we had a couple people ask what the eight what the intended age group was for um for the book it’s about from a preschool to
Elementary age kids so you know K through five especially pre-k through five fantastic all right so all that information is uh there on the screen and um if you don’t have the time to write it down now it’ll be in the recording and we’ll be sure to include a link to that book in the replay description uh next week all right uh so let’s go ahead and get to wrapping up here so um thank you all again so much for participating in the webinar today uh thank you Henry for running it thank you Jody for joining us and taking all of
those wonderful questions from our audience members um it was absolutely delightful having you here today um now we have another webinar coming up next month uh what makes brain HQ effective the science behind the exercises uh you know get a look at the the gears that make brain HQ run uh that’s going to be taking place on July 12th so look for an invite to come out a week before that um Henry Jody do you have any final parting words that you want to share with our audience oh just uh Jody was wonderful to see you
and talk about these incredibly important issues and um thanks to everyone for coming to this webinar and um like I always say at the end happy brain training get out into the world some but if you’re going to be sitting behind a computer do a little brain HQ that’ll be good for your brain too Jody anything from you to wrap up it was really great to be here Henry and Stephanie and um thank you for providing this really important information to everyone and I’d say yeah get out in nature and also you know I think um there’s uh evidence.
To say that you if you engage in community problems such as the increasing risk of weather events and climate change we together as a community when we voice our opinions and try to solve them it’s actually good for our mental health and well-being so um get out there with your families and friends and we can do this together a wonderful thought thank you for wrapping us up like that Jody Stephanie thank you for hosting us uh and everyone else happy day and happy brain training.
