iThrive Wellness Summit 2020

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iThrive

John Kelly

Neuroplasticity, Lifestyle Medicine and the Mind-Body Link

We're going to be talking today about the brain, the changing itself, and the let's see here, I can't get...

Okay, neuroplasticity in the mind, brain connection, and transformation.

Are we aware that there are actually 2 hearts in the human body?

This is surprising to some people, but actually we're talking about 1 heart, of course, that resides in the chest.

This is the pump that we all are familiar with, pumping blood to all the body.

You realize that the chest heart beats continually over 30 million times a year, 3 billion times in a lifetime.

And in fact, it's some of the first fetal tissue that's identifiable with the naked eye.

Well before there's actually any blood in the circulatory system, we can see pulsatile tissue that's going to become the cardiac pump.

If it stops for even a few seconds, we're going to pass out, and if it doesn't start back in a few minutes, we won't wake up.

It's no wonder that data shows that Medicare spends more funding and more time on the heart than any other organ in the body.

So there's another heart, however, that resides in the cranium rather than the chest.

As the chest heart is continually beating, the brain heart is continually making new connections.

You've ever thought about how is it that so much information can be stored in the same amount of space?

The size of the cranium of a child is minor, minor difference from an older person, and yet millions of bits of information have been stored and the brain is continually making new connections.

In fact, physiology shows us that about 25% of the cardiac output from the chest heart supplies the brain.

And so it's a very high energy consuming.

Medical science is now exploring this cranium, this labyrinth inside of our cranium and unraveling the mysteries, we can now read with 90% accuracy our words, even before we speak them, still not able to read our thoughts, I say yet, because who knows what we may learn to do.

But it's true, they acted to the robes on a human being.

My wife is a very practical woman and she tells me, well, just wait a millisecond and you'll know exactly what I'm going to say.

But humor aside, this could be a wonderful advancement for those who have no voice box or no ability to speak.

An example of the brain or brain heart is Phineas Gage.

He's become famous or infamous because of an accident he had.

Looks like a soldier with a rifle, but if you look more closely we see that what he's holding is actually a temple.

And if we look more closely also, we'll see that it looks like he is winking, but actually his left eye is closed because it's missing.

Phineas Gage lived in the 1800s, but here was a few years ago in PLOS 1 where they are mapping the changes that took place in Phineas Gage's brain as a result of his accident.

And you can see here the computer simulation looking at the connections that were destroyed.

Because of the phenomena that happened to Phineas Gage as a result of his accident.

What happened was his job was tamping the charges that were placed in the boreholes during civil engineering where they were actually doing railroad building or highway building.

And 1 day the unthinkable happened where he was tamping the dirt over the charge and the charge went off prematurely and that tamping rod became a missile that went up through Phineas's head as simulated here in this red showing.

And this is an actual photograph of his actual skull, by the way, which has been preserved because of this remarkable effect that happened to him.

He was changed dramatically as a result of this accident.

It didn't kill him, he didn't have an infection, but what happened was, Phineas Gage went from being a responsible citizen and a supervisor of men to being a profligate.

He was just a changed personality and character altogether.

He ended up spending, leaving his family and home and going to South America, spending his money and just character completely transformed because of the disconnections from the frontal lobe that took place because of his accident.

And it helped us to understand the critical importance of the frontal lobe as a center of executive function in the brain.

There's another photograph from the article published in 2012.

So as I said, he had a dramatic change in personality and character as a result of this destruction of the frontal lobe and the connections to it.

So there are 2 hearts in the human body, 1 in the chest, 1 in the cranium, but we've all heard about these heart cancer it's not even on the front page anymore when someone has a pump removed from the chest of 1 person and we put it into the chest of another person.

It is literally a remarkable and amazing bit of surgery, but as I say, it's so common, we don't even think of it that way.

You're talking about a brain transplant And the work is serious work is being done moving forward with this idea.

But before we get too excited about this, I'd like to ask you to think for a moment, would you want to have a brain transplant if in fact it was possible.

Someone else's brain in your body, think about it, a heart transplant is a donated heart, but a brain transplant, that's more like a donated body.

So I haven't actually met anyone that has told me they would be interested in having a brain transplant if it was possible.

In fact, some folks say, well, maybe if we could somehow hone ourselves and have a spare brain, but if you know anything much about the way this works, even that would not be the same you.

There's only 1 of us with each of our brains.

So actually it turns out that of the 2 hearts, the cranial heart is the most important.

This is the 1 that, in fact, I would like to suggest that the reason people are willing to undergo the traumatic experience of a heart transplant, a chest heart transplant, is to keep the cranial heart going.

We want to continue to have a cognitive existence and that's why we're willing to replace the pump in our chest with someone else's.

Even though many times it requires immune suppression and other kinds of having this tissue in our body.

So what we really need to do is not to replace the brain.

We would like to update the wiring, shall we say.

Neuroplasticity has discovered that, in fact, that's what's happening.

So neuroplasticity, the science of neuroplasticity has changed practically everything that we thought we knew about the brain.

We had thought of it as hardwired or in some cases, a little humor, hardly wired, but almost of what I'm gonna be talking about here is drawn from the book and the research that's reported in Dois's book called The Brain That Changes Itself.

That was on the bestseller list for quite some time.

He has a second book on this topic, in heels and stuff.

That's also quite remarkable, still what I'm talking about.

I want to give credit to the changes itself.

So as it turned the most valuable real estate in the universe is not really in Acapulco or Beverly Hills or even some future planet that we might colonize when this when we just if and when we destroy this earth but it's actually the brain cortex area the surface area of the brain is sold to the highest bidder and used for whatever we are asking our brains to do in other words the rewiring of our brains is a continual ongoing function just like rebuilding the surface on the freeways or the highways in our country where they're constantly repaving.

Brain cortical area is being remapped for maximum efficiency to perform whatever we are using our brains to do.

So for example, if you take up piano playing and you've never played piano before, as you practice and require your brain to become more expert at playing the piano, the map on our brain between the cortex and motor neurons that connect to our muscles of our hands and parts of our body that are used in This new function in this case piano playing those maps are revised and refined continually Most of this work that we're talking about actually was discovered from the work of Paul Boccherita, who was what we call a doctor doctor.

He was known as the man who could connect anything to anything.

In fact, he was the 1 that NASA used to develop the ability of the astronaut's space suit to provide sensory perception so that they could actually perform tasks wearing this suit.

If you think about it, the reason they wore these suits, wear them, do wear them, is because of the lack of pressure.

And so this suit has to be capable of maintaining an adequate pressure inside the suit to protect the human being.

And when you have something that's capable of having that much pressure and sustaining that pressure, it's very difficult then for the fingers to have any sensory perception.

Bakirita is the 1 that helped to design the receptors for the suit so that it would be capable of transmitting a sense of touch and feel to the astronaut inside.

There's another picture of him at a conference.

So let me just tell a little bit about the story as he shares it.

So what happened was that his father Pedro had after Paul's mother had died, Pedro's wife had died, he had a stroke.

And that stroke left him with hemiparesis.

Basically he was paralyzed on completely on 1 side.

He was unable to walk or speak and his son, he had 2 sons, Paul we've talked about and a younger brother George and his son George took care of him because at that time, Paul was in residency and there was no way that Paul had time to help with his father.

So George, he went to live with his son, George.

And I say that with tongue in cheek, he's still busy, but he did have more time than Paul and so so Pedro went to live with his father and and George says the only model I had was how babies learn so we played games rolling a ball like children and what he George and his father Pedro did was they designed exercises to improve Pedro's motor function.

And eventually He regained, he, Pedro, regained all functionality.

He was able actually to go back to work as a professor and in New York.

And they were so excited at the improvement that had taken place in the full, apparently full recovery, they were excited and they made an agreement that when Pedro died that they would have an autopsy and they would publish the results showing the ability to for the brain to recover after a stroke, which was practically unheard of.

In fact, oh yeah, the rest of that story, I'm sorry.

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Neuroplasticity, Lifestyle Medicine and the Mind-Body Link

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