Lifeboat Foundation

Sleep loss is no longer considered an emblem of productivity or success—research has shown over and over that it’s one of the worst things we can do for ourselves. The body may not need sleep so much, but the brain sure does: a huge amount of housekeeping is done while we’re sleeping, and losing sleep, especially chronically, prevents this essential work. Two new studies illustrate what sleep loss does to our thinking skills the next day and to the brain’s ability to clear out potentially dangerous “gunk.”

The first study, from Michigan State University, had 77 people stay awake all night in the lab and 63 go home and sleep normally. All the participants were rested before the study began, and then separated into their respective groups for one night of sleep deprivation or normal rest. The researchers gave them tests of attention (the Psychomotor Vigilance Task) and cognition (the UNRAVEL method, which involves having to keep track of a series of steps in the face of period interruptions) in the evening and again the following morning.

The sleep-deprived participants did conspicuously worse on the tests than the rested ones: The evening before, there was about a 15% error rate after interruptions on the UNRAVEL test, which the next morning rose to 30%. In contrast, the rested group performed about the same in the evening before and the morning after. The sleep-deprived also had significantly more lapses in attention the morning after, compared to the rested group.

It has long been understood, and by cultures too various to list, that salamanders have something of the supernatural about them. Their name is thought to derive from an ancient Persian vocable meaning ‘fire within’, and for at least 2,000 years they were believed to be impervious to flames, or even capable of extinguishing them on contact. Aristotle recorded this exceptional characteristic, as did Leonardo da Vinci. The Talmud advises that smearing salamander blood on your skin will confer inflammability. Not so. But the intuition that salamanders possess fantastical powers is not unfounded.

Like earthbound immortals, salamanders regenerate. If you cut off a salamander’s tail, or its arm, or its leg, or portions of any of these, it will not form a stump or a scar but will instead replace the lost appendage with a perfect new one, an intricacy of muscle, nerve, bone and the rest. It will sprout like a sapling. Science has been chopping up salamanders for more than 200 years with the aim of simply understanding the mechanics of their marvels, but more recently with the additional aim of someday replicating those marvels in ourselves. Might salamanders be the great hope of regenerative medicine?

The salamander in which regeneration is most often studied is an odd and endearingly unattractive Mexican species known as the axolotl. In addition to its limbs and extremities, the axolotl is known to regrow its lower jaw, its retinae, ovaries, kidneys, heart, rudimentary lungs, spinal cord, and large chunks of its brain. It heals all sorts of wounds without scarring. The axolotl also integrates the body parts of its fellows as if they were its own, without the usual immune response, and this peculiar trait has facilitated some of the more grotesque disfigurements it’s endured in the name of science. In experiments after the Second World War, East German scientists grafted small axolotls crosswise through the backs of larger ones. The animals’ circulatory systems came to be linked, and the researchers hailed the conjoined mutants as triumphs of collectivism.

Thank you for watching this powerful interview with Dave Asprey!
Check out the show notes here: https://www.lewishowes.com/860

Dave Asprey is the creator of the widely-popular Bulletproof Coffee, host of the podcast Bulletproof Radio, and author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Bulletproof Diet.

Continue reading “Age Backwards, Biohack Your Life and Be Superhuman | Dave Asprey and Lewis Howes” »

Boosting brain function is key to staving off the effects of aging. And if there was one thing every person should consider doing right now to keep their brain young, it is to add extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) to their diet, according to research by scientists at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University (LKSOM). EVOO is a superfood, rich in cell-protecting antioxidants and known for its multiple health benefits, including helping put the brakes on diseases linked to aging, most notably cardiovascular disease. Previous LKSOM research on mice also showed that EVOO preserves memory and protects the brain against Alzheimer’s disease.

In a new study in mice published online in the journal Aging Cell, LKSOM scientists show that yet another group of aging-related diseases can be added to that list—tauopathies, which are characterized by the gradual buildup of an abnormal form of a protein called tau in the brain. This process leads to a decline in mental function, or dementia. The findings are the first to suggest that EVOO can defend against a specific type of mental decline linked to tauopathy known as frontotemporal dementia.

Alzheimer’s disease is itself one form of dementia. It primarily affects the hippocampus—the memory storage center in the brain. Frontotemporal dementia affects the areas of the brain near the forehead and ears. Symptoms typically emerge between ages 40 and 65 and include changes in personality and behavior, difficulties with language and writing, and eventual deterioration of memory and ability to learn from prior experience.

It’s easy to get excited about breast milk. Just the basic fact that a woman can eat food and turn it into a complete food instantly tailored to grow that particular newborn is quite outstanding. But there is more to breast milk than what meets the eye and understanding the perfection of it could mean a better life for premature babies.

For starters, when a baby suckles her mama’s breast, a vacuum is created. That’s right. Saliva in, milk out. The infant’s saliva is sucked back into the mother’s nipple, where receptors in her mammary gland read its signals. Katie Hinde, a biologist and associate professor at the Center for Evolution and Medicine at the School of Human Evolution & Social Change at Arizona State University, calls this “baby spit backwash,” and it contains information about the baby’s immune status. As far as scientists can tell, baby spit backwash is one of the ways that breast milk adjusts its immunological composition. When mammary gland receptors detect the presence of pathogens, the mother’s body produces antibodies to fight it, and those antibodies travel through breast milk back into the baby’s body, where they target the infection.

“[Breast] Milk is so incredibly dynamic,” says Hinde. “There are hormones in breast milk, and they reflect the hormones in the mother’s circulation. The ones that help facilitate sleep or waking up are present in your milk. And day milk is going to have a completely different hormonal milieu than night milk.” That broken-down means that breastmilk made at night contains hormones that help your baby sleep.

The FDA is helping to speed up the process of researching and approving psilocybin, a hallucinogenic substance in magic mushrooms, to treat major depressive disorder (MDD).

For the second time in a year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has designated psilocybin therapy — currently being tested in clinical trials — as “breakthrough therapy,” an action that is meant to accelerate the typically sluggish process of drug development and review. It is typically requested by a drug company and granted only when preliminary evidence suggests the drug may be an enormous improvement over already available therapy, according to the FDA.

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NOTE FROM TED: Please do not look to this talk for medical advice. This talk, which was filmed at a TEDx event, contains strong assertions about multiple sclerosis and lifestyle medicine that lack sufficient scientific evidence for general prescription. TEDx events are independently organized by volunteers. The guidelines we give TEDx organizers are described in more detail here: http://storage.ted.com/tedx/manuals/tedx_content_guidelines.pdf

After a shocking diagnosis that would begin stripping Bob Cafaro of his ability to perform, sheer willpower and changes to his daily life allow him to beat all odds.

Continue reading “The Psychology of Beating an Incurable Illness | Bob Cafaro | TEDxCharlottesville” »

It turns out the gut is full of surprises. And one of those surprises may have offered up a key for unlocking a new way of treating multiple sclerosis (MS). Investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital have discovered a microRNA—a small RNA molecule—that increases during peak disease in a mouse model of MS and in untreated MS patients. When a synthetic version of the microRNA was orally given to the mice, it prevented disease. While several steps remain before these insights can be translated into therapy for patients, the researchers describe their results as both exciting and unexpected. Their findings are published in Cell Host & Microbe.

“We’ve discovered a new mechanism to regulate the microbiome and treat human disease that hadn’t been known before,” said senior author Howard Weiner, MD, co-director of the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at the Brigham. “The gut microbiome is known to play an important role in MS and other diseases. Our findings, which show that a microRNA can be used to target and influence the microbiome with precision, may have applicability for MS and many other diseases, including diabetes, ALS, obesity and cancer.”

Weiner, lead author Shirong Liu, MD, Ph.D., an instructor in the Weiner laboratory, and their colleagues investigated how the altered gut microbiome affects the course of MS. To do so, they studied the microbiome and microRNAs found in the experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) model of MS. Unexpectedly, they found that when they transferred fecal matter from EAE mice at peak disease, it protected the mice who received the transfer. The team found that a specific microRNA, known as miR-30d, rather than live bacteria, was responsible for preventing disease. The investigators found that miR-30d is enriched in untreated, relapsing-remitting MS patients as well.