How to Biohack Your Mind, Boost Your IQ, and Improve Your Memory in 21 Days
Ameer Rosic Monday, May 4th 2014
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Harder, better, faster, stronger! It’s possible, and you can do it yourself!
Want to boost your IQ by 21 points in 21 days? What would you say if I told you that you were limiting your body? That you were capable of running so much further, so much faster, of working harder, of lifting heavier, of living better? Nearly everyone on this planet has sold themselves short, limited their bodies and potential by the things they do. Through inappropriate diet, habits, and lifestyle choices, our bodies can start to turn against us, making weaker, fragile, and lazier. In today’s Podcast, Ben and I discuss how you can biohack your mind, boost your IQ and achieve optimal performance
Transcript (Listen to the Full Podcast Here): Ameer: Hey Ben. Welcome to the Optimal Health Show. How are you doing? Ben: Awesome, Ameer. Thanks for having me on. Ameer: My pleasure. Right before this call, you and I were talking and you mentioned you’re doing this podcast in front of a barn house or something? Ben: I’m actually at this farm slash health retreat in Austin, Texas because I missed my flight. By “I missed my flight, “my flight got cancelled for two days in a row. So I rigged together a little stand-up workstation over here. I’m standing up by the side the house. Managed to borrow a microphone. It’s the extent to which I go to get on the world-famous Ameer Rosic broadcast. Ameer: That’s what I call dedication. A true Optimal Health warrior. Ben: That’s right, baby. Ameer: You were in Austin, Texas at the paleo effectsand everything. Were you talking about your brand new book, which I absolutely love it, Beyond Training? Ben: Yeah, yeah, exactly. That just came out twenty-four hours ago. Ameer: Yeah, it’s fresh off the presses. I’m curious though. As many authors, what enticed you to start writing this book? Obviously, you’ve been in the game for a very long time. You’ve written other books. You’ve done so much content-driven knowledge out there. I’m just wondering though. Was there a catalyst or something that pushed you. Like, “Ben, you have to get this book out there.” Ben: Sure. Think about it this way. I have a hodgepodge of “recipes” out there for everything from hacking your brain to enhancing your recovery to building muscle or losing fat quickly to getting your body ready for the rigors of, say, a triathlon or Spartan race or a series of cross-fit events. All sorts of things scattered around on many, many websites on the internet. Then, many books that I’ve written before. But never everything in one spot. So I want to take all these recipes I have for getting the most out of your body and mind and put them all together in one central, easy-to-reference location. This is the cookbook that resulted. I simply split everything up into the elements of training, nutrition, lifestyle, recovery, and the brain. I put it all together. It’s a little over four hundred eighty pages long and it comes in this beautiful hardcover book. There’s about eight free hidden chapters online that come with the book as well. My inspiration was to have this source where if people just wanted everything all at once, the big hits, so to speak, they could just have it. That’s why I put the book together. Ameer: How long did it take you to write that? That’s huge! Ben: It took about a year to write but took about ten years to learn. Ameer: People only see the tip of the iceberg. They don’t see the bottom portion of it. Ben: Right. It’s like that Picasso analogy where Picasso paints a painting in two minutes flat and it’s like, “That’s a Picasso?” and Picasso is like, “Yeah. It took me twenty years to actually hone.”
Ameer: Now, in the book, you mentioned that you talked about recovery, you’re talking about biohack and everything. Now, for the biohackers out there who are super geeky on this, is there any specific areas in biohacking that you really digged deep into? Ben: For biohacks, probably some of the bigger ones are the brain and the sleep components. The last one would be recovery. Getting your muscles and nervous system to recover as quickly as possible. Preparing your brain for the best sleep possible. Also, enhancing mental performance to everything from binaural beats to specific nutrient blends and oral tropics. Things of that nature. Ameer: That’s awesome. Let’s talk about the enhancing your brain. You mentioned the binaural beats and certain nutrition. What is binaural beats, for people who don’t know? Ben: The way the binaural beats work, first, you need to understand brainwaves. I think some people kind of understand. You have your alpha delta data brainwaves and many of us live in, for example, a beta brainwave state versus a focus, relaxed, in-the-zone alpha brainwave state. The actual hertz for the alpha brainwave state is about eight to twelve hertz. What can happen is, you can lull your body into an alpha brainwave state by playing two different beats in each ear. The differenced of which results in an eight to twelve hertz frequency. That would be the alpha brainwave zone. You could put on a binaural beat track and I have a bunch of links the book. There’s a tone of free ones online. You could be playing, for example, three hundred ninety-five hertz in your left ear and four hundred and five hertz in your right ear. By using combination of those frequencies in both left and right ear, the resulted frequency is a ten hertz frequency. Production of brainwaves that are at that ten hertz of frequency. You could do something similar to engage yourself in the delta brainwave frequency, pre-sleep. I will use something like binaural beats primarily for pre-race or pre- very difficult workout where I want to get myself into the alpha brainwaves zone. I use something like pulsed electromagnetic frequency or PEMF for of the sleep component. For that delta wave component, I use, what’s called an EarthPulse. I put an EarthPulse underneath my mattress. It emits a frequency of about between seven point three and seven point eight hertz. It’s very close to what the earth’s natural frequency is. The natural frequency that would be emitted by the planet earth is. It simply emits that underneath my mattress while I’m sleeping. It lulls me into that deep sleep, relaxing restorative brainwaves zone. There are some other cool things that PEMF does. Primarily, improvement in mitochondrial health and cell membrane healing. That’s another cool modality that I use. The binaural beats, it’s basically a simple audio track that you play. Again, you can find binaural beats for free online. Ameer: Now, if someone wants to start biohacking their brain and having more clarity, would you say there’s any baseline testing that people can do to measure their progress? Ben: There’s a few things you could do. For example, if you wanted to see how improvements in the brain were affecting your central nervous system, in particular, the responsiveness and the strength of your central nervous system, you could grab your phone and download the CNS Tap Test which is a basic right finger and left finger tap test that measures how many times you can tap an X number of seconds. You can track that and log it on a daily basis. That’s a really good core I relate to the strength of your central nervous system. The ability of you to engage in repetitive contractions over and over again in a short period of time. That one’s called CNS, Central Nervous System Tap Test app. Another way you could do this is by measuring the strength of your nervous system is using something called heart rate variability testing. Which would mean, for example, I use an app that’s called the Sweet Beat app for this. I wake up in the morning. I put on a Bluetooth heart rate monitor. Once I turn that on, I turn on the Sweet Beat app and it will test both my sympathetic and my para-sympathetic nervous system.
That’s a five minute test you can do. It’s a really, really good sign of the strength your nervous system can do, which is, again, a very good indicator of neural health. That type of neural health ties, I find, more often, into neural muscular recovery and stress. How well you’re doing de-stressing and repairing and recovering your body after a workout, than it does to pure mental performance. I like the CNS Tap Test for pure mental performance. I also like gauging how well your brain is performing by tracking your performance on apps. For example, two apps on my phone are Lumosity and In Back Training. I’ll use Lumosity as a way to engage my brain in novelty and variety and challenge each day and then In Back Training to work on improving memory and recall. You could Google either of those. Ameer: They have In Back apps for the phone now? Ben: Yup. They have In Back apps for the phone. They have In Back for the Kindle. I have an In Back app on both my phone and my Kindle so I can play In Back, for example, anywhere. Standing in line at the airport, in a waiting line for groceries. Really cool way to just quickly slip into and work your working memory. That results in a direct improvement in IQ. Ameer: I think In Back, they said, they’re the only ones clinically proven to actually boost IQ as well. Ben: Yeah. There are even educational systems in schools using In Back for children to improve IQ in children. It’s a pretty cool form of training. For those who haven’t done IN Back training, it’s easier to play the game to see what it means that to actually have it explained to you. But it’s essentially, a number will flash on a screen or calculation such as three plus one will flash on a screen. M minus two In Back training would mean that after three plus one appears on the screen, and the answer to that is four, of course. I hope your listeners know that, Ameer. So three plus one equals four. Next it says, five plus three and you know that that is eight. Next it’ll say three plus three and you know that is six. The next is, what is the answer to the equation two equations ago? You know the answer to that is four. You say four and you go on. You tend to repeat that and it’ll go into an In Back for three count back. You just basically rapidly working your recall based memory while, at the same time, engaging in simple calculations. Ameer: Do you have any other morning rituals for improving your cognition? Maybe some dietary ones or shakes or some types of supplements? Ben: I’m big on a gram of curcumin, most morning. The only mornings I’ll ever avoid is there’s some evidence that curcumin may inhibit muscle hypertrophy because it can really shut down formation of free radicals. It’s a potent brain anti-inflammatory. But one of the issues is, if you’re constantly taking in high dose antioxidants or powerful antioxidants, like curcumin, sometimes you can blunt the body’s natural response to exercise. Many mornings, I would say five out of seven mornings or so, I’ll do curcumin. More often than that, a lot of times when I’m on the road and I’m traveling and I’m exposed to the stress from airport x-ray machines and solar radiation while I’m on planes, things like that. If I’m going to be lifting weights in the morning, I won’t take curcumin because I don’t want to blunt my muscle building response to lifting weights. I’ll avoid it then. But most mornings, I’ll start off with about a gram of curcumin. I generally, in my smoothie, because, for me, most mornings when I’m at home, I’m doing a kale smoothie, one of the things that I add to my kale smoothie is caprylic acid because of its ability to rapidly converted into key tones, which the neurons really like to use as a fuel. I’m a big fan of adding about two tablespoons or so of caprylic acid to my morning smoothie. That’s another one that I will do in the morning from a nutrients standpoint. As far as other good ones for the brain, one that I’ll do midmorning on an empty stomach is, and this is just a daily for me, I don’t do a ton of supplements daily.
Some people think I pop thirty pills a day. I don’t. I do a fish oil. I do the curcumin. I do, typically, before I go to bed at night, magnesium. Most and rest of the time, it’s targeted nutrients when I need them. But this one I’m about to tell you, I take every day, it’s a Chinese adaptogenic herb blend. Because adaptogens really, really help you respond to stress. Many of the things that are in the adaptogens like eleuthero, ashwagandha, rhodiola, maca root, things of like that nature. These also really, really help increase blood flow to the brain. A couple ingredients of the Chinese adaptogenic herb blend that I use are cydia choline, which is very, very similar to phospho tyto choline or the type of choline you would find in fish, eggs, walnuts… things of that nature. That’s really, really good for both the brain and the eyes. It also has [Inaudible] [13.38] in it and huperzine. Both of those are neuro tropics. They increase blood flow to the brain. They’ve even used them on studies done in NFL Football players to reverse a lot of the issues created with head damage from years of playing football. Those are something I find to be really, really help in terms of improving focus and improving memory, IQ, reading speed, visual acuity. All the little things you want going on with your brain on a typical work day. Ameer: Where can people get that adaptogenic mix? Ben: That blend is called Tea and She. I get that out of Portland. It’s handmade by a Chinese herbologist in Portland. His name is Roger Germer. I met him a few years ago. He’s super-duper knowledgeable in the field of Chinese adaptogens. It’s a powder and it’s mixed in an extremely dense ratio. You’re going to see about a two to one to a ten to one ratio in terms of the concentration of herbs in most Chinese adaptogenic herb blends in the market. This is a forty to one ratio meaning there is literally dozens and dozens and dozens of pounds worth of herbs squeezed into one little packet. It says on the packet to mix in the water. I just dump it straight into my mouth and hold it for ninety seconds and swallow and chase down with a glass of water. That stuff works really well. Ameer: Cool. I was talking to you a while ago and you’re mentioning a lot about inversion tables. Have you used them to help you out? Ben: Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of the brain, not only can they, using an inversion table, which is just like a table that you can keep out in your garage or whatever to hang outside down on, not only can that increase the cap polarization of your brain, it will literally cause growth of new tiny blood vessels in your brain if you hang from that thing for five to ten minutes just a few times a week. But if you’re one of those standing workstation people, like me, where you’re on your feet all day and I do that to upregulate lipase, my fat burning enzyme, and also to train a lot of my tiny feet and core and hip muscles to build endurance throughout the day. One of the things you’re going to find is your legs get heavy, sometimes blood pools in your feet. Sometimes you end up with legs like a Las Vegas waitress, all those varicose veins and all that nasty stuff going on. That’s another place where the inversion table comes in. You hang in an inversion table after a day of standing on your feet, it decompresses your spine, drains blood from your feet, your legs back up in your brain, feet step back in your heart. Honestly, they’re not that expensive. If you buy them new off Amazon, they’re kind of spendy. I tell people this in my book. Go on Craigslist, type in inversion table. Usually you’ve got rich people who thought they were going to get really healthy by hanging from an inversion table just dumping these things on Craigslist for a few bucks or even giving them to you if you’ll haul them away. Then you just put it out in your garage like I do. I like to hang out in the morning sunshine. I’ll literally just go out there when the sun’s rising and my garage opens towards the sunrise. I’ll open my garage door and just hang from the inversion table while I stare out at the sunrise, do deep breathing, hang there for about five minutes or so. Ten minutes max. You’ll feel like a million bucks.
Ameer: Do you incorporate any type of meditative breathing or breathing modalities in your practice? Ben: Yeah, I do. I don’t do a lot of meditation in the traditional sense. I’m an athlete. I tend to swim a lot. I run a lot. I run my bicycle. I use those times for meditation. The way that I do that, aside from when I’m swimming where I’m not really doing the deep nasal breathing, when I’m running an cycling, I try and do nasal breathing. When you breathe through your nose, the turbines in your nasal cavities actually circulate air, humidify air, oxygenate air and the air that winds up at the alveoli in your lungs winds up being better oxygenated at a temperature that allows for it to saturate your tissues much, much more easily. There’s an exercise and a physiological benefit to nasal breathing. But also, there are barrier receptors in your chest that, when you engage in shallow chest mouth based breathing, up-regulate cortisol production and increased stress. What that means is if you go for a run, you can have your run be deep, restorative, oxygenating, stress-reducing activity if you do deep nasal breathing. Or you could have it be stressful if you engage in shallow chest breathing. So when I go out for a run, I focus on breathing from my nose and I’ll get into this deep meditative state, especially if I’m running on a trail. It’s just this really cool flow state. That’s one area that allows me to get the benefits of meditating and kill two birds with one stone and be exercising at the same time. I take it to the level, too, where I will engage, not just in nasal breathing but in rhythmic breathing. Rhythmic breathing means that as you’re doing something like running, for example, you breathe in for three foot strikes and you breathe out for two foot strikes. Now, what that means is that you are breathing off C02 just a little bit less because your exhaling less than you’re inhaling. It turns out that carbon dioxide and the lack of carbon dioxide in the body is one of the primary regulators of stress and cortisol production. You’ll tend to see a lot of times, folks, you don’t breathe well. They hypo-ventilate. Meaning they don’t breathe off enough C02 during the workday. I’m sorry, they breathe off too much C02 during the workday. These are often people engaging in quick sighs. Like if you’re at work and you find yourself just sighing or maybe doing shallow chest breathing while your checking emails. A lot of times, you’re breathing off too much C02. If you engage in this rhythmic breathing, where you’re doing nasal breathing but also exhaling, less than you inhale during exercise, you’re avoiding that lack of C02 and really helping yourself out from a stress standpoint there, too. I do nasal breathing. I do rhythmic breathing. I learned how to do nasal breathing from a book called Body, Mind, Sport by John Douillard. He runs a company called The Life Spa in Boulder, Colorado. I learned how to do rhythmic breathing from a book called Running on Air by Budd Coates. That one was published by Runner’s World. It teaches you this process of how to learn rhythmic breathing. By combining nasal breathing and rhythmic breathing during exercise, that’s my form of meditation. I don’t actually do much of taking focused mindful mediation breaks during work or anything like that. For me, I see the benefit in meditating three or five times a week for twenty minutes. But, since I’m exercising anyways and I figured out a way to turn that into meditation, I just roll with that. Ameer: Two for one, baby. Ben: That’s right. That’s right. Ameer: Now, is there any kind of foods that you think really helps increase brain neurons? Ben: Yeah, absolutely. Foods for building neurons… Obviously, some of the biggies are going to be some of the same things that really help out with eyesight. Those are foods that are rich in what’s called lutein and zeaxanthin. Wild caught fish and eggs are two of them. Interestingly, nature gives us clues. Avocados are good for your balls. Celery contains some nitric oxide components that are good for erections. Shellfish are good for women’s libido. All these things that are shaped in nature are actually good for certain things. Eggs, shaped like an eye. Good for the eyes. Walnuts are like a little, tiny brain.
They’re shaped like a brain. Walnuts are really, really good. I like those as an excellent way to give you some DHA for the brain. You’ve got about thirty percent of your myelin sheaths that are used for neuromuscular transmission. About thirty percent of those are made up of oleic acid. Oleic acid, just like the name implies, is something that you get from olive oil. In addition to fish, eggs and walnuts, I’m a big fan of olive oil. I mentioned some of the actual supplement sources in addition to food sources. Let me think if there’s another one that I could give you that would be good for brain building. I would say that one of the issues with things like walnuts is some of the conversion of the fatty acids into DHA are not super-duper complete compared to some of the animal sources I was talking about like eggs and fish. But if you’re vegan or vegetarian and you want to get a more readily available form of DHA, I’m a big fan of going after marine sources where you can use LG based DHA sources like spirulina is really, really good. For some people, that might be considered a supplement more than food. But it really is just a plant. Chlorella is also really good. Clorella is a little bit better for detox than it is as a DHA source but it’s pretty good. You can even get bottled-up phytoplankton. Like you can get marine phytoplankton sources. A drop of marine phytoplankton literally contains billions of cells. That’s really, really good. That’s a source of DHA as well. If you’re vegan or vegetarian and you can’t do eggs or fish and things of that nature, and you want t a little bit more than what you get from walnuts, I’d turn over to some of the things that we get from the ocean for some of your DHA. Ameer: Is there any new tropics that you’re a big fan of? You mentioned some of them earlier with the adaptogenics but aside from that, anything else? Ben: Occasionally, I’ll use one blend. Paracetam, aniracetam, alpha-GPC blend. One of the websites that I like for bulk, powdered neuro tropics is just called peak neuro tropics. I think it’s peakneurotropics.com. A pretty good mix. You can put all of this onto a digital spoon scale. Measure it out if you don’t want to get a capsule filler or something like that. For one dose, you do about one point five grams of paracetam and then you want a two to one ratio of that to aniracetam. So about zero point seven five grams of aniracetam. So you’ve got one point five of paracetam, zero point seven five grams of aniracetam. Then, what you’d want to add is about five hundred milligrams of a really concentrated source of choline because when you take aniracetam and paracetam, those are going to amp up your brain’s activity so high that you’re going rapidly deplete choline which is necessary for nerve transmission in the brain. Take something called alpha-GPC. You’d want about five hundred milligrams of alpha-GPC, a really potent choline source along with that paracetam aniracetam blend. One point five of paracetam, zero point seven grams… or seven hundred fifty milligrams of aniracetam, five hundred milligrams or zero point five grams of alpha-GPC. You can just put all of that on a digital spoon scale and measure it out with a tiny little spoon. Just dump that all in your mouth and hold it for ninety seconds. Chase it with a glass of warm water. That’s a really, really good stack. I wouldn’t use something like that more than a month or so but if you have that day that you know is going to be super busy, you have to go speak on stage, you’re going to be low on sleep, you’re going to be at a conference, maybe you’re at a bender in Vegas, I don’t know. That’s a really, really good stack. Something that you could use a little bit more often that’s a little bit less capable of potentially producing a little bit of a reliance upon it would just be to simply use caffeine combined with L-Theanine because L-Theanine will help to enhance the effects of caffeine while also reducing the anti-wakefulness. Ameer: What do you think of matcha tea which has a really good ratio of caffeine to L-Theanine? Ben: Matcha tea is good. I’m generally coffee in the morning, green tea in the afternoon kind of guy.
Ameer: Same here. Ben: The other thing that I’ll add into that mix that I’ll often do as a neuro tropic that gives me a little bit extra, talk about two for one, a little extra bang for the buck in the weight room, too, is just creatine. About five grams creatine. If you’re vegan or vegetarian, take creatine, five grams a day. No doubt. But if you’re not, and you’re getting enough creatine from meat-based sources but you just want to use creatine as a neuro tropic, it does have some neuro tropic effects. Add about ifive grams a day. There’s no need to load or tea load or cycle. You can get a basic creatine monohydrate powder or creatine capsule. About five grams per day, works really, really well if you’re doing a cup of coffee in the morning and dome green tea in the afternoon. Ameer: Very cool. Ben, if you had to summarize what would be your number one Optimal Health tip? Ben: You’re going to love this one, Ameer. It would be to sleep more. Ameer: Awesome. Ben: I know you’re a real sleep nerd. I slept almost ten hours last night. I’m usually seven to eight hours on days when I’m not really beating myself up on training. If I had a training day and I had a tough workout day yesterday, I’ll be at nine to ten hours. Generally, when I’m at home, it’s seven to eight hours at night. I have something called a biomat underneath my mattress at home. This is just a mat you lay on your bed and it emits infrared waves which can assist with growth hormone release, which are really healing and restorative for the body. There’s even some physicians that use them for cancer. They use it for what’s called hypothermic treatment for cancer. It’s also got tourmaline crystals and amethyst crystals embedded in it. Those actually release, what are called, negative ions. EMF from computers, wifi routers, travel on airplanes, etc. is going to cause you to build up a lot of positive ions in your body and these negative ions released by these crystalline sources can help to balance that out. It’s got this really healing, therapeutic, restorative effect on the body. I sleep like a baby on that thing every afternoon when I’m at home after lunch, I’ll curl up for forty to sixty minutes on this biomat. I’m a big fan of that, something that I actually discovered three months or so, I don’t talk a lot about it in the book because I discovered it after I sent the book off to the publisher. That’s a relatively new discovery of mine that I’m really liking quite a bit as far as sleep goes. But I would definitely say that sleep is my number one. Ameer: That’s amazing. Those are killer tips. Ben, where can people find your book right now? Ben: Well, it’s at beyondtrainingbook.com. It’s at all the local book sellers at Amazon and everything, too. But if you just want to go to the source and see all the bonuses and stuff that I’m giving away with the book, beyondtrainingbook.com is the perfect place to go. Ameer: Well, thank you so much for coming on the Optimal Health Show. I’m definitely going to be recommending your book to everyone I know. ‘Til we meet again, my friend, have an amazing day. Ben: Awesome. Thanks, Ameer.
Optimal Resources Mentioned:
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Beyond Training: Mastering Endurance, Health & Life
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EarthPulse Sleep-on-Command Pulsed Electromagnetic Sleep Machine State-of-the-Art PEMF Therapy System Pulsed Electro-Magnetic Field Therapy
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Caprylic Acid
Ameer Rosic
Ameer Rosic is obsessed with health. A Registered Holistic Nutritionist, Functional Diagnostic Practitioner and Functional Medicine Practitioner, Ameer has spent years empowering himself with knowledge about optimal health, and now his passion is to share that with you! From interviews with top health experts to fitness and nutritional advice and more, Ameer Rosic can help you live a life of optimal health!
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