369: Sizing Up the Notion of Tailoring Your Brain with Emily Willingham
“Unless you really do live alone and never encounter other people or engage with them at all, you are not just one brain. We are a social species. We’re shaped by evolution to interact socially for the sake of the species. And so our brains are kind of configured for those processes.”
In this episode, Emily Willingham joins Indre to talk about tailoring the brain, a subject on which she’s an expert and about which she writes extensively in her book The Tailored Brain: From Ketamine, to Keto, to Companionship, A User's Guide to Feeling Better and Thinking Smarter. Emily is a journalist, a science writer, the author of previous books, including Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis, a coauthor of The Informed Parent: A Science-Based Resource for Your Child's First Four Years, and is a regular contributor to Scientific American and other publications. She is the joint recipient with David Robert Grimes of the 2014 John Maddox Prize which is awarded by the science charity Sense About Science to those who stand up for science in the face of personal attacks.
Emily begins by giving a bird's eye view of the topics covered in her book The Tailored Brain, laying out the essence of tailoring the brain not from society's perspective but how an individual feels about oneself. She touches on the different tailoring tools and explains in detail the default mode network that has a role in how we interact socially, our social cognition, and negative rumination. Emily also looks at two other networks: salience network and executive function network, and how they function, and delves deep into the need to tweak the default mode network and how this can be accomplished. She goes on to share her perspective on the development of cognitive skills and provides insight into neuroenhancers like Ritalin and Provigil, how they work, their effects, and what to expect from taking them, while also addressing the common misconceptions about them. Finally, Emily discusses the keto diet, its roots and impact on the brain, and the idea that our brains are social, citing the energizing effect of working in a room with people. If you want to learn how to to feel better and think smarter – and, really, who doesn’t? – then today’s episode of Inquiring Minds is definitely a ‘must listen’.
