Optimize Brain Health by Balancing Social Life with Downtime, says Dr. David Agus | Big Think

Optimize Brain Health by Balancing Social Life with Downtime

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Life is a marathon, says Dr. David Agus. Maintaining longterm brain health is all about having positive social relationships, and scheduling time for the brain to relax.

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DAVID AGUS:

David B. Agus, MD, author of the New York Times and international bestsellers The End of Illness and A Short Guide to a Long Life, is a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California and heads USC’s Westside Cancer Center and the Center for Applied Molecular Medicine. He is one of the world’s leading cancer doctors and pioneering biomedical researchers, and is a CBS News contributor. His newest book is THE LUCKY YEARS: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health.

Over the past twenty years, he has received acclaim for his innovations in medicine and contributions to new technologies, which continue to change the perception of health and empower people around the world to maintain healthy lives, longer. Dr. Agus has built a reputation for his unique way of viewing the body’s relationship to health and disease. He explains, “Sometimes you have to go to war to understand peace. My work in the cancer war has taught me a lot about all things health-related, much of which goes against conventional wisdom.” An international leader in new technologies and approaches for personalized healthcare, he cofounded two revolutionary companies in personalized medicine: Navigenics and Applied Proteomics.

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TRANSCRIPT:

David Agus:  The brain is a tremendous organism that helps all of us. And brain obviously functions for our cognitive function, it functions for our well-being, for our mindfulness, for how we interact with others. And I want to start to tell you a couple of stories that I think gives us the flavor of what we need for long-term brain health. The first is an experiment that was initially done in mice and then it was done in humans. And that is touch, the power of touch. If you take a mouse and you take it away from other mice and put it alone, all of a sudden it gets more immune problems, it gets more disease, it takes longer to get over infections. You put it back so it's touched all the time it goes back to the way it was and much quicker getting over when it gets sick. And the same is true in humans.

We were designed to be social. And so people who are loaners that spend all their day alone where there's no touch and no other human interactions don't to do well. So you need to figure out a way to get that touch. People who live with someone, cohabitate, live longer than people who live alone. So figure out a way to do it and figure out a way to change your life. Go out tonight. Find somebody. Obviously I'm not pushing you to live with somebody right away, you have to live with the right person, because that other side of it is stress is bad. And when you have relationships that pull you down it's very hard for all of us. So there's an old Buddhist expression, detach and transcend. And I want you to do that. Start to take a look at your relationships, both good and bad. When it's difficult and when you see a relationship that really makes you crabby, whenever you're with this person it get's you in a different mood or really affects you, you need to figure out a way to get away from that. Obviously you can't eliminate all of your family because many of those are family members, but you have to figure out a way so that those interactions don't bring you down and hurt the rest of your life.

I want you to take that 20,000-foot view of you to look at your social interaction because I think that's key.

Because life is a marathon and I think it's key to go that marathon and do well is to have those designed correctly. At the same time I want you to be mindful of you. I want you to figure out what is the best schedule and ways to deal with your life. So, for example, we know is that downtime is important. Downtime every day is actually what allows what happened during the day to sink in. So if a child is at school they study and study and has no downtime, they're not going to remember as much as if they have that downtime at the end of the day. So figure out a way to do it for your children and for yourself. For me it's that drive home. That drive home I turn off my devices and I like to listen to some music, classic rock, which my kids make fun of me for listening to, and that's my downtime and it actually wo...

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