Pod Insights The Dr. Hyman Show Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD About this episode Dementia rates are skyrocketing, and cognitive decline is a growing concern. But what if you could actually grow a new brain? In this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show, I sit down with Alberto Villoldo, PhD, a medical anthropologist and shamanic healer (and author of Grow a New Brain), to explore the powerful intersection of ancient wisdom and cutting-edge neuroscience.
In this eye-opening conversation, you’ll discover:
The Amazonian secret to protecting the brain from dementia and cognitive decline.
How certain plant compounds can activate your body’s natural detox and repair systems.
The surprising role of gut health in brain regeneration—and how to reset your microbiome.
Why serotonin depletion is wreaking havoc on mental health and how to restore balance.
How shamanic healing and modern science align to create lasting cognitive health.
Tune in to learn how you can take control of your brain health and unlock the potential for true regeneration.
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Transcript 11,377 words · 2 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.
0:02 Speaker 01 In the Amazon, the rate of dementia is one out of 100 people. In America, it's one out of five people. And primarily women, you know, women have a stronger incidence of Alzheimer's. So why did they know about the brain that we didn't? And the laboratory? How did they protect it? And we found it. We found the secret.
0:24 Speaker 00 Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, well, check out my membership community, Dr. Hyman Plus. And if you're looking for curated trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website, drhyman.com, for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.
1:04 Speaker 00 So Alberto, it's so great to have you back on The Doctor's Pharmacy.
1:07 Speaker 01 Good to be with you, Mark.
1:08 Speaker 00 You know, so for those people listening, and we've been friends for 25 years. We've been to the Amazon together. We've taught workshops around the world together. We're now together at your house in Santa Fe here in New Mexico. And, you know, I'm recovering from back surgery, but we're not going to talk about my back today. We're going to talk about the brain.
1:25 Speaker 01 Let's talk about the brain. That's kind of close to your back. It's a little bit higher.
1:28 Speaker 00 It's at the bottom end of my brain. And you've written this new book, which has a very provocative title, which is called Growing a New Brain.
1:37 Speaker 01 That's right.
1:38 Speaker 00 So why do we need a new brain? What's wrong with our brain?
1:40 Speaker 01 Well, I'll tell you, what's important here is to understand that we grow a new brain already anyway, every seven, every 20 days. An entirely new brain, you know, at different rates of speed. We grow a new body every seven years, you know, skin cells every seven days. The lining of your gut is every three days. But we thought the brain didn't repair itself. Remember in college, we learned that you only had so many neurons and every-
2:08 Speaker 00 Mess them up with drugs, that's it.
2:10 Speaker 01 Every shot of tequila was 20,000 brain cells. Today, we know not only that we have stem cells, but that every neuron, through a process known as protein synthesis, regenerates itself.
2:23 Speaker 00 That's really remarkable. So what you're basically saying is that- That the science of the brain is sort of in a new era.
2:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:31 Speaker 00 What we used to think about the brain. We now are completely reevaluating and realizing that we have the capacity to impact our brain in ways that we never thought possible.
2:42 Speaker 01 Precisely.
2:43 Speaker 00 And I wrote a book about this fifteen year plus years ago called The Ultra Mind Solution, fixing your brain by fixing your body first.
2:50 Speaker 01 Precisely.
2:50 Speaker 00 And you previously wrote a book called Growing a New Body, which is based on a lot of the work we did together.
2:54 Speaker 01 We did, yeah.
2:55 Speaker 00 But this growing new brain book is very intriguing to me because it kind of challenges our notions about about a lot of the work that I think you do, which is shamanic healing, energy medicine.
3:06 Speaker 01 It's shamanic energy medicine.
3:08 Speaker 00 And dealing with a lot of the things that are, we think of as psychological.
3:12 Speaker 01 In fact, I'm going to put on my shaman's.
3:15 Speaker 00 All right.
3:15 Speaker 01 Shaw.
3:16 Speaker 00 There you go.
3:16 Speaker 01 Because, you know, I started out in a brain laboratory at San Francisco State and then I went to the Amazon. But I noticed that Gabor is using a shaman's shawl.
3:26 Speaker 00 I like that.
3:27 Speaker 01 And today I think we have to become neuro shamans. You know, rely on it because we studied the brain and we're looking at the hardware. But what about the mind? None of these brain scientists have anything to say about the mind.
3:40 Speaker 00 Well, that's it. I mean, the joke was that neurologists pay no attention to the mind and psychiatrists pay no attention to the brain. But the truth is, we have to do both. And so when you started in this work, you were really coming at it from the perspective of psychological healing.
3:56 Speaker 01 I was coming.
3:57 Speaker 00 And spiritual healing.
3:58 Speaker 01 Precisely.
3:58 Speaker 00 And energetic healing.
3:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:00 Speaker 00 And you realize you maybe came up against a wall and couldn't fully help people resolve a lot of their psychological, emotional, spiritual issues unless you also help them heal their brain, hence growing a new brain.
4:12 Speaker 01 Repair the brain. You got it. Our brains are broken today. And we know the list of the things that are breaking the brain. But we really don't know yet how to repair it, how to upgrade it. How do you upgrade the brain to create psychosomatic health? That's what we were investigating at San Francisco State. And when I got to the Amazon, I shut my lap down.
4:28 Speaker 00 Wait, I just want to stop there. You said psychosomatic health. Now, we've all heard of psychosomatic disease. It's all in your head.
4:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:35 Speaker 00 You're talking about. The opposite.
4:37 Speaker 01 Right. How do you do that? We know how to create psychosomatic disease. Basically, it's a stress hormones. You know, adrenaline, cortisol, the, the Amidala running the show, you being angry all the time. You're gonna get sick. We know that. But how do you create psychosomatic health and come to the optimize brain function, come to the state that the ancients used to call gnosis?
5:00 Speaker 00 Yeah.
5:01 Speaker 01 Which is direct knowing, which is, we think it's knowing all that happens when you operate from the lower brain, where you think you're a know all. Take a fifteen year old kid, you know?
5:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
5:12 Speaker 01 Why don't you leave now? Home now, honey, while you know everything. But we're talking about upgrading the brain so you know the all. And you come into the state of gnosis where you understand of how nature works, where you understand how you can create health.
5:27 Speaker 00 And it was sort of easier back then, right? With the indigenous people and the Incas five hundred years ago and the descendants of those Incas are the people you study with. And they didn't have environmental toxins. They didn't have social media. They didn't have uh, all shitty ultra-processed food. So what are the kind of insults that we've now had to deal with that have caused our brain to become so dysregulated? That we're seeing this, you know, rampant crisis of mental illness that we're seeing increasing violence. We just, you know, recently saw a shooter try to take out President Trump. I mean, that's just terrifying to me, right?
5:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, anxiety, the violence, the projection of the shadow. The enemy is the other. And we don't see it in ourselves. So we know these psychological mechanisms, but at a certain, when I shut my laboratory down, I was in the biology department, not in psychology, but in the biology department. And we had a small brain lab and we were in the section where you keep the brains, the formaldehyde. I was surrounded by two hundred brains, pickled brains.
6:26 Speaker 00 So bad. I actually recently tested my biological toxins and embedded in myself is still the formaldehyde from when I was in med school dissecting cadavers.
6:37 Speaker 01 Two years, two years in that lab, surrounded by brains. And I couldn't get a second opinion from any one of them. It's that's it was a terrible thing. Then I shut it down and I went to the Amazon to see how people protected the brain. Remember, Native American peoples had no writing.
6:53 Speaker 01 They had no record keeping. So how do you protect the wisdom, the knowledge of a tribe, of a society, of pyramid builders, of architecture? Because it's all stored in the brain, the mind of the elders. How do you protect the brain of the elders when you don't have writing? What happens if you forget how to make fire? That could be a big problem.
7:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, definitely.
7:16 Speaker 01 So that's what I began to study, how, and I was funded at that time by Big Pharma. I was a medical anthropologist and they wanted to know the big, the next big cure.
7:26 Speaker 00 Or all the drugs in the Amazon that they can reap and harvest.
7:28 Speaker 01 Precisely. And because in the Amazon, the rate of dementia is one out of a hundred people. In America is one out of five people.
7:38 Speaker 00 Wow.
7:38 Speaker 01 And primarily women, you know, women have a stronger incidence of Alzheimer's. So why did they know about the brain that we didn't? And the laboratory? How did they protect it? And we found it, we found the secret.
7:49 Speaker 00 Really?
7:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:50 Speaker 00 Okay, lay it on us.
7:51 Speaker 01 Totally.
7:52 Speaker 00 Dr. Valdo, what are you talking about?
7:54 Speaker 01 I'll tell you what it is. I'll tell you, it's about restarting systems that shut down at about the age of thirty-five. Which are the detoxification systems, which are the N R F two activators. That's what we know them to be.
8:08 Speaker 00 What's that? That's a big word. I know what it means. I bet most people listening don't know what an N R F two activator is.
8:14 Speaker 01 I can't pronounce it. But N R F two is.
8:17 Speaker 00 Nuclear Factor capa.
8:19 Speaker 01 Capabate, yeah. It's a, it's a protein that sits on the cell membrane. They're like the Navy SEALs. And when they're needed, because of some outside insult, they go in from the cell membrane into the nucleus. And they begin to switch on the genes to create health and silence the genes that create disease. Now, this was only discovered about twenty years ago. And the Johns Hopkins, Josh Hopkins researcher, they found in the laboratory is that these systems, which are the master detoxifying systems, begin to shut down at the age of thirty-five. But today we know how to turn them on again. We know that we have to get the password protected regions in our DNA to switch on
9:03 Speaker 01 these systems because biology invest heavily on the young.
9:08 Speaker 00 So what's the password?
9:10 Speaker 01 The password are certain plants that are the N R F two activators. And we know what's many of them are, and the Amazon is full of them. What we found in the Amazon was that, actually, we found this with our friend David Perlmutter, that the sacred plants, not the teacher plants, those were the psychedelics, which we can get to a little bit later, but the sacred plants were the ones that switched on your detoxification and regeneration systems. And today, we know what they are. You know, five day old broccoli sprouts. Broccoli is a huge N R F two activator. Coffee is an amazing N R F two activator. But there's the hormetic curve, the hormetic effect. If you do it for more than five days in a row, you begin to shut down the very systems you're beginning to turn on again. So you've got to cycle them.
9:55 Speaker 00 So this is a really important point you're making because, you know, all these plant compounds that we think of as medicine can be medicine for us, but they're actually the defenses for the plants. So they're they're poisons. And the dose makes the poison. And what you're saying is these are, I think this is phyto hormesis is the actual term. I've written about it in my book on longevity, because it's such an interesting concept that these stress molecules in plants, and the more stressed a plant is, the more it makes of these defense molecules.
10:23 Speaker 01 Precisely.
10:23 Speaker 00 The more it activates our body's own embedded longevity repair pathways.
10:28 Speaker 01 And you've got to have the the ones that are bioavailable. Like, the most bioavailable one that we know is sulforaphane, which comes from broccoli sprouts, five day old broccoli sprouts. You've got to chew them well. Imagine you're a rabbit trying to eat a broccoli sprout, and then there are these toxins being produced, and which is the defense mechanism that all plants have, that for us becomes medicine at the right dose. And that will switch on these very same systems, because the body thinks that suddenly you're consuming a poison, and it'll mount a huge antioxidant defense. It'll start producing glutathione, which shuts down normally at about the age of thirty
11:10 Speaker 01 five, will begin producing superoxide dismutase, a massive production of these. But if you keep eating those broccoli sprouts every day, it'll shut them down, say, hey, this is not poisonous.
11:22 Speaker 00 Right, because your cells upregulate and downregulate in response to the environmental cues. That's why you get. Alcohol tolerance or opioid tolerance, you need more and more to have the same benefit, right?
11:33 Speaker 01 Precisely. And this is what the Amazon indigenous people discovered without knowing what N R F two stands for. They just know that these were the sacred plants that promoted longevity.
11:45 Speaker 00 But they weren't any broccoli sprouts in, in, in the Amazon.
11:48 Speaker 01 No, they have a bunch of other, uña de gato, cat's claw. There's fifty others that are extraordinary, but we can't get them in the West because we don't know the quality that we're getting and we don't know how accurate the dosing really is. It's all into dosing.
12:02 Speaker 00 Those other ones like curcumin.
12:04 Speaker 01 Curcumin is an amazing one, but curcumin is five percent bioavailable, whereas sulforaphane from five day old broccoli sprouts you grow at home, you gotta turn your kitchen into your laboratory.
12:16 Speaker 00 So I gotta be hippies and grow sprouts in our kitchen now?
12:19 Speaker 01 Totally.
12:20 Speaker 00 Please do that in college.
12:21 Speaker 01 Five day old broccoli, homegrown broccoli sprouts are eighty-five percent bioavailable. So do your curcumin, do your golden milk, but be sure that you pay attention to it. And it's in my book, my most recent book, um, which is the Grow New Body Cookbook.
12:36 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:37 Speaker 01 All of the science is there, but now for growing a new brain, we need the N R F two activators and the things that will promote neuroplasticity and neurogenesis.
12:47 Speaker 00 Yeah, and there's other things you talk about besides these plant compounds. And you, you talk about the other major factor that needs to get turned on to repair the brain called B D N F in the book.
12:57 Speaker 01 Precisely.
12:57 Speaker 00 So what is B D N F?
12:59 Speaker 01 B D N F stands for brain.
13:01 Speaker 00 Not B D S M, it's B D N F.
13:02 Speaker 01 B D N F, B D, brain derived, coming from the brain, neurotropic factors, factors that regenerate the brain. Now this switches on the production of stem cells. So that one of the best B D N F inducers is mother's milk.
13:18 Speaker 00 Wow.
13:19 Speaker 01 But it's hard to get at the health food stores, you know, you can't get it. But because mother's milk is fifty percent D H A, omega three fatty acid. D H A omega threes are promoters, turn on the production of B D N F. So does exercise, meditation, but the classic, the best one is, is D H A, is omega three. And in fact, Nate, you know, I'm an anthropologist, but at the. Native American peoples in North America used DHA as their money, as their currency.
13:51 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, it was, right?
13:53 Speaker 01 It was a fish called, what was that fish called? The candlefish. It was so rich in oil that you could put a wick and a dried fish and light the wick, light your fish and it would be your candle.
14:03 Speaker 00 It was in the Pacific Northwest, yeah, the fish was in there.
14:06 Speaker 01 Pacific Northwest and they would extract the oil, even today, they still do it. Hundred percent rich in DHA and that's what they used to trade with. And also it turned on the higher brain production of stem cells and it repaired the hippocampus, which is why there's so much trauma today. Today, trauma has become as common as air.
14:26 Speaker 00 What's the hippocampus and how does trauma impact that?
14:29 Speaker 01 The hippocampus is the learning center in the brain and it's rich in cortisol receptors. I mean, it's full of cortisol receptors. And when you have trauma, when you switch on the fight or flight system, and it's not fight or flight that does it, fight or flight, you get to fight, you get to run. It's when you can't fight and you can't run. If you're six years old and an uncle is fondling you, you can't fight, you can't run, you freeze. And you get into freeze. And when you get into freeze, your brain is the wash and cortisol and adrenaline. Now, if your mother wasn't sure that she could rely on her partner to take care of her and her baby, you were born with your fight or flight turned on.
15:14 Speaker 01 The HPA axis, hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. Your brain was, because cortisol and adrenaline go right through the placental barrier.
15:24 Speaker 00 Yeah.
15:25 Speaker 01 So the Hopi have a saying that before you're born, that you have a twin, an invisible twin, all of us do. And before we're born, the twin looks out of the uterus to see if the world is safe. And if the world is safe, it says, come, come on, come on, let's go out into this world. It's loving, it's, if it's not safe, part of you is not born. And you're born with soul loss, what they call in the in native societies, they call soul loss. So you have to do a soul recovery. But when you're born incomplete like that, we know the brain chemistry now.
16:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
16:02 Speaker 01 So this is the, you're born with your fight or flight switched on. That damages your hippocampus. You cannot have a new experience. You cannot learn. You can't store memories. That's what the hippocampus does.
16:13 Speaker 00 See, in your book, you talk about sort of how we, we need to heal our bodies to heal our spirit and our mind. And can you talk more about that? Because it's really kind of goes to what you're talking about. You know, Carolyn Mace used to say, your biography becomes your biology.
16:29 Speaker 01 Yep.
16:29 Speaker 00 And, and, and what you're essentially saying is that your, your biography, your story gets transmuted into biological signals, along with all the various other things that we're exposed to in our modern world, our processed food, the environmental toxins, chronic stress, digital overload, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But, but in order to actually really heal and to become whole human beings, we, we both have to heal the brain and the mind and the soul.
16:57 Speaker 01 And the body. You know, and you know, in the West, we practice medicine by specialty, you know, geography. The neurologists don't talk to the GI docs and most of what's happening in your brain is coming from your gut.
17:10 Speaker 00 Yeah.
17:10 Speaker 01 So there's no people that do the entire system. And this is what
17:14 Speaker 00 Well, I do.
17:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. You, you and two or three others that I know. But this is what the shamans, the indigenous people do. They look at the entire system. And not only the whole entire body and mind, but how you're relating to the ecosystem, to nature and to the family system and to your destiny. Like, an important part of the healing is finding out what is it that you came to do here in this world? And when you go on that quest, even if you don't find out what it is you came to do, but you're looking, searching for it, suddenly the universe passes you back. Mother nature begins to support you in your healing. And this is what I learned in the Amazon, because,
17:55 Speaker 01 you know, I was in the biology department and in biology, you believe that Mother Nature, that Gaia, the planet, loves her species, but she doesn't care about the individual members of the species. You know, she cares about the species. You and I are expendable. But the shamans believe that the minute you come into service of the mother, that you become an earth keeper, that you become conscious of the impact of your actions in the earth, that she takes a personal interest in you. And then magic begins to happen. They call it magic, we call it health.
18:32 Speaker 01 So that, so that one of the things that I stopped doing, I always used to bless my food, you know. I stopped blessing my food, now I ask my food to bless me. This is coming from the mother. So your return to the mother is so important because what happens at that point is that you heal shame. And shame is the most bedeviling, befuddling, uh, toxic emotion that we can have. Shame means I am not worthy, I'm not a good person. And that's the very first experience that we have emotion in the West, because our mythology. See, when I was in the Amazon, I would ask people, what's your mythology of origin, your first story ever told?
19:16 Speaker 01 And our first story ever told is we got banished from the garden.
19:19 Speaker 00 Yeah, they bite that apple and we're screwed for life.
19:21 Speaker 01 Because we were ashamed. God comes and says, where are you guys? And why are you hiding? And the, um, and Anna says, because we are ashamed. So we heal the shame. The shame is the deadliest, uh, toxic emotion that we can have. And the way we heal it is by returning to the mother and finding out that she loves us.
19:42 Speaker 00 And, and part of that you're, you're talking about in, in the book, Growing a New Brain, is really about how to use food and lifestyle strategies and supplements and other tools to help actually sort of repair a lot of that damage that.
19:57 Speaker 01 Look, you can't grow a new brain on french fries.
19:59 Speaker 00 No.
20:00 Speaker 01 You can't.
20:02 Speaker 01 You gotta have the right
20:03 Speaker 00 You would have the french fries for dinner, Don Alberto?
20:05 Speaker 01 The right neuro nutrients to be able to do that. And an essential one of these is tryptophan. So you know, tryptophan is a precursor for serotonin. And serotonin is ubiquitous, it's everywhere in nature. So trees have it, butterflies, plants have serotonin. And for us, it's a neurotransmitter. For a plant, it tells you when to go flower. But I suspect it does that for us too, when do we blossom?
20:33 Speaker 00 I mean, you've seen a plant that looks kind of depressed, you know, and it's kind of saggy and sad looking.
20:37 Speaker 01 Put a little bit of tryptophan, and today, we can order it from Amazon, you know.
20:41 Speaker 00 Is that what's in that plant food that you put in your can?
20:44 Speaker 01 You don't have to go to the Amazon, you can order it from Amazon. And it's, uh, and tryptophan or 5-HTP is a precursor for serotonin. And serotonin is what repairs the hippocampus. This is absolutely the key, and we're serotonin deprived right now. Our foods are devoid of serotonin. And a hundred years ago, a pea, a sweet pea, had twice the amount of tryptophan than it does today because we're breeding foods for sweetness.
21:13 Speaker 00 For starch, not protein.
21:14 Speaker 01 Precisely.
21:15 Speaker 00 Tryptophan's an amino acid.
21:16 Speaker 01 It's an amino acid.
21:28 Speaker 01 We have a hunter-gatherer genome, evolved 2 million years ago. Our DNA hasn't changed that much. In 2 million years, when we were hunter-gatherers, primarily, we were gatherers, scavenger-gatherers. We would find roadkill and bring some meat home, but most of the time, we were, we were gatherers. And, and the animal protein was very scarce. So the transport system to get tryptophan into the brain gives priority to the three amino acids that are the branched-chain amino acids, valine, isovaline, and leucine. Prioritizes them because we had such little, for millions, thousands of years, so little animal product.
22:13 Speaker 01 And then tryptophan has to take a second place because you need these for the protein synthesis. But today we're serotonin deprived and that's why so many people are in the SSRIs, which are flooding the brain with serotonin to help you stabilize your mood and your hippocampus repair.
22:31 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:32 Speaker 01 And the hippocampus is what we're learning happens.
22:35 Speaker 00 So interesting when you're talking about this because, you know, for years I've done diagnostic testing, which allows me to look at the effects of inflammation on neurotransmitters. And so we measure something in the urine that is called quinolinic acid, which is a byproduct of of tryptophan and 5-ht metabolism. When it's there's inflammation that diverts it away from producing serotonin to produce this very toxic compound called quinolinic acid, which is found very high in people who are depressed or have autism or dementia and it's it's it's I can tell immediately if someone has brain inflammation.
23:15 Speaker 00 The question is why? And so a lot of the disruption in serotonin regulation, I think, is because of our inflammatory diet and our gut microbiome. And you do talk a lot about the gut-brain.
23:25 Speaker 01 We do talk.
23:26 Speaker 00 You told us about this framework of how the brain repair has to also start in the gut.
23:32 Speaker 01 You know, the thing I really don't like about being interviewed by you, Mark, is you've written about it.
23:39 Speaker 01 Already, you know, but luckily I don't read all your books, so I come up with my own.
23:44 Speaker 00 Well, we're coming at the same thing from two different lenses, right? The shamanic lens and the medical lens.
23:48 Speaker 01 Precisely.
23:49 Speaker 00 But we end up in exactly the same spot.
23:51 Speaker 01 Precisely. And the thing is that today we have to become our own chief scientist because we can't rely on the science. You know, the editor in chief of the British Medical Journal wrote that 50% of the articles that they publish are bogus.
24:09 Speaker 01 They're bad science, but we just don't know which 50%. So we have to be very careful researchers.
24:15 Speaker 00 Yeah.
24:15 Speaker 01 Find out who we trust, and especially when it comes to probiotics and comes to the gut. Because the probiotics we buy at the store are only 1% of the whole gut probiotic system, which are the anaerobic ones, the oxygen breathers. 90% or 95% of our gut is the non-oxygen breathers, the anaerobic ones that nobody, you can't buy them. You can only feed them and hope that they
24:43 Speaker 00 Grow.
24:44 Speaker 01 That they grow and they get strong, because that's where you produce serotonin. Your gut transforms tryptophan into serotonin, and then it gets taken by the vagus nerve and by the bloodstream across the blood-brain barrier and into the brain. There's this little teeny bit of serotonin produced in the brain by the raffin nucleus. Very, one out of a million neurons are serotonin producers. Most of it comes from your gut. If your gut's broken, you're not producing serotonin, which then the pineal gland, once it gets to your brain, if it gets to your brain, turns into melatonin. So you can sleep.
25:24 Speaker 00 Yeah.
25:25 Speaker 01 And if your fight or flight system is attenuated, is toned down, if you're not in constant alert, waiting for danger, or who's the shooter that's gonna come by? You know what kids are most terrified of today is going to high school, because there's such, you read about such danger. If your fight or flight system is toned down, then the pineal gland can not only produce melatonin, but it'll begin to methylate serotonin, which is a tryptamine, and you end up with di-2-dimethyltryptamine, which is ayahuasca.
26:00 Speaker 00 Whoa.
26:01 Speaker 01 Which is the brain produces. And all of the psychedelics, by the way, work on serotonin receptors in the brain.
26:08 Speaker 00 So LSD, psychedelic mushrooms, psilocybin.
26:14 Speaker 01 LSD, ayahuasca, which is the most powerful psychedelic known to humans, is produced by the brain. That's why we have receptor sites for it, but you have to get the serotonin in there. And then you wake up the higher brain, and this is what allows you to create psychosomatic health.
26:31 Speaker 00 Hmm.
26:31 Speaker 01 Because you have the experience of oneness. Of communion, of belonging. You understand how life works and how you're part of it.
26:39 Speaker 00 Wow. And so, so part of the healing of the brain, you're saying is healing the gut? How do you, how do you recommend people do that in your book?
26:48 Speaker 01 Well, you know, there's a dozen books written about these, including a couple by you.
26:53 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
26:54 Speaker 01 How do you repair?
26:55 Speaker 00 I'm curious of what you've learned, you know, from a different set of lenses, looking at
26:59 Speaker 01 Yep.
27:00 Speaker 00 how we start thinking about the gut. You know, for example, visiting you in Chile, you have this big bunch of raspberries. It's kind of a culture medium for probiotic, Saccharomyces boulardii, that's really powerful in regulating.
27:14 Speaker 01 This is the key for us. The work that we do is a product of Saccharomyces boulardii, which is actually a yeast. So it's not really a probiotic, but it's yeast that acts like the United Nations peacekeeper inside the gut. And it begins to regulate the colony and it gets rid of Candida.
27:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
27:34 Speaker 01 Which has taken over the gut of most people in America today. Candida is a yeast that proliferates the minute you take antibiotics. And you can look at your tongue and if it's got a white film on it, you've got Candida. Now, the purpose of Candida, everybody should have a little bit of this yeast.
27:51 Speaker 00 And there are many other yeast and fungus that grow in the gut, too, yeah.
27:54 Speaker 01 But especially of Candida, is to ferment you after you die. This is like nature's garbage disposal system.
28:00 Speaker 00 Kind of like the last of us TV show where you get eaten by the mushrooms.
28:04 Speaker 01 This is it, yeah. So, but you don't want that to happen a day too early, of course. So Saccharomyces boulardii, and this is in my website, I've got, you got instructions, it's in my books, is actually a yeast that competes with Candida, brings balance to the gut, especially to this kind of dark area, this, this kind of black hole that we have in our guts of the, of the anaerobes, the non-oxygen breathers. And it brings balance to them and allows them to proliferate and it gets rid of the bad parasites, it gets rid of the HP Lory, for example. There's really good science behind the use of Saccharomyces boulardii. And it's been used with babies and children for 50 years to stop diarrhea.
28:49 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's quite incredible. In fact, they use it clinically in medicine for people who have C. diff as a treatment.
28:54 Speaker 01 Precisely.
28:55 Speaker 00 C. diff, which is because of Clostridium bacteria that can kill you. I had it and it almost killed me. And yeah, it's a powerful confound. We call it a yeast against yeast.
29:04 Speaker 01 This is, and the beauty of Boulardie, Saccharomyces Boulardie, is that it doesn't stay in your gut, doesn't colonize. It leaves after about six, seven days.
29:13 Speaker 00 You know, one of the things we see a lot on our stool test when we do stool analysis is a reduction in something called IgA. That's an antibody, the first line of defense of your immune system.
29:22 Speaker 01 Right.
29:23 Speaker 00 And when you say have COVID antibodies, so those are the defense against COVID, right? So you have a system in your gut which interacts with the outside world. And typically, when our guts being such a mess, we see a lot of people with suppressed IgA levels. And the Saccharomyces helps to bring it up. So you're talking about these sort of ancient organisms that we've symbiotically evolved with to help regulate our biology and restart and renew processes that had been going on for hundreds of thousands of years.
29:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:49 Speaker 00 But we kind of messed them up.
29:51 Speaker 01 Yeah. You know, if you want to see animals in Africa, you go to where the food is. That's where the animals go. And that's what these bacteria did in our gut also. They went to where the food is.
30:03 Speaker 00 Yeah.
30:04 Speaker 01 So they get to eat first.
30:06 Speaker 00 That's true, they eat first.
30:07 Speaker 01 They eat first and then there's actually about 10 levels, 10 layers of probiotics in your gut. And then we get to eat last because one layer, they begin to break down our foods. So Boulardie is an excellent remedy and then you've got to feed the others. And what do they feed on? They feed on the stuff that you don't digest.
30:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, one of the, one of the most interesting things I discovered in the last years, especially when I got sick with ulcerative colitis after C. diff, was this whole body of research, not just about fiber, not just about prebiotics and probiotics, but about polyphenols, which are phytochemicals that you're talking about from these sacred plants that actually feed the good bacteria too. So they actually love that stuff.
30:49 Speaker 01 This is, you've got to feed them. This is the best way because the probiotic market is an $80 billion market annually. And most of the stuff doesn't work. Unfortunately, there's some good ones, but none of them work with the anaerobes. The only way to work with them is with ubiquinol, with not with quercetin, with quercetin, the polyphenol-rich compounds that will feed them. And the fiber also is really important. So beginning with the gut and then you find the keystone species. So in Yellowstone National Park, they shot many of the wolves, drove the wolves away and they found that the whole ecosystem went out of balance.
31:27 Speaker 00 Yeah.
31:28 Speaker 01 And they reintroduced the wolves and the ecosystem went right back into balance. And one of the keystone species is the Archimancia municipalia. So if you work with these keystone species, they bring order to the ecosystem.
31:42 Speaker 00 Yeah. The acromancy is really important. We've done a lot of work on the podcast talking about it because it's such an important. But I had very low levels when I had colitis and I took pomegranate, green tea, and I took cranberry in high doses.
31:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:57 Speaker 00 Every day in concentrates and it regrew my acromancy.
32:01 Speaker 01 Yep, it's incredible how quickly they respond. But you've got to get rid of the bad guys first. Sometimes you have to take fluconazole or you've got to take something to get rid of the of the yeast, which colonized very rapidly. And then you've got to reset your vagus nerve because the vagus nerve is the transport, is the highway, taking serotonin to the brain.
32:21 Speaker 00 Wow, so we've covered a lot here. I, I, I, we've covered, you know, the ancient ways that our brain is designed that we can actually activate to grow a new brain and to deal with both the mind and the soul and the biological things that go wrong with our brain as a way of actually accelerating our growth as human beings. Because at the end of the day, this is what it's about. Health is not just about, you know, being healthy, not sick. It's about actually being able to express your life in a way that's fulfilled and whole and alive. And if you don't have mental, physical, social, spiritual, emotional.
32:56 Speaker 00 Brain health, body health, you're not gonna get there.
32:59 Speaker 01 You're not gonna get it. Yeah.
33:01 Speaker 00 So there's a bunch of other stuff you talk about in the book that I think is quite interesting. What is, what is this whole idea of mitochondria?
33:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:06 Speaker 00 And we've written a book on Power Up, I think it was called Power Up the Brain?
33:10 Speaker 01 Power Up Your Brain with David Perlmutter.
33:12 Speaker 00 Who's a really good close friend. He's on the podcast, is incredible neurologist. And I was like, that was your kind of first foray into, out of the shamanic work into like the.
33:20 Speaker 01 Well, see the mitochondria, see the thing is that there's nothing more spiritual than biology.
33:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, a hundred percent.
33:26 Speaker 01 Begin with. I mean, it's a miracle.
33:29 Speaker 00 Like the Tao, I call it, call it the Tao of biology, like the Tao of physics, yeah.
33:32 Speaker 01 And the, and the people that, that say the psychologists are great, you, it's good to be able to tell your life story to someone. But you can't, you can tell your life story, but how do you change your story when your story is deeply biological? And it's not just what happened to you when you were little. So the, the perspective that I learned from the shamans in the Amazon is that trauma is not what happened to you. It's a story you wrap around it. There are no traumatic events, there are only traumatic experiences. And to heal that experience that's been damaging your hippocampus, you've got to support your hippocampus. You can't write a new story about your life journey until you begin to repair the hippocampus.
34:15 Speaker 00 So how do we do that, doctor?
34:16 Speaker 01 You cannot, you gotta change your brain to change your mind. You can't change your mind without changing your brain. That means intervening with the hippocampus first and foremost. Repairing the gut, but the quick fixes are things like L-tryptophan, 5-HTP, the precursors for serotonin, and in six weeks it begins to work and you begin to feel happier. Serotonin, you know, is the happy molecule.
34:40 Speaker 00 Yeah.
34:41 Speaker 01 So then the, then you have to go on the quest. And the quest is, the quest for. What am I doing here? Why did I come to do in this life? Did I come to spend another year in therapy? What is your personal quest? And how can you make a difference in the world? Leave this place a better world than the way you found it? And that's what's gonna bring you. Then you're not going to be fighting with your body. You're not gonna, you're gonna begin to shift your priorities to eating natural, seasonal, local, organic, to becoming kinder, gentler person.
35:18 Speaker 00 Yeah.
35:19 Speaker 01 To forgive more easily and to, uh, to love yourself and to make your way back to the garden, back to Eden. You gotta drop the whole shame story, which is, I am not worthy.
35:31 Speaker 00 Yeah.
35:31 Speaker 01 You only do that, you cannot do it through psychology. You gotta do it by returning to the mother, by becoming an earthkeeper, a steward of our planet, in your own little way.
35:43 Speaker 00 When you're talking, when I, when I hear you saying in the subtext there is that, you know, reestablishing a relationship with nature is really critical here.
35:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:50 Speaker 00 And nature is our biology. And unless we understand our biology, everything from our gut microbiome to our mitochondria, to all the different things that affect us, we're not gonna be able to get there.
36:03 Speaker 01 Yeah. You can never be disconnected from nature because you are nature.
36:07 Speaker 00 Yeah.
36:07 Speaker 01 You can be disconnected in your own way, but you are nature. You embrace your nature and you recognize that, um, that you're on a spiritual quest.
36:17 Speaker 00 Yeah.
36:18 Speaker 01 To find out who, you know, the three ancient questions that every spiritual tradition has, who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?
36:27 Speaker 00 Hmm.
36:28 Speaker 01 And you know, the church answered that for us for a long time. And then science came around and, you know, said you didn't, you know, you came from a primordial soup. Who am I? You're a bunch of molecules and, and where am I going? Nowhere.
36:43 Speaker 00 Right, right. Disorienting.
36:46 Speaker 01 But the spiritual traditions are about you finding, going on the quest. You begin by asking the questions, but you gotta get to the higher brain. The problem is that our lower brain, our limbic brain and the underthought brain, needs ceremony in order to change.
37:03 Speaker 00 Hmm.
37:04 Speaker 01 And that's why you have ceremonies in every culture, every society in the world.
37:09 Speaker 00 Well, what's interesting is that most doctors around the world.
37:14 Speaker 00 Do ceremony.
37:15 Speaker 01 Do ceremony, yeah.
37:15 Speaker 00 That's how they heal with ceremony. I'm gonna tell you a quick story. I was, I was in Mongolia on this horseback trip where Genghis Khan, you know, rode his horses and it was an incredible trip. And I got the worst friggin hiccups that wouldn't go away for three days. They literally were thinking of evacuating me for a case of terminal.
37:37 Speaker 01 Medevac.
37:38 Speaker 00 And we got, we got to this little village and it was in remote Mongolia and I don't even know where it was. And there was a, a yurt, one yurt, and there was a family that lived there and apparently the, the elder women, woman there was a shaman. Among her other duties of herding goats.
37:54 Speaker 01 Sure.
37:55 Speaker 00 And yaks. So she brought me in her yurt and she, uh, took these stones and bones and this kind of sacred objects and kind of threw them and kind of read what was going on with me and, and then she took my shirt off and, uh, she put rancid yak butter all over my belly and started rubbing and chanting and rubbing and, and after three days of, of sheer misery and actually fear, because there's a lot of serious things that
38:25 Speaker 01 Sure.
38:26 Speaker 00 chronic hiccups can mean like cancer.
38:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:28 Speaker 00 I was like, oh my God, am I got cancer? They went away. I don't know.
38:32 Speaker 01 You had.
38:33 Speaker 00 Ceremony, or they just would have gotten away anyway, but the point was that, that there, these ancient cultures, uh, their healers are also very embedded in both nature and in ritual.
38:45 Speaker 01 Yeah. And the ritual is so important because you're giving the, the person permission to get well. You're giving them permission to explore something new in their life. That's why we have graduation ceremonies. That's why you go into the military. It's full of ritual and ceremony. You need permission from the healer and from yourself and you need to go through a little rite of passage. It doesn't need to be yak butter on your chest and your genitals, you know? So the, uh, uh, it needs to be a small rite of passage that you create with your provider. Sometimes it's prescribing a medication that'll do it. Yes. But if you can also orient the person towards their quest. Put them on a quest. Ah, then Helios accelerated tremendously, but to be on a quest, you need the brain nutrients.
39:30 Speaker 01 And the neuro nutrients are the stuff we're deficient in.
39:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
39:33 Speaker 01 You need to detox the brain because we're exposed to so many, um, so many toxins. Remember the body in his wisdom stores toxins in fat.
39:42 Speaker 00 Yeah.
39:43 Speaker 01 And the brain is 70% fat.
39:46 Speaker 00 Yeah.
39:46 Speaker 01 And this is the kind of fat you don't want to lose, you know, when you go on a diet.
39:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's so interesting, Robert, you're talking about the brain and fat and the decline of our brain function. And, you know, one of the things as a functional medicine doctor is I'm always looking for, you know, what are the emerging scientific discoveries that can help us to kind of help our patients? And, and there's been a new set of diagnostics, which allows us to see things that we could never see before. Like imagine the discovery of the microscope or the telescope. And now before we had to sort of, we kind of knew everybody's poison. Like if we did autopsy studies, we could do biopsies of fat tissue. We can measure everybody's just a load of got a load of pesticides and dioxin and DDT.
40:23 Speaker 01 P C P's and the.
40:24 Speaker 00 Plastics and phthalates and di, you know, pesticides and B P A, you name it. But we never could measure that in real life humans very easily because in the blood it, it kind of goes into your fat. Most of it. And there's a new test that I've been doing out of Germany that measures intracellular toxins. And I have one patient with dementia and another one with Parkinson's, which are both neurodegenerative diseases. And we're seeing more and more of these problems.
40:49 Speaker 01 Yep.
40:49 Speaker 00 And.
40:51 Speaker 01 They're rampant.
40:52 Speaker 00 They're rampant and, and what was amazing was we can now measure these levels of cellular toxins. And using a process of replacing the fat in the cell membrane.
41:01 Speaker 01 Yep.
41:01 Speaker 00 We can get rid of them using phospholipids, which is what their cell membranes are made of. It's really quite amazing.
41:07 Speaker 01 You know, the especially when you look at the statistics, if you get to be 75, one out of. Two people will have diagnosable Alzheimer's. If you get to be eight, I'm sorry, one out of three, you get to be eighty, one out of two people.
41:20 Speaker 00 Yeah.
41:21 Speaker 01 This is, this didn't exist a hundred years ago, before Dr. Alzheimer's got to put his name on this illness he identified. In the Amazon, the thing that amazed me is that the incidence of dementia is one out of a hundred people. There's very little hard to see.
41:37 Speaker 00 It's one percent there and twenty percent here.
41:40 Speaker 01 Twenty percent here. It's crazy and it's of course related to our lifestyles.
41:45 Speaker 00 So, learning how to grow new brain, a pretty important topic.
41:48 Speaker 01 It's really important and remember, the brain is fat, so you gotta give it the good fats. You cannot turn on the higher brain until you go first in a ketogenic diet and doesn't need to be, you know, eating meat three times a day. But you gotta go into autophagy, you gotta go into start recycling cellular waste and eliminating. Man, we know how to do that now. The beauty of it is not only do we have the diagnostics, we know how to reverse this stuff. We know how to create a new brain. We know how to help people grow a healthy brain. That's not only gonna prevent the dementia, it's gonna let them step into this place of gnosis, of wisdom.
42:26 Speaker 00 Yeah. It's interesting, you know, we've had Chris Palmer on the podcast, I'll probably have him back again, who's a Harvard psychiatrist, talking about mitochondria as the core dysfunctional unit that is causing most mental illness, everything from autism to schizophrenia to depression and bipolar disease. And then we have to treat the mitochondria. But you're also saying that in terms of the aging brain, and not just, not just that, but also just having a healthy brain, we really have to focus on.
42:53 Speaker 01 You got it.
42:53 Speaker 00 On that. So, how, how does that come up in your book?
42:55 Speaker 01 You know, the mitochondria, it's a big section on mitochondria and how do we restore mitochondria? They're fuel factories inside every cell and your brain and your heart have the highest concentration of these fuel fact, energy factories in mitochondria, but they're not only producing energy, they are.
43:15 Speaker 01 Actually in charge of the death clock. And whoever runs the death clock runs the show. They tell cells when they need to die so new ones can be born, so regeneration can take place. But mitochondria have, they're actually, they don't belong to us. They are actually bacteria that join our cells, they formed a eukaryotic cell millions of years ago. So that it cut a deal with this multi-cellular organism saying, hey, I'm gonna give you energy, you keep me protected, keep me warm, keep me safe. And that's what, that's what they do. But what they do is they turn, basically they store energy in the form of sunlight.
43:56 Speaker 00 Yeah.
43:57 Speaker 01 Of ATP, of a molecule called ATP, adenosine triphosphate. This is like the little sparklers that kids use. And when that, they're depleted, that energy becomes, goes from being ATP to ADP, adenosine, mono AMP, adenosine monophosphate, your fuel tank is empty.
44:18 Speaker 00 Yeah.
44:18 Speaker 01 And the, um, so this process of storing energy, of processing energy, of protecting the mitochondria who have thirty-eight genes in a ring that are unprotected. Cause our DNA is twenty-four thousand genes and a double.
44:35 Speaker 00 And your brain cells have more mitochondria than any other cell in your body, per cell.
44:40 Speaker 01 And they are the feminine life force.
44:42 Speaker 00 Like twenty thousand, fifty thousand.
44:45 Speaker 01 Per neuron.
44:45 Speaker 00 Per, per cell.
44:46 Speaker 01 Yeah. And we only get the mitochondria from our mothers. So they're, they're what the, I heard the Amazon shamans saying, you know, your people, their feminine life force is very weak. And then David Perlmutter said to me, of course, it's mitochondria.
45:02 Speaker 00 That's right, that's right.
45:03 Speaker 01 Cause we get it from the mother. So how do we protect, repair? And here's where we get into zombie cells.
45:10 Speaker 00 Yeah, talk some about zombie cells. These are the zombies like.
45:14 Speaker 01 Like the ones in Haiti.
45:15 Speaker 00 The spirituals, no, you're not talking about that.
45:18 Speaker 01 We kind of, because zombie cells, these cells are neither living nor dead. And they're actually a, a cancer protection mechanism that every cell has.
45:31 Speaker 01 So if a cell is not able to copy its DNA, its information accurately to a daughter cell, mother cell, they're, they're mother cells and daughter cells, there are no, there are no daddy cells. If it doesn't copy correctly, it'll neuter that cell, so it cannot replicate.
45:48 Speaker 00 Yeah.
45:49 Speaker 01 Because we call that metastases.
45:51 Speaker 00 Yeah.
45:51 Speaker 01 So it'll neuter it, but it won't kill it. So these cells are not able to reproduce, they're neither living nor dead, but they're mitochondria. They become fat and swollen and are starting to produce chemical signals, chemokines, cytokines that are pro-inflammatory and they're very toxic, but it's a cancer protection mechanism. But when you have too many of these, remember the problem here is the copying. If the copying is not accurate, they get neutered. And what interferes with the copying is the signal to noise ratio, all the toxins we're exposed to. These cells begin to build and we end up with cancers. These, these senescent cells are called, and they were discovered
46:32 Speaker 01 um by James Kirkland at Mayo Clinic, who did a beautiful gerontologist who said, I'm tired of prescribing walkers and wheelchairs, how do we begin to deal with the causes of aging? And he found that there were senolytic agents that actually switched on, the kill switch, turned it back on in these cells. And you could get rid of them, you could do away with them.
46:57 Speaker 00 You could kill the zombie cells, which are also called senescent cells. Senescent. Senolytics is, senescence is aging and senolytic means to kill aging.
47:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
47:07 Speaker 00 Kill the aging cells.
47:08 Speaker 01 Kill the aging cells.
47:09 Speaker 00 So, so how does that work? How do you do that?
47:11 Speaker 01 Well, you, we don't know exactly, at least I don't know how they work, but they seem to switch back on the kill switch in mitochondria.
47:18 Speaker 00 And what are the therapies they're using?
47:20 Speaker 01 And the therapies are combining things like quercetin and fiscitin. Fiscitin is made from strawberries.
47:27 Speaker 00 Yeah.
47:27 Speaker 01 And quercetin is, is polyphenol, it's made from onion skins, a variety of products, natural products, and it's a hit and run intervention. Four or five days and, and I have a senolytic protocol that we use in, in our retreat center in Chile that you've been to. And in four or five days, you do away, it's a one and done treatment.
47:53 Speaker 01 That you need to repeat, we're finding out three or four times a year because we got forty years or fifty years of senescent cells in us. And that, what that does is to basically reset the system. You don't have this burden of zombie cells that you need to, that you're, that you're functioning with. It cleans you out.
48:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's true. Also, there's a great study out of Israel where they looked at, I talked about in my book, Young Forever, where they use hyperbaric oxygen over sixty sessions. I actually am doing it right now. I just came from it because of my back surgery to heal the wound. But the, uh, the beauty of the, the hyperbaric is that it, it actually creates a stress, but it kill, also kills the zombie cells.
48:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. And this is, I think, essential, absolutely essential. Our protocol is not only folic acid, quercetin, which is commonly used for this, because this will kill the zombie cells, but how do you get rid of them? So you gotta work on the transport system and support the liver and eliminating them. So we're combining it with, um, with alpha-lipoidic acid and with, um, liver support, including glutathione or glutathione to help the transport and eliminate them out of the body so they're not just sitting there.
49:06 Speaker 00 This is amazing. We're talking mitochondria, zombie cells, the microbiome, serotonin, uh, you know.
49:13 Speaker 01 But see, this is, this is plant-based. This is working with, and the reason you're, you're gonna hear a lot more about senescent cells because we're getting to molecular solutions, to pharmaceutical solutions.
49:26 Speaker 00 Yeah.
49:27 Speaker 01 Um, but this is available today. Folic acid is strawberries. You'd have to eat thirty pounds of strawberries to get the same effect.
49:36 Speaker 00 You can take it as a supplement.
49:38 Speaker 01 But it's an amazing supplement, four or five day intervention that lowers your burden of these toxic cells that are pro-inflammatory.
49:47 Speaker 00 Yeah. One of these, you know, um, It's so fascinating is that, you know, we can start to embed these practices into our daily life. And you've written this book, Growing a New Brain, which is not just talking about the theory. You've talked about case stories, you've talked about
50:03 Speaker 01 And how to do it.
50:04 Speaker 00 And how to do it.
50:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:04 Speaker 00 So can you maybe share some stories about how this would be applied? What are the kinds of things people are doing? How does it work?
50:11 Speaker 01 First, let me share a story about how I kind of got into on this track. Because I was running a small lab at San Francisco State. We were looking at can we create psychosomatic health? What are the mechanisms? And I got frustrated at one point, shut the lab down and went to the Amazon to see what they did. People that had no technology, but they had the plants, the natural world, the plant world, and the mind, the power of the mind to create, you know, we know the placebo effect is the most tested medication in the world.
50:47 Speaker 00 Yeah.
50:48 Speaker 01 Because every pharmaceutical is tested against placebo. And we know it's extraordinarily effective.
50:54 Speaker 00 Yeah.
50:55 Speaker 01 I mean, it's 68% as effective as morphine in the case of gunshot wounds. Amazing. So I began to looking at what's the placebo effect? We don't know what the mechanism is, but we know it works. We know it works even when the person you're giving the sugar pill to knows that it's a placebo.
51:16 Speaker 00 That's amazing.
51:16 Speaker 01 It's extraordinary. A lot of the shamanic healing is based on mobilizing this resource that we have to create health, that we call, that we dismiss derogatively as a placebo. That's just a sugar pill. Most of what you're getting in your pills that you take.
51:37 Speaker 00 Well, you're activating your psychopharmacology, because I always say the best pharmacy is the one between your ears.
51:41 Speaker 01 The one between your ears, yeah. So this is how, what I became interested in. And so how do we do that for ourselves? Well, meditation seems to be one of those things. Practicing inner peace, breathing practices that begin, because that's the interface between your, that can allow you to self-regulate your physiology and your nervous system.
52:07 Speaker 01 So I think we have to discover what works for us. We have to provide the brain with the neuro nutrients, the support, get the serotonin. We're serotonin depleted right now. And, and this is things that we can do immediately. And then turn your kitchen into your laboratory. And then take part in what is number of people are calling the experiment of N is equal to one.
52:31 Speaker 00 Yeah.
52:32 Speaker 01 Where you have, you know, in medicine, if you have a research project, you want N, the number of participants to be as big as possible. But here the experiment is N is equal one is my experiment is called Alberto. And yours is called Mark.
52:45 Speaker 00 I love experimenting on Mark.
52:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, me too. And the problem, the thing is that if you don't do the experiment, you get to be in the control group. And the control group is deadly statistics.
52:58 Speaker 00 Yeah.
52:59 Speaker 01 You want to be an outlier in that bell curve. So we need to take control of our brain today, not outsource it to our digital devices like we've done. You know, the, our memory functions are all outsourced to our digital devices. I was writing one of our blogs today and it said, this thing popped up. Do you want help with writing this blog? It was chat GPT asking me if wanted me to do it. Soon, we're only going to be here to clean the machines. So we need to really upgrade our brain, take the next step in human evolution. Because the one interest, a couple of interesting details. There are 40 million species on this planet, more or less, and only three of those don't have a death program in their DNA.
53:42 Speaker 01 And they're humans, dolphins and whales. Every other species in nature has a death program. There are no grandmothers in nature. There's, there's, um, they're eliminated. Whereas we have not only have grandmothers, but we can live 30, 40 years after menopause. You know, menopause in nature, it doesn't exist. Nature is doing a biology experiment with humans, dolphins and whales and longevity.
54:08 Speaker 01 And to take part in that experiment, we need to be proactive in it. We need to attenuate the systems that create psychosomatic disease, the amygdala, the production of cortisol and adrenaline, and switch on the production of the psychedelics that the brain produces to awaken the higher brain. It requires the psychedelics.
54:33 Speaker 00 Well, let's talk about that. I was gonna close with this because I think this is really an important framework. Because historically, we thought of psychedelics as causing psychological effects. But now we know they're causing biological effects and literally structural and functional changes to the brain.
54:52 Speaker 01 Incredible.
54:53 Speaker 00 For example, by increasing BDNF and other
54:55 Speaker 01 Yep.
54:56 Speaker 00 brain trophic nutrients, things that are helping the brain grow, repair, heal, reduce inflammation, and things like, you know, DMT from ayahuasca, from, you know, the bufo, from the Sonoran Desert toad, the psilocybin medicines, MDMA, which is synthetic chemical, LSD, synthetic chemical, but that comes from a plant, ergot. All of these are things that have been around for hundreds of thousands of years.
55:22 Speaker 01 And they all act on serotonin receptors.
55:24 Speaker 00 And they act on the serotonin receptors. But what we're now learning about them is that they can really create profound lasting changes in the brain, in a way, grow a new brain. Tell us how you think about that.
55:36 Speaker 01 It's amazing. If you've seen the brain on drugs, on psychedelics, you find that there are 20 to 30 times the amount of neural networks.
55:45 Speaker 00 Not the Richard Nixon brain on drugs with the fried eggs?
55:47 Speaker 01 Not the one with the fried egg, yeah. And the problem is that many, they say, we're doing this experimenting without a traditional sacred structure. So every culture that works with psychedelics knows that you need a diet to prepare for it, a diet that's rich in serotonin, for example, and some of the MAO inhibitors.
56:07 Speaker 00 Yeah.
56:08 Speaker 01 And you need to prepare a sacred space, a safe space, not just drop some acid, or give somebody some ketamine. But even then, tremendous healing happens. So that's the chemical effect is what we're looking at. Other societies looked at the sacred. What was the environment? How do you create a safe space? How are you able to commune with the divine in whatever form you encounter it? And that's part of what we're looking for that we don't have the answer for.
56:39 Speaker 00 That that's true. I think it's true. But I think what's what's sort of exciting to me is this sort is this sort of revolution in brain science and the revolution in trauma healing, the revolution in psychedelic medicine, the revolution in understanding the body as a system and network, all these things are coming together. And I think it's going to change everything. We think about the brain, the mind, our lives.
57:02 Speaker 01 Totally. It's going to open up the door to explore the mind.
57:05 Speaker 00 So where does the future look like? Tell us about how you see the future.
57:08 Speaker 01 I am very optimistic. I see the future as tremendously exciting. I think that there have been five extinction events in the planet before. We're living in the in the fifth one right now. Started about fifteen, twenty years ago. More species are dying than the previous one. That's when a gigantic meteorite struck the earth and wiped out ninety percent of life forms. During extinction events, nature seems to take the foot off of the brake and step on the accelerator, evolutionary accelerator. So it's not only evolution in between generations, but now within generations. That we can become a new human than many.
57:43 Speaker 00 It's called epigenetic reprogramming.
57:44 Speaker 01 Epigenetic reprogramming to become a new human being that can have long life, long health, and can become a keeper, an earth keeper, a steward of the earth, and can experience her and his divine nature.
58:02 Speaker 00 So beautiful, Berthel. I mean, you know, I think about it a little scientifically, too, which is that this concept that's emerging from our scientific discovery, in a way, you know, we talk about shamanic healing, we talk about energy medicine, we talk about kind of healing from trauma. That this fundamental concept of epigenetics, which is relatively new, it's the idea that there's a control system regulating our genes. And our genes are fixed, but which ones are turned on or off is regulated by this sort of master coder. And the coder is the epigenome. And that gets programmed generationally. So trauma can be transmitted generationally.
58:43 Speaker 01 Totally.
58:43 Speaker 00 The impact of toxins or crappy food is transmitted generationally. And those impacts are found downstream, two or three generations down. So if your grandmother was exposed to glyphosate, you're at risk for all sorts of cancers and deformities, right? If your great grandmother had a trauma, then that might be embedded in your DNA like the Holocaust survivors.
59:03 Speaker 01 Precisely.
59:03 Speaker 00 Who had children and their children and grandchildren are impacted.
59:06 Speaker 01 Have very low levels of cortisol that's been happening for generations.
59:09 Speaker 00 So what's exciting and what you're talking about essentially is using this like a science to reprogram the epigenome.
59:15 Speaker 01 Precisely.
59:16 Speaker 00 So you can evolve within one generation. So there was this debate between Darwin and Lamarck. Darwin was like species evolved through natural sex selection over time. Lamarck was like species come fixes they are. They're both right in a way, in a way, right? And so these traits and he he was like traits can evolve in even in a generation. So I think.
59:35 Speaker 01 Very rapidly.
59:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, very rapidly.
59:36 Speaker 01 Not only that, but we inherit not only the toxic legacy of our ancestors, both biological, chemical, emotional, but also the gifts, the extraordinary gifts of resilience, of courage, of endurance, of right, you know, and we have to begin to tap into that instead of our psychology today is so.
59:55 Speaker 00 That's beautiful. I never heard that.
59:57 Speaker 01 It's turning us into victims, you know?
59:59 Speaker 00 I never heard that. That's that's one of the most beautiful things. I love that. Tell us more about that because I I think that's a great thing to end on. Which is this idea that we not only inherited bad stuff, but good stuff. And that makes us into human beings that we are that are all the good that we are.
1:00:14 Speaker 01 It makes us into beings that are incredibly powerful, that have tremendous potential and possibilities. And can be part of a grand plan of dreaming our world into being. We are the sons and daughters of heroes, of people that have so much courage that cross the that cross the bearing straits that survived under conditions that were that were sitting around a fire, looking at the stars and realizing we're not alone. Ten thousand years ago, we have that in us as well and we need to awaken. But we can all it's so easy to find what's wrong. Now we got to begin to awaken what's right within us.
1:00:54 Speaker 00 That's a beautiful. So Alberta, tell us how they can find more about your book, about your work, about your website.
1:01:00 Speaker 01 The book is called Grow a New Brain. It's out now and it's in bookstores and Amazon. And it's, and it has some risky practices in it too. So I've got to caution you on that because some of these are meditative, kind of journey practices. And my website is called the4winds.com, the4winds.com. And what I do today is to train modern shamans, neuro shamans. That's why I have my scarf on. A shaman's scarf.
1:01:30 Speaker 00 So beautiful, Mark. Well, thank you so much for being back on the Doctor's Pharmacy.
1:01:33 Speaker 01 Great to be with you again, Mark.
1:01:35 Speaker 00 All of our wisdom and knowledge.
1:01:37 Speaker 01 Thank you so much.
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