Dr. Tommy Wood: Enhancing Brain Performance & Preventing Dementia

**Andy Galpin** (0:00)
The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor and scientist and the executive director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University. In today's conversation, I'm going to be talking to my friend Dr. Tommy Wood. Tommy has an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Cambridge University, a medical degree from Oxford, as well as a Ph.D. in physiology and neuroscience. Tommy is now running his neonatal neuroscience lab at the University of Washington. In addition to all that, he is a well-versed rower and strongman, and has worked with athletes across every sport, and in particular, more recently, focusing a lot on Formula One drivers. And I say all this to help you understand that Tommy's ability to run back and forth between physiology and science and application into human performance is really unparalleled in the areas of brain health and cognitive function. So in our discussions today, we talk a lot about those areas. We talk about how to enhance, understand, identify short-term cognitive performance, what that even means, what that looks like from an exercise and supplementation and technology perspective. And then we talk about how that looks in the long term. So how do we prevent and even deter or eliminate things like dementia and brain aging? And Tommy, over the course of our discussion, will bring up at least five points that I feel like are quite counterintuitive or, in other words, are going to surprise or potentially even aggravate some folks out there. The reality of it is, I don't think a lot of us truly understand the current state of the literature on both short and long-term cognitive function.
And Tommy does a wonderful job in this conversation of bringing that to the forefront. So we really are more understanding of what the literature says and how that transfers into practical application. Another thing I think worth mentioning here that we get into, that I get asked about all the time, is how things like exercise have a causal effect on brain health. Of course, there's a correlation between strong muscle and physical performance and how well you age, but how is it directly impacting and how is that a causal if it is at all? Tommy wonderfully walks us through all that in a way that I think everyone can comprehend and get a great grasp on. So with all that in mind, I hope you thoroughly enjoy this conversation today with Dr. Tommy Wood. Dr. Tommy Wood, welcome to Perform.

**Tommy Wood** (2:33)
Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here with you.

**Andy Galpin** (2:36)
There's a lot of things I want to get into today, things that you and I have chatted about before, but most of the things that I actually don't know the answer to. Hopefully, I can pry some information out of you about enhancing brain performance, things that we can do now in the short term as well as long term brain health. But I think before we can get to that, for my own personal sake, I know I say some of these things wrong, so I'm hoping you can kind of fix this. But maybe it would be best for us to just start off with what is cognitive performance? How do you define that? How should we think about it? And what are the aspects of cognitive performance?

**Tommy Wood** (3:13)
I think one issue that's come up a lot recently in this field is that some of these things are actually very hard to define. So when we think about cognitive function more broadly, the way that we've traditionally thought about it is, how do you perform on some standard cognitive test, like an IQ test? And then there are tests for a whole bunch of other functions, like executive function or response inhibition, and trying to suppress the desire to make a response, which is an important part of planning, and the prefrontal cortex plays a big role there. Also testing working memory and all these other things that we might or our ability to learn and remember in short periods of time. And that's kind of what we've had because that's what we've got. We have standardized tests, we know how you score compared to other people, we think we understand which parts of the brain are involved in those functions. But the real problem is that while they do relate slightly to the different functions you and I would want to do from day to day, it's that's an imperfect association. And beyond that, there are a whole suite of cognitive functions or things that we do with our brain that you can't really measure with those tests. So part of the problem is defining what is it that you want your brain to do.