YouSaid · the spoken record

Dr. Tommy Wood

lines on the record: 128
first: 2026-01-28
most recent: 2026-01-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“No, other than, you know, if you do happen to pick a copy of the book and you do have any complaints, do send them to me. One of the reasons why I wanted to make it so that every statement that I have in the book has a citation. You can go, you can read that paper. If you disagree with my interpretation of it, I want to know, like, I can't promise that I have all the answers. So that will help me learn more. So yeah, if you have a complaint, just tell me about it.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was my grandfather's name, and then these names sort of get passed down in the family. Technically, it should have because I was the first born grandson. It should have been my first name, but my dad was English and it was like people are just going to make fun of him at school. He's going to get bullied if he's called Ragnar. It's very cool now, right? Because of Vikings and all these other TV shows where Ragnar now appears.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, so you're right. Ragnarok is like the final battle for Valhalla. And actually, there are some online gaming accounts where I use the name Ragnarok. No, I think what it means, the translation for the Old Norse is like wise counselor. I think that was another reason why I picked it, because it was very self-important as a 30-year-old health blogger.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my PhD chair, kind of. Writing blog posts, but my middle name is Ragnar. So I created a website. It was Dr. Ragnar. That was initially where I did my stuff.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I first started blogging around the time you first started podcasting. I remember listening to your first interviews with Dom Dagostina back in the day when I was like.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your favor, and that's the case from almost anywhere where you kind of approach it. And I think that means that people are much more likely to actually start doing this stuff and realize that it doesn't require a ton of work to start moving the needle. And then these things, you know, sort of compound over time.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think those things that I mentioned make it different. I think it's very practical and approachable, but very science driven. And if people want to dig into the references, those are available. And then I think towards the end, after I've given you like there's all these different areas where we talked about nutrition, sleep, physical exercise, I give how you would approach each of those things in terms of supporting cognitive function and minimizing dementia risk. But then I kind of bring them together in a model of how I think people can implement this in our daily lives. Like how do I just pick one thing and actually does picking just one thing help to support like the overall function of the brain? And the answer is yes, it does because when you sleep better, so say if you focus on improving sleep, you're more sociable. You're more likely to engage in cognitively challenging tasks. Your blood sugar improves, your blood pressure improves. So just changing one area, suddenly the whole network shifts.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I only really connected with them about a year ago, but they've been some of the most, I just have, like, they've been so, so helpful. Like, what do you do when you wrote a book? And how do you get it out there? And how do you get people to read it? Like, they've given me so much of their time and help. They've been amazing.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That are just like endless tables of blood tests and supplements and this stuff that just like most people are never going to do, right? It's not going to be sustainable. I didn't really see a middle ground. But equally, I wanted it to be very heavily referenced. So if people want to get into the references, I have a reference list. It's going to be 2,000 papers all in humans. And it's cited in the text. I have like little superscript citations in the text.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I like to joke that the book is for anybody with a brain. The subtitle is about preventing dementia, but really a ton of it is just about cognitive function and cognitive performance in general. So even people who are younger and aren't thinking about dementia yet. Although, like you said, it's worth thinking about it earlier than you think. I think for most people who think about how their brains work or want their brains to perform better and or want to prevent or minimize their risk of dementia long term, it's got what I think the big rocks and the tactics for how to address those that we know substantially increase dementia risk, all those things we talked about earlier, the kind of contribute to those dementias that are potentially preventable. And the reason I wrote it is because I didn't think that book really existed. Like people might focus on one particular area or they might focus on everything. There are books on dementia prevention.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get older. I don't think we need to start taking DORAS to prevent Alzheimer's because I think your sleep is probably already doing the job that it's doing. And there are studies that show that increased cognitive stimulation in older adults improves sleep quality or that engaging in cognitively stimulating activities helps to offsets some of the potential increased risk that we would have with poor or less good deep sleep, which is when a lot of this clearance happens. So I think a lot of the other things that we mentioned already, physical activity we know improves sleep quality. I wouldn't jump straight to Dora's, but in somebody who does have insomnia and say CBTI, so CBT for insomnia doesn't help them, or some of these other things that we can do to improve sleep and those don't work. And you've ruled out anything sinister, then I think they're now our best option to help support sleep.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think we look at it and it's a market for all the things that you should be clearing out of the brain when you sleep that you aren't, right? Amyloid is one of those things. There are probably many other things as well. So the DORAs have now several studies in different states in an insomnia, in sleep apnea, these states where we know people are getting lower quality sleep and they certainly seem to improve that. I think that in individuals you have some kind of sleep issue, be that insomnia, something else that's going to prevent high quality sleep, then improving that is certainly going to be beneficial right now. The doors are now the best option. Previously, people recommended Trazodone, which was like we talked previously like the least worst option because it doesn't negatively affect sleep architecture unlike many of the other sedatives that people might use to help sleep. But if you're sleeping fine or you manage to maintain high quality sleep as you”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like very quickly, we know that sleep quality and quantity affect amyloid accumulation in the brain. That can be seen over short periods and long periods. And some of that work is from Matt Walker's lab. And he's even done studies that show that later in life, if you can improve the amount of sleep that you get, that's associated with a lower.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like when you open the cat, actually, if you look it up, there are all these YouTube videos of people who get it in the US and they open it and like the smell comes and they immediately throw up. It's like you open the tin and you like take out this like rotting bones of herring that you kind of put on bread.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. There is one thing that's. So actually, I don't mind the shark that much. There's one thing that's much, much worse. If you ever have a chance to try sur strumming, which is a Swedish fermented herring in a can, that is the worst thing I've ever put my mouth. It's terrible.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, you're supposed to alternate shark with Brendovine, which is Icelandic aquavit. You eat the shark, then you use the Brendaine to take away the taste of the shark, you use the shark to take away the taste of the Brenavine, and then you just continue that until you just.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because it is ammonia. So to make Greenland's shark, which is the type of shark edible, so Greenland sharks don't have kidneys, so their tissue, their body accumulates urea, right? Because they can't, they don't peer it out. So in order to make it edible, that urea has to break down to ammonia, then it becomes... In quotation marks. And so it is ammonia that you're tasting, but it's like it's got the texture of tuna and the taste of a really, really, really strong blue cheese that you peed on.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do generally supplement just like a few micrograms a day, maybe 15 or 20, but that's mainly because it comes with my vitamin D that I will supplement particularly in the winter. In the summer I get plenty of sun exposure on bare skin, but in the winter can't do that in Seattle. But I also don't mind a little bit of natto or some fermented foods that would have K2 in as well. So don't need to supplement.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this was during the summer when light would come in early in the morning, would disrupt sleep. And they saw significant improvements in cognitive function in those wearing the regular eye masks versus like the Zoroastrian. That's probably my list”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things that have helped me a lot, I stop work before dinner. I don't do work after dinner unless I really, really have to. And that helps a lot because I find I ruminate a lot more if I do work late into the evening. A basic shutdown routine I put on the blue light blocking glasses. They're probably just placebo at this point, but like I put them on and like my brain is like, oh, it's bedtime. And then I read fiction before I go to sleep. I have a quite a recent purchase was an eight sleep, which has been amazing because I tend to get quite hot when I sleep. That's helped a bunch. So it's kind of helped stay cool. And then I wear an eye mask, which I really like for blocking out light. There were also some very nice studies on that. One of my favorite studies looking at eye masks. You ever see this one where in the control group, they had them wear like a Zoro mask. So they were still wearing a mask, but like the eyes were cut out.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“High CO2 really negatively impacts sleep. Like lots of people in a small room that's not ventilated, that can definitely negatively impact sleep. So we always have a window open or something for that reason.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The lowerest thing to consider, and I don't think they've looked at it by APOE4 genotype, but. Things that have an anti-inflammatory effect or decrease inflammatory burden seem to have an outsized benefit for those who are APO E4 carriers. And so gum disease would obviously be one of those that's worth keeping an eye on.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And my dentist looked at it and he was like, You didn't get that done in the US. That was his first comment. Gum disease to ginge vitus, especially if it advances the periodontitis, is a significantly associated with an increased risk of dementia. This is probably both due to an increase like systemic inflammatory effect plus those bacteria can get into the bloodstream. They're found in atherosclerotic plaques in heart disease. They've been found in amyloid plaques in the brain. So treating gum disease is really important, whatever that requires. And that's why I mentioned xylitol to you, because there are several studies showing that xylitol gum or xylitol mouthwash can improve the oral microbiota, decrease some of these cavity and productontitis causing bacteria like strep mutans and porphyromonus gingivalis. So it's just like a really low risk kind of thing. There he is with his gum.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The two most important lipids and other things are important as well. But those are consistently the highest risk factors. Managing blood pressure is really important. So you live near somewhere where there's a lot of air pollution, then air filters certainly seem to help there. And then oral health was the final one. So I say this because I appreciate that I'm British and I'm going to tell you you should go to the dentist. Historically, when I lived in the UK, I did not go to the dentist very frequently. And actually, the first time I went to the dentist here in the US, I have this one metal crown from back when I was a medical student.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So actually, knowing this, I then just completely changed how I approached my seat. So if I didn't sleep well, I'm like, do you know what? I'm actually going to be fine. Then it turns out I am fine. So that's like, yes, sleep is critical, but how we think about these things, I think, is really important. So important factors are going to be avoiding excessive alcohol, don't smoke. But then two things that you mentioned we haven't touched upon fully. I'll kind of like briefly talk about. One is air quality and air pollution, which is a significant risk factor for dementia. A lot of these studies are quite recent looking at, say, wildfire exposure and things like that. But even living near roads, like in the short term associates with greater cardiovascular risk, higher blood pressure, which you can improve with having an air filter of all the different metabolic type risk factors for dementia, high blood sugar and high blood pressure.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So, like, yeah, the creatine helps. But equally, like, we travel, we have kids, all this kind of stuff. Sometimes you're just not going to sleep well. But in short periods of time, over like a few days, what happens is that processing speed slows down, but accuracy doesn't. The quality of your work is just as good, it just might take you a little longer. And mood is affected much more than performance. So actually, we don't perform less well. We just feel more grumpy about how we performed.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Long term sleep is critical, right? Absolutely. And any sleep you can get more than you are having now, the better, right? So if you sleep six hours a night, you can get six and a half. Great. Don't think that you have to sleep eight hours. If you can get an extra half an hour, that's amazing. But in short periods of time, actually sleep deprivation doesn't have as much of a negative effect on cognitive function as we think. And this is just important so that we can go about our day-to-day lives and perform well when we don't sleep well.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of it was honestly self induced because I thought I didn't sleep well, therefore I'm not going to function well. I'm going to be grumpy, like all this kind of stuff. And we know that this is influenced by outside factors, it's influenced by our own thought processes. There are studies that have shown this, randomizing people to be told by their wearable they didn't sleep well, even though when they slept just fine. But what you see...”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also affected me at home because my wife was like, if you don't sleep and then you don't get your coffee, I don't want to be around you because.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think this is the major thing that's missing from these studies looking at dementia prevention as a risk factor. I think inadequate sleep really seen in so many studies now associated with increased risk of dementia. So that's something that I very consistently make sure that I get enough of. That's like the one thing that really is non-negotiable. I don't mind if my diet gets a bit crappy for a few days or I don't mind if I can't get to the gym for a few days. this stuff integrates over months and years like but if I can only focus on one thing then sleep is really critical for me but I will say one thing that I've noticed a lot was that historically I used to really get in my head about my sleep and I know this is going to be the case for many people who have tracked their sleep or used wearables or thought about the importance of sleep right and so something that changed recently particularly because I spent a lot of time looking at the research and this”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Yeah. So that's essentially it. And this is what becomes important in dancing, learning languages, learning music, right, is that you're having these opportunities to fail, to kind of get beyond your current capabilities.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Yeah. If you don't ever get to the point where you're no longer capable of doing the thing that you want to do, nothing needs to change.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The easiest way to think about this is that if we're trying to improve function and structure of certain parts of the brain, that allows us to have greater reserve, greater total capacity. And therefore, if we do lose some volume or some capacity as we get older, we have more to lose. So we're less likely to get to the point where we have significant deficits. In order to drive improvements in structure and function, we need to drive these processes that we call neuroplasticity. New connections, new branches, all the supporting machinery, the other cells that are necessary, right? We think a lot about neurons, but there's a whole bunch of other cells and stuff in your brain that are really important as well that are part of this response to stimulus. But to drive neuroplasticity, you essentially have to have a difference between capacity and expectation. The best way to uncover that is with mistakes.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so this happened with my mum, actually, and she recently got hearing aids, and I encouraged her. I was like, as soon as there's a thing that you need, you should get it. And it's had a dramatic effect on our quality of life. And so we know that if you lose an input to an area of the brain, that area of the brain is going to decrease function as a result, right? It's no longer being used and with the process of allostasis or constantly adapting to the demands that are placed on you. That part of the brain is just going to diminish its function. So that's part of it. But I think a bigger part is that when you lose senses, you no longer engage in the world in the same way that you did previously. You go out of the house less, you socialize less, you do less tango dancing, right? Because you don't feel like you can engage with it in the same way. So I think there's a lot of benefit from recovering lost senses. That's not the same as, so if you are born or if you never had sight or you never had hearing, that's not associated with increased risk because you learn to engage with the world in other ways, right? So it's the loss of that engagement that I think is important. Then the error.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were several studies that suggest that sensory loss, particularly vision loss through cataracts and hearing loss through age-related hearing loss, Presbycus, are associated with an increased risk of dementia, and that this risk is reversible. So if you have cataract surgery, then that increased risk is no longer there. And if you get hearing aids, again, that risk is no longer there. Of those two, randomized control trials have only been done with hearing aids, and they only showed significant benefit in those who were at an increased risk of dementia for other reasons, so like poor health, cardiovascular disease, these other things. So it may be that it's kind of exacerbating other underlying risks, but equally, we can think about two broad reasons why sensory loss might lead to cognizant decline and why often as people get older, they're like, I don't want to get hearing aid because I'm like,”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not as much, certainly frequent music listening is associated with a lower risk of dementia as much as you can like and cognitive decline as much as you can like get rid of all the sociological pieces of that. There are some studies looking at training adults in musical theory, which requires actually listening to music and then pulling out the different components that seem to be again associated with similar benefits to say learning to play a musical instrument. So I think even some of that attentive listening and actually sort of like engaging with the music as a listener seems to have some of the benefits in addition to like producing the music yourself.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I speak Icelandic because my mom's Icelandic, so half of my family are in Iceland. And then I lived in Germany and France when I was a kid for various periods of time. And then I did my PhD in Norway. And I taught in the medical school, so I had to learn Norwegian so that I could teach Norwegians medicine. Wow.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you know what? I'm actually the same. And like we're kind of convincing ourselves that this is real just because it's the case for us. But I often do cognitive function tests on people we work within studies and that kind of stuff. And we do this full battery, all the things that you mentioned. And on every test, memory, all these other things, I'm just like, I'm perfectly average, right? And you kind of, you always think that, oh, I'm so smart. So therefore, I should be like what X standard deviation. But no, I'm like perfectly average on everything except for response inhibition tasks or the stroop test. Then I'm like, and I also grew up speaking multiple languages.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you do see that those who were born by link or that who grew up bilingual have a decreased risk of dementia. Or if they do get dementia, they get it later. But you also see improvements. If you train in a language, even like using an app on Duolingo, they've shown that in older adults, you use Duolingo. And of course, you have to like actually move through it, not just stare at it for 30 minutes a day, but that you see significant improvements in executive function. You see the same thing with music learning. So there is something to these complex very human kind of skills that have these carryover effects into these kind of core components of cognitive function.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you get shown words that spell a color and they are also colored. And then you have to respond based on whether the word spells the color you're looking for or is the color you're looking for. And so it requires you to juggle these multiple things. So yeah, they use tests like that. But basically it seems that because you spend your entire life having to suppress one language while you activate another and then move back and forward, your brain becomes better at suppressing these different. So at the same time, interestingly, it seems you become less good at other things. So it's like none of this is good or bad, but people who are bilingual seem to be less responsive to what's immediately happening around them in the outside world. And that's probably, again, just because of how their brains have adapted to these different stimuli.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So often it's like a go no go task. You're presented with different stimuli, and it's whether you react to it or not. But like a strup is partly an example of that, where people don't know what a stroop is.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Perform better on tasks requiring executive function. So things like response inhibition, which is you kind of want to do something, but you stop yourself just in time. Normally when I talk about it, it's like, you know when you have these thoughts of like, oh, well, what would happen if I just opened this window and jumped out? Or you think something and you stop yourself just before you say it because it's a really bad idea because it's like your boss.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Effect. So part of this is probably because we're training our brains to be able to focus and learn. And then part of it is just like the actual engagement in this complex task. And so when you look at, say, languages, two very good colleagues of mine at the University of Washington, Andrea Stocko and Chantel Pratt, they study individuals who are bilingual. And what they see, they've done this from both measuring brain activity and different types of cognitive function and then trying to model what's actually going on. And what it looks like is that those who grew up bilingual”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Although most, if we're talking about video games as a cognitive stimulus, the one that has the best evidence is Super Mario 3D World, just in case you were interested. Lots of studies with that, actually. And what they did is they compared amateurs to experts, and then they also looked at the effect of an intervention where people actually were trained in this thing. As you increase in expertise in these different creative, complex arts, you see improved structure and discreteness of these like really critical networks that are susceptible to aging as we get older. But the effect was similar in Tango dancers versus those who are bilingual versus those who are artists versus video gamers. So there's some core effect of these complex multi-sensory stimuli that require us to gain significant expertise and skill in order to perform them that seem to have this broad”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so when you look at different ways to quantify how old this brain looks, one way is to look at the structure and the connectivity of the networks and how discrete they are, things like the front-to-prietal network, the salience network, right, the attention network. These parts that are really important for executive function focus attention, all this kind of stuff. And they tend to lose function as we get older. And the easiest way to do this is with EEG. So Electro Encephalogram, where you measure the electoral activity in the brain. And so in this study, what they did is they took a whole bunch of different studies and they looked at these different creative experiences. So one was Tango dancing, one was language learning, then there was musicians. They had artists. And they also had video gamers and they had an interventional study where they had people learn the video game. And it was StarCraft was the game that they used just in case anybody was wondering.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a bit of both. But in this context, I think it's kind of useful because when you think about what happens to the brain as it ages, there are a few things that happen, right? The structure changes, different parts of it get smaller, right? You lose volume, but then functionally also changes. The different networks that we have in the brain that have different functions and activities, they become less discrete and they become more distributed. You get less of these kind of very functions specific, tightly knit networks and connections. And then everything just like becomes a little bit more loose and different areas of the brain get connected together and it's sort of like a bit more of a mismatch. You get this increase in entropy, initially what we call this brain entropy, right? It's not as discrete. Entropy then decreases again as we get towards the end stages of dementia just because there's not much going on in there.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I'll break that down into it, it's different components. Kind of like when you did an MRI scan for your brain and all those other tests you did, there were various different ways that people can sort of like estimate how old the brain looks”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this actually, if we include dance, this comes back to something that we kind of started talking about earlier, which is what are these experiences or what are these activities that you can do with the brain that kind of maximally activate it or increase glucose uptake. And there was a really interesting study that came out recently called Creative Experiences and Brain Clocks.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mainly blood to get out, so the blood can you're not compressing the arteries where the blood gets in. You're stopping the blood from coming out.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. It looks like a tourniquet to tie off your leg if you've blown off your foot. And again, they cost like 20 bucks. They're probably not the best. Anyway, so I had some of those and some like 40 buck bands. And that was all I used to work out for like four or five months. And I didn't lose any muscle mass or strength. I just got straight back into it afterwards. So like you can maintain and gain pretty well as long as you like BFR can be a little bit painful if you sort of push it.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT