Your Brain Isn’t Broken—You’re Living Out of Sync With Your Biology | Benjamin Smarr PhD

Your brain doesn’t just run on chemistry.
 It runs on time.

Every day your body broadcasts signals through sleep timing, light exposure, body temperature, hormones, and circadian rhythms—yet most people ignore these patterns while chasing pills, supplements, and productivity hacks.

In this episode of the Crackin’ Backs Podcast, we sit down with Benjamin Smarr to explore a new frontier of human biology: how time-series biology and wearable data may unlock powerful, non-drug ways to improve brain health, mood, and performance.

Dr. Smarr’s research looks at the body not as a snapshot—but as a movie, where continuous biological signals reveal patterns that traditional medicine often misses.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why “normal” is a misleading concept in human biology
• How circadian rhythms and sleep timing shape mental performance and mood
• What wearable devices can reveal about your hidden biological patterns
• Why body temperature rhythms may be linked to depression and mental health
• The overlooked role of light timing, temperature regulation, and daily rhythms
• How “social time” vs biological time affects cognition, sleep, and productivity
• Where self-tracking and wearable data help—and where they can backfire
• Whether the future of medicine could include “time prescriptions” instead of drugs

This conversation reframes how we think about health, performance, and mental well-being—not as something fixed, but as something that shifts with how we live in time.

If you’re interested in sleep science, circadian biology, wearables, mental performance, precision health, and the future of non-drug brain optimization, this episode will challenge how you think about your own body.

About Dr. Benjamin Smarr

Benjamin Smarr is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering and Data Science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He earned his PhD in Neurobiology from the University of Washington, and later served as an NIH fellow at UC Berkeley in Psychology.

His research focuses on biological rhythms, neuroendocrinology, wearable health data, and HealthAI, developing technologies that improve precision medicine while reducing algorithmic bias for diverse populations.

The Smarr Lab works at the intersection of women’s health, aging, circadian biology, and data science, aiming to accelerate the future of personalized healthcare and population-level health insights.

Dr. Smarr’s work and insights have been featured in global media outlets including NPR, BBC, Forbes, and many others. He is also a strong advocate for science communication and community empowerment in discovery and health innovation.

Learn more about his research and work HERE:
 
 

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Transcript

Dr. Spencer Baron (00:00)
So what if the fastest way to upgrade your brain isn't a new pill or a new protocol, but a new relationship with time, your sleep timing, light exposure, temperature rhythms, and the hidden patterns your body's already broadcasting 24 seven. Today we are with the UCSD bioengineer and data scientist, Dr. Benjamin Smart, whose work uses wearables and time series biology to find the levers.

you can pull non-drug, real world measurable to change how your brain feels and performs. Welcome to the show, Dr. Ben.

Ben Smarr (00:38)
Thanks so much for having me. That's a very flattering introduction. I sound very knowledgeable.

Dr. Spencer Baron (00:44)
We can only speak the truth around here. So Dr. Ben, let me ask you, when people hear non-drug ways to affect your brain, which obviously Dr. Tarrin, I love, they think mindset, breath work, meditation, stuff like that, but your lab comes at this through biology and time and data. Can you share with us the simplest way to explain what you actually

Ben Smarr (00:46)
You

Sure.

Dr. Spencer Baron (01:11)
study and how life uses time and why that changes the brain.

Ben Smarr (01:13)
For sure,

for sure. We'll start with the super short version. Your body is trying to keep track of time. And so when you do things has an impact on how well you can do them. And the more that you let your body know what time it should think it is. So, you the opposite of jet lag, having a nice daily routine, the easier it is for your body to coordinate and do the things you want it to do.

Dr. Spencer Baron (01:19)
You

That is very simple to understand. But time, meaning your effectiveness and the way you use that time, is that how you're suggesting that?

Ben Smarr (01:52)
Well, of course, now we start getting into the rabbit holes, right? So in theory, it's very simple. But what a lot of my research is, is doing two things. One, it's trying to understand what are those best times for different activities, different kinds of thinking, resting, memorizing, being focused. The challenge, of course, is twofold. One, those are different across people. And so there's just knowing the average doesn't help. We really need to understand how to see it within an individual.

Dr. Spencer Baron (01:55)
Ha

Ben Smarr (02:21)
And the second challenge is those rhythms happen in literally every single cell in your body. And so what we try to do is find ways to measure those things that don't involve actually having to biopsy every single cell in your body because you don't get to do that over and over. And so that's where I use a lot of wearable devices to try to pick up things like temperature rhythms, heart rate rhythms as a way of

looking inside non-invasively to get information about where is your body, how stable are those rhythms, and therefore what might you be thinking about in terms of timing context.

Dr Terry (02:59)
you know, a lot of old school science love looks at our bodies, either myopically, if it's in Spencer, Dr. Spencer, I as a world, for the shoulder joint, we only like the shoulder, but a lot of things look at the brain is snapshots, you know, one blood draw one lab, one lab visit one questionnaire, and your work is more like looking at our life like a movie instead of a snapshot.

Ben Smarr (03:17)
That's right.

That's right. That's

right.

Dr Terry (03:26)
and everything is continuously, days and months, what do you learn from continuous real world measurements and how can we basically, ⁓ that we never see in a traditional design?

Ben Smarr (03:38)
Yeah, it's absolutely right. The traditional medicine, of course, was developed for what can a doctor do with a patient sitting in front of them, right? Medicine evolved obviously pre-digital. And so someone comes to you and you go, okay, well, looks like your shoulder hurts. Let's get that shoulder back and joint or whatever you do, right? The thing that now the digital tools let us do is say, well, after you leave the office, we can still see what's happening. We can still get those data. We can still make those observations.

And so I'll give you a real world example. When COVID was raging around 2020, 2021, I was leading a big study using aura rings because they were the first wearable with temperature sensors. And I still think they're best hardware on the market for what it's worth. And so we were looking at temperature rhythms to see who's getting fevers. And a lot of doctors said, you know, that's not how you do that. You have to put a thermometer one end or the other, and that counts as core temperature. And that's how you tell a fever.

And I said, okay, but I'm not just going to ignore these temperature data just because they're on someone's finger. Let's see if there's something there. And the average temperature changes almost not at all on your finger when you get a fever. But if you compare it for your time of day, then it goes up a bit when you're having a fever. So that is to say at night, we can tell who has a fever because they're sleeping too hot for them compared to all their previous nights. And in fact, even in the daytime,

their temperature might look like a very normal human temperature, but you can go back in time and say, you know, okay, but for Ben at noon, normally he would never be this hot. You know, something's changing and making him have to dump a lot more heat from his body. That's what we're picking up on those, on those temperature sensors is the loss of heat through your skin. And so, you know, that's a reason to worry. And in fact, we showed that those algorithms worked very well, that we could detect fevers, that we could detect COVID even before people felt sick.

Because it wasn't about an average temperature, it was about comparing those patterns day by day and seeing the worrying trend.

Dr. Spencer Baron (05:42)
Would that be for injuries too also? ⁓

Ben Smarr (05:46)
I haven't done injury

research, but I'm really interested in that. So a lot of the time when you have an injury at the site, especially as you guys know, you're recruiting blood vessels, you're recruiting, ⁓ obviously a lot of temperature. And so being able to monitor, you know, is that the right, not just is it hot, right? But is it the right pattern of change that indicates it's healing as opposed to it indicates maybe it's infected? I think you could absolutely do that.

Dr Terry (06:12)
So I'm going to inject that. four days ago, actually five now, I had a traumatic dislocation on my shoulder and no, it's, it's all good. And I looked at my, my aura ring and I immediately showed my body was in stress. And, and when I looked at where it said it was stress, it was based off a temperature. My temperature increased and my heart rate actually decreased, which I thought was

Ben Smarr (06:20)
Yikes, sorry.

huh.

Hmm.

Dr Terry (06:42)
fascinating. And,

Ben Smarr (06:43)
Yeah, that's interesting.

Dr Terry (06:44)
and because it wasn't my norm, it showed my body in mild stress the day of the next day it went up, it bumped it up to moderate stress. And I the funny thing is, I felt great. And so it was showing that and I've been tracking it and it asked why is the effect and you put the tag in right, I put injured. But even as I did therapy, I would see the HRV drop.

Ben Smarr (06:55)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Terry (07:11)
like it improved and then you know four or five hours after therapy it started rising back up and when I did therapy it dropped back down again so so it so to answer your question Spencer on on injuries yes it is showing it but if it didn't have that baseline ahead of time it wouldn't have done anything

Dr. Spencer Baron (07:31)
Actually, know, though, oh, sorry, I didn't mean to go ahead. No, I was I was going to ask that post trauma. I'm I'm wondering if we get a lot of patients that come in that, you know, they come in, they they reached over to pick a piece of paper off the floor and blow their back out. I'm wondering. And a lot of times we track it to I always ask the patient, would you do the day before? Oh, I was doing heavy deadlifts, but I didn't feel it that. But. You know where that's going.

Ben Smarr (07:31)
I mean, that's a... No, no, no, go ahead, go ahead.

Right, right.

No, absolutely. And you guys raise really good questions here, right? One is, can we get at treatment efficacy? And again, if we have these nice continuous data, there's a pattern there, right? The way I like to think of it is, if your body's doing something different, your body must be doing something different. And so if we're measuring your body, we ought to be able to see something. And then, Dr. Spencer, to your point,

where you put the measurements matters, right? So it might be easier to measure some things from the finger, some things from the armpit. Maybe you do want, you know, oral thermometry for some things. Maybe you want people to have smart kinesiology tape on their lower back when they're doing deadlifts and you can look at the pattern of change of temperature there or electrical activity. But again, if something changed in your body, right, something went snap, your body's responding. Your body knows that. The question is

⁓ A, do you know it? And sometimes the answer is no. And B, does that mean there's some digital signature that would help you know it? And I think the answer is always yes. It's just not always obvious what that signature is yet.

Dr Terry (09:07)
Let me ask you this, you're changing it by this talk, you're changing the definition of baseline. ⁓ So what in your vision is how do we find the definition of baseline to improve mental performance and mental health?

Ben Smarr (09:20)
Hahaha

You know, I was just challenging my students with this on a test last week. ⁓ Defining baseline turns out to be really hard. ⁓ That is not at all obvious. And the question is one of if you want resolution, right? So on average, is my temperature 98.6, you know, probably sure or something like that, right? On the other hand, minute to minute, it ought to be changing, right? If it's really static 98.6, I'm probably dead in a 98.6 degree room and I don't want that.

And so I want to see those changes. And so then the question becomes, OK, well, like, how much change should that be? Again, if my temperature changes exactly minute to minute the same way every single day, that's probably pretty weird, right? Like, I don't wake up exactly the same time every day. I don't drink coffee exactly the same time every day. So there's some expectation of, OK, it kind of looks like a daily rhythm, but it's kind of wiggly. It's kind of different. How different?

Matters when you're trying to train an AI to recognize these patterns from a digital signal, right? The human intuition is I don't know. It looks kind of normal. But the way that the AI works, they don't have intuition. They have to say, you know, these numbers look weird or they don't in some numerical comparison. so figuring out, well, does that mean I take the average of today, the last two days, the last week, the last month, the last decade? We don't know. Right. And so.

trying to figure out what's the right scale of baseline for whom is actually a really open problem.

Dr. Spencer Baron (10:55)
You know, I love that you're talking from a place that you take a selection of different times of the day, because if you think about it, even endocrinologists and internal medicine, when they're determining your hormone levels, whether it be testosterone or estrogen, they do a blood draw and they go, you're fine, or you're not. now, know,

Ben Smarr (11:20)
Totally.

Dr. Spencer Baron (11:24)
your hormones fluctuate through the day. So that's why I think that, yeah, I think it's fascinating that you're coming up with something simple, well, somewhat simple that you can track.

Ben Smarr (11:27)
Absolutely.

Well, and again, it's

hard for the doctors. feel sympathy for the doctors because I think a lot of us say, you know, hey, I asked ChachiPD, I Googled it, I have all this data, you why don't you know this doctor? That's not what med school teaches you. Med school is, you you guys know this better than me, course, right? Med school is getting you like, get this guy back out of the hospital, right? Fix the shoulder or whatever. And so we have to respect that there's a huge amount of data being generated very suddenly.

Dr. Spencer Baron (11:38)
You

Yeah.

Ben Smarr (12:01)
That's different than a huge amount of human knowledge being generated. We have to learn what to do with those data. so going, you know, have we known since the fifties that your hormones change across the day? Of course we have, but you go to the clinic, you're only in the clinic, hopefully, you know, half an hour, an hour, right? You, nobody wants to live in the hospital getting their blood drawn every 20 minutes. So one of the things that I think is a really interesting, ⁓ maybe augmentation or compliment is to say, if you were getting

For example, your temperature data in your finger ring matches the pulses in your hormones pretty well in the studies that we've done. And so maybe you could work with the clinic to time that blood draw to be at the peak of the trough of those rhythms to make the comparison easier to understand. To my knowledge, nobody's doing that yet, but it's not necessarily that we don't want the blood work the way we don't want to know in detail what's going on inside you. We just want to know what we're comparing against. And if it's the peak one day and the trough the next day,

That could be the difference between you have a diagnosis and a medication or not. so helping people see how to take advantage of that data to get the right timing, the more precise comparison, that's a huge opportunity space.

Dr. Spencer Baron (13:16)
You know, it's fascinating for the viewers and listeners that, you know, aren't, you know, doctors, the lay people. If you think about it, it was only what, maybe, you know, 40 years ago, we heard about white coat syndrome during a blood pressure check. And you go, well, why don't you do it at home after you get up and rest in a chair for 15 minutes? people bought these home blood pressure monitors.

Ben Smarr (13:24)
Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, yeah,

That's a great comparison.

Dr. Spencer Baron (13:45)
I mean,

yeah, you're giving a perfect example is how temperature is so valid because it's always fluctuating or not. Well, with that said, can you talk about the there's some large scale data showing people with more depressive symptoms that tended to have higher body temperatures or possibly less day night temperatures and so on.

Ben Smarr (14:09)
That's That's

right. So, that's, you know, number of people working on that, but that's work that I've been able to contribute to with Dr. Ashley Mason at UCSF, who is my long time clinical better half. ⁓ Yeah, you know, the idea there is for some people with depression, depression is a challenging name because it describes lots of different kinds of things. And so it's, you know, depression is really an umbrella term for lots of different kinds of things. And we're still trying to learn.

somebody comes in as depressed, how do you figure out what kind of depressed so that you can figure out what kind of treatment? And for some people that have depression, what we find is the daily rhythm of temperature is reduced so that they're not getting as big a swing between the day and the night as they should. And if you can measure that difference, that gives you some risk indication for, is this person at risk for becoming severely depressed? It lines up with...

Lots of things we know, right? So if somebody's depressed, it's much more likely they have a sleep problem. It's much more likely that they're these biological daily rhythms. call them circadian about a day. So circadian rhythms, you know, it's much more likely those are messed up. In fact, every kind of depression has an association with a circadian disruption. And so, you know, it makes sense that therefore the daily patterns of these things should look different. The challenge there again is, you know,

How well can you know exactly when is somebody becoming depressed or are they just as a person, depressive, right? ⁓ How fast should those patterns be changing? So there's a lot of work to be done there, but yeah, it's very, again, promising that if it's the case you're becoming depressed because your sleep is messed up, we can track that now. Because your daily rhythms are messed up, we can start to track that. So it's exciting in the other direction. I'll just highlight for your listeners.

Dr. Spencer Baron (16:01)
Yeah.

Ben Smarr (16:03)
What that also means is instead of, here's Prozac, try it for eight weeks and then come back and tell me if you're still depressed. You can start to imagine much more rapid responder, non-responder identification. So Ashley has been working on things where you, what I affectionately refer to as you sous vide the patients. She puts them in these saunas and she gets them the core temperature to rise. And the idea is if your body wasn't able to generate the right temperature rhythms,

maybe you sort of cook the person, you reset their homeostat, and then they go back to have, and it looks like that's right. I mean, it looks like she's having effect and that seems to be working in the early studies, which is really exciting, but we can see it the next day, right? We don't need to wait eight weeks to say, your temperature change? And so it really opens up the idea of people being able to learn much more rapidly what's working for them rather than what's the sort of clinical standard on average.

Dr. Spencer Baron (17:00)
I am absolutely fascinated by this. Let me ask you, why would temperature change with depression or not change or level off? What is going on there?

Ben Smarr (17:03)
Ha ha ha.

Yeah, Yeah,

yeah, yeah. ⁓ Probably a number of things, right? So one version is if you are suffering a lot of inflammation, right? These days we know that there's a lot of connections between the brain and the gut. And so if you have a microbiome dysbiosis or if you have just, know, Crohn's, something like that, right? That's likely to put your brain towards a depressive state from that inflammation. And then because it's inflammation, right? Being inflamed.

we can pick that up in one way by looking at your temperature. Another thing to think about is that temperature is actually one of the oldest circadian rhythms that was studied way back when in the 50s when the field was just getting started. Circadian rhythms didn't really become vogue until probably 90s or the 2000s even, but it's been studied for a long time by a very few people. And one of the first things they noticed was that your core temperature has these daily cycles.

And so again, if you think that the daily rhythms are refreshing your brain, are contributing to good sleep, and those are not working, when we see a perturbation or a, you know, the wrong shape of that temperature rhythm across the day, maybe it's not temperature that it's causing the depression, but maybe it's the temperature that's a sign of your clocks are not working.

Dr Terry (18:33)
It's your scene. ⁓

Dr. Spencer Baron (18:33)
Okay, hold on. This is like Pandora's box here. All right, so what if a patient is

Ben Smarr (18:36)
Hahaha

Dr. Spencer Baron (18:44)
taking anti-inflammatories and they're, okay, go with it.

Ben Smarr (18:47)
Yeah. Now we're there, right?

so why, let me, let me jump to your question. Why don't we just all live with these things already? And the answer is because our lives are complicated and messy. And so is it true that all things being equal, we can see these rise of temperature associated with depression? Yes. Does that mean every time we see your temperature go up, we should tell you you're depressed? No, that's crazy. And so how do we, how do we know which ones to filter for?

Dr. Spencer Baron (19:13)
You

Ben Smarr (19:16)
Right? I don't, if I don't know that you were just eating a bunch of spicy stuff or taking anti-inflammatories or running, you're doing your exercise, right? There's all these other reasons why you want to temporarily look hot, why your daily rhythm might reasonably change. And so there's just a lot of learning to do. ⁓ and this actually gets to the way, you know, we, if you want to talk about the way that science is going to change over the next five, 10 years, I hope there has to be much more participation by people.

to be able to get that resolution of pattern. I'm never gonna know that you're doing exercise on anti-inflammatories and should have been this hot but aren't because of those things if you're not working with me to help me understand your context. There's just no reasonable way that I could actually extract all that stuff from you and be accurate. And so, despite maybe some large companies best efforts, I think we're just never gonna actually get there passively. And that means we need to figure out how...

to help people want to be part of this process, how to understand that they shouldn't just say, well, on average, that's what the textbook says, so that must be true for me. How do you make that into a positive shared discovery process is, I think, super interesting.

Dr Terry (20:27)
Have you, I'm gonna interject. Wait, wait, I got really quick. I know you're on the roll. But he mentioned Advil, that people will pop Tylenol whenever temperatures go up a little bit. Have you seen, and that's an anti, they call it antipyretic, that one supposedly affects your temperature more than even Advil does. Have you seen any relationship with people that use Tylenol with depression?

Dr. Spencer Baron (20:30)
Okay, okay, okay.

Ben Smarr (20:31)
Hahaha

Yeah, yeah.

Hmm.

It's a really good question. No, I don't know those data. I don't know that those data have been gathered at all. It's a great question. And again, it may have to do with where are you measuring things? So, or when are you measuring things? Right? So you might pop the Tylenol and not have the acute fever, but we might still see that, for example, your body has to dump more core heat that it's still generating somewhere. And so do you see that sort of prolonged heat loss through the skin as opposed to the normal shape of regulation? I don't know.

But that's a great question. It makes a good experiment.

Dr. Spencer Baron (21:22)
But that's where, sorry, Terry, were you, okay, okay, because I feel like I'm flooding with questions here, but.

Dr Terry (21:24)
No, you're good.

Right, I

hated

Ben Smarr (21:30)
Great. ⁓

Dr Terry (21:30)
even asking that question because I saw your animation, But I had to get that in because everybody takes Tylenol for heat. And I went, ⁓ could that be relationship between depression and Tylenol? But I'm done. You're tough. Go ahead.

Ben Smarr (21:40)
Yeah, yeah.

Hahaha

Dr. Spencer Baron (21:44)
So

what now you mentioned the aura ring is the one that tracks temperature, obviously, as long as you're wearing it. But it also I don't have one, but it also provides the time of day that you're training or things like that. So it does give you a fluid ⁓ perspective.

Ben Smarr (21:51)
That's right.

Sort of, sort of. mean,

all of these companies try to do some activity tracking these days, right? They try to make some comparisons. ⁓ I think the simple way to say this is, you know, however good the company is, they don't have as many engineers as they have users, right? And so all of the different things you care about can't possibly actually also be somebody's focal project. And so they can give you estimates of some of these things.

Dr. Spencer Baron (22:21)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ben Smarr (22:30)
And maybe sometimes those are things you care about, like, you know, did its activity tracker correctly identify you were bicycling or not, whatever. ⁓ the, know, did you pop a Tylenol before that bike ride? There's no possible way they're going to know that. Right. And so sort of putting the two of you together, right. The context is still really, really invisible unless you're providing it. And so, you know, one solution used to be a lot of these companies, ⁓ just made the data available to users because it was kind of.

They were mostly selling to biohackers in the very early days. These days, it's mostly the company's data, and they're using it to develop these algorithms ⁓ to hopefully give you back some of that insight. But ⁓ without the data and a sort of nerdiness of wanting to go through and go back to your calendar and be like, when did I take that Tylenol? ⁓ Finding these patterns remains just a lot of ⁓ work.

Dr. Spencer Baron (23:22)
Okay, are you ready for this one? And this gives tremendous explanation as to why we have folks, know, barking about how the benefits of a cold plunge at a certain time every morning or how a sauna will work every a certain time. And you get different perspectives. You know, there's people that hate it. There's people that love it. So is that, you know, is that

Ben Smarr (23:25)
Hahaha

That's right.

That's right.

Dr. Spencer Baron (23:48)
Is that like, recommending a sneaker to someone? Not all of them, you know, not one size fits all, or how would you?

Ben Smarr (23:53)
Yeah, one

size definitely does not fit all. That's exactly right. I think this is really funny. It's one of the things I try to get my students excited about two things. One is diversity. One is sort of chaos, lack of knowledge. And because biology does both a lot, right? We're all different. We're different in weird ways that are hard to anticipate. And so until we can measure those things and understand what we're dealing with, we're missing some pieces.

You know, the example I like to use is everybody takes this for granted when they buy a shirt, right? Nobody would say, what's the right size of shirt for a human? That would be an uncomfortable shirt, right? We've measured 10,000 people. We've found all of the average armhole sizes and neck hole sizes. And that's the kind of shirt you get. Nobody wants that shirt, right? You go, no, no, I have different dimensions. I need this one tailored or not, or I need this neck hole let out or whatever,

But then you go to medicine and you're like, no, everybody needs a cold plunge at 8 a.m. And it's just, it's silliness. know, what we can measure from almost anything is there are, you know, usually there's a group that's maybe a majority of the people that have been studied that have the time of day when they're best at some trait, some exercise, some learning exercise, whatever it is, best at taking a drug, dealing with the side effects in their liver, all those things. But there's always other populations that are not quite the same.

Right. And so, you know, are you a morning person or an evening person is one of these sort of abbreviations we tend to use. But it's worth thinking about how in medicine, if we assume everybody ought to be doing the same thing, or in wellness, you you ought to all be doing deadlifts, you ought to all be taking cold plunges. You know, even if that's true for most people, if it's not true for some people, we may be actively doing harm to those people, giving them really bad advice and, you know, to your earlier story, right, helping them throw their back out because they did it at the wrong time of day for them.

And so think it's much more important not to say, you know, does that mean either everybody takes a cold plunge or cold plunges are nonsense? It's much easier to say, you know, okay, it looks like cold plunges do something for someone like, let me figure out for me when that might work. How do I measure whether it's having an effect? It's a little bit more commonsensical and a little bit less just jump on the bandwagon.

Dr. Spencer Baron (26:09)
Boy, that opens up so much interpretation because you got people that they do the cold plunge every day or they do the sauna every day at a certain time. they're just, I'm in fault for ⁓ training at the same time every day, even though sometimes I feel like garbage, but would it be safe to say that maybe

Ben Smarr (26:30)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Spencer Baron (26:38)
you should maybe well I guess would temperature be able to interpret when you should do a cold plunge or that same person do a sauna.

Ben Smarr (26:46)
Oh,

you know, that's what we would call a testable hypothesis, right? That if we were, back in the sort of 2014, 2015, 2016, I was doing a lot of work with quantified self, with biohacker groups, that'd be a great study, right? We go, let's all measure our temperatures. Let's figure out if we take our cold plunge one time, another time.

Dr. Spencer Baron (26:52)
you

Ben Smarr (27:12)
How does that change those temperatures? Is there an indication, hey, your temperature is going up, your temperature is coming down, that turns out to predict how we're going to feel about that cold plunge? You have to do the experiment.

You know, that's the fun thing about biology is it's, it's complex enough. It's easy for all of us to have ideas, right? it makes total sense. If you're depressed, you should take a cold plunge instead of getting hot because you're too hot. It's great to have these ideas, but they're hypotheses until you test them. Right. And so what you, as a scientist, what I like to do is say, that's cool. Like, how would we test that and actually know, and then maybe even better, how would we help other people test that and know for whom does it work? Not just on average, does it work?

Dr. Spencer Baron (27:26)
So, yeah.

So we now understand that the brain has a lymphatic system that I guess during REM or some portion, right? And that's when it cleans out all the byproduct of thought and things like that. Imagine, you know, it's like an exhaust on a car, you you think hard and you, but, know, yeah.

Ben Smarr (28:02)
Super cool. Yeah, yeah.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's basically right.

Dr. Spencer Baron (28:19)
Well, you know, it was really obvious to me when I took a neurology course, was so way, I mean, I hadn't heard this stuff in 30 years and some, and I was so fatigued after eight hours a day for three days. I go. I just sat in a chair. That's all I did was listen, you know, and I, yeah, so brain fatigue. So I wonder maybe a I don't know if a cold plunge or a sauna might have helped with that.

Ben Smarr (28:32)
Yeah, right?

You

Dr. Spencer Baron (28:49)
lymphatic drainage possibly? Any thoughts?

Ben Smarr (28:52)
Possibly. mean,

yeah, possibly. Right. One of the challenges of doing anything for eight hours is your body probably wants to be changing state faster than that. And so if you're helping it say, okay, now it's time to change or okay, basically, you know, the cold plunge, one way to think of it is sort of you're stirring the pot, right? You're saying whatever state my body's in, I want to give it a challenge and I want to make it sort of reset itself. It's not the only thing it's doing, but it's one way to think of it.

You know, I think those things are really good, right? What I do, even they make me teach 80 minute classes. Nobody wants to pay attention for 80 minutes. So I tell the students, you know, 40 minutes in, we're to take a two minute break, stand up. I call it stretch your pancreas, right? But like move your lymph around, move your blood around, get your body out of that sedentary state for a minute, because you'll think clearer afterwards.

Dr. Spencer Baron (29:27)
Right.

Interesting. Yeah.

Dr Terry (29:42)
I got another hypothesis.

We talked about ⁓ depression could be associated with if we have ⁓ high temperature and we drop it down. Has there been any studies about if you're depressed, a cold plunge is better. If you're anxious or have anxiety, a sauna is better?

Ben Smarr (29:58)
So neat.

I'm not that I'm aware of my suspicion is sadly, it's probably a little bit more different flavors of ice cream inside that, right? Where we would say what kind of anxiety was it? What kind of depression was it? I think you're right that we could get to a state where we would have that resolution, right? And we'd say based on these patterns over time, based on the way you're describing yourself, know, recommender systems like Amazon has, right? Based on people like you, we think the cold plunge at this time of day would be the best thing. ⁓

I don't think we're there yet. think we have a lot of trouble defining anxiety and depression still. And then when we take everybody with those labels and we lump their data together, you know, the image gets pretty blurry. And that's one of the reasons it's hard to come up with these better, more precise treatments. But, you know, one of the things that I take away is most cultures have something about, you know, go in a sauna, sit in a cave with a fire, get a steam, you know, whatever it is.

⁓ There is clearly something basically physiological about being able to screw with your temperature regulation to affect your state. So there's clearly something there and learning how to drive that, you know, with a little bit more nuance than just doing donuts in the parking lot is sort what we're driving at.

Dr. Spencer Baron (31:13)
So the...

Dr Terry (31:14)
I like eating

donuts in the park a lot, instead of doing it.

Ben Smarr (31:17)
Ha ha!

I'm with

Dr. Spencer Baron (31:20)
Then

Ben Smarr (31:20)
you.

Dr. Spencer Baron (31:20)
you would have liked that Krispy Kreme 5K run that they've been doing for, my gosh, you have to eat a dozen, you run halfway of the 5K, you eat a dozen donuts, ⁓ obviously glazed donuts, and then you have to run back. Obviously most people spent their time vomiting on the side of the road, but.

Ben Smarr (31:27)
I don't know this.

No,

I was gonna say, this sounds

like self-punishment that I'm not quite into, but alright.

Dr. Spencer Baron (31:45)
⁓

Dr Terry (31:46)
No. ⁓

Dr. Spencer Baron (31:48)
And it's a real thing I found out from a patient. ⁓ So I'm curious about this idea of how your body exhibits a temperature. Now, from what I understand, obviously you bang your knee, it swells, it's hot. That's temperature. there's also the consideration of

Ben Smarr (31:50)
I'm sure. I'm sure.

Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Spencer Baron (32:14)
you know, obviously thermoregulatory responses, you know, what, ⁓ you know, it's responsible in the brain for regulating temperature and, or, or let's say, ⁓ my gosh, you're, you're, ⁓ my God. Your pineal gland is responsible for daylight, you know, identifying daylight during our nighttime during sleep. you're, ⁓

my gosh, I forgot what gland it is that would be responsible for, adrenal glands, excuse me, adrenal glands too. When they're run down, your body exhibits a temperature. So these are organ specific reasons, right? So how would you know what is, I guess.

Ben Smarr (32:45)
sure, okay.

That's right, that's right, that's right.

Well, that's

a great question. That's one of the reasons I enjoy this work is questions like that. When you say your temperature should be 98.6, first of all, of course, we know these things should be changing. But second of all, did you mean my knee temperature? Did you mean my pineal temperature? Did you mean my liver temperature? What are you talking about? We don't have that kind of specificity because, again, the training traditionally was stick the glass rod in one end or the other.

make sure they're not obviously on fire, and then that's kind of what temperature is for. And so this idea that we can glean a whole lot more information from it means we have to be a little bit more serious about the engineering, right? How are we using it? Where are we measuring it? When are we measuring it? But I like to joke that from the physics point of view, the way we would say it is, your body is not one uniform thermal mass, right? Which is to say the hamburger can be crispy on the outside and bloody on the inside still, right?

There's no reason to think that if I measure your mouth that I definitely know what temperature your toe is. That's silly. And so trying to figure out, you know, what temperature is really most of the time is where is the blood flowing? And so then we're saying, okay, is the blood going to your skin? Is the blood going to your brain? Is the blood going to your adrenal? But temperature is also because it changes. It turns out temperature acts kind of like a hormone. It's a signal across your body.

And so for example, you mentioned your pineal controlling melatonin, but the reason that your pineal thinks it knows what time to make melatonin at is because it's listening to your suprachiasmatic nucleus, the SCN that sits above where your eyeball nerves cross. And that is trying to sense, you know, all of the cells in your body have these circadian rhythms, but that's the area that's trying to keep them all together. And so we call it like the orchestra conductor. And so one of the things it does, turns out,

This is work by Joe Takahashi, who's one of the greats in the circadian field, is that your brain is sending these waves of temperature through your body, through your blood, as a timing signal to get all, to get your adrenal and everyone else to know, hey, it's noon, hey, it's time to wake up, hey, it's time to go to sleep. And so, you know, again, one of the reasons we might be able to affect depression by putting you in a sauna, it might have nothing to do with temperature in and of itself. It might be that that's a reset signal to get your different body parts to line up again or something like

Dr. Spencer Baron (35:27)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ben Smarr (35:27)
But temperature is cool, temperature is complicated,

we just haven't really appreciated it before.

Dr. Spencer Baron (35:33)
What is it? What area of the brain as you get older? There's dysregulation. Is it the hypothalamus or? Yeah. Yeah.

Ben Smarr (35:41)
I mean, probably everywhere. Hippocampus is what people tend to pick on as the like memory center that starts to shrink. But your brain

is a whole big old neighborhood, so I'm sure there's things going on everywhere.

Dr. Spencer Baron (35:51)
Yeah, well, you know, as you get older, I tend to be colder at more often. I always wonder. ⁓

Ben Smarr (35:56)
Yes, yes, older is colder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've

just started getting into this.

Dr Terry (36:00)
you

Dr. Spencer Baron (36:01)
Colder is colder. That's great. And it's true.

Ben Smarr (36:03)
Well,

yeah, no, and it's one of those things where you go, okay, well, we just sort of take it for granted, but what if the extent to which older is colder is actually a reflection of, for example, how flexible your cardiovascular system is? And maybe that's a really important sign for very early detection of are you gonna become at risk for dementia or decline? Heart disease is what kills most people. And so being able to tune in and be like, well,

I'm not seeing those heat waves go through your skin the same shape every day. That's a reflection of the blood's not being carried in the same pattern. Does that mean you're losing plasticity? Does that mean there's a kink, right? All of these things are on the table. We just haven't really, like I said, we haven't really appreciated temperature before.

Dr. Spencer Baron (36:49)
I think this is fantastic that we're challenging the thought of, measure blood pressure with a, you measure temperature, you take it for granted, but now you're applying this age old approach to something so much deeper. So with that said.

Ben Smarr (37:06)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Spencer Baron (37:09)
You know, you had, I understand you had some early work in showing the sleep timing variability and later sleep onset correlated with, you with performance. that still, how do you, how, what is, what's currently going on?

Ben Smarr (37:18)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

it's a big deal these days, right? We've got the Olympics going and there's a lot of work for teams dealing with how do I practice at the right time of day so that when I'm performing in whatever country that isn't my home country and I'm all jet-lagged, the jet-lagged version of me thinks it's the time of day when it's used to performing, ⁓ which is kind of wild. It's kind of a head trip, right? But ⁓ the groups that I knew that did this long ago that have

Dr. Spencer Baron (37:39)
Mmm.

Ben Smarr (37:52)
to my knowledge, been leading the pack. And you know, I'm sure I'm missing some things, so I don't want to make anyone sad that I don't call them out. But the New Zealand rugby teams, many, many, years ago, were already onto this because poor New Zealand had to fly everywhere to play a match, right? And so they were just dealing with jet lag much more consciously, I think, than a lot of other groups. But no, it's absolutely true. When you practice is part of the memory of the practice.

You know, you were saying that you get up and you do your deadlifts at the same time every day, whether you feel like crap or not. Um, you know, there's good reason to believe that's probably right in so much as your body is probably anticipating. This is the time of day I'm going to get that strain. I better be ready for it. Uh, not to be morbid, but just to flip it. You know, when you have people that overdose on drugs, often it's because they took the drugs, the same dose they're used to taking. They just took it in a different time. And so their body wasn't ready for that dose at that time.

And it hits different. so just thinking about, you know, first of all, there's not one time, right? Again, it's every single cell in your body is trying to keep time. So are they coordinated? Are you letting them know what they should be doing? It's like, do the garbage men share your clocks or if they're on a different time zone, they're going to cause traffic, right? So, ⁓ you know, you're letting your body be able to anticipate these things. And then are you leaning into that anticipation? Are you being a jerk and surprising it with pizza?

1 AM, right?

Dr Terry (39:21)
Interesting. Hey doc, on that you mentioned jet lag and both Spencer and I deal with patients that travel a lot. What's some of your tips you've learned about in this modern day whether you have wearables to handle and to get the best out of your body when you're traveling?

Dr. Spencer Baron (39:22)
Yeah.

Ben Smarr (39:30)
Sure.

There's some apps that will try to help you anticipate these things and give you advice to adjust. And to my knowledge, they're all sort of reasonable. I don't think there's a silver bullet. But the general advice tends to be, I think, good advice, which is just do all the things. If you're going to be there long enough to adjust, if you're going to be there for a day, maybe don't bother. But you're going to be there for a couple of weeks. The rule of thumb is it takes about a day for every hour of time zone.

to really get nicely crisply realigned. But you can try to make that a little faster because different parts of your body look for different timing cues. So we talked about temperature, that's pretty universal. But when are you eating? And your GI tract might see that. When are you exercising? And maybe that's affecting that blood temperature and giving you that pulse. You when are you sleeping? When are you social? All of these things. If you can convince your body that there is clearly one time.

It's a lot easier for your body to get lined up on that time. If you're eating on California time still, but you're sleeping on Paris time now, your body's very confused because you're giving different signals to different parts of it. And so it just makes it that much harder for them to line up. the, you know, just, just get on local time and do everything on local time. Even, you know, it's hard to do, but some people will try to do it, you know, a day or two ahead of time and start adjusting a little bit before they leave. ⁓ that's, that's not crazy at all.

Dr Terry (41:06)
Alright, so basically if you travel, you're in California, travel to Paris, as as you land Paris, just start doing it like a local would like you've been there. What's the thought process on hydration when it comes to for that? There's a lot of talk about drinking a lot more water on the plane to help hydration to help you mix in. What's your thoughts on that?

Ben Smarr (41:13)
You're in Paris and that's the time, exactly.

⁓

I mean, planes certainly dehydrate you, and so that's good advice anyway. I don't have any knowledge about hydration specifically as a clock resetting signal, but it doesn't sound like it's going to hurt you. So it certainly seems like probably a good idea. Urine production is one of these early circadian rhythms, actually, going way, back to the 50s and 60s. And so they're, you for all I know, I'm making this up, but for all I know,

peeing on France time might actually be an important physiological signal. So, hydrating and holding it until you get onto the right time of your normal daily routine.

Dr Terry (42:11)
Of course you're peeing in the toilet not peeing on a Frenchman or something like that. ⁓

Ben Smarr (42:16)
Hopefully peeing, that's right, appropriate temporal but also spatial context,

exactly.

Dr. Spencer Baron (42:24)
You know, it's funny is the fact that he I almost I was when he said ping on France and I almost didn't hear time being on France time and I'm thinking, yeah, they don't like Americans over there. So that's probably right. We should be on France.

Ben Smarr (42:31)
hahahaha ⁓

Dr Terry (42:31)
You

You

Ben Smarr (42:36)
man, no, no, no,

I'm a consensus builder. If they don't like us, you know, let's bring them to the table, not peel them. ⁓

Dr. Spencer Baron (42:42)
Yeah.

So you also can you explain more about social time versus biological time and, you know, how that works into the performance?

Ben Smarr (42:51)
yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. mean, that's really complicated and it's not well studied and I wish more people studied it. I think it's super interesting, but you probably have a sense that if you're watching an exciting movie or talking excitedly to an old friend you haven't seen in years, it's pretty easy to stay up and forget about time, right? And so, we know, that's just sort of a silly example, but we know that your emotional state can impact these things.

that there's times when you're more emotionally resilient or more emotionally sensitive. Sleep is really important for recovering those things. And so trying to understand that interplay, it's really interesting and it's not something I think has been well studied. What's better studied as a counter example is, or sort of a different example of the same principle, is this idea of food and trainable oscillators or timed meals or time restricted eating, these things, right? We say,

You know, the, the time that I eat has a big impact on the time that my liver and GI track and intestines, all these things, you know, the time they think it is. And I could sort of separate that from sleep time by eating earlier or later and try to find some ideal alignment. so social time is probably like that. There's probably rhythms of when are you excited? When should you be not being excited and letting yourself get to sleep, for example? ⁓ but we really just haven't.

done the of the physiology studies of that sort. It's not even clear to me exactly how you do that, right? You'd want to sort of know how socially engaged and actually also interested is somebody moment to moment to compare it to their physiology. And so how do you measure that is still, I think, pretty challenging.

Dr. Spencer Baron (44:35)
You know, it's funny you bring that up because you think in relationships, new relationships, you could talk for hours. And now it's like for me and Karen, it's like, all right, 20 minutes. Yeah, I got to get to bed now. You know, it's all of sudden.

Ben Smarr (44:41)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, and the

get to bed part is fun, right? So if, you know, back in the day when you talk to people on airplanes and they weren't all just sort of plugged in, ⁓ I used to love having these conversations because somebody goes, man, you know, my wife wants to be in bed at 10 and I don't want to be in bed until midnight, but then she's up at five and I hate it. I find this absolutely hysterical that like, can I entrain to my partner, you can I get our clocks to align? Should I not date them? Should I sleep in a different bed?

I just think this is super interesting. I don't know that there's dating apps that take into account like, are you guys gonna be a good rhythm alignment? But I think this is fascinating.

There's a, we talked, do you mind if I get just very slightly, you know, clean, but adult ⁓ there's, there's, talked about how there's things that work for most people, but there's these minorities that get left out. Right. And I don't mean, you know, ethnic minority or demographic minority, but just groups of people for whom the thing doesn't work. ⁓ Sex is one of these things. So there's, there's really compelling data that most people prefer evening sex and

Dr. Spencer Baron (45:29)
I, I, ⁓ hell yeah, go for it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no.

Ben Smarr (45:55)
That's the mismatch that I think would be really fascinating, right? If your partner is only horny in the evening and you happen to be one of these poor morning horny people, you know, does that kill your relationship? Right? ⁓ It's just biological incompatibility. I think these things are really interesting. I wish we could learn more about them more easily.

Dr Terry (45:56)
you

Dr. Spencer Baron (46:13)
That is perfect. And it's funny because I get up really early in the morning and it's my quiet time. So I like that. And so I don't care, right? I don't care if anybody sleeps a little later. That's the case, but fascinating. All right, that's great. And then you bring up, you think about newlyweds and they're like hyped and excited and they're just pushing their bodies to the limit and they don't get sick.

Ben Smarr (46:15)
You

I like that too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Spencer Baron (46:43)
until maybe two weeks later or three weeks later maybe, you

Ben Smarr (46:48)
Yeah, well, there's all of this, you know, we think of our decisions being ours, right? And this hasn't been primarily a neuroscience talk, but of course your brain is what's doing all of this thinking for you. And so, you know, there's calculus of like, I haven't reproduced with this person yet. I should be putting energy into that. I don't want to miss the opportunity. But, but like you said, you know, okay, Karen, like, you know, I don't know how long you guys have been together. sounds like a long time. That's really nice. You know, that that's no longer a novel opportunity, right? It's sort of you, you're

Dr. Spencer Baron (47:14)
Right.

Ben Smarr (47:15)
You're happy.

Dr. Spencer Baron (47:17)
and she's gonna listen to this podcast, I'm gonna get punched in the head here. this is great though. Yeah, I know.

Dr Terry (47:24)
I'm keeping quiet.

Ben Smarr (47:28)
Well, you know,

I don't want to get you in trouble. guess one way to say it is the old Chris Rock bit about, know, if it ain't new, it's through, right? There's a sort of a mental practice of saying, you know, should we have date nights because that sort of makes it feel more novel. It gets our brains into that space again. These are conscious practices one can do.

Dr. Spencer Baron (47:31)
Nah, nah, nah.

Great. Nope, we have date night. I think I just saved the relationship by that conference. Okay, we have date night. ⁓ Terry, I don't know if Michelle should be listening to this. ⁓ this is fantastic. right. So yes. So yes, social time versus biological time, that makes a lot more sense now, you know, it's, and how your body reacts and responds, especially when you're excited to talk or not. So, ⁓

Ben Smarr (47:48)
There you go, there you go. Perfect. Perfect. ⁓

hahahaha

And I'll add

a layer if you don't mind. ⁓ The other side of social time is, ⁓ I'm at work all day, I come home in the evening, do I just wanna be on my phone or playing video games or whatever people do specifically to not feel like my whole day belongs to work, right? So there's this idea of revenge procrastination. And there's part of your brain that says, I didn't get my me time basically, right?

Dr. Spencer Baron (48:17)
Yeah, please.

Ben Smarr (48:43)
But this actually causes a lot of problems because then people stay up late to regain some of that time without necessarily thinking about like, but this is actually the time of day when my body really needs me to be sleeping. Right. And so then we actually have this pretty, pretty epic pandemic of self-imposed sleep deprivation, which makes people perform less well physically, mentally, emotionally. So it's a really interesting challenge of, you know, the, the amount of hours in the day.

is not the same as the right time for you to be doing things. And so it's, you know, in the same way that you can't make somebody work 24 seven and not kill them, right? You like, how do you schedule the right times? So since I'm making a few call outs to, to people that I like, um, there's a company called Oh waves, uh, whom we're doing a clinical trial right now, but it's a, it's a really nice guy. Uh, Royann is a doctor out of San Diego, UCSD and

He made this app, which is like a calendaring app, and you can put into it the different times you're doing different things. When's my study time? When's my me time? When's my meal time? When's my sleep time? When's my workout time? Yada yada. And so we're giving this to students, and we're trying to say, you know, if the students have some help thinking about, their schedule stable? Have they baked in enough me time so they don't have to stay up all night feeling, you know, feeling deprived? Does it end up actually helping? Do they feel better? Do they do better in their courses? You know, I don't have the data yet. We're doing it now.

But I love this idea of sort of giving people tools to think about filling the time in an optimal way rather than just the number of minutes or the number of hours.

Dr. Spencer Baron (50:22)
That alone, I mean, it provides answers to questions that I often have that I talk all day at work to patients asking back and forth, listening very acutely. And, you know, it just, when I get home, love my dog because he can't talk to me. it's just, we just.

Ben Smarr (50:32)
Sure.

Dr. Spencer Baron (50:47)
⁓ geez, that is, and I actually wondered why sometimes I am so happy to be, you know, quiet by myself, not talking or listening to music. And that explains a little bit more as to why that rebound. What did you call it? You called it something. ⁓

Ben Smarr (50:48)
Yeah.

Yeah, Revenge procrastination is the term that people

use when they're trying to be exciting. But, you know, it's the idea that it's almost like I'm spitefully not sleeping because I deserve to have, you know, internet time or whatever, right? ⁓ But it's unfortunately, like most revenge, probably pretty self destructive.

Dr Terry (51:14)
I love that term.

Dr. Spencer Baron (51:26)
Yeah, that is fantastic. Because my dad used to always say, procrastination is the thief of time. And that just is drilled into my head. the fact that you said revenge procrastination, I go, wow, you know, that works. At least you have a label on it now.

Ben Smarr (51:37)
Ha

Dr Terry (51:41)
Right.

Ben Smarr (51:41)
Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Spencer Baron (51:43)
What about

⁓ 10 predict data sets? Can you explain that a little bit more?

Ben Smarr (51:50)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, time predict,

time predict was this amazing, amazing experience that, COVID was starting. I was just starting my professorship at UCSD, but I had been consulting a great deal to help the Oro ring folks get their science department started in the U S originally a really impressive group of Finns that had built this amazing ring. And, you know, they're getting the U S business going. And then so I was

I think probably one of the few people in the world who was like, hey, these temperature rhythms are really informative. You should think about how to use that. So ⁓ came to UCSD, but knew them very well and had met through them in fact, Ashley Mason, because she wanted to start using the oar rings for this depression work that we talked about. And so when COVID started, the then CEO Harpreet said, we're a pretty small company. We really wanna show that we're

caring about our users and differentiating from big old Apple watch, ⁓ let's do a COVID thing, right? And so Ashley as the MD and me as the data guy got together and pitched this idea. And the NIH who is in the world, the largest funder of health research said, you guys are stupid, wearables are toys, that's not a thing. But the Department of Defense, yeah, I know, right? Department of Defense said,

Dr. Spencer Baron (53:12)
my god.

Ben Smarr (53:17)
Yeah, we do exposure detection. get that, you know, here's money, make it happen. And so, ⁓ you know, Ashley was the PI and I was the sort of UC San Diego PI and led all the technical efforts. And we had this great run where we asked basically anybody that already had a device, would they share the data with us? And, and aura faithfully would push all that to us. And then we asked them a bunch of questions and, you know, daily symptoms things. Are you getting a fever? you having a cough, et cetera, et cetera.

stuff with COVID, But then things exactly like we were talking about earlier, right? Other things that might make that harder. So are you on this or that drug? Do you have this or that health condition? Are you feeling depressed? you feeling, are you drinking more alcohol this month? All these things. And that has become this incredible data set that, I don't know, we've published, I think, a couple of dozen papers out of maybe by now, but it's one of the largest research data sets as opposed to a corporate data set. ⁓

that lets us ask some of these basic questions. It's where a lot of those depression analysis came from. I've been doing a lot of work on sex differences. And I know you had a speaker on recently who was talking about sort of sex differences in exercise, a fantastic episode. you know, most of medicine has been on guys that look like us, right? And so ⁓ that means we don't know actually what a lot of other people look like. And it's not just women, it's the elderly, it's young people, it's people from different countries.

There's all these populations we've just not actually looked very closely at. And these wearable devices are amazing because people just generate the data in their daily lives anyway. I don't need money to bring someone to a hospital and slap a thing on them. They're already generating the data. We just need them to want to share and we can start to study all these things at once. It's amazing.

Dr. Spencer Baron (55:06)
I love when he answers questions that come up in my head before I even ask them about the gender differences in the data. thank you. Thank you. Sorry, Terry, go ahead.

Ben Smarr (55:10)
Hahaha

Dr Terry (55:17)
No, no, you're absolutely right. You brought up some kind of interesting what you're in a job that is looking at the future, you're teaching the future, your future is sitting in your classrooms every day. So what do you where you see the future five, 10 years now with time prescriptions?

Ben Smarr (55:38)
I hope that it starts to get there. There's a bunch of reasons we probably don't have time for that are not scientific reasons for why that's challenging. you know, sort of politics and business motivations don't always align with what's best for everybody. But from an engineering point of view, these things are already totally doable ⁓ in exactly the same way that, you know, Amazon says people like you and it makes some recommendation. The kind of graph model that's underneath that

can absolutely be modified for this kind of thing. And so that's exactly the studies that I propose these days and I'm doing with my lab and doing with my students is saying, you know, so you have a continuous glucose monitor. Great. I don't care what your average glucose is. I want to see that shape. And I want to be understanding is the advice we give you, you know, we can train a machine learning to say, given all these glucose data, given all these shapes, we think your glucose is going to be worse next week. But the point is to be wrong, right? The point is then say,

what would I tell you about changing that shape that we could test whether that helps you then regulate your glucose better? You know, this sort of like behavior modification, right? If somebody coaches you on when to sleep so that you don't feel so tired in the morning or unhappy or whatever. We already do things like this. It's just, we don't tend to do it in a data-driven way in the same scale. That's not an engineering problem. That's really much more, do people at the NIH think that's reasonable? Do they have the training to understand why that is?

you know, good and complements traditional medicine rather than robots coming to take their jobs, which I don't think is the case. You know, do companies understand how to make those data available to enable those studies? There's all of these layers, but I would hope within five or 10 years, we'd be much more accepting of, you know, when you take your drug really matters. When you exercise, when you go to school. I don't mean to get on a soapbox. guess there's so many examples of this. So if you would delay school start times.

Not only do kids learn better, but violent altercations go down, drug use goes down, dropouts go down, teen pregnancy goes down. Because you're not making them wake up what for them biologically is way too early in the morning. And if I made you get to work and start your podcast or start your clinic more like it at 4 a.m., you'd hate me too, right? ⁓

Dr Terry (57:56)
No, he would love you.

Dr. Spencer Baron (57:56)
Heh heh. Heh heh.

Ben Smarr (58:02)
So, you know, we're starting as a society to recognize that it's not just how much do you have, but that the win is important for that optimization. I hope we do a lot more of that. You cancer drugs is another one. We know that for a lot of cancer drugs, taking them in the morning reduces the tumor faster and causes fewer side effects. Most doctors probably don't know that. And so this idea of what we call chronotherapy still feels really niche and weird.

It's not, it's accepting that your body deals with the toxins better at certain times, the receptors for the drug are up at certain times. You know, there's quite a bit of scientific literature on these things. It's really the slow thing is getting people to be aware of it and think about how can they build that into their either their medical practice or their daily lives.

Dr Terry (58:48)
My last piggyback before Spencer goes is what's for the person that owns the OarRings, does you know it so well or a glucose monitor? Most people look at them and all they look at is their readiness score, their sleep score and their activity score. What's some practical things that people can listen to show, can they really learn more about how to use your devices a little bit better and what can they look for?

Ben Smarr (59:14)
I think it's pretty device independent really. think the general practice is, you paying attention to the pictures? Your brain is really stupidly good at pattern recognition if you give it pictures. The reason we can look at clouds and say, I think that's a dog, is because our brain is just desperate to find patterns in things. Instead of just looking at, does my number look like a good number today?

If you can say, you know, does this shape match my intuition? If I look over the last several weeks, can I see that there seems to be a trend or does it look like it's just bouncing around like crazy? That discipline of just trying to compare yourself over time, not just your subjective memory, which is usually pretty bad for most of us, but with these pictures to help to sort of build a case. You know, that's a very easy...

basic approach to life. People do this for their finances. People do it with a scale for their weight. It's thinking about the trends, and it's thinking also that your intuition counts. So as much as the digital tools are great, if somebody hasn't made a score for the kind of... One of the things we've noticed long ago was when you drink alcohol and then go to bed, your heart rate is really high at the beginning of the night. And at this point, lots of devices could help you see that. So...

It's not about what's your average heart rate, but it's did I see that swoop at the beginning of the night? And if I see that swoop, does that mean I should have my wine earlier or go to bed later or whatever, right? It doesn't matter if someone's giving you a score for that. You look at the picture, you go, the thing has the swoop or it doesn't. And that's what I'm steering by, right? I think that's just sort of a basic empowerment of believing your experience counts, which why shouldn't it?

Dr. Spencer Baron (1:01:06)
Wow, Terry, do we have time for rapid fire?

Dr Terry (1:01:09)
Absolutely.

He's

a professor.

Dr. Spencer Baron (1:01:13)
Yes.

Now, this is one of my favorite parts of the show because we do ⁓ rapid fire questions and or rapid fire answer, I should say. And the faster you can answer, the better, especially since we're at the end of the show. Now, if you're ready, I got four questions for you. Are you ready, Dr. Ben? OK. And you kind of answered this first one. Of course, this is you have you have, you know,

Ben Smarr (1:01:32)
Hit me.

Dr. Spencer Baron (1:01:41)
Here, let me ask the question. If you had to delete all your data, everywhere or more, every metric, and live purely off of intuition, do you think you'd become more or less accurate about your life?

Ben Smarr (1:01:54)
less accurate, possibly happier.

Dr. Spencer Baron (1:01:57)
Such a scientist. All right, there you go. Question number two. What's something you believe about life that can't be proven with data, but you're convinced is true?

Ben Smarr (1:02:10)
Gosh, mean, models of complexity or something like that. The way that there are shared structures that, if you think about the spiral of a galaxy and the spiral of a sunflower and the spiral of a snail, there are these energetic forces that lead to the same patterns emerging over and over and over again, and it's really hard to study them, but it's gotta be the case.

Dr. Spencer Baron (1:02:35)
Is that an answer or what? That is fantastic. That was only you, Dr. Beth. That was great. All right. Number three, if time is a if time is the hidden language of biology, what's one moment in your life where time felt like it slowed down or sped up and changed you?

Ben Smarr (1:02:40)
TCH!

I think I have a terrible sense of time. think that when my partner asked me at the end of the day, you what did you do today? I have trouble remembering. I think I've stopped thinking about time in that linear way. And it's, I don't know if that's good or bad. It's how I function. But my sense of time is radically warped. Every day feels like a week. ⁓ I feel like this is a terrible answer, but.

Dr. Spencer Baron (1:03:30)
It works. I can't wait to answer this last one. You're ready? You obviously spend your time, your life studying rhythm. Are you someone who lives in a rhythm or are you constantly fighting it?

Ben Smarr (1:03:34)
Sure.

I am a strong believer philosophically in surfing. I think you have to, as they say, move when the spirit says move. And so I think the most valuable thing is developing tools for interoception or introspection, right? Saying, you know, I know I'm supposed, it's 9 a.m. I'm supposed to do my dead lifting, right? If I really don't feel like that's a good idea, I don't have to be a slave to the clock, right? There's always a little bit of give.

Dr. Spencer Baron (1:04:14)
That's great, because I tend to be a creature of habit and sometimes I just got to listen to myself say, maybe not a good idea to do that today. ⁓ Dr. Benzmar, that was fantastic. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

Ben Smarr (1:04:23)
Yeah.

⁓

tons of fun. Thanks for having me. Thanks for letting me give you weird answers. This is the ball.

Dr. Spencer Baron (1:04:35)
We wouldn't want it any

Dr Terry (1:04:37)
⁓

Dr. Spencer Baron (1:04:37)
other way. Thank you.

Dr Terry (1:04:39)
Thanks buddy, we're all good.