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Talk About Mental Health & Well-Being… Why Not? Mark ‘Charlie’ Valentine suffered life changing mental illness, before beginning a journey to recovery and wellness; the darkness of PTSD transformed by the light atop mountains and beyond. Mark is now joining forces with Seb Budniak, to make up the ‘White Fox Talking’ team. Through a series of Podcasts and Vlogs, ‘White Fox Talking’ will be bringing you a variety of guests, topics, and inspirational stories relating to improving mental well-being. Find your way back to you! Expect conversation, information, serious discussion and a healthy dose of Yorkshire humour!
White Fox Talking
E58: [Adventure Mind Series] Unlocking Adventure Neuroscience - Dave Gallagher's Insights on Mental Health and Personal Growth
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Join us as cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist Dave Gallagher takes us on an enlightening journey into the realm of adventure neuroscience. Discover how your brain transforms in adventurous and extreme environments and unearth the surprising therapeutic benefits these experiences can offer. Dave shares his compelling insights on how embracing adventure can not only enhance performance and well-being but also push the boundaries of both personal growth and scientific exploration.
Explore the complexities of our brain networks, with a spotlight on the default mode network and its role in mental health conditions like PTSD, anxiety, and depression. We investigate how adventure therapy can recalibrate these connections, shifting focus from internal rumination to external engagement, and discuss transformative research on psychedelics that offers innovative avenues for mental health treatment. Through this exploration, we reveal how combining adventure with positive stress can harness the brain's extreme stress response, paving the way for better mental health.
Our conversation also touches on the societal shift towards outdoor activities like cold water swimming and forest bathing. These activities are not only changing perceptions but are also fostering a more active and engaged community. Learn how integrating mindfulness and incremental goals into daily routines can empower individuals to tackle mental health challenges. Finally, discover how initiatives like the Adventure Neuroscience Collective are advancing our understanding of human cognition in real-world, extreme scenarios, and inspiring a new "adventure mode" of thinking.
Hello and welcome to the White Fox Talking Podcast. I'm Mark Charlie-Valentine and at the controls is Seb. Hello, hello, seb. How are you? Very well, thank you, looking forward to another recording Adventure mind. This is the second in our series, I believe, or have I just messed up the order just in case we change it? I'm not sure you make the order. This is the second, third or fourth, fourth. Cut that out as you wish. And yeah, so we've spoke to melinda already and we're going to continue with this adventure mind series and the. Hopefully they explain to the listeners and viewers the therapeutic benefits of adventure and I'm delighted to have secured dave gallagher back on the show. The white fox talking podcast is sponsored by energy impact and I'm delighted to have secured Dave Gallagher back on the show. The White Fox Talking podcast is sponsored by Energy Impact. Dave, you joined us before, just as a one-off, after Nature Mind actually, but I took us down some different rabbit holes, so this time we're in relation to Adventure Mind and we want to talk science.
Speaker 2:How are you, dave? I am good. Thank you, and thank you for getting me back on. I wasn't sure how well it went down last time, but I'm glad to be invited back no, it's great, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, last time we didn't use you to your full potential. Yeah, we talked science and we talked, but I sort of drifted off, as I do sometimes, went on tangents and probably didn't use you to your full potential. As I mentioned earlier, what I would like to do, or what we would like to do, is talk about the science and the neurology of adventure, and if I start going on about negative things with mobile phones, seb can slap me. Yeah, I can do that quite easily. Yeah, cool, right, dave, if you want to give yourself just a quick little brief introduction in case people didn't hear the last podcast, wait which they should, and then we'll crack on yeah.
Speaker 2:So to reiterate and I did listen back to last time just to kind of recap on some of the things we talked about and, to be fair, I think we did go into quite a lot of the science, which I was grateful to be able to to talk. So yes, Dave Gallagher, I am a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist and I advocate something called adventure neuroscience. So it's basically how the brain functions in adventurous situations. What are the benefits and the well-being side of things from taking on board adventures and challenges and even straying into kind of extreme environment and extreme sports type of activities. So it's a really exciting area and I feel I'm kind of pushing some of the boundaries of the science in that direction. And you know, the message is if we can get the most out of our brains.
Speaker 2:We evolved in pretty extreme situations as it is. What can we learn from that and what can we learn from pushing our own boundaries and embracing challenge? So yes, I'm a research scientist. I'm basically an extreme sports and adventure advocate. I hang about with people like base jumpers, but I also try to get on as many type of adventures as possible and extol the virtues of doing so. So I'm very excited to be here. I'll be talking about a lot of the science around this and some of the organizations and people I'm involved with and hopefully convey the message that you're looking for, which very much dovetails with the adventure.
Speaker 1:Main philosophy excellent so you said that you're a researcher. So how much research is going on into this sort of field of neurology?
Speaker 2:I mean neuroscience, neurology, psychology, neuropsychology. They're very broad and in-depth fields of inquiry and as I look into the kind of adventure and the extreme sports and extreme environment side of things, there is less specific research that is particularly focused in that kind of niche area. But there's an awful lot we can learn from the psychology and neuroscience of performance and also the science around stress and how this impacts on our behavior. So a lot of what I do and where I look is coming from that kind of broader background, you know, to understand what the stress response is, how the brain adapts to situations and how we focus our attention to get the best out of our performance. And of course well-being is a big part of that. That's not to say that there isn't much research. There is a lot of research in adventure for well-being and again that's what Adventure Mind is of course promoting.
Speaker 2:But I tend to focus a bit more on the kind of extreme side of things because that's more the kind of province that I'm used to being in. So there's kind of the psychological stuff there. The neuroscience is maybe slightly less and it's maybe slightly more speculative. Speculative because there are certain challenges in getting very neuroscientific in the kind of real world and you know this sort of adventurous situations that we might be interested in. But that's not to say that there haven't been studies which look at how the brain adapts, you know, to interventions that use adventure and you know people coming back from extreme situations and maybe having their brains imaged and so on. So it's quite a burgeoning and exciting and challenging new area, if I might say, which is kind of where I'm trying to, to get more involved in and bring the lab out of the lab into the wild and bring lessons from the wild into the lab and kind of, you know, marry that up so the effects that you're looking for or the effects that you're looking for or the effects that you're researching?
Speaker 1:say, two people go on an expedition and we spoke with belinda about behavioral differences. Now, behavioral differences that might be just someone clicking out of a habit or maybe finding themselves some more confidence, or something like that. How is that different to measuring the neuroscience and that like, I suppose, brain adaptation?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, I mean the point is neuroscience doesn't exist in and of itself. When we look at these questions, we're looking at the psychology, we're looking at the behavior as well. So it's important to have multiple measures. And again, where certain of the lab techniques might not translate directly into the real world, so so you can't really take an fMRI brain imaging machine out into the wild and get people to do what they do in the wild and some of that coming back from the wild and then going into a machine.
Speaker 2:You don't necessarily have that context, but it's important to have multiple measures, something that you might refer to as triangulated measures. So that's where you're not just looking at, say, the brain activity or the physiological responses, you're also looking at psychological data. So you know, asking people how they've got on, looking at psychological metrics which show how they've improved some area of their mental processing or their emotional responses as a result of the experience, and then you start to piece together the picture as you bring all these data together to kind of form a broader sort of view of what's going on. So you know if you're kind of trying to isolate which part of the brain is involved in confidence or what have you. You know in isolation that's not so feasible.
Speaker 2:So you really do try to kind of marry together different measures. And there's no substitute for observing behavior and you'll know, as a mountain instructor you'll become very conversant with human psychology by virtue of being out there with people observing how they behave. You don't necessarily need an EEG trace to show that there's been an improvement in someone's abilities or confidence. So again, it's really how we can bring all this together into a meaningful narrative and add something, by understanding the kind of discrete mental states and brain states that are involved in these processes and also the flip side, where certain brain connections are maybe disordered or damaged, such as in things like PTSD, and how actually looking at adventure interventions can perhaps heal those connections, and you can see that observably in scans afterwards as well. So really you know how intelligently can you use these, these techniques and this science and meld it with the behavioral side as well.
Speaker 1:That that's very important so, as somebody that I suppose on the podcast, I do keep going back to my own experience because that's what I know about. That's my only sort of mental health expertise. I didn't make a great job of it, but we've got people coming into, or people coming into adventure or outdoors, and we've got people coming in with possibly from a negative side of mental health to try and fix these disorders. We've also got people that are not and they're going on to improve. Can we? Is there a difference? Or, if you know what I'm trying to say, you know, yeah, difference in the way the behavioral changes, or is it just an improvement and then and then and then a positive improvement, moving from what would say like a baseline level?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think. Yeah, I think what you're kind of talking about is there are recovery from negative sides and there is an enhancement in one sense from doing these things and, to be honest, it's two ends of the same spectrum, I'd say. I mean maybe not in a definitively linear sense, but this is what I perpetually kind of look at. I mean, for instance, there's most of the literature or the traditional literature on, say, performance in extreme environments tends to focus on the negatives of being in extreme environments, because that's kind of where the science has focused its tendency to be performance on cognitive tasks or, you know, mental processes and how they deteriorate when you put them under stress. Having said that, there's there's been less in the in the past of a focus on the positives, because that's just kind of where the science was looking, but now there's more interest in the actual positives that come from being in extreme environments and there's finer measures, I guess, and there's more of an interest in that positive side. Now I mean I can unpack in a short while the kind of brain mechanics, if you like, the networks involved, which I touched on a little bit last time about how parts of the brain which can go into the. You know you can go into your head and become ruminative and all this. And there's parts of the brain which can get I don't want to use the term damaged, but they're perhaps more hyperactive and not subserving the best for what you might want out of your well-being. And there's ways we can look at adventure and interventions which can help get that back to that baseline. And then there's ways that we can actually use adventure and use nature and the wild to actually stimulate that in a positive way.
Speaker 2:Now, when I say it's not linear and I hope I'm not getting too convoluted here it's not necessarily that. So in the sphere of, say, ptsd, you will get people going, veterans and so on, who've got PTSD going on nature interventions and there's some healing, if you like, of some of that disordered connection and they're coming back with some transformed purpose or whatever. And I've seen this in areas such as using the sailing environment with, say, homeless people and people with substance addictions. Now it's not to say that you're healing that completely. You're not completely changing them for the better in one sense, but you are taking them out of that negative pattern of behaving and thinking and getting them to have a renewed purpose and like anything in life, once you have a renewed purpose, you then have a foundation to build on that and improve all the other deficits of your life.
Speaker 2:So I don't know if that's quite getting at what you're saying in a clear-cut way, but the point is there's a recovery aspect to get back to baseline and there's an enhancement, but you don't necessarily go back to baseline to then go forward. It's kind of a triangular sort of thing. But if you can edge more towards the positive, you're going to generally be able to reduce the negatives at the same time, but maybe not get rid of them completely. I don't know if that's completely confused you mentioned ptsd there.
Speaker 1:So if we went with a individual, yeah, my personal belief is every well. I think everybody's mental health is individual to them, different boundaries, parameters, scales, so and circumstances, no, if we've got a person, let's just summarize with PTSD and we're moving out into adventure what is going out or in nature, therapy, what is going on in that brain, in the brain physically, to promote better well-being and get sort of push the negative effects of that them conditions are worked to one side I mean it's a very complex area and I'm not a complete expert in a kind of clinical neuropsychology sense in ptsd.
Speaker 2:It's something I'm very much interested in touching on and looking at the synergies between what I look at in something called the default mode, for instance. So let me just quickly unpack what I mean by default mode and then we'll kind of come back to that. So we have these brain networks, which are basically collections of brain regions which all have different kind of processes involved. So you have something called the default network, which is basically when we're not focused on doing something productively or a task or a goal, it's kind of our default setting. So if we're sitting there, not necessarily doing some particular chore or task, we might just sit back and start mind-wandering. We're daydreaming, we might turn inwards on ourselves and become kind of ruminative and so on. Now this is quite an important and it's very heavily researched area of neuroscience. It has been for 20 years. So the default mode is one kind of setting, if you like. Then you have a kind of a task focused setting and the two tend to be mutually exclusive. So when we're not focused on a task, we're in this kind of default mode, having that if we switch to a task kind of focus state, that default mode tends to die down. But if we can't make it die down because we're so stuck in our heads, it compromises our ability to do tasks. So we're less goal focused, we're generally less external world focused. Now, when it comes to PTSD and again I'm not a complete expert in this by any stretch, but much of the literature will show that the default mode areas are kind of compromised or disordered or the connections are not in the kind of healthy range, and this can mean that a person with PTSD, but also anxiety, depression, can go into this kind of hyper connected state which means you're not able to get out of that self-ruminating type of status. The default mode will process events in memory as if they are happening for real, which can then stimulate the stress system to act as if things are happening for real. And of course we need to have a grounding in reality in order to not be stuck in our heads. So if we're in that kind of PTSD hyper state for want of a better term we can't turn down this default mode. So what might be happening? And again, this is not really being researched heavily in terms of adventure. Yet there's other stuff which is looking at the kind of pharmacological side, I guess, of PTSD and other therapeutic aspects of getting at PTSD. The idea is that to heal those connections or to sorry, to something called remediate, which basically means remedy, to remedy those disordered connections, interventions need to happen.
Speaker 2:Now adventure, by virtue of being a challenging thing which is kind of positive it can be positive if you look at it that way can stimulate the stress system in a positive way. It can also orientate our attention to the external environment. And that goes back to what I was saying about when you're stuck in this default setting you can't put your attention in the outside world, and that's one thing. When you're in a habitual environment that you're always around and you're at the same four walls, the same urban environment or the same cues that cue you to behave in a certain way and maybe trigger as well those PTSD memories, if you can get into a more adventurous kind of environment which stimulates you in a novel way, excites your stress system in a positive way, and it just gives you more of a kind of meaningful connection with the outside world, nature and all the opportunities that affords and the health giving side of that and in theory those connections in that default mode can become a little bit less hyper-connected and disordered and a little bit more back to normal.
Speaker 2:And again, like I'm saying, this is quite early days in PTSD in that particular domain, but there is some literature out there and that's again where I'm kind of trying to kind of look into.
Speaker 2:So yeah, basically that external orientation of your attention, that ability to embrace adventurous, novel, stimulating, natural kind of stimuli in the outside world, can potentially shift our attention and kick the brain into a switch, flip a switch, so to speak, to get out into that outside world.
Speaker 2:And again, I mean you will know very much about the stress response and how that manifests in your own experiences of that.
Speaker 2:And again, where adventure produces a stress response and it's something that can be positively sort of reframed and purposed to get in tune, and again we can go into more detail on that and I've talked, I think, quite extensively last time and at some of the workshops I think you were at the Adventure, mind and the Nature Therapy workshops where I talked about if you can get that handle on the stress response, you become more empowered to behave in a positive way and respond in a positive way than if you're in a more reactive kind of state, as you might be in PTSD. So it is a complex, there's no simple answer. But that's kind of a way that if you look at the brain connections you can start to understand how stimuli and interventions can help you heal or remediate, if you like, those disordered connections you know, when you're going into that description there which is fair from my own experience of and we spoke about this recently, roy Morris, didn't we?
Speaker 1:which a little bit more about escaping them thoughts, and we'd looked at it like a railway carriage going through and do you get on with the thought and go with it, or do you not? Or do you look at it and, yeah, during the worst times of PTSD you're just on the carriage, you know, and you don't know where these thoughts are, and it's only years and years afterwards that you sort of think. Well, only years and years afterwards that you sort of think, well, I didn't even actually make that decision.
Speaker 2:so, yeah, no, what I was going to say on that I mean, and again, so you know, we're going to touch on things like mindfulness and the observation of the thoughts, as opposed to being swept up on the carriage with them.
Speaker 2:And we've got to be clear here the difference between the benefits for in inverted commas normal healthy people and healthy brains, but people you know, where there's mental blockers and whatever, or mild mental health issues, and what we can get from things like mindfulness versus, you know, hard clinical kind of diagnosed conditions and it's not. Yes, there are some benefits of things like mindfulness in terms of turning down this default activity and there's lots of stuff out there which shows that can be great. But again, there is a distinction between the clinical sort of basis and the neurochemical basis of what we're talking about and the potential for adventure as well to help that and the kind of more healthy brains where the effects are more pronounced. It's not to say that we can't use things like adventure, but of course we can, and lots of studies and case studies have shown that giving people adventurous outlets can help PTSD for sure.
Speaker 3:Have we got any more neurological settings in our human brain? Because you talked about the default setting, the task-focused setting. Is there anything else? Have we got more stages? Surely, our mind is very complex.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And there's always a danger when explaining principles from a neuroscientific point of view in a brain science and capturing them in very pithy sort of ways that oh, you're either this or you're either that, and you can trigger it with this technique and that technique. So it's nuanced and, to be honest, the networks. There are countless networks. There happen to be three principal networks involved in attention. That's kind of where I focus a lot of my attention, of which the default mode is one, and there are two other networks involved as well the salience network, which is basically around what you attend to and what is meaningful to you to attend to, depending on your kind of mindset and what your brain is anticipating, and that can be attending to the interior of your body, so the signals which suggest how hot, cold, tired, lethargic, excited, whatever, so the internal bodily state, and it can also be attending to the outside world and what cues are important to then help you achieve a goal. So this salience network is is very important in terms of the default mode and how it kind of flips from one mode to the other, and there's something called the executive control mode as well. And I tend to focus on these three key networks because again there's a lot of literature which certainly in the performance, in the stress and in the wellbeing kind of side of things, these three networks are very researched in terms of the way they interconnect and the way the default mode is kind of on more on and the executive control or task focus network is more off, or vice versa, and how the salience network flips between the two. And you know there's such a lot of information out there about this. It's very relevant. There are other networks and there's other kind of interconnected networks even within those three. And that's an exciting area of research as we get better at processing data around how the brain connects up in multifarious ways. And again that gets quite convoluted quite quickly if we go down that route. But just to kind of make it known that there are many modes of cognition, if you like, many modes of operation, but these networks are pretty robust in terms of broad settings, if you like. So if you are in your head you're not kind of concentrating on stuff in the outside world or task focused, that default mode network is very clearly kind of these areas are all communicating with each other, whereas if you're in that kind of externally focused state the default mode will generally be kind of more closed down and this might be a good time actually.
Speaker 2:Actually we kind of touched on something interesting sometimes thought of as controversial, but we can educate the listeners about this just before we came on air and that's to do with research in brain science which has particularly found some interesting findings with this default mode. And that's getting into the kind of topic of of psychedelics and you know the impact of these kind of novel, if you like, centuries-old compounds. But these novel interventions which are in the science is really looking at things like treatment-resistant depression and other conditions where conventional SSRIs and that which are effective are maybe crying out for an extra kind of intervention, pharmacological intervention which can help people who aren't responding to these other substances. And what's really interesting aside from the debate around psychedelics or whatever you want to get into what was found in kind of transformative experiences with people, particularly in the kind of treatment-resistant depression sort of sphere, was the actual precedence of brain activity and the way the brain's changing under these compounds, when people are having very profound experiences which they're coming back from and finding that their symptoms are alleviated quite profoundly and these effects are lasting for quite a long time and what was particularly interesting it was in particular, a group in Imperial College which was spearheading a lot of research was looking at this default mode region and finding that the connectivity was changed in ways that were unexpected. The connections were kind of spreading out across the brain, literally expanding the mind, and what was?
Speaker 2:If I can summarize this in a kind of simple form, what was being interpreted from this is that the default mode is where we have these kind of ground in patterns of thinking and behaviors which we can sometimes struggle to get out of. We're going into these ruminative loops or we're stuck in ruts in our kind of thinking and behaviors, habits and addictions and whatever. But actually how can we get out of that stuck in a rut sort of thing, when these connections are so strong? Well, in these experiments it was found that the pathways become more neuroplastic as a result of the influence of these compounds, the psychedelics in particular, as they acted on something called the serotonin 5-HT2A receptors, which I'll reference again in a moment and why. It's kind of relevant in what I'm talking about. But basically there's greater neuroplasticity, which meant when the connections kind of went back to how they were after these psychedelic sessions, people seemed to be more pliable in their attitudes and their behaviors. Those stuck in loop patterns of thinking were slightly more flexible, and this opened up people to new experiences and actually reframing how they were seeing their depressive symptoms and so on. And so you know, we could go off at length into the science of that.
Speaker 2:But the reason I reference it is because that was very groundbreaking in terms of looking at this brain region, or this set of regions called the default mode network, and it was quite surprising that the researchers were expecting the brain to be going haywire on these compounds, but actually they found reduced activity in the default mode network. Now, the default mode network is very hungry in terms of metabolic energy and resource use, which might explain why, if we're not focused on something productive, we end up just stuck in our own heads. It's actually quite tiring. It's not a relaxing thing. We're not resting in the way that we could be when we're not productive. We need to understand how to rest better.
Speaker 2:So the bottom line is that was quite an unexpected thing to find from the research, but what that's getting to is that there's an extreme stress system which this 5-HT2A serotonin system is acting upon and that, in an evolutionary sense is a kind of a sudden jolt to the brain to go look, you're in a danger or a life-threatening situation here If you don't recalibrate your mental model of what you expect is around you in the world. That's actually not a benign creature in front of you, that's a saber-toothed tiger. It's about to eat you. You need to make a snap change in your way of looking at the world and effectively so, it said, this extreme stress system basically shocks you to recalibrate and and come up with a more neuroplastic view of the world and that can help in protecting against kind of the negatives of being stuck in those kind of very grounded patterns of thinking.
Speaker 2:And I guess the the connection I'm looking at is to what degree is adventure and challenge and positive stress situations actually able to act upon this system? And there's no data I can reference on that as yet. But that's where I'm kind of finding the connection. And it's not for the sake of getting into psychedelic research, for the sake of it, to be fair. I've looked at it for nearly 30 years, but with a keen interest in what they've been finding, because sometimes it's that kind of you know, that side of research which spawns these interesting results which make sense.
Speaker 2:The other side of the signs kind of look up and go, okay, there's something really interesting to get at there and this is why I think adventure can be really stimulating and challenging to shake up our view of reality and the world and to potentially look at ways to remediate these disordered connections in, certainly, people with PTSD. And there's no kind of surprise that veterans organisations are looking at things like psychedelics but also looking at adventure-type interventions which can help people overcome all this kind of stuff. So that's kind of where I bring that into the discussion. And again, it's not to be looking at controversial fringe stuff at all. It's actually really mainstream and exciting and, uh, you know, making that connection the response to a stressor such as a saber-toothed tiger, etc.
Speaker 1:Danger, and your the response to that. Surely that's an evolutionary thing and this is why we're as a species. We're probably at the stage we are now, and then we've removed a lot of them stressors. So is that so, removing them stressors and removing that? Would that be an improvement or development? Is that possibly why we're suffering a lot more depressions and procrastination?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it's not a direct sort of cause and effect that you remove stressor, you become more depressed, obviously, but the lack of challenge and, coupled with the, the excess of attention of things which stretch our attention. So we know that and I don't want to. Obviously we're not going to go down the rabbit hole of phones and whatever, but the, the reduced attention span we have in in the modern day is definitely got a bearing on this, because our attention is frazzled, we're not getting deep rest or we're not searching for that kind of, you know, the deep challenge followed by the deep rest and reflection. And again, and this is what I advocate as well, and from this perspective of these different networks, I almost kind of talk about it in terms of antagonistic muscles that you can train in the gym. So you're not going to just go and do your biceps, you want to balance it out with your triceps and so on and so forth, legs and arms and all this. You want to kind of strengthen all sides of the equation. Now it's easy, and I think last time I probably talked a lot about the default mode and the negatives of it and how being stuck in the default mode and it's easy to then throw the baby out with the bathwater and kind of say, oh well, you need to get out of your default mode. You need to kind of turn it down and get into a productive way of doing things. Yes, to an extent, but the more on you are, the more productive you are, and the less you're actually getting that kind of default rest and I'll come to that in a moment the less you're switching off, the more you're liable to be burnt out anyway. So you've got to balance it out.
Speaker 2:So I guess what I advocate is having the challenge but also having the moments of reflection when you're out in challenge. And this is something I've been developing, a concept with various people, and it's related to what I did at Adventure Mind and it's also related to some of the research I'm doing with the likes of UCLAN and that's to put people in high-stress, high-ropes type of courses whereby they're really engaging with that stress response. But I'm encouraging them to take several moments and actually, whilst in a potentially stress-inducing state, not only to actually enjoy it and we can come on to some of the techniques where you can actually calm the system to be able to enjoy it, but also to have some reflectivity, so you're actually training, in a way, your default setting, whilst sometimes in an extreme situation or a more stress or challenge situation, but also to impress on you that you can actually take more agency over these modes of cognition. And that's kind of the message I'm trying to promote, that we can treat it like you can be focused. And there's lots of stuff out there about how we need to become more focused. There's books, atomic Focus and all sorts of books telling you how you can become more focused, and that's great. But also we need to kind of work on our default mode and make it get the best out of for us that we can get out of it. And I use an example as well.
Speaker 2:I don't remember if I referenced this last time, but I've done quite a few sailing voyages out at sea which I found very stressful because I like my sleep. I'm not great with deprived sleep or shift sleep or whatever and just being out at sea I found quite stressful because, especially when you're on watch, you're having to focus. You're having to focus on the horizon, on the, the compass, especially in the dead of night, when you're helming a vessel in the middle of the sea on your own and you're having to stay focused, because if you go into that kind of ruminating or even just mind-wandering state, you start losing the course very quickly. You know you're having to then compensate on that, on that compass. To an extent the same in the mountains, but in the sea it's a very sudden recalibration and you've got no real visual reference point other than the compass to know that you've gone off course. So getting in that default state then is not good. But when you go to your bed, if you're then in a kind of ruminative state or you're trying to still think about problems, that's not going to help you.
Speaker 2:For when you next come on watch and what I found, strangely enough, is on these kind of watch cycles, a few hours on, a few hours off throughout the day I started to find that my insomnia was which I've had all my life, mainly because I think about this all the time it was kind of switched off and I'd drop off to sleep and I had a very deep sleep for a couple of hours and then up again and then a couple of hours later and eventually after three or four two hour sort of stints, I feel great and I'm ready to go again and I kind of came back from those experiences better because I'd learned to kind of focus when I needed to focus and switch off completely when I needed to switch off.
Speaker 2:So there's ways we can kind of train at least that's what I'm advocating with challenge type of situations and, again, a bit similar in expeditions as well. Expeditions, as you'll know it can be very stressful. You wish you weren't there when you're. When you're there. But there can be a lot of downtime where you can reflect, you can read a book, you can chill out outside the tent, and it's how you kind of get into those modes which suit the requirements of the situation and how you can turn off. So we've got to be better at turning off as well as turning on, and I think that's a key message to become balanced and kind of heal these tendencies to be stuck in our heads or burnt out because we're trying too hard to do things. So yeah, again, I've kind of gone off on a bit of a around the world thing so I've kind of forgot what the original question was with all the research and the data that you collected over the years.
Speaker 3:Is there like an optimum task focus set in time, that you should concentrate in certain time limit? On the other side, is like an optimum where you go into default, like an optimum time that you spend in default mode. Are they like optimums or can you train yourself to spend more time in each different setting?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean, again, it's going to depend on context. I don't have any specific data on that. I mean, I know people like andrew huberman talk a lot about on his podcast on the times a day, when you know you might be best suited to creative tasks versus more mundane or focused concentration type of tasks, and that will also depend on your typology as to whether you're more of a morning person, a mid-afternoon person or an evening person. So I don't actually have any specific data personally on that. It's more kind of my own experiences of this. So, yes, there will be a steer which you kind of look up and see which type of person you are. But I think I mean, I advocate it's about getting in touch with that in yourself. To start off with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's loads of hacks out there and you can try things and you can try breath work and all this, but it's kind of what, what fits into your own routine and and I also, again, I always find myself coming back to well, we can come up with a bunch of principles that might work in practice for most people as a general rule of thumb, but I keep coming back to the likes of people who don't have the luxury to necessarily get the best sleep or whatever, and looking at people like first responders, emergency services and so on, whereby their shifts are what their shifts are, and it's kind of like there's an optimum as to, well, this is what you should be doing, and then there's a practicality of, well, your routine doesn't allow it, but what can we get within that? How can you get more in tune a little bit with some of these kind of principles? How can you bring a bit of breathing into your routine? How can you do a little bit of sitting down for five minutes and getting into that kind of deep default rest type setting and understand why that's a good thing and I think that's what I would advocate, depending on the person coming and speaking to me. Otherwise it ends up being oh, this is what you should do, and then they go. Well, that totally won't work for you.
Speaker 2:And that's why I talk to a lot of people, whether it's people in the police or veterans or, you know, emergency service, mountain rescue, whatever and try to form a better picture of how some of these principles can help you in different ways. But the main thing is just can you understand why it's a good thing and then try and leverage bits of these into your normal life, and not when you are at your fully stressed state, because that's not the time to start doing these things. You need to kind of have an idea of different types of breathing, different types of mindfulness, different types of mental focus when you've got a chance, in advance of the situation. Otherwise it's not necessarily going to kick in. And this is something I've tried to do with charities, such as taking homeless people or substance abuse people up hills.
Speaker 2:Again, I don't introduce these concepts when they're kind of clinging to the scramble, having not scrambling before. I try to get them into that mindset in advance at different key stages on the way up the mountain, and then eventually there's something to draw back on. When we get to that scrambling situation they're kind of all right, I see what you're saying, I can take that on board if I feel like doing it. I don't want to be told in that moment oh, just breathe, because you're likely to get sworn at, which I have been at as well. So, yeah, sorry, it is about kind of tailoring it and getting the idea of the principles and then leveraging it into your lifestyle and then, like any habit, the more you get into that, the more you'll find time and space to kind of bring that into your routine we spoke about ptsd and anxiety.
Speaker 1:I believe ptsd an anxiety-related condition anyway, which I only found out recently despite 24 years of it. So there'll be a lot of people looking at some of the providers, some very good charity providers. We've had on with things like depression, and obviously I'm talking from a negative side of this, but for someone who's got depression, which can be a debilitating condition one, how do they break their sort of mindset to actually set out on an adventure and how is that adventure going to help them with that condition, do you think?
Speaker 2:Again, there's no easy way for someone who's, you know, deep in the throes of depression to even get out of bed, let alone consider going on an adventure I don't know if I touched on this last time for someone who's deep in the throes of depression to even get out of bed, let alone consider going on an adventure I don't know if I touched on this last time. But one thing that and it came kind of from something Andrew Huben was talking about actually micro goals. It's about breaking it down into what's achievable in the very small scale at the very least. So if you can't even get out of bed, you're not gonna think about going for a three-mile walk or even getting out of the house. But it's down to kind of small things you can do, whether that's moving your finger, then moving all your fingers, then moving your arm and then turning over in bed and then sort of. I mean there is again from the neuroscience. There is a suggestion that very small actions and very small goals can actually produce dopamine, a dopaminergic reward. It kind of closes off a dopamine circuit which is rewarding in itself and rewarding in the sense it then gives energy and impetus to do a slightly bigger type of action and pursue a slightly bigger goal, which might be moving your body and then getting out of the bed. So at that level again, unless you've got access to someone coming around and trying to inspire you to do something, it's just about trying to understand that you start small and then small things lead to bigger, exponential progress.
Speaker 2:I mean, obviously there are things like social prescribing as well, and the more we have access and education about things like that so if you go on the GP and you're talking about depression, hopefully the GP has or the practice has a link worker has some access to social prescribing initiatives and that's kind of promoted as an option to get involved with a group who are going out in the outdoors, whether that's for a walk in the forest or in the hills or whatever open water swimming or whatever. So there are. The more we have a network of those kind of social prescribing type of options, the more that's in the consciousness of the medical fraternity and the more people get access and awareness of that. And again, you know there's so much to be said about the support and the infrastructure of social networks which help you get involved in things like that. You know there's stuff in the talking with people that I know in the police kind of therapy side of the police there are charities which police officers are going doing things like surfing and all sorts of things which are quite novel and stimulating for people to go. All right, I've never thought of that and there's some great results coming out of some of those initiatives.
Speaker 2:So again, I mean, how does someone who is isolated from all this awareness motivate themselves? At the end of the day that's a very hard thing to do. But if there's more awareness of this which of course Adventure Mind is doing great work to promote that all the work at UCLAN and others looking at social prescribing and Mind Over Mountains and other charities like that, really pushing the message around social prescribing and the benefits of doing small-scale to bigger-scale adventures, that can be a real impetus and hopefully the more awareness of that, the more people who might be caregivers to people with depression will plant the seed when they see them and when they help them out and give them some kind of impetus to, you know, to try and find some motivation to do something. But again, yeah, it's a tricky one and it's easy to sit here and kind of say, oh yeah, adventure's great, you should just go and do it. Well, we know that that depression is a is a massively debilitating condition. So yeah, I mean again. I know from some personal experience of being depressive at times.
Speaker 1:you know getting out of bed is the hardest thing, but but one action leads to another and hopefully that then leads to getting outside and there's so much to be said staring up at the sky, staring up with trees in the outside, and suddenly getting a burst of energy opening up your body, breathing and actually starting to see opportunities to to take it further and uh, yeah, a couple of things there that, um and I keep going back to this passage in a book that I read, and I don't know if it were a gab or a maté Anyway, they did an experiment and they were in a sort of old people's home and they gave one side of the ward flowers and they gave the other side of the ward flowers and told them to water them, and told them people to water them, and the people that had to water their own flower generally lived longer. They studied it and they get a bit of an awful set up. Really, I think a bit brutal, isn't it? Because they're expected that, but because they had purpose, and I do need to dig that passage out so I can reference it because I can't mention it.
Speaker 1:You know, making these small changes, which was something I can definitely identify with, you know, from you know, I'm going to go out and go for a walk rather than go to the pub, know. And then the benefits from that you just mentioned then going outside and getting the. I've heard of blue light, green light, cytoclines, the fresh air, the exercise. Are these mood enhancers or are they actually changing the setup of the brain?
Speaker 2:yeah, there's certainly from the brain networks point of view, which I'm very interested in. There's certainly literature and research out there which shows there are changes to connectivity. There's parts of that default mode work I think I'm pretty sure the subgenual prefrontal cortex is part of the default mode network or it's implicated in the default mode network. And I remember studies from a while ago I think it was forest bathing, it was certainly exposure to natural scenes. Being being in nature and to some extent being exposed to pictures of nature can also help Are shown to kind of down what you call down-regulate parts of the brain, parts of that default mode network, in the sense that you know the connectivity is reducing in its kind of hyper-connected state and that can help reduce depressive symptoms. So yeah, there is definitely potentially information out there which corroborates that the connectivity of the brain is changed by exposure to nature. I know for certain, in terms of looking at things like immersion in water, that has definitely been researched in terms of the kind of neurotransmitter effects and the cocktail of different interaction of different neurotransmitters, from dopamine, serotonin, cortisol, norepinephrine and endorphins are actually working together in that immersion in cold water or open water to affect the brain, the connections in the brain and also then spawn positive affective or positive emotional responses and reduce depression, reduce depressive symptoms. So there's definitely a neurochemical basis to being in natural environments, more so from what I've just said to do with actual immersion in water, and that's much more of a kind of a shock response as an adaptive response. And I do suspect as well in more extreme environments, by extreme there's a kind of a shock response as an adaptive response and I do suspect as well in more extreme environments, by extreme, there's a kind of a pronounced physiological effect of being in that environment that will have a more pronounced effect on the, the changes in the brain chemistry and how the system adapts and maybe to an extent what I went what going back to what I talked about before, the, the stress serotonin system that we touched on, maybe creating more of an adaptive response there Again, a little bit out of the kind of my entire knowledge base there, but it's, yeah, there's psychological effects of being in nature, perceptual effects as well, but there are. There's definitely burgeoning evidence for a kind of neurophysiological change that's occurring there, change that's occurring there. I mean, you know, even if we're going to so there's a perceptual literature, how we perceive different types of environments can affect our kind of mood, state and whatever from a perception point of view.
Speaker 2:So it has been found that there's a difference in the complexity of the, the, the scene, and in the scenes and the elements that constitute scenes in the natural world versus the more urban and artificial worlds. By that I mean, if you take the general standpoint, that when we're in a kind of room I'm in a room now with four walls my ability to focus is limited by the wall two meters away. Everything's kind of got hard edges. If I was in the street again, there's quite a lot of hard edges and angles which you don't necessarily find in nature. Nature has a lot more complexity as a rule, and this has been actually kind of measured and sort of described in terms of what they call the fractal complexity. So fractals are kind of repeating mathematical patterns, if you like, in reality, which kind of scale up. So you might think of things like snowflakes scaling up or things like branches, clouds moving, water flowing or undulating. There's a lot more actual mathematical complexity. I don't want to go too much in maths I'm not a mathematician and it gets very sort of wow, complicated, but there are measures of complexity that are in nature versus in urban settings.
Speaker 2:And it's also said that our brains, our visual systems, evolved for more complexity in nature and we find it more easy on the eye and more aesthetically pleasing because we kind of are more in tune perceptually with the environment.
Speaker 2:We have a different range of focus, we can focus into the distance, there's a much more panoramic view there and this is more pleasing and easier in a way to our perception systems, whereas being in hard edged kind of limited focus environments in the more urban world or artificial world it can lead to a bit more strain and stress on our perception system.
Speaker 2:So even at that level of having a more natural scene to process, it's kind of more in tune with what our brains have evolved for and it can actually influence our mood and our sense of wellbeing in that sense because it's just easier and things which are perceptually easier means less cognitive load on the brain and actually there's more space to think and you know and reflect and contemplate and not even innovate in your thinking because you've got a more expansive kind of environment. So you know there's some fascinating stuff when you get into that level of brain and perception and so on and what the difference between nature versus non-nature? There's a lot going on beyond just that. Oh, it's nice and more pleasant being outside. You know there's physiological and perception and so on kind of benefits to that.
Speaker 1:You just mentioned forest bathing, Seb. Did I mention that? I got a distinction in my recent? Really have you? I might have mentioned it once or twice.
Speaker 3:It might be a first.
Speaker 1:And you mentioned the word perception there. So if I talk to somebody about forest bathing, I might have mentioned it once or twice, it might be a first and you mentioned the word perception there. So if I talk to somebody about forest bathing, what? And then you mentioned cold water as well, and there's a perception that getting into cold water is something horrendous, and even somebody stepping out of the door, putting some walking boots on and going for a low-level walk if it's raining.
Speaker 1:How do we change these, change these? Damn. I don't want to go off on a tangent and go negative, but how do we change that sort of perception? Because what we have now is a society where we wake up in a bed with a duvet on. Yeah, I get out of bed, maybe go get a warm shower. I don't. I get a cold shower, and then it sets me up for the day. But then I get in the, put my jacket on, I walk to the car, get in the car, put the heater on or depending who I'm with and for myself. How do we change that? Because that has got to my mind and I'm not the scientist. This is why I'm asking you to my mind and I might be incorrect. That has got to be having a negative effect, surely, because we're not stepping outside the boundaries. Absolutely, yeah, I mean it's a behavior change problem.
Speaker 2:If I'd completely solved it, I'd probably be a millionaire by now. But yeah, I mean, one of the things is encouraging the kind of society to change its opinion on that, which, again, I think things like adventure, mind, it's the evidence basis, it's the getting communities of people who are spreading the world, that the word, evangelically about the benefits of all this, and it's having access to groups. I mean, look, look, how much open water swimming is taken off. And there's everyone and his wife or her husband seem to be, you know, involved in open water swimming, which which is funny, because I used to jump in the north sea as a kid and and it was just going jumping in water. It was cool, but that was just part of it. So, you know, partly people respond, I suppose, to trends or to things becoming more accepted as the thing you do and why you would do it. And you know, having taster sessions and communities of people who do that is the way forward. I mean, maybe there's the equivalent of a couch to 5K, for you know, having taster sessions and communities of people who do that is the way forward. I mean, maybe there's the equivalent of a couch to couch to 5k for, you know, going out in in swimming in the water. I don't know, it certainly seems.
Speaker 2:I was down at ross on sea, which is one of my nearest beaches in north wales, the other day. It was a beautiful day and I thought I've got a few hours. I'll try and get in the sea. I mean, it was balic. I must admit I wasn't expecting it to be as cold, given the nice weather we've had, but I love that. But I was quite surprised how many people were actually in the sea. You know, it seems like there's more people in the sea these days, you know, which is funny because, like as a kid, people either did or didn't jump in the North Sea, but it wasn't such a big thing, but now it seems to be a big thing because people, like you say, are reticent to step outside their comfort zone. And I don't know if I know that there's a lot of more paddle boarding and things like that and I think the Coast Guard incidents and lifeboat incidents reflect that, certainly since lockdown. So I don't know. I mean more people are definitely doing these types of things because there's more of a buzz around it and it's it's again, it's about getting people interested and selling the kind of the benefits of that as well, rather than it's a challenge for oh, you're brave enough, is it a bucket list sort of thing? Well, actually no, there's health giving benefits and actually much like any kind of dietary type of things as well.
Speaker 2:Whether there's some kind of getting this into schools, you know selling. I know going a little bit off tangent, but I know there's a move in wales at the minute to get experiential outdoor learning, outdoor stuff on the curriculum and to try and be the first country in the world to actively promote this and get everyone doing that. So it would be brilliant to get more stuff like that in schools and kind of offset some of the culture of you mustn't do that, you mustn't climb a tree. I was involved with some. I mean, I do work with quite a lot of kids and I've seen in the not too distant past kids climbing a tree and then someone going, oh, what are they doing up a tree? Oh, I can't have them up the tree.
Speaker 2:And I'm like, well, you know where do I stand here on the health and safety of working in this space, versus like I fully endorse them climbing a tree. You know that's brilliant and don't tell them, not you know, how are they ever going to learn? So I don't know. Is there a way we can get this more in the curriculum? Is there more of a way we can push it into communities and social prescribing, of course, as well, which I keep coming back to, and, and just you know, spreading the word? But, yeah, is there a couch to 30 fathoms or something, I don't know what, the equivalent just trying to think where we're going that.
Speaker 1:So I have to keep away from the negative side. Yeah, I have seen an awful lot and I do go about, I'll you know. I admit I'd spend quite a bit of time on social media. Looking at the mental health side, I'm trying to push this podcast, to be fair, but there seems to be an awful lot of showing toddlers out in the woods splashing around in puddles and saying, yes, this is the way it should be, rather than wrapping them in cotton wool. And I suppose we have got our health and safety side. It's got to be considered. But do you think we've lost balance of? We've got the health and safety side? And if somebody say 100 people are climbing a tree, somebody falls and loses a life, then that'll stop 99 people developing neural networks, developing growth. I don't know, it's a difficult one. I don't want to put you on the spot. What do we do there? Sacrifice one for the 99?.
Speaker 2:I mean it depends how you're pushing. Are you advocating right? It's playtime, everyone has to get up the tree. There are ways that there are, I'm sure if we innovated and got our heads together to to put that on the table the health safety part, but put the advocate coming up with new ways to make things safe but challenging, maybe it's more more autobelays in climbing walls, making it fun to be climbing, pushing things like climbing. I mean these high ropes courses are just wonderful and since I've actually probably been on with you last time, I've been much more involved with kids and seeing kids doing more experiential activities, not so much in the tree climbing side of things, but things like lighting fires, rudimental bushcraft, not so much using knives that's getting a little bit in the dodgy territory but a progressive kind of system which gets the kids doing things which are kind of skills for, you know, which have bearing on survival down the lane.
Speaker 2:So I don't know how we address that. I think it needs a sensible discussion with people who are higher up the hierarchy who maybe are out of touch with what's actually going on in terms of the experiential things that are being done. That's a tricky thing to get in a conversation with people and get them to understand that there needs to be managed risk. Maybe there's a potential to change that attitude. I don't know. But, like I say, I mean sometimes it's about spawning innovation, and a problem spawns a new approach and rather than just getting rid of the old approach and making it all sanitized are you know people like running, climbing walls or other kind of adventure courses? Is it worth getting them in the room with schools and whatever and just saying, look, we can make this, we can tick the safe box but actually make it quite challenging at the same time. Trees are trees and you know how do you legislate against kids growing up trees? I don't know that that's that is. That's put me on the spot a bit to solve that.
Speaker 2:But that's where I'd kind of, I think, I guess, because at the end of the day, I have this a little bit, well, quite a lot in terms of the academic research. So I've hung around with base jumpers for the last several years and witnessed some very hairy stuff and my interest is how do we measure the brains of people doing base jumps in situ? How do we take something from that situation and get the everyday person in that situation so they can kind of go through these transformative experiences. But how the hell do we do that with the extreme risk? And that's kind of led me to look at things like high ropes courses, leap of faith type of activities such as I I advocated at adventure mind, and these are pretty damn scary things to go up on and and elicit that stress response. So I think there's ways we can tap into that stress response and that sense of challenge and you know the movements involved to to upskill people and reconnect with these skills that they've had in the past, but in kind of new and innovative ways, while still people will still go climbing and still have whippers and still fall off and people still climb trees and people do parkour.
Speaker 2:I mean what I mean? You had richard wall on here a while ago. He does, he's interested in parkour. There must be a lot of twisted ankles, but what are they doing in their kind of, you know, their gyms and whatever? I presume there's more padding. So people are going high up and it's mitigating the risk. Yeah, I mean we've got to be sensible over this. But how do we? We'll come up with new ways to to do this and promote it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know there's quite a few more sort of clip and climb facilities open which have fought, but basically aimed at the younger end and with pies parties you've got young people, children, basically being clipped into harnesses and jumping around all over the place. So that's got to be a positive from a learning rather than just cutting them off. And one thing that was fascinating was the lady at Adventure Mind who spoke about the junkyard playgrounds and if anyone's not aware of them, they're worth looking up and it's adults out around and there's 15 foot platforms and there's hammers and things like that and the research that she was saying the result from there was quite fascinating. So I think that might be a future podcast if we could persuade. Although if I keep putting the, if I keep putting the guest on the spot to solve all the world's problems, then then maybe not I, I might have to edit that out.
Speaker 3:Just because you were talking about the research that you're doing. I was just interested how many people are there a lot of people doing this similar kind of research across the world? Do you share your findings, your information, your data, your results? You know, is this a global study or is it quite locally to the UK?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I'm trying to connect more up with people around the world, particularly in America.
Speaker 2:I mean there's a lot more I'm aware of certain people and the appetite for some of this type of stuff. There's things like flow, research, flow and adventure, flow and extreme sports and there's groups out in America doing this. There's also a lot of veterans type of research as well and I just I have a lot of connections in America so I do talk to a lot of people around the world in a lot of different domains. I mean in terms of what I'm doing specifically, it's a little, I mean because I'm more in the adventure and extreme side and the kind of unique protocols I guess I'm coming up with. There's not that many people I'm aware of. Obviously uclan's big in the kind of adventure for well-being, social prescribing and I'm connected up with people there. You get sports science, people doing various bits of research, but it's always a bit of a conundrum to to really be pushing certainly neuroscience out into the real world.
Speaker 2:I've worked with with a research group in Chile a few years ago where we took EEG machines up into high altitude mountains. So we were up at like 4,000 meters in the Andes. We were driving a pickup truck with a 64 channel EEG system up into the rarefied air in the borderlands between Chile and Argentina, but that didn't really lend itself to us doing in situ. I mean, we're kind of motivated by mountaineering. You know how people cope with high altitude, but actually you can't strap a 64-channel EEG machine to someone's back when they're mountaineering. So you have to compromise in terms of getting measures but in a more sedate setting, albeit in the real world environment. We also did some stuff back in the lab in kind of simulated environments as well. So there are people looking at, say, vr as well and putting people in kind of high stress situations in VR, putting them up on planks in VR and eliciting some of the same kind of responses are and eliciting some of the same kind of responses. It's much easier to do scientific research into these things when you can simulate it in a lab because you're not then constrained and you're not so much in the noisy environment and you don't have to take all the equipment out there. So there are people doing this type of stuff in different ways.
Speaker 2:I guess I'm trying to take the lab into the real world and get as close approximately as I can, and I tend to focus on the more extreme people as well. So I feel quite unique in that. So it's a bit of a frontier of the research. But again, yes, I do connect up. I'd like to just mention something.
Speaker 2:So I've kind of formed a collective called the Adventure Neuroscience Collective.
Speaker 2:So I'm trying to promote the idea of adventure neuroscience, which is effectively understanding how the brain functions in extreme situations in the wild, the benefits of adventure for the brain, everything that the likes of Belinda and Adventure Mind are doing.
Speaker 2:But I'm just kind of bringing the neuroscience more to the forefront and I have colleagues in different labs around the world who are very adventurous in themselves, but also brain scientists, and I'm trying to grow that collective as well as a kind of research network, if you like, so that different research groups around the world can share, you know, common insights and protocols and you know and look at different elements of this picture.
Speaker 2:You know I can't do everything from where I am and you know researchers on their own and in their own research groups can't do everything but connect up around the world and we can, you know, look at the broader picture and look at things like veterans and PTSD in one sense or look at kind of healthy, normal people, youngsters in another, and look at different types of interventions as well and just build that kind of picture to spread the evidence basis for why it's really healthy to to engage in adventure and these other kind of benefits, and this is how we can change people's behavior to become more adventurous. And that's kind of my strap line, if you like. So, yeah, so there is a research network. There are people around you never quite know everyone who's doing this, but research can be quite a small kind of a small world when you find out who's doing whatever and then you can connect up and try and build it as a collective.
Speaker 1:Well, that's got to be a positive, hasn't it? I mean just referencing going back to the forest bathing. I think that started in the 1970s, didn't it? In Japan? Now it's, you know, to add the science back, to back up what people are doing, then invites more people to join that, hopefully, and follow that through. I wonder if it might be good if there was a book coming out around this sort of subject. That would be good, so then people that weren't academic or weren't scientists could read about this. What do you think to that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, people have been telling me to write a book for a very, very long time and last year I decided to just get on with it. So yeah, the last year I've actually written a book. I mean, it's being edited. I think I'm on the third or fourth edit at the moment to really try and strip it down. So yeah, it's about adventure neuroscience, if you like, and it's kind of a very personal, autobiographical look at different environments and how I kind of progressed from a very anxious kid, kind of held back, full of energy, full of enthusiasm to do adventurous things. But something was holding me back and I had this kind of relationship with anxiety which I kind of tackled as I got older and as I got into the science and became a psychologist and eventually a neuroscientist. So I've written a book on adventure neuroscience which aims to. We talked about different modes of the brain, different modes of cognition. I guess the story is around how we can almost access what I call an adventure mode of cognition. You know, we can switch out of a default mode or a kind of ruminative mode or a kind of a everyday, just plodding along mode and try and stimulate the brain into this kind of adventure mode, as I call it, which I guess I'm hypothesizing, is kind of a blending and a balance of these different settings in the brain, if you like, which we talked about before, and that's to inspire us to become more adventurous, to embrace challenge and to really try and elevate purpose and ambition to get the most out of doing fun and adventurous and productive and meaningful things in life. So, yeah, so hopefully in the next few months I might have it published. I'm currently looking to publish as a literary agent to get it of interest to people and it's yeah, it's kind of a roadmap, if you like.
Speaker 2:I kind of the strapline I've come up with. It's like a scientific travelogue. So it's got a bit of Bill Bryson in there travelling around the world haplessly but actually in more extreme settings. There's a lot of the kind of scientific my own journey through science to unpack you know how, how we respond to these adaptive situations in in more challenging and extreme environments. And then it's kind of a roadmap for the, the reader, to sort of how can we engage this adventurous mode by you know practical steps? And I kind of say that it's. It's about transforming the mind without the drugs, basically. So it taps into that whole scientific background for adventurous transformation, if you like. So yeah, it should be hopefully coming out in the next few months and uh, you know, we'll see where we go with that good it sounds.
Speaker 1:I'll be honest, that sounds great for me to be fair to read that obviously I've got not the scientific side. I'm sort of a reflective now and looking back at being where I was with the ptsd depression, heavy drinking, and then accidentally finding this pathway that's then led through to, you know, the outdoors adventure, climbing, calculated risk taking and now learning about the science and what actually happened to myself. Have you thought of a title? Because belinda's pinched adventure. Mind, you can't have that, can you?
Speaker 2:well, his used to be called adventure revolution and then I I actually I came up, I mean I had a very convoluted long title and then I sort of thought, well, adventure brain, taking neuroscience to the extremes felt appropriate. I don't know if that's a bit close to adventure mind, but it is the main side and it's about, like I say, taking neuroscience to the extremes. So that's a kind of working title for now. We'll see how we get on with that. Yeah, it's, it's too easy to have too many words in there and you know a road roadmap to the adventurer's brain or whatever. So we'll see.
Speaker 2:But that, that for now is the working title, because it's definitely about a bit of extreme and it's about, you know, unlocking the brain. So brain needs to be in there and neuroscience is kind of key. I used to more proclaim that I was on adventure psychology, but actually the neuroscience is kind of where it's at and I know last time we talked about neuropsychology. So yeah, it's, it's, it's quite a balance to to sell it to the public in a way that doesn't sound completely off the wall.
Speaker 1:Cool and you will be at Adventure Mind in November. Yes, I intend to be. Yes, yeah, absolutely, and you're going to carry on, hopefully, carry on working with Belinda on this, because I think it's a great thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I've been working on some evidence-basis reviews and stuff with Belinda, so looking at the more adventurous extreme side and how that's good for the brain and the mental health. So that's been very useful exercise to consolidate what's out there. So, yeah, very much still involved with with adventure, mine and belinda brilliant, dave.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much for joining us again. You are our first guest that we've had on a second time. Wow, yes, now, unfortunately that doesn't qualify you for two of our very special White Fox Talking mugs. When I get them to get that to you, that's just because of environmental conditions. But, yeah, thanks for that, dave. I look forward to getting the book, or seeing the book. Let me know, let us know when it comes out. I'll be in touch before then anyway, sure.
Speaker 3:Excellent, we'll put a post out as well, won't?
Speaker 1:we. We will put a post out. Yeah, thanks a lot, dave Gallagher. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. Cheers, buddy, and if you'd like to support us and help us keep the podcast going, then you can go to Buys a coffee or you can click that on our website, whitefoxtalkingcom, and look for the little cup. Thank you,
