Train Your Brain: The Science Behind BrainHQ

In this illuminating episode of Wellness Connection MD, Dr. McMinn and Coach Lindsay welcome renowned neuroscientist Dr. Henry Mahncke, CEO of Posit Science and creator of BrainHQ. Together, they explore the science of neuroplasticity—how the brain can adapt, heal, and grow at any age—and discuss how BrainHQ leverages this power to improve cognition, memory, processing speed, and even reduce dementia risk.

Dr. Mahncke shares compelling insights from hundreds of peer-reviewed studies and groundbreaking clinical trials, including new research on brain atrophy in long COVID, and structural brain changes observed through fMRI. You'll also hear real-world stories of transformation—from stroke recovery to safer driving—illustrating the tangible benefits of personalized brain training.

Whether you're aging proactively, recovering from illness, or simply seeking sharper mental focus, this episode delivers hopeful, evidence-based tools to support your cognitive wellness.

✨ Key Topics Covered:

• How neuroplasticity rewires the brain across the lifespan
• The evidence behind BrainHQ’s cognitive training exercises
• Long COVID, depression, PTSD & brain fog: how BrainHQ helps
• Functional medicine, brain speed, and practical applications
• Real-life success stories and future visions for brain health

"Your brain is built to grow. It just needs the right kind of challenge."

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Brain Training and BrainHQ
• 6:22 Dr. Manka's Personal Journey into Neuroscience
• 9:26 The Science of Brain Plasticity
• 15:10 Evidence Behind BrainHQ's Effectiveness
• 21:53 Brain Health Revolution and Growth Mindset
• 27:11 Long COVID and Cognitive Rehabilitation
• 34:52 Brain Imaging and Structural Changes
• 45:12 How BrainHQ Training Works
• 51:16 Future Vision for Brain Health

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to Wellness Connection D. Today we're going to explore the powerful world of brain training with neuroscientist Dr Henry Manka, creator of BrainHQ. Dr Manka walked us through the science of neuroplasticity the brain's incredible ability to change and heal at any age and how BrainHQ taps into that capacity using personalized adaptive exercises. He shares compelling evidence from major studies showing Brain HQ's ability to improve memory processing speed and even reduce dementia risk. We also dove into exciting new research on long COVID, brain atrophy, mood disorders and real-life impacts on things like better driving and stress management. So whether you're recovering from illness or just want to stay sharp, brainhq offers scientifically validated tools for cognitive health. And Dr Maka reminds us your brain is built to grow. It just needs the right kind of challenge.

Speaker 2: 0:56

Welcome to the Wellness Connection MD podcast with Dr McMinn and Coach Lindsay, where we bring you the latest up-to-date, evidence-based information on a wide variety of health and wellness topics, along with practical take-home solutions. Dr McMinn is an integrated and functional MD and Lindsey Matthews is a registered nurse and IIN-certified health coach. Together, our goal is to help you optimize your health and wellness in mind, body and spirit. To see a list of all of our podcasts, visit mcmdcom and to stay up to date on the latest topics, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast player so that you'll be notified when future episodes come out. The discussions contained in this podcast are for educational purposes only and are not intended to diagnose or treat any disease. Please do not apply any of this information without approval from your personal doctor. And now on to the show with Dr McMinn and Coach Lindsay.

Speaker 3: 1:52

Good morning, Dr McMinn. It is good to be back on the show today with our listeners.

Speaker 1: 1:56

Well, coach, today we're going to touch on a very important topic, and that is brain health. Specifically, we're going to explore a concept of brain training with an evidence-based program called Brain HQ, which can help you keep your brain sharp and can also help you when things start to go off the tracks. We have on the show today a very special guest to help us break it down, and that is Dr Henry Monca, phd, the CEO of Posit Science, which makes Brain HQ. He received his PhD at UCSF, which is University of California, san Francisco, where lifelong brain plasticity was first discovered. Before positive science, henry worked across biotech, medical devices and video games as they applied to healthcare, and then worked with the British government on science and technology partnerships. Through his work with positive science, he has likely been involved in more studies of cognitive training than anyone on the planet.

Speaker 1: 2:45

You know, coach, many years ago, as a part of my functional medicine practice, I put together a program to optimize brain function and to help people with mild cognitive impairment and early dementia. Dementia is usually not caused by one big thing, but instead there are many factors that can contribute to cognitive decline. Therefore, my program included many aspects, including classic lifestyle measures, as well as many other factors which, for the sake of time, I won't go into here. If you would like more information about that program, then please go back and listen to our podcast entitled Brain Health from 2019. As a part of my program to improve brain health, both in terms of preventive measures and therapeutic measures, I became familiar with a program called Brain HQ. It was being recommended by many scientists and experts in the field at that time, especially in the functional medicine space. There were many brain training programs available at the time, but Brain HQ seemed to stand out as the evidence-based go-to program for brain training, and over the years I have recommended it to many of my patients and I have actually tried it myself.

Speaker 1: 3:43

The Brain HQ program is widely regarded as one of the most evidence-based and scientifically validated cognitive training programs available.

Speaker 1: 3:50

Its efficacy has been evaluated in hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, including large-scale randomized controlled trials, and this is in a field where many commercial brain training programs just lack the rigorous evidence. As an older adult myself, I can testify that the number one top concern of older adults is dementia, and unfortunately it's becoming an epidemic. I recently read that a whopping 35% of Americans in their 70s have some sort of dementia, and it even gets worse as folks get older. This creates huge problems for patients, their families and for society as a whole. The total economic cost of dementia in the United States is estimated to be $781 billion per year. Oh my gosh, that's just a staggering number. Brain HQ has been around for many years, but what interested me in discussing it on the show at this time is some interesting recent research that was done right here at UAB, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, on using brain training as a tool for healing the crippling and life-altering brain-associated symptoms of long COVID, which may include things like depression, fatigue and severe brain fog.

Speaker 3: 4:53

And before we get into our interview, we have just a couple of brief housekeeping duties to take care of. Our podcast remains commercial-free, and it does cost us money, though, to produce these podcasts, so think of us like public radio and consider making a contribution to help us keep this good functional medicine information coming to you.

Speaker 1: 5:14

There are a couple of ways you can contribute. First, if you buy nutritional supplements, then consider purchasing supplements from our Full Script dispensary at a 10% discount. You can see the link to Full Script in the show notes, or go go to mcminnmdcom and the link will be right there for you at the bottom of the homepage under helpful links. It's quite simple Just click on the link and they'll guide you through the process. It's a win-win you get high-quality supplements at a discount and we get your support for the show, for which we are very grateful.

Speaker 3: 5:40

And you can also make a contribution to the show directly via credit card or PayPal at the Support the Show link, which is also down there below in the show notes.

Speaker 1: 5:50

And don't forget to subscribe to the show and tell your friends and family about us so we can keep it growing. And thank you so much.

Speaker 3: 5:56

And without further ado, let's dig into keeping our brains working like clockwork via brain training with Brain HQ.

Speaker 1: 6:03

So for that reason we're very excited to have on our show today Dr Henry Manka to discuss Brain HQ, an exciting and important program for brain healing and optimization. Welcome to the Wellness Connection MD podcast, dr Manka. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Speaker 4: 6:17

It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me on.

Speaker 3: 6:21

So I get to be the co-host on this show. I'm so honored. I'm Lindsay and just curious, so what personally drew you to this field and the mission of BrainHQ?

Speaker 4: 6:31

Well, you know, it's been a long journey and I would say it probably began when I was about eight or nine years old. To be honest, if we wind the clock back that far, when I was eight or nine years old, I was living in Washington DC and my grandfather started to develop what we would now recognize as Alzheimer's disease. But then, you know, no one was really sure what was going on. It was just sort of called getting funny as you got older or senile dementia. And even though I was quite young, I remember what my family went through to support him and take care of him on that journey and I saw the toll that it took on my own dad who was watching his father go down that road, and I've kind of carried that with me throughout my life.

Speaker 4: 7:12

And you know, then I came out to graduate school at the University of California, san Francisco here, and I had the great honor of studying in a fantastic lab run by the legendary Dr Michael Merznik, who fundamentally discovered the idea that the adult brain is plastic and can rewire itself. And we don't need to think about our brains as just wearing out over time. We should think about our brains as constantly reorganizing and rebuilding themselves. And so you know that fundamental insight that we can rebuild brains with experience and learning and training is what led to the foundation of Brain HQ. But what led to my excitement and my own passion about the project is, you know, my own experience with my grandfather and that of so many people that I know and love to sort of get this idea that you know, brain plasticity isn't just a laboratory phenomenon. It's something that we can all put to use in our lives to enjoy better, healthier brains and better, healthier lives.

Speaker 3: 8:06

I love hearing your personal story there about your grandfather and then how you've taken this from the lab to clinical application. That's really inspiring.

Speaker 4: 8:19

It's a really mission-driven company here. Mission-driven company here. Just about every single person at Brain HQ, you know, has a family member, a friend who's got a pretty deep connection to you, know some brain health disorder or another, and it's common enough, right? I mean, brain health disorders are, you know, pretty ubiquitous. It's not hard to go to a room and ask people to put up their hands. Hey, do you know someone in your life who's been affected by Alzheimer's or head injury or mental illness in some way? You know, the brain is by far the most complicated organ in our body Some people call it the most complicated machine in the known universe and there's a lot of things that can go wrong with it. There's a lot of things that can go right with it, and that's a very motivating thing to kind of figure out the science of, but then, even more importantly, figure out how to put it to use in the real world.

Speaker 3: 9:06

Well, let's jump in. Explain to us some of the core scientific principles that Brain HQ is built upon. What theories about brain plasticity and cognitive function are most central to your approach to what y'all have built here?

Speaker 4: 9:22

Yeah, the fundamental idea, as you correctly call out, there is the idea of brain plasticity. And to really set the stage here, you know, if you were to rewind the clock to, let's say, I don't know, 1970, right, a long time ago now and you were to ask any neuroscientist how does the brain work, every neuroscientist would have said the same thing. They would have said the brain's like a computer chip inside your head, right, it's got wires, it uses electricity, it processes information sounds exactly like a computer chip. But that idea led to some really wrong ideas about brain health, right? One of the wrong ideas it led to was that, hey, the brain just wears out over time. You know, we know that computers wear out over time. We've all had the experience that hey, the computer just doesn't work anymore, it's time to get a new one. And we kind of thought that's what happened to ourselves as we get older. You know, if you read papers from that generation of scientists, you will read about the wear and tear theory of aging. Right, we just wear out and there's nothing to be done about it, like a machine running out of gas. And it also led to some bad ideas about brain injury, right, I think we all know that if you drop your computer hard enough like it's going to break, you're not going to fix it. And I think that led to a lot of ideas about brain injury and brain injury recovery as well. And you know, what's important about the idea of adult brain plasticity is that, hey, all that's wrong, right? Please do not think about the brain as a computer chip. It's not. Your brain does not have processing speed and it does not have RAM and our heart just doesn't fill up, like all those analogies are just confusing and bad, right.

Speaker 4: 10:45

And what the idea of adult brain plasticity tells us is that our brain is rewiring and rebuilding and reimagine itself at any age. You know, it happens when we're little kids, it happens when we're young adults, it happens when we're older adults. It happens if we have healthy brains, it happens if we have unhealthy brains. It is just how the brain works. And once you really come to appreciate that at a basic science, that the brain is plastic and reimagining and rebuilding itself, it actually opens incredible doors because all of a sudden you realize, hey, many of the things that go right with the brain we can help go right even faster. Many things that might go wrong with a brain? Hey, we can probably fix if we rewire it. And so you asked, you know, where does this science come from? Well, that's the idea of it's brain plasticity.

Speaker 4: 11:26

And then you know, more specifically, if we think about aging, for example, like, hey, what happens to the brain as we get older? Why is it that many people not everyone, that's important, but you know, many people start to slow down or exhibit some memory problems? And you know, it turns out that the brain starts to develop this kind of noisy information processing. So, you know, as we get older, it's a little bit like our brain is a radio and it's on a dial and it just gets a little bit off the station, so there's more static coming in. And if you've ever listened to a noisy radio, hey, it's harder to pay attention, it's harder to understand what they say, it's harder to remember what they say, and in fact, well, those are all cognitive problems, aren't they?

Speaker 4: 12:06

And it turns out that as we get older, for various reasons, our brain gets kind of noisy, like that. And that's why, as we get older, it's harder to follow what a kid says when they're talking quickly, it's harder to hear what someone says in a noisy restaurant Harder to remember what they say. So what the Brain HQ brain training exercises are designed to do is take that power of brain plasticity, let's rewire the brain and let's do something helpful with it. Let's take that noisy information processing in the brain and let's clear it up. Let's make information processing in the brain faster and more accurate and, as a result, let's bring that radio back on the tune. And that helps people well, helps people hear and see more clearly, helps them improve their attention, their speed, their memory, and then even helps improve real-world functional activities of all kinds, fundamentally because the brain is just healthier and working better as an information processing system. So that's what we can do with this incredibly powerful idea.

Speaker 1: 13:02

Well, that's great. Dr Maka, you know, one thing we hang our hat on on this podcast is being evidence-based, and it seems like that's one of the core principles of Brain HQ, if I'm reading it right. There are other brain training programs out there, but none of them seem to have quite the scientific rigor that Brain HQ has. And, by the way, let me be clear I have no financial connection with Brain HQ. I don't want anybody to think I'm promoting them for that reason. But let's dive right into it. There have been hundreds of high-quality studies on Brain HQ, so please share with us some of the more pivotal studies that most strongly demonstrate the effectiveness of Brain HQ, and what were the findings, the key findings of those studies.

Speaker 4: 13:40

You're absolutely right. You know, from the moment we founded this company we've been really deeply committed not just to science like hey, let's get the idea of brain plus just you right but the idea of clinical evidence. And you know, hey, if a person's going to spend time or even money on a brain training program, like they should have some reasonable confidence that it works and it's going to help them. And you're right, and it's kind of you to say so, but we are by far and away the leader in this area. There's actually more than 300 published scientific studies now specifically using brain HQ exercises that show in large-scale randomized controlled trials that it helps people think faster, focus better and remember more, as we like to say. So I'll mention a couple of them in brief.

Speaker 4: 14:19

I was actually involved with one of the first large-scale randomized controlled trials of any computerized brain training program. We did this study with Mayo Clinic and University of Southern California back in the day and you know we did a classic gold standard trial. We took more than 400 healthy older adults. Half of them got randomized to do brain HQ exercises and, importantly, half of them got randomized to a control activity. And what they did is they watched and learned from educational DVD ROMs. This was back in the day. You know things like Carl Sagan's Cosmos or Sister Wendy's History of Art. So both groups were doing things with their brains right, but only the Brain HQ group was doing those things to make brain information processing faster and more accurate.

Speaker 4: 15:00

The other group was just learning facts like in a class, and what that study showed is well dramatic improvements in brain speed in the brain age group. Beautiful improvements in memory equivalent to about 10 years of cognitive function. So people in their 70s were performing more like people in their 60s afterwards. And then beautiful improvements in real world cognitive function. People saying hey, I can hear better at noisy restaurants. I remember the names of people that I meet saying hey, I can hear better at noisy restaurants. I remember the names of people that I meet. So that was just a wonderful gold standard population. Really, I think kind of set the field on the right track of hey, evidence matters. We should be doing studies that are as good as drug companies or medical device companies in establishing efficacy here, and that's, I think, where we really started to try and set the bar between. A brain training program is something that's been shown to work and there's a million brain games out there and hey man, I you know, play one if you want. But there's no evidence behind any of them.

Speaker 1: 15:51

You mentioned processing speed. How do you measure processing speed?

Speaker 4: 15:56

Oh, there's lots and lots of ways. You know, one of the ways we do it in Brain HQ is we'll actually just we have a beautiful auditory assessment or a training exercise as well, where you hear two very brief whistle sounds and you know, one of the whistles might go up and the other one might go down, like, and you hear them, and you hear a pair of them, and if they're slow and far apart, everyone can figure out hey, the first one went up and the second one down. But we make it harder and harder and harder to measure your true brain performance limits and as they get faster and closer together, eventually you can't quite hear. Was that an up or a down, or did the down come first or the up come first? And that measures what we call your auditory processing speed threshold right, and so if you are a young person with a good, fast, healthy brain, you might only need 20 or 30 milliseconds. That's a tiny little bit of time between those two sounds, but on the average, as we get older, you might need 100 milliseconds, you might need 150 milliseconds because your brain is operating more slowly.

Speaker 4: 16:54

It's not done processing the first sound before the second sound comes in, and so you can't straighten them out, and so that's a very standard way that we and others use to measure brain speed. But there are lots of other ones as well, and there are many people who would say and I'm one of them that I think the central cognitive challenge of aging, and a lot of other conditions as well, is actually speed of processing. You know, we often think as we get older, well, we have memory complaints. Right, that's the main thing, and people do. Don't get me wrong, but underneath those memory complaints is almost always a processing speed disorder. That's contributing to the memory disorder. Our brains just slow down, and that's part of that noisy information processing that we talked about.

Speaker 3: 17:33

Hmm, I love hearing about all those studies. It's really impressive that there's so many associated with Brain HQ that y'all have done, and they're randomized controlled trials, they're peer reviewed and it's robust data that's coming out of that and you're seeing the trends of real outcomes, not just like cognitive or health, but also like how this impacts daily life too.

Speaker 1: 18:04

And also that they're done with major institutions like Mayo Clinic. I think anybody can go out there and find somebody and pay enough money to do a study and make their product look good right, but you're not going to fool Mayo Clinic like that. So the fact that you're doing them with like UAB, Southern California, Mayo Clinic, some of these major institutions, that certainly gives it some credence.

Speaker 4: 18:26

I'll just briefly say you know we were inventing a field and I think if you're inventing a field, it's really, really important to put it on those solid scientific grounds and exactly the ways that you lay out there.

Speaker 3: 18:36

It's really exciting to think that you've been on the forefront of a revolution, really, so to speak, of just how brain it's just like a wild frontier almost to think about the brain in this different way and how that can impact our whole world.

Speaker 4: 18:52

You know, it really is an enormous change and you're right to put it that way. And you know, one of the best kind of ways to think about it is the physical fitness revolution. Right, if you go back to the 70s, that was a time where we first started thinking that, hey, man, we all need to take care of our bodies. Right, we need to get some exercise and we need to eat. Right, and if we do that, we're going to enjoy better physical health and we're going to live longer and we're going to live better. Right, we'll be able to do the things we want to do with our bodies. But the physical fitness revolution, really, you know, started at the feet and went up to about the neck is how I would put it. And it's only now that we're realizing that.

Speaker 4: 19:30

Hey, a lot of those ideas apply to our brain as well. The brain is as much a part of the body as the heart or the liver. And, hey, if we do the right things with our brain, you know, we can keep it healthy and sharp as well. But it is a revolution. You know, people often ask me hey, what's the biggest challenge in this field? And I always tell them the same thing like it is inertia, right? You know, I still meet people when I talk to them about aging and cognitive function and they say well, you know, my grandfather had Alzheimer's, so it's going to come and get me. When it comes and gets me, there's nothing I can do about it. Like now, please. That is a terrible way to think about brain aging. There are lots of things you could do, certainly including brain HQ, but a lot of other things as well to improve your brain health. You do not have to take the risk that you're going to get Alzheimer's at 63 or 83 just because your grandfather did, and you know.

Speaker 4: 20:18

Similarly, I talk to people who have these very crystallized ideas about brain health. I talk to people like oh, I'm bad at math. I've always been bad at math. I can't learn a language. I've never been able to learn a language. Well, I respect your lived experience. Right, you are telling me the truth, but let me just tell you no such thing as a math brain. There's no such thing as a language brain. There are simply situations that you might have been better or worse, where you know the quality of the brain plasticity-based instruction that you got, whether it was around changing your brain to work better in math, or changing your brain to work better in French or German, like all of our brains can change in those directions and it's that feeling that we're just stuck with the brain we have. You know, that's actually the feeling that I want to change the most when I talk to people about brain health.

Speaker 4: 21:04

You know we can rewire and rebuild and make better brains and it's just such an empowering idea to realize that is in our power, that's under our control. There's things that we can do and you know I mentioned that revolution. We went through that physical health revolution. Everybody knows we can do with our body. The next challenge is to go through it with a brain health revolution and realize, hey, we can do this with our brains as well.

Speaker 3: 21:25

I love that message of hope that you have. That's beautiful, but I also feel like it translates to not just our aging population, but to our middle and younger generations. What if me, as a parent, teach my child hey, your brain is something we're going to take care of, and it can grow and you can always work on these skills and I don't label them as you just can't like. You have this type of brain, you're just not good at that but instead foster those other things. I love this message of hope that you're bringing.

Speaker 4: 21:58

I think it's empowering at every age, certainly with kids. I think one of the most important thing a kid can realize is that they can grow and learn and change. Right, and that's part of being a kid and that's part of growing up. And, hey, that's true for a kid who doesn't think they're good at math, right, they can rewire their brain to be a good math brain brain. But it's in general, true. You know there are these incredible studies that came out of Stanford around a growth mindset and you may have heard of these and you know what they did is they took kids in summer school and split them into a half, a group that got sort of ordinary summer school instruction and the other half of them got instruction that was rooted in the idea that, hey, learning changes your brain and you may not be good at the skill now, but if you change your brain you can get better at it. And what they showed is that if you had that growth mindset, if you understood that your brain can change, you actually got better at school as a result of that.

Speaker 4: 22:47

Simplifying a very complex study, as you might imagine. But you know that insight I think is exactly right, but it's true when we're young adults and middle-aged adults and so forth as well. You know, I think one thing that can really happen during our careers is, you know, we get kind of good at something and we kind of want to rest on our laurels, right, like it's nice to be good at your job. But you know, what our brain really craves is, our brain craves new learning and new challenge, right, you know I'm a neuroscientist.

Speaker 4: 23:13

Sometimes this topic comes up with me that people say, well, hey, what is the brain for? And mostly what people say is, well, the brain's for thinking. And that's completely wrong from an evolutionary biology perspective. The brain's not for thinking. It doesn't care if you think or not. The brain is to allow you to change and adapt your behavior, and we, as humans, have these incredibly complex brains, and that's why we can adapt our behavior in these incredible complex ways.

Speaker 4: 23:35

Right, we can live successfully in the Arctic. We can live successfully in the Arctic, we can live successfully in the desert, we can live successfully in downtown San Francisco, because our brains change in response to what we need them to do. And that's incredibly true for, you know, adults throughout their careers as well, hey, taking on new challenges, pushing yourself in ways that are outside your comfort zone. You know that process of continuous learning is going to build a healthier, stronger brain, even when you're middle-aged, even when you're a parent and you're like tearing your hair out because you're busy all the time. You know that's actually going to set you up for successful brain health as you get older as well, because you'll have built that foundation as a young adult or a middle-aged adult. It's so important.

Speaker 3: 24:13

Thank you for saying that. That's really good to hear.

Speaker 4: 24:15

I'll tell you a story, though I got to tell you. My wife is a neuroscientist as well and we probably talk a little bit too much about brains in my house, when he was 10 years old and he had done something he wasn't supposed to do, you know, we were talking about it over dinner and he put his head down on the table and he said my brain made me do it. And we thought, okay, all right, maybe that's enough brain conversations for this poor kid, Probably taking more for this than we really mean him to.

Speaker 3: 24:43

That's an amazing story. I love that. Well, I'm going to switch gears a little bit. Are there any studies that are currently in process that you could tell us details about that you're excited about, or more information coming out down the pike?

Speaker 4: 25:01

Yeah, there's always an incredible number of exciting stuff going on with BrainHQ. You know, researchers all over the world reach out to us every week, every month, and say, hey, I got funded. I want to run a study. I want to look at BrainHQ in schizophrenia. I want to look at BrainHQ in head injury. I want to look at BrainHQ in, you know, rural children who have ADHD. I want to look at brain HQ and you know rural children who have ADHD. I want to, you know, do all these incredible studies because all of our ideas around what we can do with our brains continue to grow and expand and change. But you know, here's a highlight that came out just recently from your area, which was this wonderful first study done in long COVID at the University of Alabama, and this was led by a wonderful researcher there named Dr Jitendra Uswate, and you know what he was interested in is.

Speaker 4: 25:46

You know, of course we've had this terrible COVID epidemic and many people, most people got better and that's good. But you know, some number of people have had these long COVID symptoms and there's a lot of symptoms that come out right. Fatigue is very common. A challenge with getting physical exercise, called post-exertional fatigue, for example, is very common as well. But one of the big symptoms is cognitive symptoms. Right, people say, hey, my brain is just slow, I feel foggy, I can't concentrate, my working memory is bad, and so you know what's going on with these folks. So you know, this researcher in Alabama said, hey, I want to put together a comprehensive rehabilitation program for these folks with long COVID, because so far there's no evidence that any drugs are particularly helpful. So, hey, should we be doing something more directly with brain training? And so he recruited a number of these long COVID patients and you know, half of them did nothing, which is currently what we offer patients with long COVID and the other half of them did a combination of brain HQ training and some intensive adaptive coaching where they really got a lot of advice about brain training and how to put what they were working on in the brain training program to use in their real life.

Speaker 4: 26:52

And you know, and he just got this fantastic result so a small pilot right, just 16 people. But what did he see? He saw these folks got better on standard measures of speed in terms of how fast their brains were working, like we talked about. He saw that they got better on standard functional measures essentially, where clinicians interview them about their everyday life and figure out, hey, how's your cognitive function limiting what you can do in your life? And they got dramatically better at this clinician-observed measure and then, incredibly, 80% of the folks who did the brain training and the coaching went back to work. And that's just a fantastic result, because so many patients with long COVID as a result of the fatigue, as a result of the cognitive symptoms they feel like they just can't go back to work and that limits people in so many ways. So just the first tiny hint of a study that says hey, you know this idea that brain training can help improve your brain health. Well, this has got maybe a lot of potential beyond just, for example, normal cognitive aging.

Speaker 4: 27:48

And there have been study after study in other related areas. You know there's things like cancer-related cognitive impairment or we think about chemo brain right, there's HIV-related neurocognitive disorder, where people have had HIV have cognitive impairment. You probably know that patients with multiple sclerosis have concentration and speed and working memory problems. You know that list actually kind of goes on and on. And it was really a surprise to me as a neuroscientist because when I first started to look into this, you know neuroscientists, they sometimes say, or these kinds of clinicians, we're kind of butterfly collectors, right, we want each of these conditions to be different and figure out how's chemo brain? Just a little bit different than multiple sclerosis and so forth. But it actually turns out that, although there are a lot of bad things that can happen to your brain, they all result in your brain having this kind of noisy information processing, these slow information processing and slow information processing. And starting to look at the same class of brain training exercises where we're trying to speed up brain information processing and put those principles of brain plasticity to work. They're starting to look like they're broadly helpful in a lot of those areas because, you know, study after study is coming back pretty positive in a lot of these very disparate cognitive conditions.

Speaker 4: 28:58

And that's again exciting because you know, there aren't drugs on the market, right, if you are a young woman and you have breast cancer and you come out and, hey, your cancer's in remission, which is incredible news, right, but you're left where you feel like, hey, my concentration is bad and my fog is bad and I can't go back to work and I can't play the role of, you know, as a wife and a mother in my family. You know there's no drugs that the FDA has approved that are helpful to you. Right, you're just sort of left in that status and hey, let's cross our fingers and hope you get better. But if where the science takes us is that, hey, doing the right kind of brain training exercises, getting the right kinds of brain health coaching the kind of stuff that you folks are doing at your clinic hey, if we can build healthier brains with that kind of thing, hey, that's just an enormous number of people that we can help. And again, I think just that right message of, hey, no one's promising miracle cures here, of course, but hey, there are real world activities a person can do to improve their brain health. Well, there's just so, so many people that that has the opportunity to touch.

Speaker 4: 29:53

So that's one exciting result that has come out recently, and you know there's more stuff that's coming.

Speaker 4: 29:59

You know, one thing that we're working on right now is that, for the first time ever, the National Institutes of Health has allowed specific researchers to connect clinical trial data to Medicare data, and so, for the first time, people are able to start to look at certain trials with BrainHQ and not only ask, hey, did that improve their cognitive function, which you did in the course of the trial?

Speaker 4: 30:20

But then to go into Medicare data and say, well, hey, did that reduce the risk of them having a fall or did it reduce the risk of Alzheimer's in Medicare data?

Speaker 4: 30:28

So that data is going to start to come out over the course of this year and next, I think. And I think that's going to be really exciting because it takes the idea of brain training from just hey, I want to maintain a healthy brain, improve cognitive function. But now it becomes like a policy level thing, like, hey, if it turns out in Medicare data that brain training reduces the onset of Alzheimer's, well, hey, we should think about dementia as a chronic preventable disorder and we should probably help people do easy, inexpensive things that reduce their risk of having this terrible chronic preventable disorder. And again, just what a change in mindset from well, my dad had Alzheimer's, so I'll get it when I get it to hey, medicare should probably figure out ways to help integrate this into the health system so we could build healthier brains and lower our risk of having this happen. I mean, what an incredibly exciting moment to be working in this field.

Speaker 1: 31:16

As you know, a lot of naysayers out there who claim that these brain training programs just don't translate to the real world and make tangible improvements in daily life of people. So is there anything else you would say to those folks to convince the doubters?

Speaker 4: 31:30

I mean it's a very old way of thinking, but you know, old ways of thinking often take a long, long time to go away. I mean, if you look back to the physics revolution in the 1920s, when all those physicists figured out how, you know, quantum mechanics worked, I mean there were physicists who went to their graves saying quantum mechanics is not true. So you know, you're not going to change everyone's mind, jeffrey Quint's mind, and you know, hey, I get the concern where people are coming from. Right, you know you do certain things. You play a video game and you know people get very good at video games and it doesn't mean they're any better at school. So you know, I get the underlying scientific concern. But at this point, with 300 published papers out there and showing impacts on all kinds of things that are very different from the exercises themselves, I just don't think that criticism holds any scientific merit anymore. You know a researcher, again at University of Alabama, birmingham, dr Carlene Ball. One of the brain training exercises she invented, which is now part of Brain HQ, called speed training. I mean, you know she showed in a study that you know looked at driving safety data from State Department of Motor Vehicles records for six years and found that folks who had done just 10 to 18 hours of that brain speed training to make their visual system faster, more accurate, they had 48% fewer at-fault auto crashes. Right, and that comes from speed DMV records. So I think we're just well past the idea that all you did was get better at doing something on a computer screen. So I'm always happy to have that debate. I've got 200 PowerPoint slides to sort of lay out the argument. By that I think we're done here.

Speaker 4: 33:03

And you know we're moving more on to questions of hey, how should this get integrated into the health system, right? You know Brain HQ is a supplemental health benefit and a number of Medicare Advantage plans. How can we make it so that when you go to your doctor, you know when you go and you say, hey, I have a concern about my brain slowing down, they can send you home with a validated brain training program, brain HQ or anyone, right, I'm happy to have an evidence-based field and you know, put it in your hands. And hey, how can we have health coaches who can help you put it to work? Right? So I think we're ready to start.

Speaker 4: 33:32

You know there's always more science to be done. I'm always excited about more clinical trials, but when you start to look at Medicare data and show, hey, we're having an impact on brain health and Medicare records, like we can just move on from the concept that this is a video game and you just get better at the video game, it's just, that's just. You know, we've had the debate, we won, let's move on and do something easy.

Speaker 3: 33:52

So, dr Monke, let me ask this what do you see as far as applications for brain HQ with? Does it produce structural changes in the brain?

Speaker 4: 34:03

Yeah, and there have been a number of beautiful brain imaging studies that have shown that brain HQ is driving direct changes in brain structure and brain function, even brain chemistry. So one of the nicest set of studies was led out of the University of Rochester by a professor, Dr Vanke Lin, and what she did is she looked at functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI and it turns out you could put people in the magnet and have them do nothing, right, you can just sort of watch the brain while it's at rest and you can get a very clear measure of, hey, how well are different parts of the brain connected to each other, right? Are they kind of operating in sync or are they operating kind of in this disorganized, noisy way? And she showed quite beautifully that brain HQ training brings more areas into the brain into sync. It improves what's called functional connectivity as a result of brain training.

Speaker 4: 34:49

Another beautiful study done out of George Mason in Washington DC looked at direct thickening of the insulation that surrounds nerve fibers in the brain. You know, you may know that of course these nerve fibers carry electricity. They have an insulation around them called myelin. And what was shown in that brain imaging study was that brain HQ training actually improves the thickness of the myelination in the brain. So, literally, you know, not just changing the wiring structure but changing, hey, how well is this insulated at the very structural level of the brain? And you know we have beautiful studies coming out over the course of the summer that look directly at changes in brain chemistry.

Speaker 4: 35:24

Right, how are we affecting neuromodulatory systems in the brain? And so you know, that is extremely clear at this point. And you know, again, no-transcript when it's asked to do a memory task, and in that sense it's the same way you think of like physical exercise. Right, when you do physical exercise, you are improving the strength and the biological health of your heart. Right, by making it doing all that pumping, it's a healthier organ. Now, Doing these brain HQ exercises does exactly the same thing in the brain. By making the brain faster and more accurate, the brain's structure is improved, the chemistry is improved, the function improves, and that's what gives you better cognitive function and that's what keeps you out of an auto crash, because your brain itself is healthier. And I think that's really what we're learning here from this.

Speaker 1: 36:39

Does your success with dementia apply to just Alzheimer's disease or does it also apply to other forms of dementia, like vascular dementia or Lewy body dementia or other forms?

Speaker 4: 36:48

of dementia? It's a great question. It's a great question. The main study that came out on this was an NIH-funded study that came out in 2017. And it was called the ACTIVE study, and they specifically had about 2,800 older adults and they followed them for 10 years, which means they started off as healthy older adults. But, hey, a number of them went on to those kinds of conditions and what that study showed is that brain HQ gave about a 29% reduction in the risk of having what they called Alzheimer's disease or a related dementia. And so in that study, they did not, you know, pick apart hey, was this vascular dementia? Was this Lewy body dementia? Was this Alzheimer's disease dementia? And they grouped them all together. And the reason they did that is, although 2,800 people is a big study, you know, from a statistical power perspective, you would need 10 times as many people if you were going to break that into vascular body dementia or Lewy body dementia and so forth and so on.

Speaker 4: 37:42

So we don't quite know yet. Is it specifically better to prevent the onset of one kind of dementia or another? And maybe we'll find out as bigger studies come on. But you know, that being said, as a scientist, you know those are definitely different pathological conditions, but they also in a way represent distinct end stages of brain health decline. And if I had to put my guess right down right now, I'd say is hey, if we can maintain a healthier brain earlier on by doing brain HQ training and all the other kinds of things we can do to maintain a healthy brain, I bet that's going to have a broad effect on risk reduction for all of these kinds of dementia. Because I think what happens is you have an unhealthy brain and then, hey, one of these kinds of dementia gets you before the other one does. But the fundamental underlying issue is that your brain is not in such a healthy state. That's my guess about where that goes.

Speaker 4: 38:32

We'll see if we have the opportunity to do big studies to tease that apart.

Speaker 3: 38:36

We've hinted at this some in our discussion, but I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on potential clinical applications for brain HQ, whether that be like people with traumatic brain injury or otherwise.

Speaker 4: 38:49

Yeah, I'm going to give you two parts of an answer to that, which is hey, there's a lot of common cognitive complaints that come out of a lot of very different clinical conditions. You know you mentioned traumatic brain injury, for example, or you mentioned PTSD. You know we've talked about some other things like chemo brain, but I might throw depression into that mix. You know all of those are quite different but there's kind of an overlapping set of cognitive issues that come out of that that are centered around speed of processing and cognitive slowing and attention and working memory deficits. And there are more and more studies that come out with Brain HQ showing that we can improve certain aspects of cognition across those disparate conditions. And that's probably because, even though those conditions are different, they drive the brain into that noisy information processing status.

Speaker 4: 39:40

I actually had the privilege of serving as the principal investigator on a Department of Defense-funded study a number of years ago that specifically looked at brain HQ training versus video games in soldiers and vets coming back from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who had cognitive symptoms. These are people who had typically had substantial blast exposures and then were coming back with all the cognitive complaints that can happen after post-concussive symptom disorder. And you know, in that study we demonstrated that brain HQ improved cognitive function quite dramatically compared to just ordinary video games. And then, even after people stopped doing the training, their cognitive function performance, you know, sustained those improvements, which kind of meant, hey, we had rewired the brain in a lasting way. And you know, that's my guess about where this science is going to take us. And you can think about it this way you know, physical exercise helps a lot of different ailments, even if those ailments are quite different. Right, there's something really important about moving your body and challenging it, and I think that's what we're going to find out with brain training as well. Is that, you know, even in these various different conditions, you know, challenging your brain to make it faster, more accurate, is going to help. Is that over time, we'll be developing more customized programs?

Speaker 4: 40:55

Right, there's no doubt in my mind that, from a brain plasticity perspective, you know, if you were to think about PTSD, there are probably ways to apply. Brain plastic has PTSD and he hears a loud bang and you know that is such a huge stimulus for his or her brain that it sends it into this. You know, ptsd condition. There's probably ways to use brain plasticity in an intelligent way to I don't want to quite say erase, but to make it so when that triggering stimulus comes in, it doesn't drive the whole brain into this terrible state.

Speaker 4: 41:30

Or similarly with depression right, there's a cognitive aspect to depression, but obviously there's a mood aspect to depression and you know that's. It's a mood disorder and there's probably smart, a condition of brain wiring. That isn't quite right. And if you believe, as the science has shown us, that we can rewire the brain, I think the future is wide open for building all kinds of clever, customized programs to rewire the brain in a helpful direction, and that's just an incredible realization to have that. Hey, if brain health issues are based on brain wiring and we can rewire the brain, hey, let's build a million programs and test them and show that they work. But let's, you know, I think we'll be able to customize them over the next decades to come to really just bring a new age to how we think about monitoring and improving brain health right.

Speaker 3: 42:31

If we were to go back to the analogy of this is like exercise for your brain, and we've mentioned video games several times and how sometimes people might have the simplistic idea of oh, it's just a video game, but is this is a more proper way of looking at this exercise? Like it's like cross training for the brain, where you're doing lots of different types of exercises, where Sudoku or crossword puzzles would just be like you're just running, like you're just doing one type of work.

Speaker 4: 42:55

I think that probably is a pretty good way to think about it. You know, the way I might build on that is. You know, often people do ask me hey, you know I already do crossword puzzles, aren't those good for my brain? And you know I usually have to give them the bad news, unfortunately, that hey, there's a lot of studies that to crossword puzzles and there's not a lot to be said about that. But why is that right? What's going on? And the reason is that the central problem that occurs across all these conditions aging or any of the other conditions we talked about is it's about speed of processing, it's about accuracy of information systems. And if you think about doing a crossword puzzle, you're not really making your brain work faster or more accurately, right? I mean, everyone sort of feels like, well, hey, the gears are turning right, the smoke's coming out of my ears, but honestly, you're just kind of sitting there and you can take as long as you like and that doesn't really drive this kind of plastic change in the brain. So if you like crossword puzzles, people should do things they like. I got nothing against that, but it's not going to improve the speed and accuracy of brain information processing. In that sense it's not going to build a stronger, healthier brain and in that sense it's unlikely to improve cognitive function.

Speaker 4: 43:57

If you look at these soldiers and vets coming back from the war, the video game control was a very strong control.

Speaker 4: 44:02

Right, you have to be fast and accurate to play most video games. But the difference there between that and a proven brain training program like Brain HQ is that you know they're really not adaptive in a helpful way. I think a lot of people's experience with video games is it's either too easy or too hard. It's rarely just right. And one of the central aspects of Brain HQ is it's quite adaptive, right, no matter where you start, it's going to get easy enough so you can start it, and then it's going to push you to get harder and harder in a very step-by-step way. And I think it's, you know, the magic here, if I may put it that way, is building that speed and accuracy training in this really adaptive way, you know, with things you see and hear on your computer that are designed to generalize to real world performance, like you know, hearing in noisy environments or driving on a road. So that's really the difference is, hey, your brain can always do something, but only certain things, rewire your brain in a helpful way.

Speaker 1: 44:58

I've actually been personally using the program for a bit and I find it actually pretty engaging and entertaining. I started using it on my MacBook, but I also noticed there's an app you can get on your iPhone or your iPad, which is kind of cool. Please simply describe a typical training session for us. What's it like, how long does it last and how often does one need to do it?

Speaker 4: 45:16

A great question. So, first of all, hey, anyone who's curious about this, you can just go to wwwbrainhqcom. You can register for free. It'll give you one exercise per day to try out, and you can just say hey, this seems like something that's interesting or helpful for me, for me. So what's it like to do this? Well, this isn't like taking a class, right. We're not teaching you information like Paris is the capital of France, right? And we're not giving you strategies like, hey, when you meet someone you know, rhyme their name with your favorite fruit or whatever that'll help you remember their name.

Speaker 4: 45:45

Right, you know, you're going to be seeing and hearing things from your computer that are designed to make your brain faster and more accurate. So what's one of them? Well, here's one of the exercises that was shown to improve driving safety. Right, you're looking at your computer screen and in the center of your screen, when you look, there's going to be a single image, a small car or a truck, right. And hey, they're pretty different. If you stare at them long enough, it's quite obvious which one is which. But at the same time you're doing that in the center of your vision, you have to use your peripheral vision to notice where is there a road sign? Is it the one o'clock position or the three o'clock or the six o'clock position? So again, if I just put this on the screen and gave you a minute to look at it, you'd be like well, this is easy, henry, there's a car in the center and the road sign is over there at six o'clock.

Speaker 4: 46:26

Well, great, if you can do it that, well, let's make a second, let's put it up there for half a second, let's put it up there for a tenth of a second and eventually what happens is your brain can't do it anymore. Right, it happens too fast, your brain cannot keep up with it. Well, as soon as that happens. Well, let's make it a little easier now. Let's slow it on down so you can get it right, and soon we find your threshold, we find the level at which you're getting maybe 80% of the right, but you're always getting a few wrong. That is the magic zone for brain plasticity, where it's challenging enough that your brain needs to rewire itself to do the task, but it's not so hard that you just can't get any of it right and your brain gives up in frustration. So you know, that's the kind of thing you're going to be doing in these brain training exercises Things like that where you're asked to process information more quickly or hear things more quickly or tell the difference between things that you're seeing or hearing more quickly.

Speaker 4: 47:16

And there's dozens of exercises in Brain HQ and they target, you know, attention and speed and memory and navigation and even social cognition, like recognizing names and faces, and as well as you know, working memory and decision making. But at their core, all of them are kind of targeting different regions of the brain with the same basic science, which is, hey, let's help that be a part of the brain, be more faster and more accurate. And then when you sit down for a session, you know there's dozens of exercises, but you do not have to be a PhD in neuroscience, you don't have to pick them yourself. There's a very smart, built-in software-based personal trainer that looks at everything you've done and constantly picks the right exercises for you and introduces a new exercise when you're ready or brings back an older exercise when it thinks you need some more practice. So most people's experience is kind of like, well, I sit down and I ask the personal trainer what I should do today and it gives me some training. And yes, how much training is done.

Speaker 4: 48:08

You know most of these studies have done training that's, you know, as little as two hours a week, which you know you can do in two one-hour sessions, which is a lot. But a lot of people, just you know, break that up. Hey, I'm just going to do a couple minutes a day and you know, kind of get my almost like getting your steps in right, I'm going to do 15 minutes a day and I'll do it five days a week or five or six days a week and kind of get in my brain training, so it that kind of works for you and your schedule and then you don't have to do it forever. You know most of these studies have looked at two months, three months, four months of brain training and seen nice improvements. And we certainly see people on Brain HQ who start every day and they do it every day for years. It's quite remarkable when I look at their training records. But hey, we also see people who train for a few months and then they take a break for a few months because they got other stuff going on and then they come back and they train some more.

Speaker 4: 48:53

And I think that's one of the great things about brain training. You've built a healthier brain. You should keep at it in general, but you can take long breaks and come back and boost your brain health up Now. I never want anyone to think I shouldn't do this. Because I do, I have to do it every day. Because I'm not going to do it every day, and I get that. You're not going to do it every day and that's completely fine. The science shows us you don't have to.

Speaker 3: 49:19

Looking ahead, Dr Monco, what is your vision for the future of brain training and how do you see Brain HQ continuing to evolve to meet just the emerging scientific understanding and user needs, but then also just the whole entrance of AI and how? That's also a revolution AI and how.

Speaker 4: 49:33

That's also a revolution. Yeah, you know, my vision for the future is that, you know, all of us have a tool in our hands or in our pocket if it's our phone that allows us to continually, you know, track and check in on our brain health and our cognitive performance and then do something about our brain health and our cognitive performance that's been scientifically validated to help us. And, hey, some of us want to build faster, better brains because we weren't trying to get more out of life. Some of us want to maintain our brain health as we get old, so we keep doing that. But, you know, my vision of the future is we all have those evidence-based tools that are easy to use, that are fun to use, engaging to use, that are proven in science to work so that, hey, we can maintain, we can build better brains and we can enjoy life in the same way that we can build healthier bodies and enjoy life. So that's the vision that I want. The vision I want is that, hey, as we get old, we don't just sit on our couch and watch old I Love Lucy reruns right, we all have an active brain health program that we're doing because we want to do all the things that we wanted to do as we got older and hang out with our families and our kids. You know, the future that I want is when, hey, when we're looking at young kids who are maybe come from difficult backgrounds or trying to figure out hey, what am I good at that? Those young kids have these kinds of tools so that they can build strong brains and go and succeed in all the ways that they can.

Speaker 4: 50:50

You know, the future that I want is when we find a person who's got a diagnosed mental illness. You know, instead of just, you know, locking them away or just giving them drugs, that you know, in addition to giving them drugs because the drugs are helpful, that we're giving them some validated brain health programs because, you know, mental illnesses have a base in brain health and we can figure out how to fix them. I want where we're taking all of this basic science around brain plasticity and we're giving everyone the ways to check on their brain health and build their brain health so that they can live the kind of life they want to live. And you know what? We're getting closer to that vision every day. You know, when we started this company, it was kind of a pipe dream, but we are really getting closer and closer to that every day and we're going to look back on this podcast when you and your listeners listen to it you know someone's going to be listening to this five years, 10 years, 20 years from now are going to think oh my God, that was the dark ages.

Speaker 4: 51:36

We used to just let people get old and we didn't give them a brain health program. We had soldiers who came back from the war and we told them just go back to school, you're ready for it. We didn't take care of people in prison who have psychiatric disorders with brain health programs. So that's what I want. I want us to be looking back to this time and thinking well, here's where we started to come out of the cave and into the light and recognize how we can help all the people that we can help have builder-breder brains. That's what I want.

Speaker 1: 52:01

For real. Well, as we're kind of wrapping things up, is there a personal story of a user or a study participant that comes to mind whose cognitive improvement really deeply moved you?

Speaker 4: 52:13

Oh, there are so many. One of the great things about working here at Brain HQ is people email you these remarkable studies, these stories. You know I have people who emailed us and say, hey, you know, you saved my life last night. You know, I was out driving and it was kind of in the dusk and I came up to a stop sign at an intersection and I was about to go through and then out of the corner of my eye, you know, I saw that there was another car that was coming through that intersection and I stopped right before I went into it and they just blazed on through and they would have T-boned me if you had, you know. And the reason I saw that is because, hey, I did these visual training exercises and I can see out of the corner of my eye.

Speaker 4: 52:47

We spoke with a woman who is part of a health plan that offered her brain HQ and she'd had a stroke before she started to use brain HQ and then she was going swimming in the pool every day in order to build back her strength after her stroke and she did a lot of brain HQ.

Speaker 4: 53:01

She found it very helpful to her. Then she said one day at the pool, you know, I slipped right, my foot just went right out from underneath me and she said I can see it all unfold in front of my eyes. Right, I was going to fall, I was going to crack my head again, it was going to double down on my brain injury. And she said at the last second, I just reached out and I grabbed that safety rail. And I grabbed it and I held on and I didn't fall. And she wrote us and she's like the only reason I was that fast is because I've been doing these brain HQ speed exercises and that kept me on my feet and kept me out of the hospital that day. And so you know, you get story after story after story like that. You're like you know what it's good to come up and come to work. Right, we're helping people, we're bringing the science forward and it's really really very motivating, really very motivating.

Speaker 1: 53:43

Well, that about does it for our discussion on brain training with Brain HQ. Thank you so much, Dr Manka, for joining us and sharing your vast knowledge and passion for improving brain health and for the use of Brain HQ.

Speaker 4: 53:58

No, thank you and again, I just encourage any listener who hears this and is curious to give us a try to come by and visit us at wwwbrainhqcom. Again, sign up, get the free exercises, see if this is something for you. We are here to spread the brain health revolution and you can be part of it by joining us. So thank you and thanks for having me on. It's a delight to chat with. Both of you Know so much about brain health and just very fun, very science-based and a great conversation. Thank you for having me on.

Speaker 3: 54:20

And thank you so much for listening. We hope that we were able to share something with you that was interesting and helpful.

Speaker 1: 54:28

And please do take a moment to rate us on iTunes. These reviews really do make a difference for us. And also, if you like the podcast, then take a moment today to let a friend know about us and help spread the word on evidence-based, holistic, functional and integrated medicine. And if you want to reach out to me to comment on the show or to make recommendations for future topics, then you may do so at drmcminn at yahoocom. This is Dr McMinn signing out and this is Coach Lindsay. Take care and be well.