173 | The Better-Brain Equation (Part 1): An Introduction to Functional Neurology, ADD and Autism

Unlock the secrets of brain optimization and unearth the real culprits behind common brain-related symptoms like depression and anxiety. Journey with us as we bring in the expertise of Drs. Rob Melillo and Peter Scire, leading specialists in brain development, who guide us through the pivotal role of inflammation in chronic diseases. Together, we challenge the misconception that these symptoms are strictly diseases and instead explore how they often stem from dysfunction. Gain insights into how enhancing the brain's biochemical environment and plasticity can revolutionize cognitive and emotional health.

Embark on a fascinating exploration of early childhood development as we showcase the incredible progression of motor skills in newborns. Discover how the seemingly random movements of infants are crucial for brain maturation, setting the stage for complex abilities like language and social interaction. We delve into the significance of primitive reflexes, those automatic responses that play vital roles in early brain development and can impact individuals long into adulthood when retained. Learn how the early coordination of eye, head, and body movements is foundational for brain growth and higher cognitive functions.

Finally, we emphasize the importance of functional medicine in naturally supporting health and wellness, while reminding listeners of the educational nature of our content. Our podcast aims to arm you with knowledge, but it's crucial to consult healthcare professionals for personalized medical advice. By understanding the neurological aspects of health, you can make informed choices to improve your quality of life. Join us in this enlightening episode to rethink brain health and uncover strategies for overcoming brain imbalances and enhancing overall well-being.

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:02

Hey everyone, welcome to the Inflammation Nation podcast. I'm your host, Dr Steve Noseworthy.

Speaker 2 0:08

One of the greatest obstacles to crafting health and wellness is identifying and controlling inflammation. It's at the core of all complex and chronic diseases and it's the driving mechanism that underlies the most common symptoms that people like you struggle to overcome. Join us as we explore cutting edge science and research to give you the information and tools you need to create the quality of life you want and deserve. And now here is the host of Inflammation Nation, dr Stephen Nosworthy.

Speaker 1 0:37

Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast. It's nice to be back behind the microphone and talking to all of you guys again. Today's episode is it's going to serve as an introduction to a multi-part interview series that I'm currently doing with world-renowned brain development specialist Drs Rob Melillo and Peter Skier, and I originally recorded the first two parts of the interview for my other podcast, the Funkbed Nation, and that's the one that's designed for healthcare practitioners. But the content of the discussion, while a little bit deeper on the science side, is so valuable that I decided to air it here on the Inflammation Nation as well. But before I do that, I wanted to do at least one, probably two, introduction episodes, which I guess could stand alone, but there's two episodes are going to lay some groundwork so that you don't get lost, because, honestly, the three of us start to geek out on brain function and functional neurology right from the jump, right Now. Having said that, I don't think you should shy away from being exposed to information that might be a little bit more technical or scientific than you're used to, because there's always something that you can take away from conversations like that, even if it's just a better understanding, in the general sense, of how the brain works and what can cause it to go sideways. So to that end, I want to introduce you to what I call the better brain equation. I may have talked about this a year or two ago in one of the other episodes, but the better brain equation essentially says that you can take any brain and make it better by doing one or both of two things. And the first thing is to optimize the biochemical environment in which the brain lives and works, and honestly, a lot of the content that I talk about here on the Inflammation Nation is geared towards that, whether that is controlling inflammation or stabilizing blood sugar, or dealing with stress and adrenal dysfunction or gut health and so on. So the first part of the better brain equation is optimized biochemistry. The second part of the equation is to stimulate the brain, to cause it to adapt and create what is called plasticity and I'm sure you've heard of that, but basically plasticity. In a nutshell, because it's much more complicated than this, plasticity is how the brain actually changes structurally and functionally to improve efficiency of function. For example, it's how you learn to ride a bike or play the violin.

Speaker 1 3:21

Now one of the issues that we struggle with is the fact that very few doctors understand the brain, especially from the perspective of function. Sure, in medicine, in modern medicine, we have the subspecialty of neurology, but medical neurologists are trained in brain disease or pathology. They're not trained in brain function or brain optimization. And while those things are different, they both have value and, to be clear, we need medical neurologists and perhaps more specifically, we need brain surgeons who are trained to manage things like injuries and disease or tumors that are well beyond the scope of simply improving function.

Speaker 1 4:09

But the vast majority of brain symptoms that people complain about that are rooted in dysfunction are not disease processes per se, processes per se, and those things are depression, anxiety, maybe OCD, certainly poor focus and concentration, bad short-term memory and the ever-present brain fog that people hear and people talk about all the time. And more than likely some of you listening have had things like head injuries in the past. Some of you may have been labeled as attention deficit or ADHD as kids and probably have grown out of it, but some of you who were in that category might still have remnants of some of those early problems that are still present today. But I want you to consider that even other issues that you wouldn't think the brain is involved, but things like gut problems or sleep issues often have a neurological component that won't completely respond to diet changes or nutritional supplements until you do something about the brain. And what's worse is that because we as a community don't understand the brain well, we see altered brain function and attribute it to either personality or perhaps aging.

Speaker 1 5:37

For example, somebody might say something like you know, I'm so clumsy, I've been a klutz my whole life. Or they might think or say about themselves you know, I've just never really been good at sports. And both of these imply a poorly developed or perhaps injured balance and equilibrium system, because that's what's required for you to be able to catch a ball or run at a certain cadence, with a certain rhythm or play more complicated sports Right. Someone else might say well, you know, I'm just I've never been good at math, and they just assume it's part of who they are, rather than seeing it as a deficiency of how the you know, like the quote unquote math part of the brain developed and functions. Or I should something else, like perhaps art. And so we can spot trouble areas in the brain by looking at what you're not good at or by looking at what you're very good at, especially if those things seem to be present from birth.

Speaker 1 6:45

People who are considered to be, say, musical or scientific geniuses often show these propensities at a very young age. But they're almost always very challenged in other areas of brain function and quite often that falls into the categories of things like interpersonal relationships or communication skills, or just simple social graces and social skills In an ideal world graces and social skills. In an ideal world, all parts of your brain will develop equally well and we would be good at everything, and the left side of the brain is capable and efficient or just as capable and efficient as the right side of your brain. But that isn't the common experience, right? And the truth is that we actually expect the brain to be a little bit imetry and a certain amount of asymmetry. Brain asymmetry is part of what makes us who we are. That's why we're all the same, in the sense that we all have the same human brain with the same general neurological pathways, and lobes of the brain are pretty much the same, but they all develop in different rates and ways, and so there's a mixture within that commonality that is unique to you and me.

Speaker 1 8:18

Now it's perfectly fine to be a little bit more logical and scientific versus artsy or musical, or vice versa. It's great if you have a mixture of those things, but when the difference between how the left and the right brains function goes beyond a certain reasonable limit, we start to see either deficits of function on one side or greatly exaggerated function on the other, or some combination of those two things. And since the brain controls everything, these imbalances can create not just those common brain symptoms that we just talked about, but also changes in how our hormonal systems work or how the internal organs work, even your immune system and your autonomic nervous system. In other words, when the brain is imbalanced, everything can be affected to some degree, which is why kids with attention deficit or hyperactivity disorders or if they're on the autistic spectrum, always have gut issues. They always have immune challenges, and it's also why we see constellations of other non-neurological metabolic complaints with brain symptomatology in an adult.

Speaker 1 9:29

And while these upcoming interviews with Drs Malolo and Skyer, the conversation starts with the new edition of his book that he published I think it was 2004, called Disconnected Kids. That book is about why kids get autism and how to fix that. The principles in the book apply to you as an adult as well, because you simply have an adult brain, and maybe this is a great time to remind you that the brain exerts control over pretty much every aspect of human function. Right, your brain is how you experience life, how you move through and explore your environment. It's how you set goals and make decisions and take actions to make things happen. You set goals and make decisions and take actions to make things happen.

Speaker 1 10:11

Before Google Maps and Siri, your brain was how you made your way to your grandma's house or to your friend's house. It's also where you feel love and joy and fear and rage, and why you can appreciate art and music or love science and learn how to read, write and do math. Your brain is what lets you walk and talk, it's how you run and jump, it's how you learn to ride a bike and it's where you feel pleasure and pain, experience grief and hope. It's where you fall in love and, in short, you can't experience life to its fullest without a healthy brain. It's simply impossible. But for most of us, our brains are simply a mysterious black box. We know stuff happens there, but we don't know exactly what or how. We don't really think about our brains being affected by our diet or our lifestyle choices or the environment we live in, and we may not make connections between what we experience as adults and how our brains develop when we were young. In short, the brain is a mystery for most of us, and that includes your doctors.

Speaker 1 11:17

So let me start to demystify your brain by talking about how your brain develops when you're born, and then we'll eventually talk about what can go wrong. The first thing I want you to know is that when you're born, you have more neurons in your brain than at any other point in your life. From the moment you're born, you start to lose neurons, but the main difference between your adult brain and the brain you had when you were born is that, while your baby brain had more neurons, it had very few connections, and your adult brain has way more connections, even though it doesn't have as many neurons, and connectivity is what gives function. It's not about how big your brain is or how many neurons you have. It's more about how those neurons you do have connect and communicate together. So again, despite having more neurons, as a baby you couldn't speak a language. You couldn't even pick your head up to look around or let alone sit or walk, as obviously a newborn. So babies are born with a huge neural mass but very few connections. And the connections they do have are all geared towards one thing and that is survival. So the infant brain is very primitive in that sense. It's all about survival and not about sophistication. And that's why babies cry when they're hungry or they're tired, or they're wet or they're in pain. And in fact crying is the newborn's only form of communication that something isn't right and something needs to be fixed.

Speaker 1 12:49

Now, if you have children or if you've been around newborns, you will know that they are capable of movement, but their little arms and legs flail about just in a very random, almost spastic manner. And that's because they come into this world with a primitive motor cortex that's what controls muscles which creates these spontaneous muscle contractions that are unrefined, they're random, they're very uncoordinated, but as the weeks and the months go by, you see these movements becoming less random, they become more coordinated and more purposeful, and it's always a moment of great joy for a parent when their baby grabs a raisin for the first time and pops it into their mouth. Baby grabs a raisin for the first time and pops it into their mouth. So as these newborn babies flail around. All that movement is actually used to help the brain develop. In fact, you can't move a joint, contract or stretch a muscle without a sensory signal coming from and going to the brain. So while these initial movement patterns are completely random and uncontrolled, the sensory input into the brain that comes from these infantile movements are used by the developing brain to create plasticity, which then allows the brain to control the very joints and muscles that are moving around in that spastic manner. And again, you might have noticed pretty much without exception, that control of the motor system precedes all other functions.

Speaker 1 14:15

Generally, kids don't speak until after they learn how to walk. There's a reason for that. And of course they don't or they shouldn't walk before they crawl and they can't crawl before they learn to sit up, and they can't sit up until they can roll from their back to their stomach. And because all of this happens or I should say before all of this happens, the very first thing that you as a baby learn to control is your eyes. Newborn babies can't focus their eyes and can't control and coordinate eye movement certainly with head position until they're a few months old. But the progression happens early and it happens like this First comes the ability for the baby to fix their eyes on a targeted interest and that might be their mother's face.

Brain Development and Functioning

Speaker 1 15:03

But in the beginning that's very transient. They can't focus for very long before their eyes are roving off to look at something else. But over time they can fixate for longer and longer. So the more they practice fixating for short periods of time, the longer that period becomes and the more control they have over being able to stare and look at one thing. As they gain control over their eyeballs they then start to coordinate their eye position and movements with the muscles in their neck so that they can turn their head or lift it up to look at something that interests them. But of course their tiny little neck muscles are not very strong, so their head kind of comically bobs up and down until weeks later they can pick up their head, and then they can. So their head kind of comically bobs up and down until weeks later they can pick up their head and then they can turn their head and their eyes towards things they see and sounds that they hear, things that catch their attention, in a coordinated pattern of movement that yokes or connects their eyes and their head together. And so the ability to control the muscles of the eyes and coordinate that with the stabilization and strength of the neck forms the foundation of spinal stability that eventually allows them to sit, crawl, stand and then walk, and all of that sets the foundation for higher brain functions, like the acquisition of language and the development of social skills, awareness of their selves.

Speaker 1 18:24

Now, when you get to the interviews with Drs Miller, lowe and Skyer, we will at some point during that interview be talking about something called primitive reflexes, and this is not something many people know about. So let me explain those briefly. Primitive reflexes are automatic movements that support the birthing process and that set the stage for early development of the brain after birth. And some of these primitive reflexes are present in utero and they help the baby position itself so that the baby can do his or her part of going through the birth canal during the birthing process. But once the baby's born, the newborn has other primitive reflexes that, for example, will help it latch onto a breast to feed or to respond to different stimuli that comes from touch or sound or movement, and these primitive reflexes again happen automatically. That's what a reflex is. It's an automatic response to some kind of a stimulus and as these reflexes activate, they essentially feed brain development. Remember that when you move your body or send some kind of a sensory input into it, say through light or sound, you feed your brain. Light or sound, you feed your brain. And as you feed the brain by increasing these sensory inputs into it, whether that is movement or light or sound, or touch or pressure or temperature changes and more, the brain responds by increasing its activation, which helps it develop and become more stable and more capable.

Speaker 1 19:56

Now, these primitive reflexes are designed to be present only until the brain develops past a certain point, and then those reflexes should go away. And this is where the brain starts to shift away from. Its only interest is survival to now sophistication. And so these reflexes go away. As the brain develops, it gains the capacity to inhibit those survival-based reflexes, and that's why most of us as adults, you know, like we don't cry when we got hungry, we don't cry if we get wet, for example, we might complain a little bit, but we don't cry like a baby does. But what happens when the baby or when, as the baby, grows? What happens when the brain doesn't develop the ability to inhibit these more primitive reflexes? And we call those retained primitive reflexes and they can affect how the brain develops and matures over the next several years.

Speaker 1 20:48

And listen, this is not some theoretical junk made up by fringe doctors. 50 years ago or so, pediatricians routinely examined growing infants for these primitive reflexes to make sure that kids were hitting their developmental milestones. But over time the focus in pediatrics shifted away from healthy development and by that I mean healthy neurological development to making sure kids stick to their vaccine schedules and taking care of recurrent air infections. So in the modern functional neurology field again, where we're focused on function and not disease per se, well-trained doctors are examining kids for these retained primitive reflexes. They're looking at adults with long histories of things like depression or anxiety or poor cognitive function or balance and emotion issues, and checking to make sure that part of the problem is or is not a retained primitive reflex that should have gone away decades before but didn't. The other thing that we look for in functional neurology is to determine if one side of the brain has developed faster or better than the other and to decide if a relative brain imbalance is part of the cause of their health complaints. While the right and the left halves of your brain certainly work together, there is a certain degree of competition where one side of the brain keeps the other side in check, and this is part of the conversation, or this part of the conversation can get very complex very quickly.

Speaker 1 22:17

So I just want to summarize a few things for you very quickly. So I just want to summarize a few things for you. I guess I'll probably wind down this episode and tell you what we're going to talk about in the next one. Otherwise I'll talk for another 30 minutes. But as you will learn in the upcoming interviews, the right side of the brain develops more than the left side of the brain in the first three years of life, between the ages of three to six, the left brain starts to develop faster than the right and after six years development kind of flips and flops back and forth until development has stopped somewhere. In the second decade it's going to vary from male to female. It's going to vary from person to person, right. So there's a range.

Functional Medicine

Speaker 1 22:59

In many cases, different functions are housed in what we call distributed networks of the brain that may have components on both sides of the brain and this distribution allows the brain to have more control over functionality and it allows different systems to integrate and communicate with each other. So, for example, the right brain is where we feel anxiety or fear or anger, let's say negative emotions, whereas the left side of the brain is where we have positivity, and it's this balance between positive and negative emotions on both sides that allow us to control our emotionality so that we can be happy and positive when we need to, or we can be fearful or anxious if the situation calls for it, and thus we we stay even keeled emotionally and our emotional output and outlook is dependent on the circumstance that we're in. If there is a developmental issue or perhaps an injury, say, to the left side of the brain, and we lose that positivity, people tend to get very emotional and they can have episodes of anxiety, they can have outright panic attacks or they can become very fearful or angry or have spontaneous crying spells. And part of helping people like this is to help them increase the activity of the left brain, to balance out and help control the emotional side, which is on the right side. So the bottom line is this Sometimes the root cause of developmentally challenged kids is in retained primitive reflexes and an atypical development process that creates imbalances in right and left brain function, and sometimes these developmental issues extend into adulthood and, if not directly causative, can certainly be an obstacle to improvement in adults with brain-based complaints, especially if they've had those complaints for a very long time.

Speaker 1 24:56

It's a different situation if a 45-year-old all of a sudden becomes anxious. I would look at that perhaps differently than somebody who is 45-year-old who says I don't remember ever not being anxious, even as a child. So I want you to consider that, whatever your complaints are, whatever complaints you're seeking solutions for, think about your brain. Think about how your brain might be involved, and that's more likely to be true the longer you've had brain symptoms and especially if you know, looking back, that you had developmental delays or things that were very accelerated. Or maybe you were a kid that got labeled with attention deficit or ADHD or something like that. So I'm going to close this episode. In the next one, which will be the final introduction to this interview series, I'll talk a little bit more detail about how bad brains are created and how they're fixed, and we'll come back and we'll revisit this idea of the better brain equation. I'll see you right back here at the inflammation nation. Better brain equation. I'll see you right back here at the inflammation nation.

Speaker 1 26:08

This podcast is for general informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine in any form or capacity. No doctor patient relationship is formed. The use of the information in this podcast or any materials associated with or linked to the podcast is at the listener's own risk. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional and personalized medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, and listeners should not disregard or delay obtaining proper medical advice when a health condition exists and warrants that. And finally, functional medicine is not intended or designed to treat disease, but rather is a natural approach to support restoring health and wellness. The use of diet and lifestyle modifications and nutritional supplementation is supportive for adjunctive care.