Scales Of Success Podcast

#58 - How Your Brain Shapes Who You Become with Dr. Sarah McKay

• Marcus Arredondo

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In today’s episode of Scales Of Success Podcast, host Marcus Arredondo connects with neuroscientist Dr. Sarah McKay to reveal the real science behind identity, agency, and how the brain changes across life stages. You’ll learn why “baby brain” is misunderstood, how neuroplasticity fuels confidence, and what actually helps the brain create clarity, resilience, and long-term wellbeing. If you want a simple, smart way to understand your mind and upgrade your life, this conversation gives you the science and the strategy to start now.

Dr. Sarah McKay is a neuroscientist, Oxford-trained researcher, author, and founder of Think Brain and The Neuroscience Academy. She specializes in neuroplasticity, women’s brain health, pregnancy, and cognitive wellbeing. She is the bestselling author of The Women’s Brain Book, Baby Brain, and Brain Health for Dummies, and is known for turning complex neuroscience into practical insights for everyday life.

Learn more about Dr. Sarah McKay:
🌐 Website: https://drsarahmckay.com/
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahmmckay/?originalSubdomain=au

Check out her books:
https://drsarahmckay.com/books/

Episode highlights:
(3:25) How the brain gathers information
(7:05) Thoughts, body signals, and meaning
(10:50) What gray matter changes really mean
(13:15) Pregnancy, pruning, and efficient brain wiring
(17:04) The father’s brain and parenting changes
(19:54) Why “baby brain” is misunderstood
(26:19) Culture, confidence, and kids’ self-belief
(31:23) Belonging, self-belief, and opportunity
(48:32) The path to clear science communication
(56:12) Real habits that support brain health
(57:28) Outro

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Note: The transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(0:00) I very early decided I wanted to be teaching neuroscience to professionals who would be integrating that into their practice. (0:08) And then they would be delivering kind of psychoeducation, you know, teaching psychologists more about neuroscience so they can integrate that into their work that they're doing. (0:16) Or teaching teachers more about neuroscience so they can integrate that into their education practice versus going direct to the end user.(0:24) Because I'm not a teacher, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a therapist. (0:28) I don't have training to do that, but I've got training in neuroscience and how to teach neuroscience.

Marcus Arredondo

(0:33) I'm excited to share today's guest, Dr. Sarah McKay, a neuroscientist, speaker, and founder of ThinkBrain and the Neuroscience Academy's training programs. (0:41) She's also the author of several books, including Baby Brain, The Women's Brain Book, and Brain Health for Dummies. (0:47) Her gift for turning complexity into clarity is unmistakable, whether she's breaking down the wiring of the maternal brain or challenging outdated narratives in science.(0:55) We talk about how the brain is rewired during pregnancy, how motherhood sharpens empathy and intuition, and how early childhood messaging shapes identity. (1:03) Her own journey from Oxford to motherhood and entrepreneurship shows that the brain evolves through experience, and so do we. (1:10) Let's start the show.(1:11) Hi, Dr. McKay. (1:12) Thank you so much for joining. (1:13) I'm excited to talk.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(1:14) Oh, thanks for the invitation.

Marcus Arredondo

(1:16) So one of the things that attracted me to your work is, obviously, neural plasticity is something that's on the forefront of what you study and what you discuss. (1:26) I want to talk a little bit about your background in having studied spinal cord injury. (1:32) I'm curious about how that plays into it, but the overarching theme of this show really is anchored.(1:41) This came up the more people I've spoken to, so it's become a little bit clearer to me, but agency. (1:47) Agency is a big thing for me in terms of, I have increasingly found among the people that I connect with, either you fit in one of two categories. (1:57) Either I am who I am and that's who I'm going to be, or I am someone that I can be in the future, that I am capable of finding new ways to morph myself into something else.(2:09) I want to just start there as it relates to neuroplasticity. (2:16) How do you think neuroplasticity relates to identity? (2:21) Here's how I'm thinking about here.(2:22) I know that I'm dropping a little (2:24) bit of a bomb here, but the way I'm thinking about this is in neuroplasticity, and I want to (2:29) go into this because you talk about this in all three of your books, and I might be summarizing (2:35) too much, but there's a through line about what stories we tell ourselves and what stories we (2:41) tell ourselves through the down-up, outside-in, up-down, top-down approach, which I want you to (2:50) also talk about.(2:51) Between all three of those things, there seems to be a through line about how we, our brain, can influence our physiology and how our physiology influences our brain, and our brain can respond to that. (3:05) But there's some choice, there's an empowering element to what you write on how that interaction takes place. (3:14) The reason I started finding myself thinking about identity, particularly as it relates to agency, is who is deciding how we interpret that if it's not our brain?

Dr. Sarah McKay

(3:26) Oh my goodness. (3:27) That's a lot to sort through. (3:31) I don't quite know where to begin.(3:34) I think, just to clarify for people who aren't familiar with my work, I often try to explain the brain in a very conceptual framework, so we don't really need to understand the inner workings of neurons and synapses and networks, or even neuroplasticity, because neuroplasticity is a word that simply means the brain changes and reacts and responds to the experiences it has. (3:59) It's just the brain doing what the brain does. (4:02) I often think, let's just take a big picture overview of what information is the brain processing and why.(4:10) All of the brain is doing is it's learning and receiving information from our body, from our physiology, from moment by moment. (4:20) It's monitoring every heartbeat, but it's also absorbing information from your body over the course of your lifespan. (4:29) That includes everything from genes and the food we eat and the movements we take and the information that's coming from our body.(4:35) It's receiving streams of information about that and using that to react and respond and predict and guide our body on what to do next. (4:44) It's also receiving a lot of information from the outside world, and that comes in through our senses, primarily through what we see and hear, because we are humans, but also what we can smell and taste and touch. (4:56) That includes everything from the rising and the setting of the sun to other people's facial expressions, to books we are reading, to information that's streaming in from this ridiculous device about what's happening on the other side of the world.(5:11) I held up my phone there for people who are listening in. (5:14) Then our brain, because we are humans, there's also what I call a top-down component, which we could loosely describe, if we were using a biopsychosocial model, as psychology. (5:28) We could call it mind.(5:29) We could call it just simply the inner workings of the brain, which creates thoughts and feelings and beliefs and expectations, what we've learned, what we expect to happen next, what we're thinking about at any moment in time. (5:43) Our identity could perhaps be part of that. (5:45) There's a lot of loose fuzziness under that umbrella of psychology or mind.(5:52) The brain is just combining all of these pieces of information, learning what works, what didn't, and what should we do next. (6:01) Perhaps it's just receiving information about your body temperature, and you're too hot. (6:07) Perhaps you start to sweat, but then perhaps you're still so hot, you start to consciously become aware of feeling hot, so you take your coat off and you open a window.(6:16) The brain is just processing information and figuring out what to do next. (6:21) It's really as simple as that. (6:24) What gets more complicated and hard to understand is when we try to operationalize more complicated concepts such as identity or self, whatever that word even means, and think about it in terms of what is the brain doing and how is the brain creating that.(6:42) I'm not that familiar actually with the psychological concepts of identity formation. (6:47) I know that's a process that we go through and has sensitive periods of development, particularly during adolescence. (6:56) That's a critical period of time in which we start to develop a sense of self and who we are and how we fit in our place in the world and who we expect to become as we're older.(7:06) So the neurobiology of identity formation is very fuzzy. (7:12) It's much easier to talk about the neurobiology of sweating, for example, or visual perception. (7:20) I think the other kind of idea that you had in there was this, I suppose you were touching on the concept there, I think, and it is a theme that runs through my books, that the brain is making meaning of lots of pieces of information, as I said, for my body, the outside world, and then our mind.(7:40) Each of these can shape and influence the others. (7:43) A thought can influence a physiological reaction in our body. (7:47) We can, for example, be thinking about an upcoming doctor's appointment, say, or a job interview, and we can start to have a physiological reaction in our gut where we feel the sensation of nervousness, and that can impact our gut motility.(8:06) So we know a thought can influence a physiological reaction. (8:09) That's not magic. (8:11) It's just how our mind is working and controlling things.(8:16) So when I'm thinking about these sources of information, they're all interacting, the brain is making meaning of them, and then predicting what's the best kind of next step or move for this person. (8:31) I think you said something about who's controlling that. (8:35) I suppose that's a really philosophical question in terms of the problem with trying to operationalize in neuroscience concepts such as consciousness.(8:49) It's easier to just talk about attention, what's in our awareness, what are we attending to, what are we noticing, versus getting into philosophical arguments about the conscious, the subconscious, greater consciousness, dualism, does the mind exist beyond the brain, that kind of thing. (9:05) That's kind of a bigger question than I think neuroscience can necessarily answer. (9:10) I personally just think that the mind is what the brain is doing.(9:14) I don't think that there's something supernatural, but lots of people have just different beliefs. (9:20) I think I've tried to touch off all of your points there.

Marcus Arredondo

(9:24) You did.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(9:24) There was a lot. (9:25) You absolutely did.

Marcus Arredondo

(9:25) I very much appreciate that response. (9:27) So I'm going to be touching and asking questions that are sort of taken from all three of your books, the Women's Brain book, the Baby Brain, and Brain Health for Dummies. (9:36) So pardon me if I sort of go back and forth, but what did take me?(9:39) My wife and I had a baby three years ago. (9:44) Baby Brain was something that was interesting to me. (9:48) I want to explore that a little bit further, especially through the context of women, heavily weighted on women.(9:54) I don't want to exclude men entirely either, because I'm very curious about what you've been able to unearth relative to men, which in many senses I think is very little change relative to having a child. (10:06) Although I want to talk about that because I feel like there's something different from my experience, but what I want to kick this off with is gray matter. (10:14) So something that you talk about in Baby Brain is the reduction of gray matter.(10:18) I'm hoping that you might be able to explain that, but in contrast, the first thing that I—when I first read that section, the first thing that came up in my head was my understanding of dementia was a reduction in gray matter as well. (10:32) And so I want to make sure I understood the differences between what is happening, the pruning, as you were describing in a postnatal brain versus in dementia where brain neurons are actually deteriorating. (10:47) So I know I'm butchering that explanation, but I'm offering that as— No, no, no.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(10:50) You're right. (10:50) You're right. (10:51) When women go through pregnancy, they don't develop dementia.(10:54) Let's just say that.

Marcus Arredondo

(10:55) I know.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(10:55) I didn't mean to— Dementia—no, but it's really important because we've immediately put these two side by side. (11:01) Dementia is a symptom, is a disease of aging. (11:05) It's an umbrella term, and under that sits Alzheimer's disease, which accounts for 60 to 70 percent of cases of dementia.(11:12) There's lots of other diseases of the brain and diseases of brain aging, which are unhealthy, which are illnesses, which are diseases which contribute to dementia. (11:19) And there's degeneration of the brain and the gray matter as part of that kind of pathological process. (11:25) What we see in different ages and different phases of life, including adolescents and males and females, and also pregnancy, when women go through particularly their first pregnancy, is we often see alterations in brain structure and changes in brain function and how brain networks or different parts of the brain kind of connect and coordinate and communicate.(11:43) During adolescence in males and females and pregnancy in women, if we were to scan people's brains across adolescence, we would see similar to what we see across pregnancy, if we scan women's brains before and after their first pregnancy, is we see that gray matter volume in some areas of the brain gets sort of slightly, there's a bit of gray matter volume reduction. (12:05) And as soon as we say reduction or loss or shrinkage or whatever, it just freaks everyone out and everyone immediately defaults to dementia or Alzheimer's disease. (12:13) But the brain isn't always doing what you intuitively think it will.(12:18) Often what we see during phases of learning or phases of development or these neurological transitions is brains are driven towards being as efficient as possible and they want to sort of streamline their functions and prune and tune the connections that they have available to be able to perform the jobs that they are, you know, doing with the most efficiency. (12:43) And so often what that is reflected as, that kind of pruning and tuning and streamlining, kind of looks on a brain scan as if, well it is, it shows up as gray matter volume reduction. (12:55) It's a tiny, it's a tiny reduction in males and females across adolescence and in women going through the course of their first pregnancy, it's about 4%.(13:02) Now that is the brain pruning and tuning and streamlining itself in adolescence and also in pregnancy, primarily in the social cognition brain networks, those parts of the brain which are involved with thinking about other people, what other people are thinking and feeling. (13:16) And in pregnancy, the biological mandate is for a mother, the birth mother, to support the pregnancy, then support that baby once it's born. (13:24) And because we are mammals, we are humans, that is to be able to recognize and react and respond to our baby's cues and be able to be tuned in and having a brain that is plastic enough so it can easily learn and tune into the baby's cues because we need to kind of react and respond and keep that baby alive.(13:40) So we're driven, it's almost as if our entire attention is consumed by this new baby and nurturing it, looking after it, as are all other, you know, mammalian mothers when their new babies are born, their pups, their kittens, whatever, they're driven to nurture and care for their young. (13:57) We just have to do it for a very long time because human childhood is very, very long. (14:01) So what we see is the refinement and streamlining during pregnancy driven by the hormones of pregnancy of the brains of those mothers.(14:09) So they become reorganized and rewired to react and respond appropriately to the newborn baby. (14:15) Now those changes persist, we see them persist almost across the lifespan, and they're reinforced by the act of parenting and by mothering and by nurturing and reacting and responding to the baby itself. (14:25) We also see brain networks, so how different parts of the brain react and respond and connect and communicate, and mother's brains becoming more flexible and reactive and responsive and efficient, because you want a brain that is reactive and flexible and responsive and efficient.(14:41) You don't want a brain that becomes kind of dopey and useless because that wouldn't be, you know, what would be the evolutionary adaptive benefit of becoming useless is to become a mother B to propagation of the species. (14:52) Quite the opposite happens. (14:54) It's just that girls and women for millennia have been taught that if you've got a female body and brain and you add in some hormones, a reproductive life transition, it just equals dysfunction and decline.(15:04) Now what happens when you're thinking about things like memory and attention, memory and what we remember depends solely, well not solely, but largely on attention. (15:15) So that is what information we are taking in and what information we are filtering out. (15:21) And when the bulk of your attention has been biologically shifted to focus in on a baby, your wife's not remembering your to-do list or where you left your shoes or your keys, or the emails or the shopping list or who, you know, didn't buy the bananas or a million other things because your attention is focused somewhere else.(15:39) Once your attention is focused on one place, you can't then focus it on a million other places at once. (15:46) And so what that feels like is as soon as you realize, as soon as you're kind of forgetting other things that you haven't been attending to, well women have just been primed to blame themselves and blame their brain and blame their neurobiology and kind of talk about baby brain. (16:03) And everyone else around defaults to that because, you know, superwomen these days should be able to do everything and, you know, it's almost like we've been primed to just blame our brains and then no one else needs to help.(16:16) And so the whole kind of premise, I believe, really of baby brain is that it's not women's neurobiology letting them down, it's everyone else around women letting the woman down, letting the new mum down. (16:27) She needs to be mothered and nurtured as well. (16:29) So we're now getting this entire, you know, this sort of research first emerged from a research group that was in Spain at the time, Susana Carmona and Alessandra Hoxheimer and their kind of crew.(16:40) And it's now kind of blew open this sort of field of maternal brain research. (16:44) And we're now getting so much data emerging, looking at kind of how do these changes emerge during the course of pregnancy? (16:52) How long do they last?(16:53) You know, structurally, what exactly is going on? (16:56) And we're starting to rewrite and tell a much more clear and positive and strength-based story actually about the maternal brain. (17:04) Now, it's very, it's impossible to talk about all of this in a podcast with a male as yourself without having to, without being also asked about the male brain because we don't want to leave the men out.(17:16) And so the woman who I mentioned who were in this research group in Spain, when they designed this very first study, they were really clever and thoughtful because they scanned the mother's brains before and then after their first pregnancy. (17:29) And they've not had any prior pregnancies. (17:31) And then they also scanned the fathers of those babies.(17:34) So these were heterosexual couples. (17:37) And so they scanned the father's brains before and after the first pregnancy with the kind of idea that they would be a control group because they might experience some degree of parenting once the baby was born. (17:48) But obviously being male, they're not experiencing pregnancy.(17:51) And it turned out if you compared the male's brains to the female's brains after the pregnancy, there was no change. (17:57) The woman's brains changed extraordinarily. (18:00) The male's brains didn't change at all.(18:03) And that's hardly a surprise because as we now know, the changes are driven by pregnancy, primarily by pregnancy. (18:09) But some other researchers have gone in and gathered up a few more dads and studied the brains of, not in comparison to the woman, but just looking at those men. (18:21) They looked at some men in the US.(18:23) They also looked at a Spanish cohort of men. (18:26) And they found that if they zoomed in and looked just at the father's brains, some men's brains did show some tiny, tiny changes. (18:35) But sometimes you might see gray matter volume increase or gray matter volume decrease or some changes in white matter.(18:40) There was not a consistent pattern of change in the same way there was in mothers. (18:45) And what appeared was the degree of change was largely dose dependent. (18:50) That is how much parenting the man did.(18:55) I hate the word hands-on, so infantilizing for everyone, except the baby pap. (19:00) How much hands-on parenting the father did, the more his brain changed, which is kind of what you'd expect because the more golf you play, the more your brain changes. (19:12) And some dudes are there for conception only and then bugger off and are never seen on the planet again.(19:17) Other men are the primary caregiver. (19:19) So you would expect that the more you do a new task that you've never done before and you're very engaged in that, your brain would change more than someone who does nothing. (19:27) So that's kind of what we understand now about parenting.(19:32) Interestingly, there's some small studies that have been done looking at couples. (19:36) So they can look at like the birth mother and then the other mother and the other mother who is not the birth mother's brains are very, very similar to the male brain. (19:45) So it's definitely pregnancy and definitely the hormones of pregnancy that are driving this massive neurological shift that we see, which is, you know, I haven't talked much.(19:55) I'm in a kind of loosely touch on this idea of baby brain, but we do have four out of five women will put their hands up either during pregnancy or in early motherhood and say, I have baby brain. (20:06) Bearing in mind, these are two vastly different physiological states, being pregnant and being a mom. (20:12) And studies of even the non-birth parent have found that they, you know, sort of struggle with what you might call baby brain.(20:20) So it's not that mother nature has rewired pregnancy brains to be, as I say, kind of dysfunctional. (20:28) Rather, it's that, you know, all of the parenting that's going on and the large longitudinal studies that have been done, which is ideally what we want. (20:37) We don't want case control studies.(20:38) We're looking at pregnant, non-pregnant because there's two different groups of people. (20:43) We want large longitudinal studies where we've got a group of women and we're following them. (20:47) We're looking at them before they're pregnant, looking at them while they're pregnant and looking at them after they're pregnant.(20:51) And when we look at that, we don't see changes in cognition. (20:53) We're not seeing this kind of dysfunction and this decline. (20:57) Women are reporting the subjective experience sometimes during pregnancy or in early motherhood.(21:03) The only people that don't report subjective cognitive changes are men who are not fathers. (21:11) You know, if we look at like cohorts of people, but the changes aren't something that we're sort of picking up as this objective cognitive deficit. (21:21) Rather, it's the ecosystem that people are trying to parent in.(21:25) And the less support you have, the less sleep you have, the harder it is, the worse you will perceive your own cognition to be. (21:34) Whereas objectively, we're not seeing, you know, dysfunctional degeneration or dementia.

Marcus Arredondo

(21:39) That makes a lot of sense. (21:40) And it's also, this study wasn't done until 2017, correct? (21:44) It was published in 2017.(21:47) But there had not been studies prior to that.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(21:50) Yeah. (21:50) They started the study in 2009. (21:53) Yeah.(21:53) But prior to that, yeah.

Marcus Arredondo

(21:55) Do you see any increase in this field now?

Dr. Sarah McKay

(21:58) Absolutely. (21:59) It's just been massive. (22:01) So that was that first study published in 2017.(22:04) And since then, there's conferences, it's almost like an entirely new discipline of neuroscience. (22:09) There has been so much, those original cohorts have been massively expanded. (22:13) There's lots of different research groups around the world.(22:16) There's lots of different ways of kind of looking and studying the brain. (22:19) There's been some really interesting, what we would call dense sampling studies done whereby we're not looking at like hundreds of women, we're looking at like one woman and doing super detailed measures of her brain throughout the course of a pregnancy. (22:33) And what we're also starting to see is a lot more data sharing and open source data.(22:38) So you do a dense sampling study of one woman like multiple times through her pregnancy, and you can gather a ton of data from that. (22:45) And then that's put in kind of open kind of source repositories where other research groups can kind of come in and mine that data and analyze that data, looking at different kinds of outcomes and measures. (22:56) And we're seeing an emergence also, not only within the pregnancy and maternal brain space, but kind of more broadly, new ways of thinking about cognitive testing.(23:06) And in terms of these (23:08) standard batteries of testing that we've always done, where a lot of your skills kind of peak (23:12) in your early twenties, and then it's perceived as this decline afterwards, we're starting to (23:17) realize that there's lots of different ways that we can look at and measure and study cognition (23:22) and different types of cognition and measures are seen to peak at different ages and at different (23:28) life stages.(23:29) For so long, there's been this narrative of dysfunctional baby brain in women, and then that's kind of driven the research in quite a narrow way where researchers have just gone in and tried to find a fault or tried to find failings. (23:46) We've had other researchers kind (23:47) of come in, largely there's a young woman in the research space asking these questions going, (23:53) well, if we look at herding mammals who have just had like, you've got a sheep who's just (23:57) had a baby lamb and there's 50 baby lambs born in that herd of sheep that day, (24:02) we know that the mother sheep gets really good at olfaction and picking the smell of her lamb out (24:07) from the flock. (24:08) If you're a dolphin, you don't need to smell your baby. (24:13) You would have a completely different kind of skill set, which would be refined and honed to keep your baby dolphin alive.(24:18) And if you're a predator and you've got like, you're a cat and you've had a litter of kittens and you need to go and find and catch mice, you're going to become much more efficient at that. (24:30) You're not going to necessarily need to be able to smell your baby because you're not sharing, you don't have babies in a flock. (24:36) So there's different skills that we see emerge very rapidly during pregnancy and postnatally in mammals that are ecologically dependent and relevant.(24:48) And yet we've always had a very narrow type of way of thinking about cognition. (24:53) And so researchers are starting to develop new types of cognitive testing and ways assessing what we're seeing happen in the brains of women as they go through motherhood. (25:03) And some of these are starting to say, well, actually, we're seeing quite significant gains in terms of flexibility and recognition of different types of tests.(25:14) So we're just starting to see new ways of thinking that is guiding science as well, instead of this very kind of limited narrow view that we've had for many years.

Marcus Arredondo

(25:25) I can't help but think that for a large percentage of our history, it's been a relatively paternal society. (25:32) A large number of scientists and researchers were male. (25:36) And that has led to sort of leading the witness, right?(25:41) Calling it a baby brain.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(25:43) Yeah, a hundred percent.

Marcus Arredondo

(25:44) Also probably feeds into the psyche of many generations of women somehow sort of falling into this belief, which was unfounded at best. (25:56) And you had mentioned on another podcast, a study relative to boys and girls in elementary school, primary school, and then sort of, I think, I'd like for you to share that, but how the public perception, what that zeitgeist, what the common cultural norms were influenced the way they viewed themselves into the future.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(26:19) Hmm. (26:20) Yeah. (26:20) And I think this is why it's really interesting when we look at neuroscience to consider not only just these biological signals that are coming from our body, but you know, the cultures that we're born into and swim in and the information that we absorb as we're growing up.(26:33) So there's some really interesting, because we often are interested in like sex differences. (26:37) If we look at males and male and female brains, when we, sometimes there are subtle differences which emerge, but typically, you know, we're looking at standard deviations and the distributions are overlapping. (26:48) And sometimes the difference between the two groups is bigger or smaller, depending on which of many hundreds of measures of a brain you're looking at, whether you're looking at cognition or, you know, gray matter volume, or I don't know, receptor distribution, there's hundreds of measures, you know, susceptibility or resilience to disease or mental health issues.(27:08) There's so many things we can consider when it comes to a brain, when we're looking at sex differences. (27:14) And obviously there are biological sex differences that, you know, start in utero and then emerge in puberty. (27:20) But there are also differences that we start to see emerge during primary school years, or as you would say, elementary school in the US, where we're not necessarily seeing biological differences driving these.(27:32) And so there's a research group based in New York, the head researcher is called Andre Simpion, who's done a lot of work in this space. (27:40) And they've gone in and looked at attitudes that young kids have to themselves and their perception of boys and girls and capabilities. (27:50) And I mean, we see this across the world and every culture, like men think that they're the man, they're the dude, there's male hubris, where it's necessarily not always warranted and women are far more kind of humble and talk themselves down.(28:03) And where does that emerge? (28:05) Is that a biological sex difference? (28:06) And it emerges quite early on in primary school.(28:08) So this research group went in and they've done this in the US, they've done this in Singapore, and they've done it, I think they might have done it in Germany. (28:15) You go in and ask five or six year olds who have just started primary school, hey, who wants to play the game for smart kids? (28:21) Or who wants to grow up to be like a clever scientist and all the boys and all the girls who are age five will say me.(28:26) But once you get to ages seven or eight, the boys are all saying me, yeah, I'll play the smart kids game, I'll grow up to be the smart scientist. (28:33) But some of the girls are starting to drop off and go, well, that's for the boys, that's a boy thing. (28:38) I'm not smart, smart is for the boys.(28:40) Girls are nice. (28:42) But being smart is a boy thing that girls opt into. (28:47) You know, maths is a boy thing.(28:50) And when we're saying, hey, girls can do maths too, we're normalising that to be a boy thing that girls opt into to become like the boys who are good at maths already. (29:00) So, you know, perhaps even with our best of intentions by saying girls can do this too, we're inadvertently, you know, doubling down on the stereotype about there being this kind of sex difference in capability. (29:14) And this idea was (29:15) extended a little bit further this year with a publication, which is fascinating, came out of (29:19) France, looking at children starting school and their sort of maths scores from you know, (29:26) when they first entered their, you know, first few days of school, and then as they progressed (29:30) through that school year, and they looked across different socioeconomic groups, public private (29:34) schools, the whole thing across France. (29:36) And what they saw was that boys started to pull ahead in maths, once they'd been at school for kind of, you know, five, six, seven months, whereas they started off on equal footing boys and girls.(29:46) And so as a cohort, the boys test scores started to improve more than the girls did, they started off exactly the same. (29:54) And what they were able to do was they were able, even able to look at children who were one day apart in age, but a year apart in schooling, because the starting date was so strict in terms of the age at which kids started, that they were able to confirm it was being an education that where the boys started to pull ahead. (30:11) And again, it's not biologically that boys have an innate capability for maths that girls don't, they were able to start seeing it, it must be something about the culture in which kids are swimming in, and how they're being talked to, and how they're learning, which is leading to this kind of this sort of deviation, and the girls are going, well, that's the kind of the boy thing.(30:32) Obviously, we would see something different if we perhaps looked at like, you know, sitting still and being nice and reading a book or whatever, we might see the girls kind of emerged there differently. (30:41) So it's interesting. (30:42) And this is not to say biology only matters or doesn't, or social context only matters or doesn't, it's to say that the brain is making meaning of both.(30:52) And sometimes it's really hard to unweave the two. (30:55) I think the messaging here for parents is we can be unwittingly, you know, with the best of intentions, we can somehow, you know, have an inadvertent consequence, particularly when we're talking about, you know, trying to promote equality, you know, it can sometimes have the opposite effect.

Marcus Arredondo

(31:15) For sure. (31:16) So I'm curious about you, though. (31:17) I'm sure you were subject to some of those cultural norms at some point.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(31:23) Yeah, it's really, I think about this all of the time, because I never, ever, ever, ever, there was some like, I grew up in New Zealand, and I went through university in the 90s. (31:36) And I went to an all girls high school, an all girls Catholic high school, which was great. (31:42) But in my final year of the high school, we shared classes with the boys public school over the road, which was also great.(31:49) Socially entered university had a really great time, never considered what I could or couldn't do that the boys would do this, and the girls would do that. (31:56) It just never entered my mind. (31:57) I didn't in the 90s.(31:58) No one ever thought about anything like that. (32:00) I never considered barriers to what I wanted to do. (32:04) And my best friend, who's now a psychiatrist, who started studying engineering, switched to maths, chemistry, and then did medicine, she would say the same.(32:11) And when I entered my neuroscience, my second year neuroscience class, I did a neuroscience undergraduate degree. (32:17) So this is at Otago University in New Zealand. (32:20) There's pretty much gender parity in the medical sciences and psychological biological sciences, anyway, in the 90s.(32:26) And we were taught by men and women, there was probably there was gender parity in our class. (32:31) So there was a reasonable degree of gender equality there in terms of opportunities and what we wanted to kind of choose to do. (32:40) And I think that that probably still holds now if you kind of look in very gendered equal societies, say Australia, say Scandinavian countries, you know, you will still see in neurosciences, at least where I went into, there's probably even more of a gendered medical research now, it's probably got more females than males.(33:02) So I never, I never noticed anything. (33:05) It's perhaps been conversations that have emerged more in recent years, where I've had to sort of, perhaps not in terms of the opportunities I was ever given. (33:18) But in terms of how research has been done, or the questions that have been asked, perhaps, I've seen more of a shift in than the access to opportunity.(33:31) And, you know, I knew female physicists and mathematicians and engineers and loads of guys who were studying biological and psychological sciences. (33:39) So I never really perceived anything. (33:44) But that's not to say it doesn't exist, just that my personal experience was never of any of that.(33:48) But like you would say, I'm quite a high agency person. (33:51) You know, I was working class, grew up in a working class family, my parents left school at 15. (33:56) I was first generation, heading off to university, applied to Oxford for my, you know, graduate schools, got in.(34:05) It was really, I didn't put a lot of thought into whether I belonged or not, I just went and did it. (34:11) I feel like there might be more messaging now about whether you, about, but there was no social media, like, so you just did your thing, you know? (34:20) I feel like it was easier then than it is now almost, because we haven't got anyone yapping in your ear about, with different messaging, whatever the messaging might be.(34:29) I never picked any of that up. (34:32) Let's just say that, yeah.

Marcus Arredondo

(34:33) Well, I think that's a testament too, to your own upbringing as well, and what stories you were telling yourself, because I, you know, even as a guy, I wondered whether I belonged where I was, myself. (34:44) So, you know, that just goes to prove that I think the stories you tell yourself are influential to some degree.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(34:51) Yeah. (34:51) And perhaps growing up how we did, and I look at my friend now, and she says it wasn't until she went to medical school, and we both grew up in a very similar kind of loving working class, you know, Catholic homes in New Zealand. (35:05) She said it wasn't until she went off to medical school, then she realised, oh, wow, lots of people here have parents who went to university, or parents who were doctors, not, you know, dads who were tradesmen and stay-at-home mums.(35:18) And so we kind of, but we didn't know what we didn't know, so it didn't influence us in a negative way. (35:23) We just went off, and we were accepted, and we had the grades to get in, and it was fine. (35:28) So there was, it very much felt like we were there on our own terms, because we worked hard.(35:33) And getting into Oxford was the same. (35:34) I worked hard, I did well, I got in. (35:37) There was no gendered stuff.(35:39) There was certainly, I never felt that, there was never an existence in neuroscience, in the kind of the neuroscience science spaces that I went through. (35:48) And then, I mean, you might call it imposter syndrome now, maybe for like a week or so, I remember arriving in Oxford thinking, oh my God, like, they'll find out that I'm not actually that smart. (35:59) But then I remember talking to someone in the first few days, and they said the same thing, and then someone else said another thing.(36:04) And then it was like, well, we all feel the same. (36:07) So well, clearly, we all, that's just how we'll feel. (36:09) That's normal.(36:10) It's not a real thing. (36:11) And so that idea was put aside. (36:13) I didn't wallow around in any of that self-doubt.(36:18) It was perhaps only later on in my career, as I progressed in my career, that I had a tougher, I began to doubt my skills more, or whether I wanted to stay in an academic career. (36:32) But I had female bosses, and they weren't particularly supportive or kind. (36:39) So the whole gendered thing to me.

Marcus Arredondo

(36:41) You think that's just because of who they are, or because you were a female?

Dr. Sarah McKay

(36:44) Who knows? (36:46) Who knows, to be perfectly honest. (36:48) I've spent lots of time trying to understand the psychology of all of those situations.(36:54) So I don't really know what to make of any of that. (37:00) But yeah, I've never kind of felt like I couldn't do what I wanted to do. (37:04) And then I left academia, and I wanted to stay at home when I had my kids.(37:08) I stayed at home to raise my boys. (37:09) Luckily, financially, I was able to do that because of my husband's career. (37:13) And I didn't want to do all of the things all at once.(37:16) I had no desire to have a career, and try and raise my boys, and do that in a country. (37:23) Because by that time, we lived in here in Sydney, in Australia. (37:26) And to try and do that without our extended families, because my husband's family's in Dublin, and my family was in New Zealand.(37:33) I thought, well, I don't want to try and do all of the things, because that would just be too hard. (37:37) I don't want to juggle the balls. (37:39) I don't want to do drop off and pick up.(37:41) And so I was quite happy to step back from my career. (37:45) And I didn't feel... (37:47) A couple of people at one point said, I remember very close friends of ours saying to me, well, you're about the only person we know who's done that.(37:58) And that was the only time I thought, well, perhaps that's kind of weird. (38:03) But then I was like, oh, well, so? (38:05) I don't really care.(38:06) I'm so glad I did. (38:08) I gave my kids the childhood that I wanted to give them.

Marcus Arredondo

(38:12) Well, I want to talk a little bit about, in that stage of your life, how you transitioned to entrepreneurship, really, as an author, and thinkbrain, and what you're doing there. (38:22) So I want to put that up there as something we address. (38:26) I certainly want to talk more in depth about women's brain health from adolescence into menopause, and what proactive things women can be doing to protect themselves and mitigate against potential negative impacts.(38:42) And sort of an adjacent interest of that is what we can be doing, even as parents, to support women and boys as they grow up to protect their brain health and to lead fulfilling lives with highest chances of success. (38:57) But before we do those two things, I do want to ask, how did you get into the neuroscience field? (39:04) What was the trajectory?(39:06) What was your areas of interest that ended up causing you to arise at Oxford? (39:11) You know, you sort of sound like you went in that direction because that seemed to make sense, but there are hordes of people that would die to get to that position.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(39:20) Yeah, I always say, what? (39:22) Like, it's hard. (39:25) So I just, I mean, it's not very dramatic.(39:30) I was doing kind of health sciences undergraduate and was in a Psych 101 lecture, and they started talking about neurons and brains and synapses. (39:39) And I was like, that's really cool. (39:40) I think I'm going to do a degree in neuroscience.(39:42) So I changed universities to where there was a neuroscience undergraduate degree for my second year and loved it and still do that now. (39:52) And then when you grow up in New Zealand, especially back in the 90s, because it's very far away from the rest of the world, it's kind of a tradition that after you graduate university, they call it your big OE, your big overseas experience. (40:06) So certainly then, I'm not sure, I think it might still be the case, you could get a two-year working visa in the UK.(40:11) So everyone heads over and lives in London. (40:13) I lived in Edinburgh, actually, and you can work and travel and travel around Europe. (40:17) And when I was there, then I started looking for PhD opportunities, because I thought, oh, well, it would be cool to kind of do that somewhere else in the world.(40:26) And so I just was going, I just used to flick through the Nature and the Science magazines and the libraries back then. (40:31) I used to go to the Edinburgh University Medical Library or the University Library, and they used to have all of the classifieds advertising PhD positions. (40:39) And so I applied for a few, and then I saw that at that time, UCL, Cambridge and Oxford had all started offering four-year degree programmes, a Master's and then a PhD in Neuroscience.(40:50) And so I applied to them all, and I got interviews for them all, because I had good undergraduate marks and good references. (40:58) And then I went and interviewed, and I got accepted into Oxford. (41:05) So that was kind of how it happened.(41:08) And I don't know whether I'd get in now. (41:11) I probably wouldn't get in now. (41:13) But I got in then, and that was just kind of what happened.(41:17) It wasn't anything that dramatic, to be perfectly honest.

Marcus Arredondo

(41:22) What was the follow on from Oxford? (41:25) What were your next steps? (41:26) It seems like you were very proactive about continuing to push the envelope, saying yes to the next thing.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(41:31) Oh, happily. (41:31) Yeah, yeah, yeah. (41:32) I mean, I just have just...(41:34) And my husband would say the same, because I met him when he was in Oxford. (41:38) He was studying Economics. (41:39) Once you go, you have somewhere like that under your belt.(41:43) You have that brand. (41:45) You were educated there. (41:46) Rightly or wrongly, the doors just open.(41:48) So doors just open for you for the rest of your life. (41:51) So it does make things very easy. (41:53) So doors have opened for both of us with remarkable ease, thanks to that brand name or having that education behind you.(42:01) Lots of people would disagree that that's what should happen, but such is life. (42:05) It is. (42:05) So my husband at that point was working in London as an economist, and we just thought, where would be really cool in the world to go and live next?(42:18) What's a cool next plan? (42:20) Because we were in our mid-twenties, and the world was our oyster. (42:23) And so we wrote down a list of cool cities in the world.(42:25) And Sydney was on that list, because it's on everyone's list, right? (42:28) My dad at that point was living in Sydney here, and we'd flown through, I think, between, we'd gone on a visit from the UK over to, my husband's Irish, but we'd gone over to New Zealand and stopped off in Sydney, because the plane stops there. (42:41) And then we thought, oh, that'd be really cool.(42:43) And then he knew someone who was working in his company here at that point. (42:48) So he just rang the guy up and said, hey, what's the scene? (42:51) And they said, oh, actually, we've got a job opening.(42:53) Can you come now? (42:53) And so he went, yeah, okay. (42:55) And so we kind of moved, and he's still with the same company now.(42:59) And so that was how we ended up in Sydney. (43:01) So we kind of came here on a bit of a, it was a bit of a whim. (43:04) We thought, oh, maybe we'll go for a year or two and then see what happens next.(43:08) And we've never really left, because it's a pretty, Australia is amazing. (43:13) And we're very fortunate to have been able to get citizenship and live here now. (43:17) And we've raised our boys here.(43:19) I can't imagine anywhere else in the world that we're top this. (43:22) So that was kind of, we kind of came on a whim. (43:25) And when I, when we, but when we first landed, I was still writing up my PhD thesis.(43:30) So I sort of spent six months working on that. (43:32) And then I went and did a couple of different postdoc, which is like kind of your first research position after you've finished your PhD. (43:39) I did that at a couple of different research institutes here in Sydney.(43:43) And then after about four or five years of that, and a couple of very disappointing experiences with the heads of groups that I was working in, having had an amazing experience in Oxford, I became quite disillusioned with academia. (43:59) And that you have to, for a number of reasons, one, you have to become an expert in a very narrow field, which is fine and interesting. (44:07) But I always felt like then I was having to ignore too many other things that interested me.(44:11) So I like being an undergrad neuroscientist more than being a postdoc neuroscientist. (44:16) That said, I love the benchwork. (44:18) I love the lab work.(44:18) And I was really good at that. (44:20) I really enjoyed the precision in them and the complex methodologies. (44:25) And I really enjoyed that.(44:27) But then the next, the constantly having to think about research funding and getting publications and you, and there's so many knockbacks and so many gatekeepers, and it's just a really hard game to play. (44:40) And I just became very frustrated and disillusioned with the process of academia. (44:45) And then I didn't have it.(44:47) And I had a couple of horrible kind of experiences of the people I was working with. (44:53) And so then I started thinking, well, maybe there's something else out there that's, but it was like 2005, six at this point. (45:00) So it wasn't like you could just go online and see science communication influences on Instagram or whatever and go, Oh, that would be cool.(45:07) There was, it was very hard to see what else was out there. (45:11) Plus there's a very strong culture. (45:13) I think it still persists.(45:15) There certainly then was a very strong culture within academia that if you leave, you're selling your soul or you've gone to the dark side, or you're going to go work for big pharma or you're, it was seen not as virtuous. (45:29) It was like what failure, what looked like. (45:31) And so that kind of keeps you there because you've identified as a neuroscientist and my whole career has been this, and it's been good so far.(45:40) So it was very hard to work up the courage to be the person that steps away from that. (45:45) Cause once you leave, you can't go back. (45:47) It's very cult-like.(45:48) And I don't mean that in a nasty way, but it was a difficult decision. (45:52) But then I just thought, what the hell? (45:55) So, but interestingly about the time I bravely worked up the courage to leave after many years of thinking about it, I was also had just fallen pregnant with my oldest son.(46:06) So it was kind of like, well, everything's going to change anyway now. (46:08) So let's be realistic. (46:10) Might as well go now.(46:13) And so then I applied and got a job as a science writer within a kind of a medical education company that did a lot of professional development training for like clinicians in the Royal colleges here within Australia. (46:28) And so then I kind of got to do the undergraduate kind of take on the science again. (46:32) And it was a really varied and fantastic job.(46:35) And then once I had my oldest son, that was 2008, then I carried on doing a bit of that as a kind of a freelance role just a little bit, you know, here and there for the next sort of four or five years. (46:50) And then decided when the boys went to started school to build the business up, carrying on doing that kind of professional. (46:59) Cause I really like doing professional development.(47:04) I like teaching the people. (47:06) I feel there's always this ethical conundrum with me teaching neuroscience direct to the consumer. (47:11) So to speak, I didn't want to talk directly to a mom of a new baby about baby's brain development or talk directly to someone about the teenagers depression.(47:21) I just felt felt like that the translation is too, it could too easily go wrong. (47:29) So I very early decided I wanted to be teaching neuroscience to professionals who would be integrating that into their practice. (47:37) And then they would be delivering kind of psychoeducation, you know, teaching psychologists more about neuroscience.(47:43) So they can integrate that into their work that they're doing or teaching teachers more about neuroscience. (47:48) So they can integrate that into their education practice versus going direct to the end user.

Marcus Arredondo

(47:53) Sure.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(47:54) Because I'm not a teacher. (47:55) I'm not a psychologist. (47:56) I'm not a therapist.(47:57) Like I don't have training to do that, but I've got training in neuroscience and how to teach neuroscience. (48:01) But that was kind of my thinking in terms of the next step of building the business up.

Marcus Arredondo

(48:06) I mean, I can't help, but think what you've done in your publications direct to the consumer. (48:11) You can call us layman because we don't, we're not trained, but I can't help, but think you've exposed a tremendous to, to a large swath of people, what many of these researchers are doing and the value that they're providing. (48:25) And in some ways have provided a portal for increasing that funding in a way that you could never do just by virtue of being in the lab.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(48:32) I hope so. (48:34) Honestly, if the outcome of all of this was to increase funding, that would be one of the best outcomes. (48:41) I don't know whether someone picking up a book is going to go and give 10 million to a research group, which is kind of what they would need.(48:50) But I think, and like, and it's, you know, my thinking and where the kind of the world was and science communications was in sort of 2006, seven, eight, nine, 10 is vastly different to where it is now, where the algorithms are driving the messaging on social media and what gets cut through. (49:09) Is it necessarily the nuanced shades of gray, careful, thoughtful science. (49:16) So there's a, but that's kind of an interesting challenge as well.(49:19) Unfortunately, it just turns into a bit of a shit fight. (49:21) Sometimes an argument, yeah, you're tearing the woman down sort of crap on Instagram, which is just stupid noise. (49:30) But it's an, it's again, and I've done my 10,000 hours, 10,000 times over now.(49:37) So I feel when I've kind of got the emotional resilience to bother, I will enter that space. (49:46) Not very, I don't really like the whole myth busting. (49:48) It's just, it feels like high school, but being able to pick and choose now how to take the neuroscience and deliver it to the world is fun.(49:59) And so I've got the books, which I suppose would be direct to consumer, but the professional development courses, which is kind of where my focus really lies is still, it's still for professionals. (50:12) I'm still adamant that that's how, that's the most ethical way to deliver the information.

Marcus Arredondo

(50:19) What made you feel comfortable to actually take that leap to the direction of the consumer? (50:23) Because I will say your writing is such that you clearly know the subject matter, but the way in which you reveal that it's a fun and easy enough read to be able to grasp larger concepts that are more difficult for somebody who doesn't the background to understand.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(50:41) Yeah. (50:41) Well, one it's practice and two it's training. (50:43) So I've always done professional development training myself and health and medical and science communications.(50:49) And for many years, I was very involved here in Australia or still am, but I was kind of on the committee of the Australasian Medical Writers Association. (50:56) And we've run, we've run, we ran years of conferences and trainings and workshops and on how to communicate science clearly. (51:05) And there's an evidence base behind how to do that and how to write and think and talk about that.(51:10) So there's, it's not like I just was magically endowed with this gift. (51:14) Like I've worked to develop that. (51:16) And social media, I suppose, also gives you a feedback loop.(51:20) You can iterate, you can write something and get feedback. (51:23) And I suppose earlier on when I was doing more contract work for other organizations, then that's more of a collaborative feedback process as well. (51:31) So you learn how to do that.(51:34) And then, so the more you do it, the better you get at it. (51:38) And then social media as well, gives a opportunity now for getting the messages out there and getting feedback on what works, what lands, what are people interested in, kind of where is the attention, you know, what's trending, and then kind of fitting the kind of the science into that, into that space. (51:55) And the books again, kind of came about, I had no desire to, or dream, it was like I never dreamed to go to Oxford.(52:01) I just saw an ad and thought, I'll apply. (52:04) Similarly, I never dreamed about writing a book. (52:07) In fact, I was like, oh God, people say, you should write a book.(52:09) I was going, oh my God, I couldn't think of anything worse. (52:11) Like I wrote a PhD thesis. (52:13) And I thought, well, I haven't got any ideas anyway.(52:15) And then I was approached and asked by a publisher to write a book. (52:19) And I, my publisher has now my literary agent, which makes me sound very important. (52:23) And she was like, oh, let's meet and chat and brainstorm some ideas.(52:27) And we brainstormed some ideas. (52:29) And that was kind of how the women's brain book idea came about. (52:32) The first book I wrote, because I'd written an article on menopause and brain fog previously for the ABC here in Australia, and it had gone gangbusters in 2015, it went gangbusters.(52:43) And she was like, oh, maybe there's something in that space. (52:46) And I went, hi, maybe there is. (52:47) But it wasn't even a thing then.(52:50) The papers on pregnancy hadn't been published yet. (52:52) They were still two years out. (52:55) But it just kind of cracked open this idea of, well, perhaps I could write a book about women's brain health across the lifespan.(53:01) And it was a quite new topic then. (53:03) It felt very niche. (53:05) And in the 10 years since then, it is no longer niche.(53:08) But now I've got my, again, I've done my 10,000 hours. (53:12) I've written the three books. (53:14) So the confidence for writing that book came about because the publisher said you should write it and here's the advance.(53:21) But that was a really tough process because good science communication requires you to be constantly putting yourselves in the kind of the shoes of your reader. (53:34) And I learned that if you write something and then the next day read it back in the shoes of your reader, you would just find fault or you won't understand it. (53:42) And so then it's very hard not to flagellate yourself.(53:44) Oh, my God, I can't believe I wrote that. (53:45) That was terrible. (53:46) And just delete it all and start again.(53:49) And so then you use all of your kind of cognitive capacity and emotional resilience up editing what you've written the day before. (53:55) And so then you feel shit about yourself. (53:57) And so then you don't want to write anymore.(53:59) So what I learned since then is just write the entire book and then go back and edit it later. (54:07) Because you waste too much of yourself editing when you could just be writing. (54:14) You can edit later.(54:15) Save all the editing. (54:16) So for my other books and I just went and I was right, right, right, right, right, right. (54:19) Just get everything out as much as I can.(54:22) Doesn't matter how long it is. (54:23) Just get it all there. (54:24) And then when you're in the editing process, you know that that's what you're there for.(54:29) You've got way more distance between something you wrote six months ago and now. (54:34) And then you can just edit it with a bit more dispassion towards yourself. (54:38) Be a bit more realistic.

Marcus Arredondo

(54:40) Do you outline before you write?

Dr. Sarah McKay

(54:42) Yes. (54:43) I'm a planner. (54:44) So I have a detailed outline and then I write everything.(54:48) And then as you are in the process of writing, then I've got systems in place that really needs to be put there and kind of how I cross reference ideas and chapters and all of that. (55:00) But I found that was a massive lesson in just getting shit done was not to ruminate too much over editing because it can be a real and then people get in this whole like this is very famous phrase within writing about kill your darlings. (55:17) I don't kill my darlings.(55:19) I copy paste them and put them elsewhere. (55:21) I don't delete them, but I put them in a file with the darlings. (55:29) Yeah.(55:29) So that's kind of the psychology, I suppose, to how I've got around to writing the books. (55:33) But I'm having a break now. (55:34) I wrote two last year.(55:35) It's too much.

Marcus Arredondo

(55:36) Yeah. (55:37) Well, I will say that they're terrific reads. (55:40) And I think they are very informative to a man from my perspective, both in understanding the brain, but also to understand what's happening, especially to a mom specifically.(55:53) So I appreciate the work that you put into it. (55:56) I know we're up on time now, and I wanted to go through a little bit more of the changes of females, but I would be remiss if I didn't at least ask one question about what women can be doing to help preserve their brain health as they age.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(56:12) Well, I don't think that there's that many differences between men and women, just humans in general. (56:16) I think the basics have never changed and are still the same as perhaps what our moms told us, like sleep's the foundation, exercise, activity, moving your body through the world, a healthy diet, nutrition, lots of good, healthy, warm social connections and supportive relationships, finding ways to buffer the inevitable stressful things that come your way. (56:41) And then there's other things that not everyone necessarily has control over.(56:46) The socioeconomic determinants of health are perhaps really powerful, but no one's really talking about them. (56:54) So if we can get the basics right, and then hopefully we live somewhere where we've got access to good health care if we need it.

Marcus Arredondo

(57:01) Well, I really appreciate you coming on. (57:03) Thank you for your time. (57:04) Keep up the good work.(57:05) I look forward to the next book, even after the reprieve here.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(57:08) There's not one coming anytime soon. (57:11) I'm on an extended sabbatical.

Marcus Arredondo

(57:14) Fair enough. (57:15) You deserve it. (57:16) Any closing thoughts?

Dr. Sarah McKay

(57:18) No, just yeah, thanks for listening. (57:20) And I suppose be mindful of where you get your information from and what stories you absorb. (57:26) Social media is also an active ingredient in a health outcome.

Marcus Arredondo

(57:28) Appreciate it. (57:29) Thank you.

Dr. Sarah McKay

(57:29) You're very welcome.

Marcus Arredondo

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