THINKWELL

AGEWELL

Keeping Your Brain Young: The Role of Meditation and Brain Coherence

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (00:01.696)
Welcome back to the Think Well, Age Well podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Heather Sandison. And today I’m joined by Dr. Alaric Arundander, a neuroscientist, educator, and international lecturer whose work has spanned more than five decades at the intersection of brain science, human potential, and aging. Dr. Arundander has contributed to research at institutions, including the University of California at Los Angeles, Penn State University,

and the University of Wisconsin in Madison. And he’s long been involved in exploring how brain function evolves over time and what we can do to preserve and even enhance it. His work focuses on the concept of brain network coherence, neuroplasticity, and the role of meditation, particularly transcendental meditation, in supporting cognitive resilience and longevity. So today we’re diving into what it means to have a youthful brain.

and how lifestyle shapes brain networks and where ancient practices meet modern neuroscience. So welcome.

Alaric Arenander (01:08.157)
Thank you. It’s a very great pleasure to be with you and all the people that love you.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (01:12.366)
Well, it’s really a pleasure to have you today. mean, know that everybody reading your bio, everyone knows why I’ve had you here. I think many people in the audience know that I am a daily meditator. And for me personally, it’s been so transformative. I feel like I am a better mom, a more creative individual, a better doctor, a better leader. I’m just a better version of myself when I get in my meditation practice. And so

There’s a lot of science to that. And there’s a lot of science around the aging and cognitive function that supports how profoundly impactful meditation can be, mindfulness practices. So I want to hear from you. You describe a progressive disconnection in brain networks that comes with aging. And I want to know what that looks like for people in their everyday life experience.

Alaric Arenander (02:12.212)
So we have a brain with all these hundreds of billions of brain cells and They’re all connected with so many different little Endings and so forth and it’s happening all the time 24 7 These cells have to learn how to connect at each moment because what we do in our life is each moment It’s not like we’re gonna take 10 minutes to decide what we’re gonna say per se So for example, let’s say

Grandma’s at the table and she’s talking about a recipe with somebody across the table at the family dinner. And all of a sudden the granddaughter says, grandma. So grandma ships from discussing a recipe to, my granddaughter. So in about a third of a second, she’s shifted from a detailed conversation and a motor activity and a dynamics and all the memories necessary for the.

structure of her recipes and so forth to instantaneously shifting to her granddaughter. That takes about a third of a second. But the extent to which she can shift from one thing to another, the extent that she can shift with her awareness, access to all her memories and so forth, depends upon how different parts of the brain work all at once. So you have the sensory information coming in and then you have the motor activity of shifting to the granddaughter. That takes a lot

of brain cells to do that and it takes a third of a second. what we have to do is find out how this brain can shift from moment to moment and there are billions of little things going on at each time and it’s necessary for each part of the brain to be connected. That’s why we understand that aging process and Alzheimer’s in particular is a progressive disconnect. What happens to that over time and it’s known that in the human brain as we grow

There are like four major periods of time that the brain goes through a major configurational shift. When you’re nine years old, there’s a huge shift approximately. When you’re 33 years old, we know about that shift. That’s when life has progressed as much as possible in its development, and now there’s a tipping point. So modern science considers 33 years old for grandma as their tipping point. But grandma has moved out through her 44-year-old transfer.

Alaric Arenander (04:36.41)
And now she’s in her 88 or 80, 83 year old transfer shift and configuration. So there’s these major shifts in how the brain moves through life. And grandma is now sitting there ahead of dinner table, trying to shift from one conversation to another and access all her memories to do that. Because she’s got all these memories of the recipes and the memories of her granddaughter. And for doing that brain cells over here and brain cells over here need to find a way to get together in that short period of time.

And the extent to which they do, grandma works fine. Grandma’s happy. Grandma moves through life and she’s well aware of who she is what she wants to do. So it’s really the synchronization of brain cells, many brain cells, each moment of life to the extent that they’re more organized and connected is the extent to which we have all our levels of happiness, cognitive function, memories, motor health, and so forth. So yes.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (05:35.279)
Well, as you talk about this connection, I’m wondering what things are necessary for that to be happening in a fluid way, right? Like, grandma doesn’t think as she shifts her attention from the recipe to her grandchild, she’s not thinking about that, right? It’s just happening naturally. And that’s the connection. And what is necessary? What do we have to have in place to maintain that as we age?

Alaric Arenander (06:02.151)
So all these connections are trying to come and go all the time. There’s one connection to the recipes and so forth, and then the shift the connection to the granddaughter. All that shifting takes place in a temporal mode where there’s windows of opportunity. And each window of opportunity determines about how many brain cells will actually participate. And so it’s really necessary to understand grandma’s brain and another perspective in terms of she has a sort of a hierarchy.

There’s a simple sensory information coming in. The motor activity or shifting for attention. Okay. Moving her body. Okay. So she has her very simple peripheral activity. She also has on the other side, a very deep activity of this is who I am. This is what I’m doing. I’m happy. I’m participating. My memories are moving and so forth. So there’s a peripheral system, very simple input output system. And then there is the deep grounded. This is who I am.

These are my memory structures. This is my sense of self. This is my sense of feeling good about life and participating. And then there’s the in-between feeder systems. So there’s the peripheral input output. There’s the deep self system and all the memories. And then there’s the feeder system in between. The most important of those systems in aging, in life in general, is this deep sense of self. All right. It’s called the rich hubs.

So the brain is not just a bunch of scattered cells, they are distributed, but there are hubs. There are hubs about how information is moved around in a very fast, in a very coherent fashion. So for example, this is an analogy. If you want to travel, you can go to your local airport, let’s say at Tamwa in Southeast Iowa, you get on your airplane. That airplane then takes you to, let’s say, Des Moines Airport, which is the regional airport.

And you get on the airplane to Des Moines and that takes you Chicago, which is a big time. All right. And then you can go anywhere in the world from there. So there’s these steps. There’s the peripheral, there’s the feeder, and then there’s the big hub. Now, if the peripheral one has a problem and there’s a snowstorm, you get in the car because the plane’s not going to go and you drive to the Des Moines. If the Des Moines has a problem with the snow and the sleet, then you got to be a bigger problem. You’re going to have to take a bus or drive even another seven hours to get to Chicago.

Alaric Arenander (08:28.666)
So the peripheral is not such a big deal. right. We can deal with sentry motor stuff pretty easy. And the feeder is not so great either, but over time, what we don’t want to do is lose Chicago. If there’s an ice storm in Chicago, the world knows it. Everything in the world gets complicated, whether it’s Russia or China or Hawaii or Florida.

So these rich hubs, these ones that are actually making us who we really are in the sense of a human being processing a life in a state of fulfillment and clarity and cognitive function. These rich hubs are all important. And these rich hubs developed last in life. So last in, first out. So by the time you’re about 20, 30, you’ve now developed your rich hubs, your sense of who you are, and then you just move through life with that.

information you’ve built up and you modify it a bit but usually it’s downhill either a slow downhill or a fast downhill so the rich hubs are the core to who we really are they’re the core to the aging problem to the core to alzheimer’s and that’s the issue with grandma grandma we’re assuming is have great rich hubs and she’s working there regardless of how much amyloid she may have in her brain or maybe some peripheral problem in her physiology

If her rich hubs are working and her brain is coherent and functioning, she can compensate for almost everything and have a long, happy life. With her granddaughter.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (09:59.663)
And these rich hubs that you’re describing, do they live in the posterior cingulate gyrus or the hippocampus? Like, do they live anatomically in the brain in a certain place? Or is it less, okay.

Alaric Arenander (10:10.864)
Yes. Yeah. These are, it’s just like geography. Chicago’s over here and this over here and so forth. They are located. They’re like places and in between there’s wiring connecting them. So you just can’t have, it’s just not a democracy where everybody’s just on the same playing field. All right. There are the big guys, just like there’s federal government, state government, and then your local county board. Okay. Everybody’s important, but if the federal government has a problem, then everybody gets to know about it right away.

So these are structures of cells which have developed in the human nervous system to subserve these different functions, either simple output or the deep sense of self and fulfillment and cognitive intactment or the feeder relating to what goes in and out and who we are.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (10:55.584)
talk about coherence and the links between brain coherence and cognitive performance and resilience against things like Alzheimer’s as we age, will you describe what coherence means and how that affects cognitive function?

Alaric Arenander (11:11.01)
good. So as we referred to before, brain cells have to work together very fast all the time. Now if you have a set of cells over here and a set of cells over here, in a very short period of time they have to link together. If this set of cells are going up and down like this and these cells are going up and down here, they’re not going to get together because they’re going to miss each other. But if they go up and down together, let’s say, then they can connect. All right, at each moment they can connect, they can connect. But if they’re going like this, they never seem to connect.

In other words, they’re not available for the system. They’re not available to the computational ability, the information, the memories. So we want all the different cells in the brain to be as much correlated as possible, but it’s a temporal thing because things come and go. For a moment, they’re all connected, they’re all in phase, and then they can connect. At another moment, they’re not in phase, there’s no possibility for them to connect. So we want everybody to be in phase as much as possible in a very orderly way, which is called coherence.

When things are moving up and down together, even if they’re slightly off-keys, as long as they’re up and going up and down together, like marching troops, everything looks great when things are marching together. When they march together, they function together. And your coherence on the level of the nerve cells determines how integrated the brain is, which determines how much cognitive function we have. So if we want more cognitive function and we want to keep it for a long, long time,

then we have to realize we need integration and the essence of integration is how cells connect in time. There are these temporal windows. If those temporal windows are available, information flows. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t flow and the person stares. They can see, they can move, but they don’t know what they’re seeing or moving.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (12:55.286)
And so are there ways that we can measure and track this before, like as a way to help us prevent progression towards cognitive decline? Or is this largely just a concept that’s studied in research at this stage?

Alaric Arenander (13:10.192)
Well, it’s easy enough to measure. You can have a simple EEG machine, even two electrodes, okay? Put two electrodes and then just measure what the person’s brain waves are doing. Are they coherent or not? You have to take the brain waves to say this part of the brain and this part of the brain. This is a prefrontal cortex. This is really important territory, right? Everybody knows that. So these two cells, so much of cells here, let’s say there’s a million cells here and a million cells here. So the question is, are they working together?

So you measure the EEG here, the brain waves oscillating, the electricity activity here, and then you ask, are they synchronized? Are they correlated? Are they going up and down together or are they just going all over the place? And that’s a simple measure. You can graph it, you can measure it, and we know now that coherence is the essence of communication. So there’s a whole theory now, communication through coherence. When you have coherence, you have maximum communication, which means maximum cognitive function.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (14:07.838)
So this, whenever I think of EEGs and coherence and measuring brain waves, it leads me to thinking about neurofeedback. So can you talk about what the applications of neurofeedback would be? Is that part of your work and what that would be for cognition?

Alaric Arenander (14:25.468)
Yes, neural feedback has a long history, 50 years or more, 60, 70 years. neural feedback is when you take something external, let’s say a picture or a movement or some graphic thing that the brain can function, right? So the information’s coming in from the external device and the information in that external device is actually connected to something in the physiology, either your muscles, your heart, or your brain waves. So as long as

brain through the sense of sight and our cognitive function can track something on the outside it will Work with that so in other words you can actually look at your brainwaves And if you want to you can change your brainwaves. Okay, that’s neuro biofeedback and Most of the neuro biofeedback out there in my opinion is not so great Because it’s not very I Know I know

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (15:21.108)
I wish you had that opinion. Yeah, I would love for you. My clinical experience with that, no, I don’t offer neurofeedback, but my experience with patients who have gone to do neurofeedback is that I have had patients spend tens of thousands of dollars, you know, over 100 sessions, and kind of feel like things were about the same, that there wasn’t much benefit. And there have been a few people who have said, this has been really, really helpful for me.

But more often than not, I hear from people that they spent a lot of money and a lot of time and they didn’t really feel like it made a difference. what, you know, I don’t want to go too far down this tangent if this isn’t, why don’t we want to talk about meditation. But I just would, I would love to understand this. It’s like, why is neurofeedback so hit or miss?

Alaric Arenander (16:09.702)
Well, the thing is, the brain can adjust to whatever you have out there. But the brain isn’t simply just alpha. And it’s just not simply this power measurement, which is usually what most of the biofeedback is, is based on power. Okay. You have, there is a guy named Bob Thatcher, he’s probably the best TEEG guy on the planet, Robert Thatcher. He’s a meditator too. And he has, he has his database between the ages of say five and 90.

This is what the average normal healthy brain looks like in terms of EEG. And from that you can take all these very sophisticated measures of how everybody’s communicating with everybody, coherence in particular, and you can say this is what the normal human being is for that age and that gender. And then you can say this is what we know it should be and then we look at the person’s brain and we do a comparison. So now you’re not just saying the person to get more alpha. You’re asking a person to

sort of identify and adjust to the normal of that person at that age. So now you have a very sophisticated, very powerful system and it works a lot. mean, he has all kinds of clinical studies gone, whether it’s business or psychiatry or it’s autism or, he goes on and on that if you go into the real nitty gritty of the sophistication of a how our brain is functioning and it’s not just alpha power. If you want to pick one measure,

alpha coherence but most people don’t do that with biofeedback. So biofeedback essentially can work but you have to dive into the nature of what the brain really is and not some simple measure.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (17:50.511)
Okay. And then EEGs, we have struggled to find, you know, there’s the P300 and the different metrics that you get from an EEG. And we’ve had trouble correlating them to cognitive function. So I think that, you find a, especially with meditation, like, do you find that there is utility in using an EEG?

to track kind of changes that would support either an increase in cognitive function or a decline in cognitive function.

Alaric Arenander (18:29.373)
So again, if you want to use EEG, you have to go through a stepwise progression. What is the baseline because of variation during the day and so forth. And then how to over time. So if you look at the data on brainwave coherence, which is one of the essence of what we’re talking about here, it correlates the more coherence you have that you can measure, in particular in the low alpha band, but you can look at theta two or something like that. But in the low alpha band, that correlates with basically everything good in life.

Your level of intelligence, your morality, how sort of crazy and stable you are, your sense of your motor functioning, even grade points, stuff like this. So everything good about how the brain is functioning seems to come down to a measure of coherence. And so you could use it, for example, as an aging measure because one of the fine things they find with Alzheimer’s and age is that there’s a loss of coherence. That’s one of the best measures of aging is a loss of coherence.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (19:32.109)
So I want to shift our conversation into meditation. This gets a lot of attention, of course, in brain health. And the claims can vary widely, of course. But what do you think is the best research that shows just the connection between meditation and cognitive decline or cognitive function? We’re here to talk about what will help us.

to maintain optimal cognitive function as we age. can you just share, like, what’s the best science out there? And is there a right way to do it? And what does it mean if somebody is thinking about adopting a meditation practice to support their brain health?

Alaric Arenander (20:14.365)
Thank you. That’s a great, great thing. Meditation has been around forever. It’s as old as planting beans and eating. Okay, so it’s part of what we can do in human life. it’s in its essence based on neuroplasticity and human experience. Every experience a person has changes the brain. If you put the same experience in, it’ll change it in same way and you’ll just get more and more of that same. But it’s always changing.

There’s never a stop to the change in the brain. And so basically, with meditation, just like anything else, it’ll change the brain to a certain extent in a certain way. So for example, if you wanted to learn how to, if grandma wanted to learn how to juggle, if she just practiced in a couple weeks, she’d be pretty good. And in a couple of weeks, you could take another brain scan. You’ll see that this part of the brain back here, which has to do with space-time coordination, okay, would have it grown. It’s a bigger cortex now, just because grandma’s, you know,

playing with their balls in the air. Okay so neuroplasticity everything is changing all the time and so it depends upon what we put into the system whether it’s more orliness more upliftment or more disorder like stress and so forth it’s what we put into the system the system will adjust if you put more and more stress into the system then the neuroplasticity will have you keep trying to work the whole maintain that stress and deal with it

It’s not going let you move out of that. It’s going to have to have you survive in that war of stress. If you don’t have this stress, then your brain is going to move in a different direction of whatever you offer. So, neuroplasticity and experience. Now, meditation. Meditation is usually considered something where the mind is moving. And it’s moving in a more restful, clarifying information to offer better health, better functioning of the brain, better life in general, and even enlightenment.

This is the whole issue is that the human person was born to be enlightened this fantastic person on the planet Unfortunately, we’re stuck with cell phones and running around doing our thing. So Meditations there are three known types of meditation and these three known types of meditation relate to a metaphor of an ocean The mind a human mind is like an ocean

Alaric Arenander (22:31.005)
Ocean on the surface, have all this little waves coming and going. Sometimes the waves are big, sometimes the waves are small. And you’re sitting on the ocean and you’re bouncing around and this is life. All right. It’s either kind of crazy today or it’s a little more relaxing or whatever the case is. But this is an ocean and there’s a depth to the ocean and deeper level depth level. And then actually at the bottom of the ocean, way down there, it’s very quiet. No matter how huge the waves are up here, it’s quiet. It’s a whole range of activity to quiet.

The same thing with the human mind. The human minds were on the surface level of human awareness, our conscious thinking level. And on that conscious thinking level, we have thoughts. Those thoughts come out of someplace, they don’t come out of Walmart, they come out of the brain. They come out of our mind, they bubble up out of some source of thought. And of course the psychiatrists and psychologists who say, there’s stuff down in there and let’s work with it. So there’s this whole range of conscious thinking level.

the subconscious and then some source of thought. So here’s the range of the mind. And because there’s a range of the mind, there’s a range of technologies to explore and utilize that range of the mind. And so there’s three types as I mentioned before. Remember I said there was three? One is concentration. You’re on something and you’re concentrating on something. This is pretty hardcore. lot of Zen things and so forth. Let me take a, pardon?

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (23:53.144)
Like a mantra, they’re concentrating on a mantra. Maybe people have.

Alaric Arenander (23:57.278)
You could, yes. It could be a mantra or cone or you could have your eyes open staring at something. Or your breath. Yes, yes. Let me take a step back though and just know that all forms of meditation have a neuroplastic response. Right? Every meditation will change something. Every meditation will do something to the brain and the physiology because just walking down the street will change your brain. So it’s not that every meditation doesn’t do something. It’s just question is what is it doing in terms of its technology?

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (24:00.227)
or the breath, or the breath.

Alaric Arenander (24:26.725)
Each meditation has a technology. If you concentrate and you’re dealing with either the meaning or focus your attention, then you’re on the surface level because that’s where you concentrate driving a car and you’re doing stuff, right? There isn’t much difference then between driving the car per se and concentrating, except for you’re quiet now, your eyes closed and it’s more inward and you don’t have to deal with the world. So concentrations up here. And then there is more contemplative.

more easy passive meditations. These would include your mindfulness and things like that. Anything where you’re watching the breath or watching the mind or watching yourself eat or being easy or doing some breath techniques. These are also valuable and they also allow the mind to settle. But each one of them you’re keeping track. Maybe you’re being a little standoffish and not trying to judge and stuff like that and trying to just go with it but you’re keeping track. So this is

In a sense, effort to keep watching, doing what you’re doing. And the third type of technique, concentration, passive mindfulness. And then there’s ones where you actually don’t get lost in the mind or don’t get held up in the mind and the mind can slip off the surface and actually transcend. That’s why it’s called transcendental meditation. Instead of being on the surface level or floating up on the surface level, you transcend. And the only way to do that is by not trying. You can’t go from here to here.

through a technique of effort. No amount of intellectual effort or intelligence will get you from here to here. It’s a very simple technique where they offer you a sound which has a certain vibration. You’re told how to use that properly and then wham, it happens. It happens for everybody, happens every time. And the results is that you move from here to here. Now what happens when you go from the surface to the depth? When you go from the surface to the depth, first of all, you’re taking your awareness where it wasn’t before.

Your awareness is now, you’re still awake, you’re still awake, you’re still awake. You’re at the very finest level of your mind and you’re still aware. Where normally you’re not allowed to be there. Because of all the nonsense and stress and strain and lack of proper wires. So you’re very deep in the mind and because the mind is there, the brain is there too. The brain has to also go through that same change in neural structure. The dynamics.

Alaric Arenander (26:47.862)
the brain communication has to also adjust to that. The mind pulls the brain into this very deep level of rest. It’s the deepest level of rest we’ve ever seen. Okay it’s so powerful this deeper level of rest changes in cardiovascular, respiratory, hormones, EEG. EEG goes from going like this the coherence and it just goes like that. You get like a hundred percent coherence.

It’s like training the brain to be orderly because the mind is allowed to be the most quiet, settled state it could possibly be in. Because there’s no intellectual rigmarole. You just transcend, maximum coherence, come back out. You just trained your brain to be more orderly. That’s the difference.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (27:31.534)
And it sounds like the benefit of this technique also comes from the consistency of doing it. It’s like getting your reps in around this, of getting that orderliness back.

Alaric Arenander (27:44.028)
Yeah, you can’t go to the gym once and then lift 100,000 pounds, okay? It’s a progressive thing. You can’t change the nervous system that fast and think you’re gonna get away with it, right? Everything has to be done in a proper modality.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (27:48.749)
Okay.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (27:57.839)
And it’s rest for the brain. We talk a lot about how the brain needs a lot of energy, and this is part of the rationale for getting into ketosis, is that the brain just is such an energy-hungry organ, and so we want to make sure it’s getting enough fuel. But this is talking about getting the brain rest. One of the things coming up for me is going into the trance state of a hypnotherapy session, say. Is that similar? How is that similar or different?

Alaric Arenander (28:25.116)
Hypnosis is when you’re actually separating the inner value of the person from the outside world and you’re having it controlled from the outside. As opposed to the person settling into who they are in the deepest possible level of their sense of self. And when they do that, because the brain is coherent, everything in your brain now starts working better. When you bring it back out, the brain is now more orderly, so automatically, and again we mentioned that coherence means more cognitive function, better memory, better learning.

more morality, it goes on and on and on because once things are more orderly then everything that you are just works better. You have ADHD, it gets better, okay? So forth and so on.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (29:06.808)
And so for someone who already has, say, a prayer practice, a mindfulness practice, or another form of meditation that they’re doing, is there a compelling reason to switch to TM?

Alaric Arenander (29:16.324)
I don’t say switch. mean like you can play tennis and you can play softball. You can do whatever you want. I would not say mindfulness is bad or you shouldn’t do it because people are doing it and they have some benefit. you find somebody that has some benefit then you use it. What I’m just saying is that there’s a comparison. There’s a comparison about if you spend 20 minutes twice a day what is the output? What is the consequence of spending that time? And if you look at the research literature last half a century

him is so powerful and so simple because first of all anybody can do it it’s easily you can do it at any age you don’t have to be really even cognitively intact and you can still do it because it’s a simple it’s not an intellectual thing you don’t have to figure out how to do it you just introduce a process and it happens by itself so it’s

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (30:05.134)
Can you describe that process? So just to give people a little bit more insight into, what would they be getting into?

Alaric Arenander (30:09.725)
Okay, so if somebody wanted to learn TM, you would sit with a teacher and they would give you a sound which is appropriate for your physiology. Now that sound is like a thought, right? It’s an impulse, right? It’s not a sound, it’s not a mantra or a sound. But you have a sound and the brain now has that sound lively because you’re thinking it, right? You’re thinking very easily.

Because you’re thinking it easily, the mind’s going, now what do do? Right? Because the mind’s not gonna sit around and not do anything. So the mind’s going, what do I do? Well, there’s a natural tendency to the mind and everything. And that is, everything in this universe is moving in one direction. It wants more. Everything wants more. Everybody wants to live longer, we want to be happier, we want more money, we want more hugs, we want more. And if it seems to be less, it’s only because we want more silence or something like that.

So everything is going towards more. And if you introduce the mind to a simple thought and you tell it not to do anything to it, other than just think it easily. And since there’s no meaning to it, the mind is going, all right, I don’t get it. I got this sound. What do I do with this thing? Now it’s left on its own devices. The mind’s going, well, if you let me do what I want to do, I want more, which is always the case. There’s nothing more over here because there’s no meaning. So on a surface level, there’s nothing to be done. But oh.

This value of the sound, because remember the sound like everything in the mind is percolating out of the source of thought. So the sound is percolating out. So it’s like a little breadcrumb trails. The mind goes, but this seems closer to this source of thought. And it’s closer and closer and closer. And then reaches a source of thought and transcends. It does that because there’s a gradient to the mind. From the surface to the depth, there’s more more creativity, energy, intelligence. Because remember, the source of thought is a source of all our thoughts.

So inside of each one of us is this huge reservoir of energy. Thoughts just keep pouring out and creativity keeps pouring out and intelligence and happiness, it just keeps pouring out of this. So if you give the mind a chance to go from here to here and you don’t get in the way by saying there’s some meaning or you have to do this or do that to it, it just goes like that. One or two seconds and there you are. And then you have some thoughts of meditation, then you use maybe the sound again and some thoughts. After 20 minutes you come out and you go.

Alaric Arenander (32:31.792)
Wow, I didn’t do anything yesterday. Let’s go do something else. Because you just re-shifted and reset the whole nervous system. And in the terms, the whole physiology. You got rid of the lactate, you’ve changed his cortisol. Everything in the physiology has changed. And so you’re a different person now. A better person.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (32:35.171)
you

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (32:47.096)
So someone, yeah, I mean, it’s transformative. I’ve experienced it myself with meditation. I’ve never done TM specifically, but with meditation in general, if someone is listening and they’re worried about the brain health right now, what would you have them start doing this week?

Alaric Arenander (33:09.616)
Well, if they have concerns and they want to live a long time and be healthier, then they have to deal with all the risk factors. You can have a list of them. Everybody knows what they are. There’s diet and there’s stress and there’s toxins. It goes on and on. All the different things that make it hard to live a long time and happy.

So you can get that list and you can plug them off and it’s good to have that. And that’s one thing you do a great job of. You help all the people at your institution to get through that list in a way that’s very functional and actually, yeah, actually implement. mean, people can have the best ideas, but if they don’t do it, it’s not going to be of consequence. So, so basically we have this situation where there’s this list of things to do. So if I come back to trance meditation, if somebody was to sit down and

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (33:40.888)
That’s our goal, yes.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (33:46.558)
Exactly. I could not agree more.

Alaric Arenander (33:59.869)
practice TM for 20 minutes twice a day everything on that list of factors would have been significantly impacted just from that one practice of 20 minutes twice a day if you have toxins for example and we have toxins in the brain in particular okay and of course we all know about glymphatics okay and glymphatics means that we can take all the daily stuff in the brain and we can flush it out into the body and purify the brain quote-unquote so purifying the brain getting rid of this

The daily products, mean, regardless of the bad stuff in the brain, just, every day we have waste products we have to get rid of. So, if you want to improve glymphatics, you need a good night’s sleep, and particularly your first deep sleep. Your first deep sleep is the best hit of glymphatics we know about. If you don’t get a good slow wave sleep at the beginning of the night, your sleep is not really done what it’s meant to do in that regard. Now, if you consider TM,

TM is very similar to that very deep rest. So I imagine 20 minutes twice a day, you just got another huge download of all the waste products. So you’ve purified, you’ve gotten deep rest, you’ve reorganized all the wiring so when you get out, you can make better decisions. Like, maybe I’ll be more sensitive. Maybe I won’t have some more of that because I know that’s not good. There’s more awareness and alertness to who you are and what you want to be. And so if you can spend just a few minutes each day

Reminding yourself who you are spontaneously. It’s not an intellectualization. I’m better now. It’s just things are clearer Greater clarity means you make better decisions. You can believe you can do it. You can actually carry it out

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (35:39.832)
Who doesn’t want more of that? And is there anything that you think people overestimate when it comes to protecting their brain health? Do you think there’s things that people are maybe doing too much of thinking it’s going to be healthy and helpful for their brain when really they should be focused in a different direction?

Alaric Arenander (35:59.581)
I think you should do everything possible for your brain and your physiology. can’t think of anything bad. mean moderation is useful. The system can only adjust in a certain rate based on who you are. Some people can move faster than others. Some people need more of this diet and less of that diet. So I think the key is you just have to do it. I mean if you don’t do it it’s just no consequence. I all the good thoughts, yes. So you need, it has to be implemented.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (36:24.679)
It doesn’t work if you don’t do it. Yeah.

Alaric Arenander (36:28.824)
And again, to here, for example, there was this Norman cousin back a long time ago at UCLA set up this psycho neuroendocrine research study. Yeah. And Fawzi with one of his guys works with them and Fawzi took all these people and melanomas. have stage three or four melanomas, which means the doctor says, ma’am, I’m really sorry, but based on what we know, you have like six months at best.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (36:40.366)
Yeah.

Alaric Arenander (36:57.52)
Do what you can do. Set things up. Enjoy your moments now because you have maybe six months. It’s not a nice thing. Okay. But it’s the reality from the medical science. Now, Fazio took another whole set of people that had the same problem, melanoma. And he says, look, you got this melanoma. It doesn’t look good. All right. This is what we know, but you can beat this for a long time. If you do X, Y, and Z, you don’t have to go away in six months. You can last a long time.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (37:03.81)
No, neither.

Alaric Arenander (37:26.064)
The study showed that in six months the people who had the medical diagnosis, it’s not going to work, you have nothing you could do, they’re gone. On schedule. Because the doctors helped them do that. The ones that were told, look you can do something about this. They’re still alive. All of them. After a couple years. They’re still alive. So the thing is, you have to think that you can do this. You have to think that you have the power. You have this human brain. This human brain is not…

doing TikTok, it’s supposed to be doing fantastic things. It’s got this wiring, this potentiality, which is huge. And if we don’t engage it, then it’s just waste. It’s a waste. It’s really a waste and it’s a shame. as part of our educational system, we don’t train people to use their brains. We just train them to get a job and behave themselves. So we just need to help people take control.

To take control just means letting go, transcending, creating maximum coherence. When you come back out, you’ve just modified every single risk factor. Whether it’s education, toxins, diet, digestion, or cardiovascular. The American Heart Association says TM is the only practice they know that actually helps reverse cardiovascular disease. It’s the only one and they look at all of them. It’s not that the other ones don’t have some impact except for

you can reduce a 50 % impact. And they did studies in Canada with this basically free medical care in Canada. So you compare people who meditate, TM, who don’t meditate in TM, over five year time, the people who are non-meditators, they continue to spend more and more money, more and more money. The government spends more and more money. It keeps going. It’s just a relentless curve. The older you get, the longer it goes, more you’re going to have problems. The people who practice TM,

As soon as they started TM there was an inflection. They got less and less and less. Five or eight percent every year, a cumulative. It just kept getting less and less and less. Simple practice, less use of medical care because you’re not sick. And Blue Cross did the same thing. Blue Cross showed everything except for Obstetrics was reduced by 80 to 90 percent in meditators.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (39:37.506)
Wow.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (39:44.822)
That’s wild. You’ve been at this for 50 years or more. how is your perspective of meditation and the brain and aging? How has that evolved since you originally got into this space?

Alaric Arenander (40:00.413)
Well part of it was I was at UCLA for quite some time and I was working on glial cells which should be a fascinating subject for people to learn about because glials are actually in charge, you probably know that, that the neuronal cells, all these wires, they’re like little kids running around the house doing stuff, right, chit chatting, where mother is now taking care of the whole thing. Mother’s in charge of everything, nutrition, balance, ionic flow.

everything important about the brain is glial cells, the glue, and then the kids just participate on their own level, just hoping that everything’s gonna work out right. So basically, at one point in my career, I realized that during research on glial cells, although it’s fascinating and probably somewhat productive, was not the same thing as being able to travel around the world and help people understand the impact of 20 minutes to twice a day to reverse aging.

reverse Alzheimer’s, get rid of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, anger, violence. We can clear out prisons. We did that. We can clear out prisons. You can change almost everything because we don’t change it. The brain can change. You shift the brain, it works better. You just give it order and then it manifests that order. If you give it disorder, then it has problems and it has control. So we all have a choice. We all have a choice.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (41:19.576)
You know, I think I asked you this question about what people overestimate when it comes to protecting their brain health. And I think I was sort of leading, into my own answer, which is this idea you mentioned, tick tock, right? think that what I see a lot of is people who are looking for that next thing, right? That they, know a lot of information. They have a lot of information, but they’re, they’re scrolling. They’re reading every email. They’re

Alaric Arenander (41:32.07)
Hahaha

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (41:47.125)
looking for more, they’re getting the next book, like the thing that they need is in the next book or in the next reel or in the next video. Instead of realizing that they have a lot of information already and it’s really most important to just put it into practice. I guess I’d be curious about your thoughts on that.

Alaric Arenander (42:06.3)
Yes, I think the key here and it’s a bit of a dialogue but there’s a difference between information and wisdom and fulfillment. Okay, information can help you to fix something perhaps but it’s not going to be necessarily fulfilling or useful if you’re a whole life. Okay and this digital age we’re finding ourselves in where this infinite scrolling

Through the dopamine hit, want more dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. And then we just wear out our dopamine and then we’re just sitting there exhausted because we can’t get any dopamine. All right. And you just can’t give up because you can’t be in that state anymore. Nobody wants to be depressed. So most of scrolling is depression. There’s all I gotta have. Where’s the next one? And so basically if you want a life which is fulfilling and long lived, it has to come from inside. Inside is all the intelligence and happiness and creativity and fulfillment.

You just have to let it out. But if we constantly are out here and there’s nothing wrong with out here, I mean it’s a beautiful world and there’s lots of beautiful things to do. But if we don’t bring what’s inside out, then the outside will never be fulfilled. You can have all the money in the world and still be unhappy. You can have all the health in the world and still be unhappy. It’s just not, the answers are not out here. I mean if you want to put somebody around the moon, you need some good answers out here. But in general, you have to have the inner coordination.

to do that. so basically what’s inside determines what you have outside. And so we just encourage people, if you practice like a meditative technique in particular TM, you get a chance 20 minutes twice a day to connect with who you are. This huge unbounded, unlimited sense of awareness and potentiality. And that just effortlessly and without any control or mugga booga, it just comes out. It just, you, just are better.

You’re just a better person every day as you’re meant to be. Yes. And so we can only encourage people to take advantage of the fact that they have a human nervous system and not keep playing tic-tac-toe with it. It’s just you can launch a person to the moon. Everybody can launch to the moon in their own awareness.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (43:59.107)
That’s my experience.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (44:09.358)
Yeah.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (44:15.288)
Well, it’s interesting, we’re having this conversation, as these, the four astronauts have just come back from that moon mission. And so many of these kind of deep questions are what comes up for astronauts, right, when they’re looking back at this blue marble at our spaceship Earth, right? There’s so many of these questions. It’s interesting, it’s like the engineering and all of the pieces that it takes to get them out there.

they kind of disappears and instead there’s just this like, my gosh, this like awareness of how small we are and how the like just incredible, I don’t know, this accident that we’re even here at this moment in the universe that we were even born that we get this, to have this human experience and I think it just like puts it all into perspective. It’s such an interesting, it’s just an interesting thing to watch and hear.

Alaric Arenander (45:07.782)
Yeah, mean, there, if you, people should definitely watch their, their interviews when they, when they have first had that interview. And what comes out of that interview is that you have billions of dollars spent and hundreds and hundreds of people doing very fine, intricate analysis and computers that we can’t even begin to imagine what they’re like. This huge edifice of digital, mechanical, technical prowess. And in the end, it all came down to who are human.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (45:12.706)
Mm-hmm.

Alaric Arenander (45:38.19)
And we’re together and we can do this. And it’s the same with Alzheimer’s. We’re human. We have a brain that doesn’t need to have Alzheimer’s. There’s no need for Alzheimer’s under any circumstances. I don’t care what kind of genetic predisposition you have. That’s not what it has to be. Alzheimer’s is not inevitable. It’s only a choice. It’s a choice we don’t always make because it’s unconscious, because we don’t do the right things and we don’t implement and don’t believe.

So we can.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (46:08.35)
There’s so much choice in the matter. I’m curious, what brings you joy at this stage in life?

Alaric Arenander (46:11.323)
Yes.

Alaric Arenander (46:18.619)
Being. being. Just knowing I’m here and everything is so beautiful and everybody’s trying to get along and everybody’s working stuff out and right now the plan is going through this whole huge transformation and on the other side something beautiful is going to come out but it’s like we got to work to keep working at it and be happy and get along. And just I mean it’s just it’s a state. I just I’m happy to be here.

happy to do whatever I can and happy just to be it’s just it’s a it’s a great honor to be human being yeah we should just honor that we I mean this this thing is not a computer that we can even even the people who are into this thing say this is cosmic this thing is not going to be replicated by AI this is not AI this is so far beyond AI and we’re just playing tic-tac-toe and now we’re not engaging it

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (46:54.85)
It is, it really is, right? We’re so lucky.

Alaric Arenander (47:17.379)
Our education system doesn’t train you to it properly. Our healthcare doesn’t train you to use it properly. And our society doesn’t usually give you the benefit of the doubt to use it properly.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (47:26.924)
And by it, you mean your brain. Yeah.

Alaric Arenander (47:28.665)
Yes, yes, It’s an absolutely, it’s an unbelievable gift of the universe.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (47:36.342)
Isn’t it? What a fun conversation. It’s such a powerful reminder that the brain is not static, that it’s dynamic, right? That we have a choice about what we allow in, and it’s adaptable and constantly responding to how we live our lives and what we expose ourselves to. So there’s choice. We really have a lot of agency here. So whether we’re talking about coherence or neuroplasticity or the role of practices like TM,

I think the bigger message that I want everyone to walk away with here is that the small things that we do each day are what add up to our experience. So we’re either supporting connection and resilience in the brain, or we’re slowly allowing that disconnection to take hold as we age. And I don’t think there’s any one single silver bullet when it comes to preventing cognitive decline, as we’ve discussed here, right? There’s lots that we can do there. The tools are meaningful.

and can shift the trajectory, but it’s up to us to implement, to explore what works best for each of us individually, but then to actually put it into practice. So thank you so much, Dr. Aaron Ander, just for joining me in this conversation, expanding on it. This episode, I hope, has sparked the curiosity and interest of all of our listeners. So please share it with someone you love. And as always, take that one small step today to support your brain health and your future. Thanks for being with us.

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (49:07.587)
Thanks

Dr. Heather Sandison, ND (49:11.265)
Did you have anything else you wanted to add or discuss there?