Deliberate cold exposure after learning or testing can enhance memory consolidation by deploying adrenaline.

“What happens when we get into cold is that we experience an increase in norepinephrine, in noradrenaline release and in adrenaline release.”

“And we are not the first to start thinking about using cold water as an adrenaline stimulus. Nor are we the first to start thinking about using cold water induced adrenaline as a way to enhance learning and memory. This has been happening since medieval times.”

“You can use cold and cold is an excellent stimulus because first of all, it doesn't involve pharmacology. Second of all, you can generally access it at low to zero cost, especially the cold shower approach.”

“You are welcome to do that if you want. In fact, that's a pretty low cost, zero pharmacology. At least exogenous pharmacology way to approach this whole thing. That's a way of evoking your own natural epinephrine that turns out also dopamine release. You could take a cold shower. You could do an ice bath or get into a cold circulating bath.”

“The point is that the time in which you would want to do those protocols is after, ideally immediately after your learning about.”

“but lately I've been doing this whole thing of cold water exposure to spike my adrenaline, 'cause I hate it, and it spikes my adrenaline after learning based on the McGaugh and Cahill data.”

“deliberate cold exposure. This is something I've talked about on the podcast before, but deliberate cold exposure can be achieved by getting into a cold shower for one to five minutes. If you're not used to it, you probably want to start with one minute, or you can get into an ice bath, and nowadays there are a number of different commercial sources of circulating cold water or if you have access to a body of cold water like a lake or a pool or an ocean. We know that getting into cold water or under cold water greatly increases epinephrine levels and dopamine levels in the brain and blood.”

“there's an age old practice really dating back to medieval times of putting people into cold water right after they learn something in order to spike, to increase their epinephrine as a way to consolidate those memories.”

“You can do that certainly by deliberate cold exposure with a cold shower or getting in up to your neck in cold water of any kind. But the other way to do that is to spike your adrenaline by ingesting 1 to 3 milligrams per kilogram of caffeine after sitting down to try and learn some material”

“And, of course, any of those alone or in combination all increase the levels of catecholamines, so it makes perfect logical mechanistic sense as to why this would work.”

“I think it's reasonable to assume that a cold shower about 30 to 60 minutes prior to doing any kind of working memory task or any kind of activity that would require increased Focus could be okay we don't know this specific Studies have not been done but could be in theory it makes sense mechanistically it's logically sound”

“so if you want to take a cold shower after learning some material or even better testing yourself mentally on that material while in a cold shower or cold plunge you certainly can just don't stay in there too long use best practices”

“deliberate cold exposure definitely wakes you up and it wakes you up very fast. And it does that because it causes the release of epinephrine and norepinephrine and then you get this long arc of dopamine release.”

“You could take a cold shower. You could do an ice bath or get into a cold circulating bath in order to evoke epinephrine and dopamine release. You could go out for a hard run. You could do any number of things that would increase adrenaline in your body.”