You may be read­ing all about brain fit­ness and brain train­ing. It seems every week brings a new bar­rage of arti­cles and stud­ies which often con­tra­dict what you read the month before: Does Gingko Biloba help delay Alzheimer’s Dis­ease? Can phys­i­cal exer­cise help you stay sharp as you age? Which computer-based “brain fit­ness pro­grams”, if any, are worth your money?

All this cov­er­age reflects very excit­ing sci­en­tific find­ings but also poses a key dilemma: How to become an informed life­long learner and con­sumer when there are few and con­tra­dic­tory author­i­ta­tive guidelines?

The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness (to be pub­lished in May 2009; $24.95) aims to fill that void. This guide is the result of over a year of exten­sive research includ­ing more than a hun­dred inter­views with sci­en­tists, pro­fes­sion­als and con­sumers, and a deep lit­er­a­ture review. Below you have some of the main find­ings from our effort. The guide not only cov­ers these aspects in more depth and offers prac­ti­cal guid­ance, but also includes 18 inter­views with promi­nent sci­en­tists to help you under­stand the research better.

Can we intro­duce you to your Brain?

The Guide will start at the obvi­ous start­ing point: The Human Brain. In order to make informed deci­sions about brain health, one needs to first under­stand the basic orga­ni­za­tion of the human brain and how it tends to change as we get older.

* The brain is com­posed of a num­ber of regions serv­ing dis­tinct func­tions. For­get IQ: our life and pro­duc­tiv­ity depend on a vari­ety of brain func­tions, not just one.

* There is noth­ing inher­ently fixed in the tra­jec­tory of how brain func­tions evolve as we age. Your lifestyle, actions, and even thoughts, do matter.

The 4 Pil­lars of Brain Maintenance

Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity is the life­long capac­ity of the brain to change and rewire itself in response to the stim­u­la­tion of learn­ing and expe­ri­ence. The lat­est sci­en­tific research shows that spe­cific lifestyles and actions can, no mat­ter our age, improve the health and level of func­tion­ing of our brains.

What fac­tors seem to have the most influ­ence? Read the rest of this entry »

A few col­leagues and I just had an inter­est­ing exchange on the recent arti­cle at The Atlantic, Is Google Mak­ing Us Stu­pid?, which basi­cally blamed Google for lit­er­ally rewiring our brains into more stu­pid brains (not being able to pay atten­tion, read deep books…) based on a num­ber of per­sonal anec­dotes and a lit­tle research.

My 2 cents: this is a com­plex topic and we’d first need to clar­ify the ques­tion, before look­ing for answers to sup­port or refute it. I found the Atlantic arti­cle super­fi­cial for a mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tion, with its title and main premise mak­ing lit­tle sense: Google can not makes us stu­pid, in the same way that guns don’t make us vio­lent or pens don’t make us good writers.

A few days ago we pub­lished the first and sec­ond install­ments of this Peace Among Pri­mates series, by neu­ro­sci­en­tist Robert Sapol­sky. Today we pub­lish the third and final one.

Peace Among Pri­mates (Part 3)

Any­one who says peace is not part of human nature knows too lit­tle about pri­mates, includ­ing ourselves.

–By Robert M. Sapolsky

Nat­ural born killers?

Read the rest of this entry »

Here you are have the bi-monthly Digest of our most Pop­u­lar blog posts. (Also, remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive our blog RSS feed, or to our newslet­ter at the top of this page if you want to receive this digest by email).

Brain Fit­ness News and Events

Upcom­ing Events: I will be speak­ing at five Health, Edu­ca­tion and Gam­ing events over the next cou­ple of months to intro­duce find­ings from our recent mar­ket report. Please intro­duce your­self if you attend any of these events.

Pre­vent­ing Mem­ory Loss-Special Issue: Con­gres­sional Quar­terly Researcher, one of the main pub­li­ca­tions on Capi­tol Hill, pub­lished an impres­sive 24-page spe­cial issue titled Pre­vent­ing Mem­ory Loss. Highly rec­om­mended if you want to be on top of the lat­est research trends and their pol­icy implications.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago we pub­lished the first install­ment of this Peace Among Pri­mates series, by neu­ro­sci­en­tist Robert Sapol­sky. Today we pub­lish the sec­ond install­ment. Next Sat­ur­day, April 19th, you can come back and read the third and final part in the series.

Peace Among Pri­mates (Part 2)

Any­one who says peace is not part of human nature knows too lit­tle about pri­mates, includ­ing ourselves.

–By Robert M. Sapolsky

Left behind

In the early 1980s, “For­est Troop,” a group of savanna baboons I had been studying—virtually liv­ing with—for years, was going about its busi­ness in a national park in Kenya when a neigh­bor­ing baboon group had a stroke of luck: Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Mr or Mrs Next US President,

We are glad to wel­come you to our blog car­ni­val. After a short hia­tus, Encephalon is back and gath­er­ing steam. We have pre­pared this “revival” edi­tion just for you, so you can be well informed and impress us all dur­ing the upcom­ing Sci­encede­bate 2008.

With­out fur­ther ado, let’s pro­ceed to the ques­tions posed by 24 blog­gers on neu­ro­science and psy­chol­ogy issues. We hope they pro­vide, at the very least, good men­tal stim­u­la­tion for you and your advisors.

Big Ques­tions

Do I deserve to vote even if I don’t have Free Will? (Marc at Neu­ro­sci­en­tif­i­cally Challenged).

If cul­ture sculpts our brains, what can our brains do to refine our cul­ture first? (Stephanie at Brains On Purpose).

Is God more than a fly­ing brain? (Jes­sica at bioephemera).

Is Your brain really read­ing This? (Pete at Brain Hammer).

A Few Intru­sive Questions

Do you play any musi­cal instru­ment? (Megan at SharpBrains).

Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Michael Merzenich has writ­ten a great post titled “cog­ni­tive reserve is a good thing to work on!. Rec­om­mended read­ing if you are inter­ested in another sci­en­tific per­spec­tive for cog­ni­tive training.

I agree we should know more (as usual), espe­cially for pol­icy deci­sions, but there is enough research, from Mar­ian Dia­mond et al (see beau­ti­ful essays below) work on enriched envi­ron­ments to cog­ni­tive reserve and train­ing, that is shout­ing at all of us: Exer­cise Your Brain! Enjoy Learn­ing! Sta­tis­tics such as that the aver­age American-including kids– watch 5 hours of TV daily… don’t mean “we need more research” but “how can we change this”?.

See a cou­ple of quotes from my recent inter­view with Yaakov Stern on the Cog­ni­tive Reserve.

• “well…I was pretty sur­prised when, years ago, a reporter from Sev­en­teen mag­a­zine requested an inter­view. I was really curi­ous to learn why Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Yaakov Stern is the Divi­sion Leader of the Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science Divi­sion of the Sergievsky Cen­ter, and Pro­fes­sor of Clin­i­cal Neu­ropsy­chol­ogy, at the Col­lege of Physi­cians and Sur­geons of Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, New York.

He is one of the lead­ing pro­po­nents of the Cog­ni­tive reserve the­ory, which aims to explain why some indi­vid­u­als with full Alzheimer’s pathol­ogy (accu­mu­la­tion of plaques and tan­gles in their brains) can keep nor­mal lives until they die, while oth­ers –with the same amount of plaques and tan­gles– dis­play the severe symp­toms we asso­ciate with Alzheimer’s Dis­ease. He has pub­lished dozens of peer-reviewed sci­en­tific papers on the subject.

The con­cept of a Cog­ni­tive Reserve has been around since 1989, when a post mortem analy­sis of 137 peo­ple with Alzheimer’s Dis­ease showed that some patients exhib­ited fewer clin­i­cal symp­toms than their actual pathol­ogy sug­gested. These patients also showed higher brain weights and greater num­ber of neu­rons when com­pared to age-matched con­trols. The inves­ti­ga­tors hypoth­e­sized that the patients had a larger “reserve” of neu­rons and abil­i­ties that enable them to off­set the losses caused by Alzheimer’s. Since then, the con­cept of Cog­ni­tive Reserve has been defined as the abil­ity of an indi­vid­ual to tol­er­ate pro­gres­sive brain pathol­ogy with­out demon­strat­ing clin­i­cal cog­ni­tive symp­toms. (You can check at the end of this inter­view a great clip on this).

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Key take-aways

- Life­time expe­ri­ences, like edu­ca­tion, engag­ing occu­pa­tion, and leisure activ­i­ties, have been shown to have a major influ­ence on how we age, specif­i­cally on whether we will develop Alzheimer’s symp­toms or not.

- This is so because stim­u­lat­ing activ­i­ties, ide­ally com­bin­ing phys­i­cal exer­cise, learn­ing and social inter­ac­tion, help us build a Cog­ni­tive Reserve to pro­tect us.

- The ear­lier we start build­ing our Reserve, the bet­ter; but it is never too late to start. And, the more activ­i­ties, the bet­ter: the effect is cumulative.

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The Cog­ni­tive Reserve

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez (AF): Dear Dr. Stern, it is a plea­sure to have you here. Let me first ask you this: the impli­ca­tions of your research are pretty astound­ing, pre­sent­ing major impli­ca­tions across sec­tors and age groups. What has been the most unex­pected reac­tion so far?

YS: well…I was pretty sur­prised when Read the rest of this entry »

The New Yorker April 30th issue includes a superb arti­cle on The Way We Age Now: Can med­i­cine serve an aging pop­u­la­tion?. Atul Gawande pro­vides a great (and a bit depress­ing) sur­vey on the geri­atrics field: more and more need for prac­ti­tion­ers, with less and less supply.

now, a cou­ple of quotes and data points that are very rel­e­vant to our efforts around healthy brain aging.

• “for most of our hundred-thousand-year existence—all but the past cou­ple of hun­dred years—the aver­age life span of human beings has been thirty years or less. (Research sug­gests that sub­jects of the Roman Empire had an aver­age life expectancy of twenty-eight years.)”
• “Inher­i­tance has sur­pris­ingly lit­tle influ­ence on longevity. James Vau­pel, of the Max Planck Insti­tute for Demo­graphic Research, in Ros­tock, Ger­many, notes that only six per cent of how long you’ll live, com­pared with the aver­age, is explained by your par­ents’ longevity; by con­trast, up to ninety per cent of how tall you are, com­pared with the aver­age, is explained by your par­ents’ height. Even genet­i­cally iden­ti­cal twins vary widely in life span: the typ­i­cal gap is more than fif­teen years.”

Fas­ci­nat­ing. First, let’s appre­ci­ate our incred­i­ble life expectancy today; we are lit­er­ally push­ing the envelop of how to main­tain healthy brains and bod­ies. By his­tor­i­cal stan­dards, many of us are liv­ing on “bor­rowed” time. Sec­ond, there you have some evi­dence for the impor­tance of our expe­ri­ence and our lifestyle on how long we live. In terms of healthy aging, on aver­age, nur­ture seems to be at least as impor­tant as nature, and the one more in our con­trol to take action today.

You can learn more on the Suc­cess­ful Aging of the Healthy Brain: a beau­ti­ful essay by Mar­ian Dia­mond on how to keep our brains and minds active and fit through­out our lives.

Related blog posts

• What does “nor­mal aging” mean? Do we all age the same way?
• Easy Steps to Improve Your Brain Health Now
• Bill Clin­ton on health care and wellness
• The Upside of Aging-WSJ
• Baby Boomers, Healthy Aging and Job Performance