Today I had a great con­ver­sa­tion with Mar­tin Buschkuehl, one of the U Michi­gan researchers involved in the cog­ni­tive train­ing study that has received much media atten­tion since early last week, when the study was pub­lished at the Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences.

I will pub­lish the inter­view notes next week. For the moment, let me para­phrase his answer to the ques­tion: “Why are com­put­er­ized pro­grams like the one you used fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent from, say, sim­ply doing many cross­word puzzles?”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Researchers at Yale Uni­ver­sity have just released a good paper show­ing the impor­tance of both phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cise to main­tain good mem­ory (full text of research paper Sin­gle Enrich­ment Vari­ables Reduce Aged-related Mem­ory Decline in Female Mice).

Some quotes from the Sci­ence Daily release Exer­cise And Men­tal Stim­u­la­tion Both Boost Mouse Mem­ory Late In Life:

• “The results sug­gest that as we get old and maybe less able to exer­cise, cog­ni­tive stim­u­la­tion can help to com­pen­sate. If the trend holds, write the authors, “These data may sug­gest that enrich­ment ini­ti­ated at any age can sig­nif­i­cantly improve mem­ory func­tion. And exer­cise plus men­tal chal­lenge in mid­dle age — when many peo­ple start to notice sub­tle mem­ory changes — may offer the strongest, most wide­spread ben­e­fits for mem­ory function.”
• The authors note that exer­cise was cen­tral to mem­ory rein­force­ment in all age groups. Says lead author Karyn Frick, PhD, “It is impor­tant for peo­ple of all ages to do 20 to 30 min­utes of aer­o­bic exer­cise sev­eral times a week. Keep­ing a healthy and active brain may pre­vent mem­ory decline in old age, but only a lon­gi­tu­di­nal study that fol­lows mice over time could con­firm this possibility.”

We dis­cussed this topic in more depth in my inter­view on Build­ing Your Cog­ni­tive Reserve with Dr. Yaakov Stern and in the dia­logue with Dr. Michael Merzenich that included fea­tur­ing the pio­neer­ing work of Dr. Mar­ian Dia­mond.

In short, if you want to pro­tect and improve your mem­ory, get ready to exer­cise both body and brain!

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).

———————————

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.

———————————

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 »

Very fun inter­view with Jack and Elaine LaLanne by Dave Bun­nell: read it at Meet Fit­ness Leg­ends Jack and Elaine LaLanne | ELDR.com. See some quotes:

• In 1936, Jack opened America’s first health club in Oak­land, Cal­i­for­nia, called the “Jack LaLanne Phys­i­cal Cul­ture Studio.”
• Through tele­vi­sion shows, pub­lic appear­ances, and books—and by sell­ing health-related products—they have been the most vocal and effec­tive evan­ge­lists for pre­ven­tive health the world has ever known.
• “Elaine works out,” Jack replies, “but I work out eight days a week. I spend an hour and a half in the gym, and then a half hour in the pool, and I change my rou­tine every 30 days completely.”
• “You’ve got to go at it hard and work on dif­fer­ent mus­cles,” he con­tin­ues. “You know how you stay young, don’t you? You work your butt off. Any­thing you do in life that’s worth­while, there’s a price to pay.”

Jack recently cel­e­brated his 92nd birthday!

We all have to be very thank­ful for their life mis­sion: a recent arti­cle from the Soci­ety for Neu­ro­science quotes:

“Every­body knows that exer­cise is good for your heart, but in recent years we’ve gath­ered com­pelling evi­dence that exer­cise is also good for your brain,” says Fred Gage, PhD, of the Salk Insti­tute for Bio­log­i­cal Stud­ies. “We now know that exer­cise helps gen­er­ate new brain cells, even in the aging brain.”

You can check other tips in Read the rest of this entry »

Here is ques­tion 18 of 25 from Brain Fit­ness 101: Answers to Your Top 25 Ques­tions.

Ques­tion:
Is phys­i­cal fit­ness impor­tant to your brain fitness?

Key Points:

• Exer­cise improves learn­ing through increased blood sup­ply and growth hormones.
• Exer­cise is an anti-depressant by reduc­ing stress and pro­mot­ing neurogenesis.
• Exer­cise pro­tects the brain from dam­age and dis­ease, as well as speed­ing the recovery.
• Exer­cise ben­e­fits you the most when you start young.

Answer:
Read the rest of this entry »

Here is ques­tion 15 of 25 from Brain Fit­ness 101: Answers to Your Top 25 Ques­tions.

Ques­tion:
I don’t want to ever retire. What can I do to remain sharp?

Key Points:

• Pro­vide your brain with reg­u­lar men­tal stim­u­la­tion that is novel and challenging.
• Main­tain your social net­work for both stim­u­la­tion and stress reduction.

“Research has shown that con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, the brain is con­stantly under­go­ing neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis, the devel­op­ment of new neu­rons and den­drites,” said Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg, Clin­i­cal Pro­fes­sor of Neu­rol­ogy at New York Uni­ver­sity School of Med­i­cine. “Learn­ing and tar­geted men­tal exer­cise pro­motes neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis – the cre­ation of new neu­rons – just as mus­cle growth is pro­moted through phys­i­cal exercise.”

Answer:

Read the rest of this entry »

Wel­come to the inau­gural edi­tion of the Brain Fit­ness Blog Car­ni­val. The tim­ing couldn’t be bet­ter  you have prob­a­bly seen the fea­tured CBS News/TIME Series on Brain Neuroplasticity.

Thanks to the over 40 peo­ple who sub­mit­ted posts. We have had to select the posts we enjoyed the most to help facil­i­tate an engag­ing and informed conversation.

Learn­ing is phys­i­cal. Our expe­ri­ence lit­er­ally shapes our brains. And vice versa. The media seems to be focus­ing mostly on brain fit­ness for seniors, but its impli­ca­tions go beyond that, as you will see in this post by Car­o­line: What is Brain Fit­ness?, and the arti­cles in this carnival.

Science-based under­stand­ing is evolv­ing from “Use it or Lose It” to “Use It and Improve It.”  As Fast Company’s Alan Deutschman provoca­tively puts it in his last book, Change or Die. We couldn’t agree more with his sum­mary rec­om­men­da­tion: “Relate. Repeat. Reframe.” Alan presents a blog arti­cle announc­ing his book (here is his orig­i­nal arti­cle). Read the rest of this entry »

News­wise released an arti­cle called “Want to Improve Mem­ory? Strengthen Your Synapses. Here’s How.” based on find­ings find­ings pub­lished in the Feb­ru­ary issue of Mind, Mood and Mem­ory, a newslet­ter from Mass­a­chu­setts Gen­eral Hos­pi­tal, a lead­ing cen­ter of excel­lence in the field of cog­ni­tive fit­ness. Essen­tially, they explain how a decline in the health of neu­ronal synapses can lead to a decline in mem­ory and gen­eral men­tal fit­ness.

For those you aren’t famil­iar with synapses, they are the spaces between neu­rons where the elec­tri­cal sig­nal trav­el­ing down from the tree-like den­drites at the top of the cell through the cell body and down the tubu­lar axon changes into a chem­i­cal sig­nal (neu­ro­trans­mit­ter) to talk to neigh­bor­ing cells. In this pic­ture from the arti­cle, the neu­ro­trans­mit­ter is rep­re­sented by the red dots. We have more than 100 bil­lion neu­rons that can be con­nected to hun­dreds of other cells by as many as 10,000 synapses.

Here are a few good quotes from the arti­cle … Read the rest of this entry »

Dana Press kindly sent us a cou­ple of books. One of them, The Dana Guide to Brain Health: A Prac­ti­cal Fam­ily Ref­er­ence From Med­ical Experts, is our topic today.

We are impressed by what Dana is doing to insert neu­ro­science find­ings and impli­ca­tions into the pub­lic discourse.

No big sur­prise then, to find out so much qual­ity con­tent inside a 700-page one-of-a-kind guide, some of it, inci­den­tally, pro­vided by Dr. Gold­berg, our Chief Sci­en­tific Advisor.

The guide is really 4 books inside a com­mon bind­ing. Priced at a rea­son­able level, and with superb in-depth text and images in all rel­e­vant areas, the book can be used as a 1) Brain 101 tuto­r­ial, 2) brief sum­mary of the basics of Brain Care and Well­ness, 3) descrip­tion of the stages of brain devel­op­ment, 4) ref­er­ence guide for around 70 brain-related con­di­tions. In my per­sonal opin­ion, every neu­ro­science, med­ical and psy­chol­ogy stu­dent, clin­i­cian and researcher should have this book in their hands to keep abreast of many recent devel­op­ments, and also be exposed to pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment courses based on it. Many fam­i­lies and indi­vid­u­als inter­ested in the brain should con­sider buy­ing it too.

Given the focus of our blog-brain fit­ness for healthy individuals-, we par­tic­u­larly enjoyed the sec­tions Read the rest of this entry »

The Inter­na­tional Health, Rac­quet and Sports­club Asso­ci­a­tion (IHRSA), main asso­ci­a­tion for health and fit­ness cen­ters, pub­lished an arti­cle today titled Are You Sure Your Mem­bers are Work­ing Out ALL Their Mus­cles? writ­ten by none other than our own Alvaro Fer­nan­dez and Dr. Goldberg.

Here are some highlights:

• “Phys­i­cal exer­cise boosts the brain’s rate of neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis through­out one’s life, while men­tal exer­cise increases the rate at which those new brain cells sur­vive and make func­tional con­nec­tions into your exist­ing neural net­works. Both phys­i­cal exer­cise and the chal­lenge from men­tal exer­cise increase the secre­tion of nerve growth fac­tor, which helps your neu­rons grow and stay healthy. The bot­tom line is that humans need both phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cise for good brain health.
• “In the short term, mem­bers can expect to see improved per­for­mance (atten­tion, mem­ory and stress man­age­ment), as with any other mus­cle. In the long term, they will notice the pre­ven­tion and delay of deficits due to aging or disease.”
• “Fur­ther­more, Read the rest of this entry »