3 Simple Habits That Can Protect Your Brain From Cognitive Decline

You might think that the impact of aging on the brain is something you can’t do much about. After all, isn’t it an inevitability?

To an extent, as we may not be able to rewind the clock and change our levels of higher education or intelligence (both factors that delay the onset of symptoms of aging). But adopting specific lifestyle behaviors–whether you’re in your thirties or late forties–can have a tangible effect on how well you age. Even in your fifties and beyond, activities like learning a new language or musical instrument, taking part in aerobic exercise, and developing meaningful social relationships can do wonders for your brain. There’s no question that when we compromise on looking after ourselves, our aging minds pick up the tab. 

The Aging Process and Cognitive Decline

Over time, there is a build-up of toxins such as tau proteins and beta-amyloid plaques in the brain that correlate to the aging process and associated cognitive decline. Although this is a natural part of growing older, many factors can exacerbate it. Stress, neurotoxins such as alcohol and lack of (quality and quantity) sleep can speed up the process.

Neuroplasticity–the function that allows the brain to change and develop in our lifetime–has three mechanisms: synaptic connection, myelination, and neurogenesis. The key to resilient aging is improving neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons. Neurogenesis happens far more in babies and children than adults. A 2018 study by researchers at Columbia University shows that in adults, this type of neuroplastic activity occurs in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that lays down memories. This makes sense as we respond to and store new experiences every day, and cement them during sleep. The more we can experience new things, activities, people, places, and emotions, the more likely we are to encourage neurogenesis.

With all this in mind, we can come up with a three-point plan to encourage “resilient aging” by activating neurogenesis in the brain:

1. Get your heart rate up

Aerobic exercise such as running or brisk walking has a potentially massive impact on neurogenesis. A 2016 rat study found that endurance exercise was most effective in increasing neurogenesis. It wins out over HIIT sessions and resistance training, although doing a variety of exercise also has its benefits.

Aim to do aerobic exercise for 150 minutes per week, and choose the gym, the park, or natural landscape over busy roads to avoid compromising brain-derived neurotrophic factor production (BDNF), a growth factor that encourages neurogenesis that aerobic exercise can boost. However, exercising in polluted areas decreases production.

If exercising alone isn’t your thing, consider taking up a team sport or one with a social element like table tennis. Exposure to social interaction can also increase the neurogenesis, and in many instances, doing so lets you practice your hand-eye coordination, which research has suggested leads to structural changes in the brain that may relate to a range of cognitive benefit. This combination of coordination and socializing has been shown to increase brain thickness in the parts of the cortex related to social/emotional welfare, which is crucial as we age.

2. Change your eating patterns

Evidence shows that calorie restriction, intermittent fasting, and time-restricted eating encourage neurogenesis in humans. In rodent studies, intermittent fasting has been found to improve cognitive function and brain structure, and reduce symptoms of metabolic disorders such as diabetes. Reducing refined sugar will help reduce oxidative damage to brain cells, too, and we know that increased oxidative damage has been linked with a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Twenty-four hour water-only fasts have also been proven to increase longevity and encourage neurogenesis.

Try any of the following, after checking with your doctor:

• 24-hour water-only fast once a month
•  Reducing your calorie intake by 50%-60% on two non-consecutive days of the week for two to three months or on an ongoing basis
• Reducing calories by 20% every day for two weeks. You can do this three to four times a year
• Eating only between 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., or 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. as a general rule

3. Prioritize sleep

Sleep helps promote the brain’s neural “cleaning” glymphatic system, which flushes out the build-up of age-related toxins in the brain (the tau proteins and beta amyloid plaques mentioned above). When people are sleep-deprived, we see evidence of memory deficits, and if you miss a whole night of sleep, research proves that it impacts IQ. Aim for seven to nine hours, and nap if it suits you. Our need to sleep decreases as we age.

Of course, there are individual exceptions, but having consistent sleep times and making sure you’re getting sufficient quality and length of sleep supports brain resilience over time. So how do you know if you’re getting enough? If you naturally wake up at the same time on weekends that you have to during the week, you probably are. If you need to lie-in or take long naps, you’re probably not. Try practicing mindfulness or yoga nidra before bed at night, a guided breath-based meditation that has been shown in studies to improve sleep quality. There are plenty of recordings online if you want to experience it.

Pick any of the above that work for you and build it up until it becomes a habit, then move onto the next one and so on. You might find that by the end of the year, you’ll feel even healthier, more energized, and motivated than you do now, even as you turn another year older.

 

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.   

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Here is how you can train your brain to tackle stress

Opined by neuroscientist Dr Selena Bartlett, inculcating several healthy habits in life can train your brain to tackle stress. Bartlett, who has been mapping the way our brains react to stress for the last 25 years as a researcher, our brains often deal with stress and trauma through addictive behaviours such as the consumption of sugar and alcohol, reported the researchers.

The  researcher also said that the first step towards attaining a peaceful mind is to understand that you can 'train your brain' to handle stress efficiently. "People are just using alcohol and sugar as medication and I can't keep designing a medication for a medication. My lab looks at the capacity of using neuroplasticity, which is the ability of the brain to change itself, to help to reduce the impact of that stress and trauma on the brain and to use the power of the brain to drive in healthy habits," Bartlett, who develops drugs to treat addiction, said.

Adding that creating even the most basic healthy change takes time, she said: "Only when we start to become aware of our automatic, often unhealthy, responses to stress, then we can start to rewire them." "However, you can actually train the brain by doing small things every day, like how you wake up in the morning, what you eat, the exercise that you do, sleep and water," she added.

Bartlett, further said that prolonged over-consumption of sugar acts on the amygdala, emotional part of the brain, in a way that makes the brain more reactive to stress. Emphasising that one should understand that our brains process negative over positive information, the researcher said: "Gratitude works. When you wake up in the morning, set up your brain in a positive direction so it will start to take in more positive information than the negative ones."

"We can train our brains to become more resilient by using the principles of neuroplasticity. We can also teach ourselves to take a healthy path to stress-management rather than relying on substances," she added, according to the researchers.

Asserting that simple changes have transformed her capacity to cope with stress, Bartlett said: "I'm the happiest I've been. I can still get triggered by things because we all do and that's life. However, now I know how to handle stress in a way that I have control over it."

this is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.     
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How the Brain Carries On Working, Even When Half of It Was Removed

Our brain’s capacity to rewire itself and compensate for severe damage is something so astonishing it’s hard to comprehend. Probably the most evident examples of this amazing capacity are patients who have undergone a hemispherectomy - the surgical procedure of removing one of the brain hemispheres. Incredibly, these patients are often fully functional and you would probably never be able to tell they have half of their brain removed if you were to meet them.



fMRI brain scan of an adult with the right hemisphere removed

Most often, hemispherectomy is conducted on kids, as before the age of three our brain is the most pliable and capable of rewiring itself. This is not to say that adults cannot get whole brain regions removed, however. As a matter of fact, resections, as these surgeries are called, are an effective method of treating medication-resistant epilepsy.

But let’s get back to hemispherectomies. How is it possible that the human brain can continue to function when as much as half of it is missing? Neuroscientists have long observed why that is the case, and the mechanism involved is something called neuroplasticity.

As you may or may not know, our brains are roughly divided into different regions, and most of these regions are responsible for doing a specific kind of task. For example, the part of our brain that’s responsible for vision is situated in the back of our brain and is called the occipital lobe (in green, see image below).

neuroplasticity brain anatomy chart
These divisions are very specific - certain brain regions are responsible for language, the movement of different body parts, psychological faculties and senses. But what happens when a brain region responsible for a certain function is damaged? Well, if everything goes according to plan, that function just gets moved to the nearest or comparable healthy brain region.

Furthermore, the younger you are, the more likely you are to fully recover, due to the fact that the ability of your brain to change decreases with age. This is exactly why hemispherectomy patients are typically children. Most often, these are kids suffering from epileptic seizures localized in only one brain hemisphere. In many cases, these patients are completely functional and live normal lives, "You can almost forget their condition when you meet them for the first time," said Dorit Kliemann, a researcher working with hemispherectomy patients in a recent interview.

Six hemispherectomy patients similar to Jody participated in a recent study at the California Institute of Technology, with the researchers trying to figure out how the brains of these patients managed to rewire themselves and how they function altogether. All six of the patients received the procedure to deal with epilepsy. The hemispheres affected by epilepsy have been removed in all of these patients at the age of 3 to 11 years, and they were in their 20’s and 30’s at the time of the study.

The researchers used the fMRI machine, a scanner that can show how the brain reacts to certain stimuli in action. When a certain brain region is more involved in a specific task, that brain region gets more blood flow, and the fMRI scanner shows that immediately.

The study revealed that the patients’ brains had much stronger connections than the brains of people with two hemispheres. Similar studies have also shown that brain functions that have two symmetrical centers in each hemisphere, such as vision, leg and arm movement, etc., tend to take the work for both sides in patients following hemispherectomy or resections.

In one study, for example, a boy regained vision in his left eye only two years following surgery that removed a third of his right hemisphere. These findings are absolutely incredible, but what’s more important, they can hopefully tell neuroscientists how the brain is capable of rewiring itself so that doctors would be able to treat brain injuries following strokes. 

this is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.     
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