Aging

Learn Your Brain's True Age and 7 Steps to "De-Age" It

Chronological brain age isn't the same as biological brain age.

Posted June 15, 2016

First, the good news.

Your brain doesn’t lose nerve cells as it ages nearly as much as we used to think. According to research by Dr. Morrison and colleagues at Mt. Sinai Medical School, earlier estimates that up to1% of neurons die off each year after the age of 25 turn out to be wrong, at least for people without neurodegenerative disease.

That means that you don’t have to lose mental abilities as you age. You might slow down a little (for reasons I’ll explain in a moment), but you won’t necessarily dumb down.

Now the bad news. Notice I said that you won’t necessarily dumb down as you get older. The fact is, you could lose cognitive abilities if you don’t treat your brain right.

Brain tissue, it turns out, is a lot like muscle tissue:you must use it or lose it.

With muscles the “use it or lose it” principle is obvious because, well, we can see muscles (or lack of them).

For instance, we understand that, with vigorous exercise, older people can get quite buff because we’ve seen photos like this of older folks who who work out…a lot!

Source: CC0 ModernWhiz

But we never see our brains, so we aren’t aware that they literally grow with exercise and shrink without it, aging slower or faster depending on whether we do or don’t use brain tissue.

You heard me right. Like muscle, the brain physically grows with constant use, and such growth can slow—even reverse—brain aging.

A number of new studies, such as Dr. Maguire’s MRI studies of the hippocampus of London cab drivers, show that parts of the brain that get heavy use can grow, while parts that experience little use can shrink.

In other words, your brain can look—and function—just as well as the muscles of the toned elderly dude in the photo. And it now appears likely that vigorous brain work outs can even slow down the progression of Dementia and similar neurodegenerative diseases.

So, what kind of shape is your brain in? Is its biological age more or less than its chronological age?

Click on this link to take a one minute (or less) test that assesses your brain’s true age. The APP works best with laptop and desktops.

This test estimates brain age by gauging brain speed. Although neurons in the cerebral cortex—where IQ mostly lives—don’t die off much with age, the axons (nerve fibers) of brain cells do appear to lose myelination (nerve fiber insulation), and this loss slows down nerve conduction and cognitive processing speed. Also, the number of synapses or connections among nerve cells can decrease with age, further slowing mental reaction time.

So, if the test showed that your brain is older than you’d like, can you do something about it?

You bet!

Simply do more good things to your brain and fewer bad things, and your brain might actually “de-age”, just like the bulging muscles of our work-out enthusiast. Here’s the list of do’s and don’ts, based on the latest research.

Get regular physical exercise (at least 30 minutes/day). Physical exercises also works out the brain (after all, brain neurons command movement, so motor neurons literally exercise when your muscles move). Also, exercise appears to increase blood circulation in the brain, preventing neurons there from being starved of oxygen. There's some evidence that improved brain circulation also flushes out toxins that can kill brain cells.
Routinely perform what Dr. Larry Katz of Duke Medical School calls “Neurobics” to work out your brain. This means exposing your cerebrum to lots of novelty with new combinations of smells, sights sounds and tastes. Take a different route to work each day, burn new kinds of incense all the time. And engage in lots of learning and growing intellectually: study a new language or how to program computers. Incidentally, there is some evidence that merely taking the brain age test (TMT) over and over again, by itself is a form of neurobics that de-ages your brain! Cross word puzzles, contrary to popular belief, don’t do a lot to slow brain aging because they use existing knowledge more than they create new knowledge (and new synapses). As with weight training or running—no pain no gain. So if what you’re doing doesn’t feel a little difficult, you’re not growing brain tissue.
Engage often with friends, family and even strangers. Talking, playing, and traveling to new places with others automatically stimulates lots of neurons.

Don’t

Be a couch potato. Obesity, high blood pressure and poor circulation make your brain old before its time
Smoke. Bad for circulation, bad for the brain in lots of other ways too
Drink to excess. Alcohol does indeed kill off neurons. Ditto for narcotics and street drugs
Be chronically stressed. Stress hormones such as Cortisol can be toxic to brain cells in large, sustained doses.

Aging Essential Reads

3 Neurological Strategies to Make Aging Better

How Digital Tools May Protect the Aging Mind

One last point. Working out your brain, like working out your muscles, is work. And avoiding fun things, like booze, tobacco and sweets, isn’t fun. So, odds are, you won’t really take any of the 7 steps above to de-age your brain, at least for very long.

Yes, your brain will age faster, but that’s way off in the distant future, isn’t it?

Comedian Steven Wright summed this up best with his observation, "Hard work pays off in the future; laziness pays off now".

But, since I’d like this blog to actually make a difference in your life, I’ll end with a suggestion for how you might—unlike with all the other do and don’t lists you’ve read –actually follow through with de-aging your brain.

Make it enjoyable in the moment, not the distant future.

Play new board games with friends, dance at a night club if you don’t want to run, engage in a contest with your spouse over who can meet the most new people per week. Read and follow through on my last blog on how to think like a spy.

The bottom line here is that, brain exercise, like physical exercise, won’t happen if it doesn’t whisper work and shout fun!*

So how do you keep your brain young?

Treat it like a child and play with it!!

*(From Jazzercise)

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/273/5271/48

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/9334292/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2927852/

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811915000944

http://m.alz.org/prevention.asp

https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/site/scripts/news_article.php?newsID=2482

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0061038

http://www.nature.com/articles/srep03457