TRAIN YOUR BRAIN TO BEAT DEMENTIA
ALL this week, two eminent neurologists specialising in Alzheimer’s are sharing cutting-edge research with Mail readers and revealing how lifestyle tweaks can help fend off the disease. Today, they show how challenging your mind and increasing your social life can help protect your brain against decay . . .
YOU might be fan of a fiendishly complex crossword puzzle or a demon at sudoku, but even if you regularly rattle off the answers when watching university Challenge on TV or flick through the financial pages of the weekend papers, are you properly exercising your brain?
our work as specialists in Alzheimer’s has taught us that simple puzzles are not enough. one fundamental factor in the fight to protect yourself against dementia — and to slow its march if it has already started — is the quest to build what neuroscientists call ‘cognitive reserve’.
A healthy brain thrives on challenge, especially challenges that are personally relevant and involve many different parts of the brain at the same time. That’s because our brains are designed for complexity and they are sustained by it in old age.
We now know that Alzheimer’s and dementia are deeply influenced by lifestyle factors such as diet, how often we exercise and the quality of our sleep. While it may be easier to blame a devastating disease such as Alzheimer’s on a single gene, this false belief is killing millions.
The truth is much harder to accept — we could be bringing Alzheimer’s and dementia in to our households through the choices we make every day.
TAKE BACK CONTROL
ALL this week in the Mail we have been serialising a personalised lifestyle plan based on information from our book, The Alzheimer’s Solution, which focuses on the small changes you can make to your diet, sleep, activity and stress levels to take control of your future.
Puzzle books will boost your brain to a certain extent, but less so if you’re already really good at them, or if you do the same type of puzzle every time. our work shows that complex activities are far more beneficial because they strengthen many of the brain’s domains as well as the connections between them.
The strength and resilience of all these millions of connections is called your cognitive reserve. This is something you develop as you go through life, its capacity dependent on the extent to which you challenge your brain, how much information you take in and all the trauma, risk, adventure, joy and knowledge you experience over a lifetime.
BUILD UP YOUR RESERVES
NO MATTER how poor your memory may be or how foggyheaded you might feel right now, your brain still holds a lifetime of rich experiences that are stored not as dots or slivers of information, but as intricate networks with many different points of entry and connection.
The more you use the links between these areas, the more you fortify and reinforce your cognitive reserve.
If you scanned the brains of hundreds of middle-aged people, you’d be very likely to find signs of Alzheimer’s in most of them. But those most protected against developing memory problems will be the ones with the highest levels of cognitive reserve.
That’s because a good, strong cognitive reserve offers huge protection against dementia. It means every area of your consciousness is connected tens of thousands of times over, giving you access to the same memory, fact, or idea via many different bridges or roads.
The good news is cognitive reserve is not set or finite. It is within our control and can be expanded and developed all through our lives.
It’s never too late! Whatever our age, we can promote the interconnectivity that allows our brains to withstand both normal ageing and neurodegenerative disease. The key lies in learning how to optimise our minds.
Yes, there is some evidence that brain games help to boost attention, executive function and short-term memory skills. But most are linear activities — and there is nothing linear about the brain.
Sudoku, for instance, challenges a mathematical centre in the brain. It requires you to read and process visual information, but you’re not actively challenging multiple areas of the brain, nor are you increasing the connections between them or engaging any personal or historical islands of consciousness.
The same is true for crossword puzzles (which mainly challenge the brain’s language centres).
All these games engage the brain on only a simple level of thought processing, demanding
memories and thoughts to be encoded via local connections, and resulting in small networks that are limited to a single region in the brain.
The sort of games the brain needs to build cognitive reserve are complex activities which directly strengthen the bridges and roads that lead to central islands of consciousness.
These exercises will form strong, resilient connections which are extremely difficult to sever and, if you challenge yourself often enough, the connections become main neural roads constantly being repaved and reinforced to create complex, overlapping communication between all the brain’s domains.
By finding room in your life for ‘multimodal activities’ (such as reading music or learning a language) you will be challenging and engaging many of the brain’s capacities. This, combined with boosting your opportunities for meaningful social interaction, is how you create a tough, mental buffer against ageing and is the means by which you will be able to hang on to your most precious memories.
Many people never experience cognitive decline. You could be one of them.
Yes, your outcome partly depends on your genetic risk, but we believe it’s affected even more so by your lifestyle and the extent to which you generate cognitive reserve.