Keep your brain sharp pullout
THe human brain is a highly sensitive receiver which takes in millions of stimuli every day, but its ability to process this constant barrage of information varies from person to person.
You might be the sort who finds yourself easily crushed by world events and struggling under the privations of yet another lockdown, or you might feel emboldened and undaunted, able to stay positive and make the best of whatever situation you find yourself in.
The key factor separating those two camps is not genetics or personality, but something entirely different: resilience.
You might believe you are born with a huge wealth of resilience, or with little, and you could be forgiven for thinking any you may have is being diminished and weakened by the unrelenting onslaught of the pandemic we are all going through.
But I can tell you resilience can be built and nurtered.
As a neuroscientist and health journalist, I have spent the past 25 years working on the medical frontline, analysing the latest brain research and travelling the globe in search of ways to boost the capacity of our brains and protect ourselves against dementia. One of the most fabulous discoveries of recent years is the fact that your individual store of resilience is bundled up in what we brain specialists call ‘cognitive reserve’. The more cognitive reserve you have, the more resilient you will be.
A resilient brain can withstand frequent trauma, it can think differently, it can stave off brainrelated illnesses, including depression, and retain cognitive memory for peak performance.
Research shows that possessing a resilient brain is what separates strategic, visionary thinkers from more average ones, but resilience is not completely dependent on IQ or education — it is available to all of us.
All this week the Daily Mail is exclusively serialising my new book, Keep Sharp, which is packed with scientifically backed ways to minimise your risk of dementia and keep your brain keen.
Today, my focus is on building resilience. In the quest to protect your brain from dementia and keep it working at its absolute optimum, this is arguably the most important factor of all.
Top up your brain’s back-up system
COgnITIve reserve is your brain’s ability to improvise and navigate around problems or obstacles. Just as your car has an efficient braking and acceleration system to allow you to swerve quickly to negotiate unfamiliar turns, so your brain can change how it finds alternative routes, so helping it to cope with challenges that could be harmful otherwise.
It is like a mental safety buffer, a big, flexible, fast- thinking back-up system that protects the brain.
We know that whatever your age, cognitive reserve helps you function better for longer in the face of unexpected life events such as chronic stress, surgery or an unexpected onslaught of environmental toxins.
However, scientists have only recently discovered an important role played by cognitive reserve in protecting us against the ravages of old age.
It originated in the late 1980s when scientists in California started to study of a group of older care-home residents.
They got to know the residents during their twilight years and conducted autopsies on them after their deaths.
What startled them was frequently finding the sort of brain changes you’d expect to see in advanced Alzheimer’s disease in high- functioning individuals who had shown no signs of dementia when alive.
The scientists concluded that these highly intelligent individuals had somehow developed enough brain ‘cache’ to offset the damage to the rest of their brain caused by dementia. This would have allowed them to continue to function as normal with no sign of cognitive impairment at all. This prompted the researchers
to come up with the theory that cognitive reserve can be been built up so successfully that it can take over the functioning of damaged portions of the brain which might be afflicted by age and disease.
the cognitive reserve then goes on to perform everyday functions to enable the people affected to apparently live free from dementia.
Since this revolutionary finding, research has consistently shown that people with greater cognitive reserve are better able to stave off the degenerative brain changes associated with dementia or other brain disorders, such as parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis or stroke.
You can generate new brain cells
old-School thinking dictated that the brain was pretty much fixed and hardwired after childhood. But we now know that to be untrue.
in 2018, researchers from columbia university in the u.S. showed for the first time that healthy older adults can generate just as many new brain cells as younger people. they found that although older adults tend to have fewer, and less robust, blood vessels in the brain, they don’t necessarily lose their ability to grow new brain cells.
the key word, though, is healthy. if you want to build your brain, you need to stay healthy overall.
Your brain’s networks are like a series of roads, and the more networks you have, the more options you have available to shift direction if one route becomes impassable. those networks make up the cognitive reserve, and they develop over time through education, learning and curiosity.
the cognitive reserve you have right now will be the result of the positive life experiences you might have had, and its size and complexity will reflect how much you have challenged your brain over the years through education, work and other activities.
Studies show the single identifiable factor which appears to statistically protect people with higher iQ, education and occupational achievements — plus those who regularly participate in hobbies or sport unrelated to their job — from alzheimer’s is very likely to be their cognitive reserve. But the best bit? You can expand and grow your ur cognitive reserve at any age.