The great genius Einstein once said, “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.” However, new research might prove the great Einstein wrong, and that nowadays more and more of the genius level accomplishment are not reached until far later in life. Read more »
Chemo Fog, or chemo brain is reported by many cancer patients, but doctors tend to ignore it since they put most of their concentration of treating the cancer. [..]
Fish and/or exercise to help Alzheimer’s disease? Alzheimer’s disease background: Alzheimer’s disease is the leading neurodegenerative dementia disorder. In most cases Alzheimer’s does not appear until after the [..]
The power of love and friends for your health Staying married or good social connections can help you live longer are covered in this Washington post article. I [..]
Does physical decline directly mirror cognitive decline? In a previous post I pointed out how after the age of 25 the brain is losing a proportion of its [..]
Reverse the brain aging process Wouldn’t it be great to reverse the age accumulated damage to your brain, stop the shrinking of your brain? Sound like marketing hype, [..]
Image by Getty Images via @daylife Are good looking people also smarter? Would this be prove how fair the world is if on average the best looking people [..]
Do you want to play? Do you want a simple brain hack to make you playful, increase your amusement, make you laugh inside? In today’s world we might [..]
Chasing the “Aha” of puzzle solving We have all chased the “Aha” moment that occurs when coming up with a solution to the problem and felt how good [..]
How to stop procrastination and start doing. The tricks: get started, and avoid temptation. Most of us at times can use any possible tips to reduce procrastination, so if you need a little momentum now go check out the article. Nothing earth shattering, but sometimes you just need a reminder or a new firing of a neural pattern.
A theory behind why smarter people live longer. Okay, tested out in smart bees, but the idea is that general stress resilience allows you not only to learn more quickly but also slow down aging. Could be related to a more efficient cellular energy system – or at least that is one possibility.
Tim Ferriss of 4-hour work week fame is coming out with a new book: 4-hour body (these are not affiliate links). In the following video he is discussing hacks for the body, and the ideology of hacks in general. I figured this would be of general interest to the blog readers here since we deal with brain health hacks.
“A creative solution to a real problem….the smallest possible changes that can produce the biggest results”
There is a whole series of interview videos of Tim over at techcrunch.
What are some of your favorite and most useful brain health hacks?
Do you want better grades at school, or a way to help your children’s grades? Brainblogger does a very nice jog explaining a new study in college students finding that physical exercise is related to better grades – better performance in school. He goes on to point out the large number of studies that have already seen this in younger students.
Of course exercising is one way to control your weight and there is new research examining the link between obesity and lifespan. A study finding that being overweight will reduce your lifespan. Now, at first you might say this comes at no surprise but I had read some paper reporting minimal negative outcomes over the last few years, which were suggesting that actual number of years lost for being overweight or obese was not that much. But this is a very large study (1.5 million subjects) and found for every 5 unit increase in BMI there was a 31% increase risk for death. The link provides more specific data regarding the specific differences between being overweight or obese and its effect on lifespan.
Postmortem studies have found that a brain structure called the locus coerulus (Latin for “blue spot”) gets progressively smaller and less active in the middle age. Although the locus contains only 20,000 of the brain’s billions of cells, it seems to play a vital role in many mental functions, including anxiety, as it may activate the “fight or flight” reflex that gets adrenaline flowing in the face of danger. The locus’s deterioration may possibly explain the mid-life remission of drug addiction and panic attacks and may in part account for the mellowing that makes many men less impulsive and irritable, and more reflective, even altruistic, in middle age. On the downside, changes in the locus may also cause depression in older men
Taking aspirin may reduce cancer by a considerable amount. Here is a good piece over at PharmaGossip explaining why this new research isn’t being covered much by the popular press – no money to be made by such a generic cheap drug such as aspirin.
Our memories are important to all of us. Memories are stored in our neuronal connections. And the healthier your brain the better your chances of keeping your memories, and not slipping into senile dementia of some sort. A reasonable amount of this blog is centered around keeping your brain healthy, and all your memories intact (or at least mostly intact).
However, there is also all those memories we off load into our computer’s RAM (short term memory), hard drive, and even off site into cloud storage.
I in fact lost about 4 months of posts from this blog more than a year ago. Maybe 40 posts. Somehow when I was updating to a newer wordpress version I lost all of my blog posts. I had an older backup of the blog but fortunately my host had a more up to date version. Things looked good for a full recovery. Now I can’t remember the exact sequence of events (hmmm my memory is far from perfect), but at one time I had the full blog back online. But somehow through a series of not-so-smart moves I lost the blog again and when all the bits settled I had lost the 4 months of blog posts. Now when you start having a less than perfect memory and make stupid mistakes you might need to question yourself. But we are human – are memories are not perfect and we make mistakes.
I remember being saddened by this loss. I had put in many hours into those pieces (because I tend to write long posts) and a few of them had sentimental value to me. Gone. My fault.
The lesson to be learned is while we do not have the technology yet to back up a human brain we do have the ability to backup our computers and information stored in the cloud (e.g host site). Take advantage of the appropriate tools and make timely backups on a consistent basis.
And since we can’t backup our own brains then it is vital that you take care of your precious brain – it is the only one you got.
Take Home Message: Backup often (and have multiple copies) and do your utmost to keep a healthy brain for there are not too many things more valuable than your memories. And once they are gone – well…..
I couldn’t think of a snappier name for what I hope to be a weekly post about brain health links I have found during the week. And hard to compete with Karol’sSweet Shit Saturdays so I settled for my current title.
And to keep you up with the latest in stunning scientific findings and fully engage your brain (which will help its health) a very good post at Neuron Culture about the recently found new life form discovered on earth based on arsenic. But what is really good is that David Dobbs has gone beyond the news flash hype of the story and giving us the digested details, which are slightly less stunning but still very important in our fundamental understanding of biology and life.
According to Wikipedia the human brain has between 50 and 100 billion neurons, and 1000 trillion connections. Now those are huge numbers. Now according to other respectable sights (university sites) the human brain’s estimated number of neurons range quite widely: 10 billion, 100 billion, 200 billion. So maybe we don’t know the exact number but it is in the billions, and more likely in the 100 to 200 billion range, but what about the number of connections? That is where the real meat is.
New neuroscience results have been widely publicized on the net (for example gizmodo) this week talking about the number of connections in the human brain based on a new paper in Neuron. Using a new technique called array tomography researchers at Stanford report in the Neuron journal that in mice brains they find a higher level of synaptic connections than they imagined before. The original Standford press release.
From the cnet article which many people used in their reporting:
They found that the brain’s complexity is beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief, says Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and senior author of the paper describing the study:
One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor–with both memory-storage and information-processing elements–than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches.”
In a related finding there was a new article that suggest the difference between human and other primates is the space between neurons in the prefrontal cortex, with humans having more space, which is speculated to allow more connections.
Now where things become really interesting is when Stephen Smith then extrapolates these results to the human brain:
“A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.”
Now that really makes you scratch your head, not to mention turn you around a few times as you try to get your head around the meaning of that statement, and numbers. There are a lot of switches in the average computer chip that is in almost every device humans make these days. According to the Moore’s Law article on wikipedia in 2008 the highest count of transistors on a chip was around 2 billion, but that was at extreme top end chip. The chips we are more familiar such as the low powered atom has 47 million, and the core intel i7 (quad) has 731 million according to wikipedia. Now a transistor, far as I understand acts as an electronic switch which is what Mr. Smith is referring to when comparing the number of switches in a human brain compared to all the computers (plus routers and internet connections) switches. I have no idea how many computer chips exist in the world, and couldn’t find an estimate in my short search, but I am pretty sure it is a big number, billions I presume. I will let you do the estimated math of the number of ‘switches’ in all the world’s computers.
Interestingly, this general science news story was also picked up by kurzweilai.net in this piece, and this is interesting because Ray Kurzweil has made the prediction that computers will achieve the ability to simulate the human brain by around 2030. However, this was based on the premise that the human cortex has 22 billion neurons 220 trillion synapses. I wonder if these new findings of each synapse having 1,000 or so molecular switches in each of them, and hence resulting in far greater connections of human neurons than we previously thought throws off Kurzweil’s predictions?
I just got back from a three week trip that included attending the largest neuroscience conference (society for neuroscience conference), which in itself was an enriched environment with thousands of people to interact with as they presented their posters. There were a large number of neuroscience posters testing the effects of an enriched environment (see previous posts here, here and here). The researchers found that an enriched environment increased neurogenesis (birth of new neurons) in non-human primates, increased the ability to handle a novel stress, and even in one study increased the lifespan of the animals (compared to a group in a non-enriched environment). The evidence keeps accumulating of just how good an enriched environment is for us.
What is interesting though is that these novel environments also increase the stress response of these animals. Now normally we think of stress as being very bad for us. However, this is more typically true for chronic stress, and even more so when the organism has no control over the stress. But it appears now from a large number of studies that the right amount of stress at the right frequency is very beneficial to our brain health and our overall health.
In the near future I will return to this idea and give further details of what the researchers find. But the take home message for better brain health is keep exposing yourself to an enriched environment, keep learning and exploring new things (including maybe playing and swimming with your mates in a new pool as shown in the photo above
“Resveratrol is a natural compound found in several plants, with some of the highest levels in red wine and peanuts. Resveratrol is considered a calorie restriction (CR) mimetic and the hope is like CR that this compound will extend lifespan.”
This current paper was a massive effort in which all the experiments where ran simultaneously in three different sites. Another interesting thing about this new paper is they also tested out another couple of compounds. All animals did not receive the tested drug at 9 months of age (early middle age for a mouse), which makes in a good clinically relevant experiment. A form of statin, simvastatin, also did not have any effect on lifespan. Statins are widely prescribed and used drug that lowers cholesterol and reported to reduce death from heart disease (but take a read of this post).
Now with two negative results with compounds that many would hypothesize to increase lifespan one could think maybe there was a problem with the experimental design. But the group also tested rapamycin, an mTOR inhibitor. And this compound, which is also thought to be a CR mimetic, did increase median lifespan (10% in males, 18% in females). Rapamycin did not increase maximum survival.
This experiment was a very large study to test if some the promising compounds out there would stand up to robust testing. When started at early middle age (roughly equivalent to 30-40 years old in a human) resveratrol and simvastatin did not improve any aspect of lifespan, while rapamycin improved the median lifespan.
I am sure we will hear more about these compounds from other researchers.
I have written several times about the importance of exercise for a healthy brain. Well, here comes another study which over a 9 year period the people that simply walked 6-9 miles a week cut their risk of dementia and cognitive impairment in half. That is a very impressive result for a relatively small time investment. Walk to the grocery store, to work, or just around town.
Walking: a simple but effective way to maintain a healthy brain.
We discuss interventions to increase the life span on the blog quite a bit – which makes you ponder what would you do if something actually worked in humans and you were given an extra 5 years of healthy life?
I found this blog piece over at PickTheBrain which covers this question from the reverse perspective of if you only had 5 years left to live – go check it out here.
What would you do if you were told you had five years left to live? I prefer to use this rather than Steve Job’s single day, because most of us, with a day or week left, would spend them seeing family and saying goodbyes.
But five years is different. Five years is long enough to accomplish almost any goal you might have, however ambitious. And you wouldn’t want to spend five years partying hedonistically, or eating your favourite meal every night.
Rather that thinking about only have 5 years left to live maybe you can ask yourself if given an extra 5 years due to some longevity intervention/treatment what would you do? A question – be it only 5 years left, or an extra 5 years, that at least makes you take a step back and think a bit.
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