I’m writing this post from the international neuroscience conference in San Diego where I’m hanging out with 32,000 of my closest friends. I wanted to summarize a few of the many cool things that came out of this conference relevant to Brain Fitness.

Why can’t computers be more like brains?

The conference kicked off with a talk by Jeff Hawkins, creator of the Palm Pilot and Handspring’s Trio. Jeff has now started the Redwood Neuroscience Institute and is working on figuring out how to teach machines to learn. His presentation called ‘Why can’t computers be more like brains’ was a fascinating look at how intelligence is organized into smaller chunks of knowledge.

I can’t cover everything he talked about in a brief post, but if your interested in this area you can pick up his new book, On Intelligence. Personally, I expect great things to come from Jeff’s future efforts in this area, which will benefit both computer and human brains.

Engage in life, protect your brain

Another very cool talk I attended dealt with methods of preventing Alzheimer’s disease (at least in mice for now). L.H. Tsai gave a great presentation about the benefits of ‘environmental enrichment’ on preventing cognitive decline in mice genetically programmed to develop dementia.

Environmental enrichment essentially involves placing mice in cages where they have a lot of complex toys and things to explore. This keeps them mentally active. The human analogy would be constantly seeking out new experiences and staying engaged in life.

It turned out that environmental enrichment had a huge benefit in keeping mice from developing signs of Alzheimer’s disease, even when they were genetically programmed to do so. This is further support for seeking out life-long learning and consistent with the studies on cognitive reserve that I have discussed before. Tsai brought a much deeper understanding of why this is true at the neurochemical level, which may help in future treatment of the disease in humans.

Fish and exercise team up for brain health

Finally, relevant to previous posts on this site and over at the Brain Code, there were many presentations on the brain boosting benefits of omega-3s. A couple of particular interest from Gomez-Pinilla’s group at UCLA, looked at exercise and omega-3s working together.

In one of their studies, they showed that supplementation with omega-3s and exercise improves cognitive function better than either of them alone. More than that, they synergize, which means the benefit of them together is better than just adding the benefit of each of them separately.

Their second study showed that omega-3s and exercise work together to protect the brain from traumatic brain injury. We already knew that people who exercise recover better from traumatic brain injury - but the new study suggests that omega-3 supplementation makes that benefit even stronger.

All in all, it was a great conference with literally thousands of presentations. It was especially good to see that lifestyle approaches to treating cognitive decline and maintaining brain health are moving more into the spotlight. It seemed that there was more emphasis on diet, exercise and sleep than in past conference years. Hopefully, the medical community will perk up and listen to scientists doing this work.