By Simon J. Evans, PhD

Does your job have anything to do with your odds of getting Alzheimer’s disease down the road? Studies have come out recently linking intellectually challenging careers to reduced risk of dementia. Other studies link education level to cognitive health in later years. Overall, people with more education have lower rates of Alzheimer’s disease than those with less education.

This really isn’t that surprising if you think about it. We know that the more you use your brain, the stronger it gets. Just like muscles in your arms and legs, the brain gets more fit when you work it out. Higher education usually means more mentally stimulating jobs and that keeps your brain fit.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to go to graduate school to stay mentally active. Big studies look at large groups of people. On average, when you look at lots of people those with higher levels of education have more intellectually challenging jobs. So overall, they have lower rates of dementia. However, you can be a high-school drop out and still do what’s necessary to keep your brain fit. Just don’t be average.

You can maintain an active mind by committing yourself to life-long learning. It doesn’t take a formal education to teach yourself new skills, read new books and continually challenge your mind – it ain’t rocket science.

There is, however, a flip-side to this coin. Even though higher education predicts lower odds of getting Alzheimer’s disease, those with higher education who do get Alzheimer’s, decline much more rapidly and die sooner than those with less education. Remember, again, this is based on big number averages and is not necessarily predictive for any one person. Still, on average if you have an intellectually challenging career, your odds of getting dementia are lower, but if you do get it, your odds of rapid decline are greater.

At first, this might seem paradoxical. But I think there is a likely explanation for these seemingly odd data. It all relates back to the cognitive reserve theory, which we have discussed in the past.

Essentially, cognitive reserve is something you create throughout your life. The more you learn and the more you experience, the more you create cognitive reserve. This is like ‘extra’ brain circuits to accomplish intellectual tasks.

Think of it like a city building multiple bridges across a river. If you only have one bridge to cross the river and it gets knocked out by a freak storm, you can’t get traffic to the other side. If, however, you’ve created reserve routes to cross the river with multiple bridges and one gets knocked out, you can divert traffic across the other bridges.

This is the same with brain circuits. If you’ve created multiple circuits through a variety of experiences you have different ways to accomplish the same task. If one takes a hit due to age-related damage, you can divert thoughts through different circuits and not really notice a problem.

So people with higher education and more challenging jobs may have reserve brain circuits. That means that even though we may all experience the same age-related damage, someone with more cognitive reserve will show less cognitive decline. There are also ways to minimize the age-related damage through healthy living, but that’s another topic.

So why would people with more reserve show more rapid decline once dementia sets in? Again, this makes sense if you think about it. People with high levels of reserve who get dementia must have experienced severe damage that took out all their bridges. Damage of this severity will take them down quickly.

However, it’s an illusion. Since studies only compare people diagnosed with dementia, they may be comparing apples to oranges. On average, the people with high reserve (mentally challenging careers in these studies) who have Alzheimer’s disease have likely experienced a lot more damage than, on average, the people with low reserve who have Alzheimer’s.

This would explain why people with more challenging careers would have fewer cases of Alzheimer’s; and also why people with higher levels of education who do get Alzheimer’s, decline much more quickly.

Overall, it’s better to boost your odds of not getting dementia in the first place by doing what’s necessary to challenge your mind on a daily basis. Commit yourself to life-long learning and stay mentally active to build more bridges. Couple this with quality nutrition, plenty of exercise and enough sleep, and you will also minimize the storms that create the damage that can damage your bridges.

Recent advancements in brain imaging show us that older people use more of their brain to perform tasks than younger people do. Scientists interpret this to mean one of two opposite things:

First, older people recruit more brain activity to do the same things in order to compensate for degeneration of specific brain circuits that can no longer get the job done by themselves. This is the compensation hypothesis. Think of it like one brain region asking for help from another brain region in order to do something that, in its younger days, it could do on its own.

Second, the older brain may become ‘over-activated’ when trying to perform a task because it doesn’t do as good of a job at assigning the task to a specific region. This is the de-differentiation hypothesis. Think of this explanation as different brain regions being unsure whose job it is to do something and then getting in each other’s way.

Do older brains cooperate or compete?

A Belgium group used an elegant approach, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, to try to figure out which one was correct. The first hypothesis predicts that increased brain activation is a sign of participation, so should improve performance. The second hypothesis predicts increased activation is due to competition, so should decrease performance.

Researchers asked younger (20-25 year old) and older (62-72 year old) participants to perform a simple motor task while the investigators watched their brain activity. Participants simply moved their hands and feet in the same direction (easy task) or in opposite directions (harder task) while undergoing a brain scan to determine which brain regions became active. In the end, the older folks that performed better had more active brain regions, supporting the first hypothesis. The increased activity in older brains, while performing a task, appears due to participation between different regions.

Tying it back to lifestyle

This study is important because it supports the notion of cognitive reserve and EPIC performance that we have discussed in previous articles. To give a brief re-cap, the more you learn and experience in life, the more connections you make in your brain, and the more easily it will be to recruit other brain regions to get things done.

When you give yourself different experiences, you force your brain to look at new situations from different perspectives. This may help ‘link-up’ brain regions and make it easier for them to communicate with each other as you age, at a time when they become more dependent upon each other.

If you create enough different brain connections throughout your life by committing to life-long learning, you may protect yourself from losing mental performance as you age. Even though your brain will inevitably age, you ensure that the different regions cooperate with each other when necessary and keep your mental capabilities sharp.

The best way to do this is to adhere to the four cornerstones of brain fitness that we have discussed in the past.

1. Feed your brain healthy foods, as they are the raw materials for building brain circuits.
2. Exercise your body since it improves the blood supply to your brain.
3. Exercise your brain by continually learning new things and challenging your mind.
4. Get plenty of rest and sleep to allow your brain to rebuild and regenerate.

Boosting the odds to maintain life-long brain fitness is simple. You don’t have to understand all the science that supports these lifestyle choices, but it’s nice to know that it’s there.

Reference: The Journal of Neuroscience, January 2, 2008, 28(1):91-99

Written by Paul R. Burghardt, PhD

A recent article in the New York Times by Tara Parker-Pope delves into the potential health risks of clutter. I was skeptical at first, but sadly as I read on, I started to recognize some of those traits…..in myself!

How did it come to this?

Well one thing is for sure, it is partially due to genetics. If my parents are reading, I’m sure they won’t protest too much, since they were put at a genetic disadvantage as well. As for my grandparents, I knew my great-grandmother on my mother’s side, and well, my grandparents were pretty screwed too. Now I want to be clear, this is clutter, not filth. Things are moved, dusted and vacuumed, but there is a lot of stuff. Hopefully my family won’t hold this against me.

That being said, science has shown us again and again that much of behavior (as well as disease) is also due to environment. This is a pretty complex aspect and may be related to the people that are around you and how they handle clutter.

Current social issues probably play a large role too, from my interactions with people that lived through the great depression I’ve noticed that they tend to be very thrifty and don’t like to throw things away.

Another thing that I’ve noticed is a lot of people tend to “fill the space.” You move to a bigger house or apartment and something has to go into the corner, and your current couch and recliner just won’t do the trick.

How does this tie into health and brain fitness?

Well, the article mentioned “hoarding,” and it got me to thinking… ‘hey, I know animals do this and most of them don’t use coffee mugs all that much.’ But they do eat food. One of the behaviors that animals will exhibit if there is a potential lack of food, or if it is something particularly tasty, is (drum-roll)….hoarding!

In fact, the brain appears to default towards hording for food and energy stores (i.e. fat). The general consensus is that the wiring of our brains, particularly the hypothalamus which is one of the main areas where energy management is controlled, is weighted toward storing energy versus expending it. So it makes sense that other things that we view as resources or that have emotional value to us would also be potential candidates for hoarding.

Why would we do this to ourselves?

Although this is problematic for us now, it helps to step back and view this from a historic reference….even a recent perspective sheds light on the issue.

Currently, we live in a time of relative bounty (at least in the US and other industrialized nations) where we don’t have to work as hard to obtain our food. I would also argue that for the average Joe (or Josephine) we don’t have to work as hard to obtain the money to buy our food. I always try to imagine what people had to do 50-60 years ago on a daily basis. Now, a greater proportion of the population is sitting behind a computer at a desk, as opposed to smelting iron, digging ditches or whatever else went on in the early to mid 1900’s. Technology has reduced the effort required for a lot of manual labor.

A few decades ago even meal preparation required significantly more time and energy. Use of the microwave oven wasn’t widespread until the 1970’s, a pretty recent social development.

So historically things like food were (comparatively) more difficult to come by, but in general energy expenditure was a part of daily life for most people. It’s probably fair to say that in the past a lot of other things were not readily available (tools, books, hairbrushes, etc), and so people tended to hang on to them, but things have changed. Today these things are easy to come by, but we still don’t want to throw them away when they are no longer of use to us.

Unclutter your environment, unclutter your mind!

The NYT article mentions compulsive hoarders, which is an extreme behavior. But is moderate clutter a result of a bigger health problem? I don’t think there are any data to support that claim, so we don’t really know and I wouldn’t get too worried.

Could control of clutter and better organization help improve our health? I would bet yes. Actually the article hinted at this point when it mentioned “How are you going to shoot a couple of hoops with your son if you can’t even find the basketball?” This is a great point.

Organization would also help reduce stress. Ever had to quickly find a receipt that you set down somewhere only to spend an hour and a half (and expend lot of patience) searching for it? Not so good for the stress level, and it takes up a lot of time that could be spent relaxing, exercising, or learning something new.

So there isn’t a lot of advice on this post, but I thought the NYT article was interesting. Plus this is a worthwhile personal aspect to consider working on. Just remember that you may be battling against some inherited tendencies, but you can ultimately turn something that requires effort and thought into habit. For me this will be a priority for the new-year (a sort of resolution if you will), to organize and simplify… for clarity and my health.

Paul Burghardt, PhD
Brain Fit For Life

How BrainFit is the man in the big red suit? Does old St. Nick adhere to the four cornerstones of brain fitness to take good care of his egg’s noggin? All in all he seems to do a fairly good job, but let’s take a closer look.

First off is Nutrition. I’d guess that the diet up in the north pole has to be similar to the Eskimos. Even though they eat a lot of fat from whale blubber, they get huge doses of omega-3s from all the fish. I’ve heard that Santa enjoys a lot of ice fishing during his downtime. So even though he goes on a once a year milk and cookies binge (or bourbon and cookies in some places), he probably does fairly well the rest of the year.

Second is Physical Activity. Cleaning out reindeer stalls and chasing elves around to make sure they get their jobs done must be physically exerting. Plus, just maintaining a huge workshop operation has to have a fair amount of physical activity on a day-to-day basis. So I’d have to give Santa a good score on the physical activity cornerstone as well.

Third is Mental Activity. This is where Santa really shines. Remembering all the kids’ names and associating all the different requests with everyone one of them is quite a feat and indicative of a strong memory. Not only that, but his sense of direction to remember where they all live shows incredible spatial abilities. Finally, some of the toy designs he comes up with these days are very creative. I have to give him top marks on this cornerstone.

Fourth is Sleep, Rest and Relaxation. Santa probably doesn’t do quite as well here. Even though he only pulls an all-nighter once a year, he strikes me as a type-A personality and is on the go all the time. I bet he’s up to the wee hours working hard most of the year. In fact, lack of sleep has a known correlation with obesity and I’ll bet this contributes to his portly mid-section.

Overall, however, Santa does fairly well in three out of the four cornerstones so let’s see how that translates into his EPIC performance (Emotional, Physical and Intellectual Cognition).

Emotionally, he seems to be in good shape. He’s always laughing (HO, HO, HO) and shows a lot of patience with all those kids constantly climbing on him. I’ve never heard anyone call Santa a jerk, so you have to figure that he does a good job managing his stress levels.

Physically, he could lose a little weight but still seems to function very well. It must be tough getting up and down all those chimneys but he gets it done. I don’t know how his blood pressure or immune function are doing but he’s probably OK.

Intellectually, he’s a star. As I discussed above, memory, creativity and problem solving skills are all sharp. Although he did seem to forget about that Lava Lamp that I requested for about 10 years in a row, but he finally came through.

So is Santa doing what is necessary to stay BrainFit? I’d have to say yes.

The New York Times published a great article today about the concept of ‘cognitive reserve’. Essentially the concept is that the more you experience during life, the better your odds of aging gracefully.

We have been promoting the four cornerstones of brain fitness in our recent posts and the article does a good job of summarizing some of these. The highlights of the report are:

1. Mental activity of all kinds helps slow or prevent cognitive decline. Staying engaged in life and keeping your mind active helps strengthen brain circuits that may slow down the aging process.

2. Physical activity boosts the brain’s ‘executive function’. Study after study has shown the benefits of physical exercise. Where the brain is concerned there seems to be real value in strengthening brain circuits that control decision making and problem solving abilities.

3. Social experiences help prevent dementia. Several studies have implicated social activity in cognitive health. The more extensive a person’s social network, the better the brain seems to work.

You can read the entire article by following this link.

two other things I would add to these are the value of nutrition and appropriate rest and sleep to boost cognitive fitness.

A new study from the University of Michigan reveals the value of socializing for enhancing brain fitness. The study will be published in February 2008, but you can access a podcast below, with Oscar Ybarra, a UM psychologist and study author.

The study, conducted in 2 parts, associated social activity with increased performance on cognitive tests. The authors evaluated a few thousand people for the time they spent socializing with friends, family and colleagues. They found that increased socializing time predicted better performance on cognitive tests, including working memory.

This part of the study, like many human studies, can’t say that increased socializing actually makes you smarter. It may be that people who do better on those tests are just more likely to socialize and that there is no causative relationship.

However, the second part of the study addressed this question. In this part, researchers divided volunteers into three groups. The first group spent ten minutes socializing before taking a test. The second group played mentally challenging games for ten minutes preceding the test. The third group watched ten minutes of ‘Seinfeld’ prior to the test.

The results showed that socializing worked as well as mentally challenging games on improving test performance. They were both better than watching TV (of course another interpretation is that socializing and mind games do nothing but Seinfeld makes you dummer, sorry Jerry).

In any case, this supports the notion that socializing may be causative for improving mental performance, at least in the short term. It would be interesting to see what the long-term brain boosting benefits are.

Other studies in the past have also correlated increased social support networks with reducing stress and maintaining brain function.

The bottom line? Get involved in life. Interacting with other people helps you keep your brain running sharp.

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