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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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.

Living healthy not only affects you, it affects your potential offspring…and yes, fellas, this applies to us too. But isn’t this something we already knew? It is true that we inherit our genes from our ancestors (parents, grandparents, and so on) and our genes impact how you develop and influence your vulnerability to disease….but there is more to the story.

A recent episode of NOVA titled, “Ghost in Your Genes”, gave a fantastic overview of some research investigating the influence that our ‘epigenome’ has on our lives, and in turn, the influence that our lives have on our epigenome.

You have more control of your genes than you think.

Your genome is the total set of genes that you inherited from your parents and your epigenome (literally translating as “on top of” or “in addition to” the genome) is partially inherited and partially created by your experiences. Your epigenome is a collection of physical modifications of your genes.

How is epigenetic control different from genetic control over our lives? Well, both the genome and the epigenome control how genes turn “on” or “off” to influence the health of our brains and bodies. One of the main differences is that your epigenome changes throughout life, while your genome is relatively unchanging from the time your were conceived.

This means that the genetic factor is more influential early in life, assuming that everyone has reasonably nurturing parents. But once we get past the early stages of development we gain some control over our genetic destiny.

Think about it kind of like driving a car. Early on, you are safe if your parents are good drivers, but once you get your own license your safety is in your own hands.

One of the most striking examples of epigenetics comes from studies in identical twins. Even though identical twins come from the same egg and start with the same genes and initial epigenome, their experiences throughout life alter their epigenetic makeup. This ultimately affects how their genes turn on and off and how this controls their health and longevity.

When are you absolved of your responsibility?

Now, keep in mind that these epigenetic changes are inheritable…..meaning you can pass the changes that you make to your offspring. So, how many generations can these effects last for, you ask? So far, researchers have data suggesting that epigenetic alterations can have effects on several generations down the line.

Since the epigenome can also be influenced by lifestyle choices (i.e. diet, smoking, exercise) and environmental factors (i.e. pollution) the choices we make today can influence several generations to come.

So aside from the birthday cards, hand-knit sweaters, and rolls of pennies, your grandparents may have also given you epigenetic predispositions for increased or decreased odds of getting diabetes and several other diseases. What kind of grandparent do you want to be?

The silver lining in all of this is that even though we start with a set of genes and an epigenetic fingerprint, we have the ability to influence our epigenome by the lifestyle choices that we make. And, since the epigenome can turn genes on or off, we ultimately have some control over our genes. So even if you don’t care about your health, think about how you might be influencing the health of your grandchildren.