Use it or lose it!

Pilot study by Alzheimers Australia (WA) finds regular brain exercises are the key to healthy ageing

Just two hours of brain exercises a week can markedly improve a person’s mental capacity and help fight age-related memory loss according to a recent study by Alzheimer’s Australia WA.

· Participants found improvements in their memory and were able to follow conversations better.
· Brain has the ability to change in response to new learning.
· Exercising the brain reduces the risk of developing dementia in later years.

The “Brain Fitness Pilot Project” involved people aged in their 60s, 70s and 80s from retirement villages and seniors fitness centres, taking part in a structured brain fitness program two hours per week over an eight-week period.

The program consisted of a series of computer-based hearing exercises aimed at sharpening a person’s ability to take in speech so that the brain can hear and remember more details.

While a majority of participants reported an improvement in their train of thought and could remember names and shopping lists better, another 70 percent found an improvement in their hearing and their ability to follow and remember conversations.

Alzheimer’s Australia WA Chief Executive Officer Frank Schaper said the study demonstrated that a regular program of brain exercises will reduce the impact of cognitive decline as a person grows older and can lead to healthy ageing.

See original article here.

Seniors may be able to slow down memory loss by exercising the brain, experts say.

Doing crossword puzzles, playing cards and other games might ward off a decline in memory or help us maintain “brainpower” as we age, reports a study by the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center and Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago. The study found that more frequent participation in cognitively stimulating activities is associated with a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s Disease.

The research looked at everyday activities such as reading books, newspapers or magazines, engaging in crossword puzzles or card games, and going to museums among aging participants. The 2002 study followed more than 700 dementia-free participants age 65 and older for an average of 4.5 years. The results indicated a one-point increase in cognitive activity corresponded with a 33 percent reduction in the risk of Alzheimer’s.

“The brain is like a muscle. If you don’t use it, you lose it,” said Jim Hanekamp, founder of Glenview-based Web site www.myfitbrain.com. The Web site features a variety of cognitive games that are geared to exercising the mind.

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The idea that the adult brain changes with experience was once a radical idea, but it is now well accepted that certain areas—say, the motor cortex, when learning a new physical skill—can grow new neurons or create stronger connections.

Now scientists report that the brain is even more mutable than suspected. Thanks to an unconventional research technique, neuroscientists have found the first physical proof that new experiences and information have wide-ranging effects throughout both hemispheres of the brain, rather than just creating connections in one discrete area.

“We have learned that what we call neuronal plasticity isn’t exclusive to individual synapses or even the neurons where they contact but rather occurs throughout the functional network in which synapses and neurons are embedded,” Canals says. “Those networks are absent in brain slices, so they couldn’t be studied before.”

By showing how activity in the hippocampus causes widespread changes in brain structure, Canals says the findings could explain why new memories are at first dependent on the hippocampus but can eventually be recalled without triggering that part of the brain at all.

See original article here.

Generate new neurons by playing brain games at Myfitbrain.

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but scientific findings seem to indicate otherwise. Research shows that our brains literally rewire in response to new stimulation. And when it comes to computer use, Internet activity may stimulate and possibly improve brain function, according to scientists at UCLA.

“Technology may be changing our minds and changing the way we think,” said Dr. Gary Small, a neuroscientist speaking last month at the UCLA Technology & Aging Conference at the Skirball Cultural Center.

Small, director of the UCLA Center on Aging, described results of research he and colleagues performed with volunteers between the ages of 55 and 76. Half of the participants were familiar with how to search the Internet, and the other half were new to it. The participants engaged in Internet searching while simultaneously undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

The MRI images clearly showed activity in the areas of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning — but only in the Web-savvy group. The inexperienced group showed no such activity.

However, after just five one-hour sessions of practice, the Web newbies showed activation in the same areas of the brain as the savvy group.

“Five hours on the Internet and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” said Small, writing about the findings in “iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind” (HarperCollins). “Recent studies demonstrate that older brains do remain malleable and plastic throughout life. Even areas of the brain that were reserved for specialized tasks can be recruited and retrained.”

In other words, “use it or lose it” applies to the brain. Indeed, Small notes, “Several studies have shown that exercising the brain with mental aerobics not only can improve cognitive performance scores but also may delay brain degeneration.”

Rest of the article here

Do your mental aerobics and brain games at Myfitbrain.

There have been prior clues that creativity benefits from ample cross-talk between the brain hemispheres. For example, patients who’ve had a commissurotomy – the severing of the thick bundle of nerve fibers that joins the two hemispheres – show deficits on creative tasks. Now Elizabeth Shobe and colleagues have provided the first evidence that creativity is boosted by an intervention designed to increase hemispheric cross-talk.

Shobe’s team tested 62 participants on a version of the “Alternative Uses Test”, a divergent thinking challenge that involves dreaming up unconventional uses for everyday objects such as bricks and newspapers.

An important factor that the researchers took note of was the participants’ handedness. Prior research has suggested that people who have one hand that is particularly dominant, so-called “strong-handers”, have less cross-talk between their brain hemispheres compared with people who are more ambidextrous or “mixed handed”.

After an initial attempt at the creativity task, half the participants spent thirty seconds shifting their eyes horizontally back and forth. This exercise is thought to help increase inter-hemispheric communication. The remaining participants acted as controls and just stared straight ahead for 30 seconds.

The key finding is that on their second creativity attempt, strong-handers who’d performed the horizontal eye movements subsequently showed a significant improvement in their creativity, in terms of being more original (i.e. suggesting ideas not proposed by others) and coming up with more categories of use. Staring straight ahead, by contrast, had no effect on creativity.

Another finding was that, overall, the mixed-handed participants performed better on the creativity task than the strong-handers, thus providing further evidence for a link between inter-hemispheric interaction, which mixed-handers have more of, and creativity. But it also turned out that mixed-handers didn’t benefit from the horizontal eye movement task. It’s as if they already have an optimum amount of hemispheric cross-talk so that the eye movements make no difference. This meant that after the strong-handers had performed the horizontal eye movements, their performance matched that of the mixed-handed participants.

The researchers also showed that, for strong-handers, the beneficial effects of the eye movement exercise lasted nine minutes for originality, but just three to six minutes in terms of coming up with more categories of use.

“Our findings may not apply to more unique populations who are characterized as ‘highly creative’,” the researchers said, “nor can we conclude … that the thirty seconds bilateral eye movement task will turn an average individual into an artist, poet, scientist, philosopher, actor or sculptor. However, we certainly do propose that the … eye movement task will result in a temporary increase in strong-hander’s ability to think of creative uses for various house-hold objects.”

These new findings complement research published in 2008 showing that horizontal eye movements aid memory performance for strongly-right handed people, but impair the performance of left-handers and mixed-handers.

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Mindless distractions might not reduce anxiety as effectively as a brain teaser.

A brain-imaging study published last year by Nature Neuroscience suggests such brain-sharpening activities as crossword puzzles reduce anxiety by activating a region of the brain devoted to logic and concentration — the prefrontal cortex.

“This is being supported by burgeoning neuropsychologic data,” said Dr. Carl Aagesen, a psychiatrist at Medical Associates Clinic. “The prefrontal cortex is used for planning, making judgments and delaying impulses. This part of our brain is how we do self-talk to turn down input from the amygdala.”

The amygdala is the source of the brain’s “fight-or-flight reflex,” which alerts the body to protect itself in times of danger and is thought to contribute to feelings of anxiety.

Surveys indicate one in five adults experience above-average levels of anxiety annually and research has shown anxious people struggle to concentrate.

Sonia Bishop, a UC Berkeley psychologist and lead author of the brain imaging study, used functioning Magnetic Resonance Imaging to study 17 men and women, ranging in age from 19 to 48, at Cambridge University. They scored in standardized tests as having varying levels of anxiety, but were not on medication.

Their brains were scanned as they performed letter-searching tasks. When the letter search was demanding, brain scans showed all the study participants’ dorsolateral prefrontal cortexes, which control planning, organization and memory, to be fully engaged.

But when the letter search was easy, the prefrontal brain activity in high-anxiety participants plummeted as their attention wandered.

In contrast, low-anxiety participants easily activated the prefrontal brain to focus on the task at hand when presented with distractions. Aagesen describes the brain as functioning like a computer. “It cannot do two things simultaneously, but it can shift back and forth almost instantaneously,” he said.

Crossword puzzles, math games, mazes and other brain-teasing activities actively engage the prefrontal cortex — which can calm anxiety.

“The more you engage the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex actively, the more you are able to shut down input from the fear centers, because you can’t do two things at once,” Aagesen said.

If you want to reduce your anxiety, try Myfitbrain brain games.

By Laura Sanders, Science News

CHICAGO — A toned, buff bod isn’t the only thing a workout is good for. Exercise protects special brain cells in monkeys’ brains and improves motor function, a new study finds. The data, presented at a news briefing October 18 in Chicago at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, adds to a growing body of evidence that shows exercise is good for the brain, too.

“This is sort of a quiet revolution that’s been occurring in neuroscience,” says Carl Cotman, a brain aging expert at the University of California, Irvine, “to realize that physical activity at a certain level impacts the brain in a really profound way.”

In the new study, researchers led by Judy Cameron of the University of Pittsburgh trained six adult female rhesus monkeys to run on treadmills built for humans. Over a period of three months, monkeys either ran, jogged or sat on a treadmill for five hours each week. Monkeys that ran got their heart rates to about 80 percent of maximum, comparable to a human training program that would increase cardiovascular fitness. The jogging monkeys’ heart rates reached about 60 percent of maximum.

After this training period, the researchers hit the right side of the monkeys’ brains with a neurotoxin called MPTP, designed to selectively kill neurons that produce the signaling chemical dopamine. These neurons, and the dopamine they produce, regulate movement, and are the very same ones that die in people with Parkinson’s disease.

Sedentary monkeys showed the expected decrease in these dopamine neurons on the right side of the brain after the neurotoxin was applied. But in the brains of monkeys that had run for the past three months, the neurotoxin had almost no effect. In the runners, dopamine neurons were just as plentiful on the right side of the brain as on the left.

Jogging also had a protective effect, although slightly weaker than running’s, Cameron says. “This is really good news. It means that any little bit more activity you can do is positive for your brain,” says Cameron. “Your brain seems very sensitive to exercise.”

When the researchers continued the experiment for another six weeks, the results held. A brain scan revealed that “the animals that were exercising had virtually no loss of dopamine in those neurons,” Cameron says. “We think that exercise is very neuroprotective.”

Next, the researchers assessed the monkeys’ ability to use the hand affected by the neurotoxin. Monkeys had to retrieve a Lifesaver candy from a thin wire, an experiment designed to test motor coordination. Sedentary monkeys could not use their left, affected hand at all, while the runners showed no difference between their left and right hands, the researchers found.

The new study highlights the importance of exercise for maintaining a healthy brain. Other studies presented at the meeting have found that exercise has a wide range of brain-protective roles in mice, monkeys and humans.

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Your brain excels when you give it good nourishment, physical exercise, keep the stress down, get the right amount of sleep, and push it novel directions like using Myfitbrain.