Your brain is made of billions of brain cells? These brain cells are called neurons. These neurons are what’s responsible for any action you take and any thought you have. If you want to move your hand, for example, the neurons responsible will fire signals to the appropriate areas of your body.

Thousands of neurons fire just to move your hand. To make the process more effective (use less energy to do the same task), these neurons that fire together, wire together by creating synapses between them. The more you fire those neurons together, the stronger the synapses become – so that the next time one of the neurons fire, the others will also follow suit.

Thus when a baby learn to walk, he/she wobbles – the neurons responsible for walking has not created the necessary synapses. As adults, walking is an unconscious effort. You do not need to think about moving your right leg forward, while at the same swing your left hand backward and so on and so forth (Our walking function is so complex no other animal brain is capable of controlling such a function). This is because the synapses involved in walking has wired together and made the process effortless and automatic.

What has this got to do with you? Well, you maybe unknowingly creating undesirable synapses. For example, if you’re watching TV on a frequent basis, soon a neural network will form between excitement and fast moving pictures – making reality comparatively uninteresting.

What’s worse is that when you go through an experience (practical instead of theoretical), neurotransmitters are released with the formation of every synapse. These neurotransmitters immediately strengthen those synapses, making it difficult for you to forget about it (this is true for most cases of a memorable scene in a TV program). Think about your first kiss, the day your get married, the day your parents bought you that house… or any other memorable events in your life.

Yet few of us frequently and actively recall these joyous times. We do, however, frequently recall events that are less than desirable.

Because neurons for remembering an experience is always connected to neurons responsible for emotions, by recalling undesirable events, you’re putting yourself through the negative emotions attached. To make things worse, recalling an event strengthens the synapses involved in the memory – making it easier for you to recall it.

Thus a habit is formed. Most people constantly sabotage their well-being by conjuring past images and living through them over and over again.

We can see, now that you know how a habit is formed, just how “asleep” we have been in our life. Here, think about your morning routine. Each and every morning, you probably do the same tasks, in the order for the same amount of time.

It’s a habit you’ve unknowingly formed. Your morning routine is not necessarily harmful, but are you taking the same approach to life in general? Are you living passively, instead of actively? Are there any “addictions” that you can get rid of – perhaps watching TV at a certain time, gossiping and even the cups of coffee you “must” have during breaks?

Most people live in this sort of reactive mode and letting the environment determine how they should feel. That is the limbic system talking – the part of your brain responsible for emotions.

By living in reactive mode, the synapses in your frontal lobe, where your consciousness resides, is thus weak because it’s rarely fired, resulting is some of the most common age-related diseases such as the inability to learn.

By making use of our frontal lobe, we can break these patterns and create new ones. One way to do that is to constantly expose yourself to novel experiences. When you’re going through a novel experience, you have no choice but to use your frontal lobe – thus preventing or potentially reversing a host of age-related cognitive decline.

Animal studies conducted at the National Institute on Aging Gerontology Research Center and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, for example, have shown that both calorie restriction and intermittent fasting along with vitamin and mineral intake, increase resistance to disease, extend lifespan, and stimulate production of neurons from stem cells.

In addition,
fasting has been shown to enhance synaptic elasticity, possibly increasing the ability for successful re-wiring following brain injury. These benefits appear to result from a cellular stress response, similar in concept to the greater muscular regeneration that results from the stress of regular exercise.

Additional research suggests that increasing time intervals between meals might be a better choice than chronic calorie restriction, because the resultant decline in sex hormones may adversely affect both sexual and brain performance. Sex steroid hormones testosterone and estrogen are positively impacted by an abundant food supply. In other words, you might get smarter that way, but it might adversely affect your fun in the bedroom, among other drawbacks.

But if your not keen on starving yourself, there are other options. Another recent finding, stemming from the Burnham Institute for Medical Research and Iwate University in Japan, reports that the herb rosemary contains an ingredient that fights off free radical damage in the brain. The active ingredient, known as carnosic acid (CA), can protect the brain from stroke and neurodegeneration such as Alzheimer’s and from the effects of normal aging.

Although researchers are patenting more potent forms of isolated compounds in this herb, unlike most new drugs, simply using the rosemary in its natural state may be the most safe and clinically tolerated because it is known to get into the brain and has been consumed by people for over a thousand years. The herb was used in European folk medicine to help the nervous system.

Another brain booster that Bruce N. Ames, Ph.D., a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, swears by his daily 800 mg of alpha-lipoic acid and 2,000 mg of acetyl-L-carnitine, chemicals which boost the energy output of mitochondria that power our cells. Mitochondrial decay is a major factor in aging and diseases such as Alzheimer’s and diabetes. Elderly rats on these supplements had more energy and ran mazes better.

Omega-3s fatty acids DHA and EPA found in walnuts and fatty fish (such as salmon, sardines, and lake trout) are thought to help ward off Alzheimer’s disease. (In addition, they likely help prevent depression and have been shown to help prevent sudden death from heart attack).

Turmeric, typically found in curry, contains curcumin, a chemical with potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. In India, it is even used as a salve to help heal wounds. East Asians also eat it, which might explain their lower rates (compared to the United States) of Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, in addition to various cancers. If curry isn’t part of your favorite cuisines, you might try a daily curcumin supplement of 500 to 1,000 mg.

Physical exercise may also have beneficial effects on neuron regeneration by stimulating regeneration of brain and muscle cells via activation of stress proteins and the production of growth factors. But again, additional research suggests that not all exercise is equal. Interestingly, some researchers found that exercise considered drudgery was not beneficial in neuronal regeneration, but physical activity that was engaged in purely for fun, even if equal time was spent and equal calories were burned, resulted in neuronal regeneration.

Exercise can also help reduce stress, but any stress-reducing activity, such as meditation and lifestyle changes, can help the brain. There is some evidence that chronic stress shrinks the parts of the brain involved in learning, memory, and mood. (It also delays wound healing, promotes atherosclerosis, and increases blood pressure.)

It should go without saying that short-term cognitive and physical performance is not boosted by
fasting, due to metabolic changes including decrease in body temperature, decreased heart rate and blood pressure and decreased glucose and insulin levels, so you’re better off not planning a marathon or a demanding work session during a
fasting period.

As part of a healthy lifestyle the prescription of moderating food intake, exercising, and eating anti-oxidant rich foods is what we’ve long known will boost longevity, but it’s good to know that we can bring our brains along with us as we make it into those golden years without being the 1 in 7 who suffers from dementia. Keep your fingers crossed and eat some rosemary chicken.

Professor Elizabeth Gould received the  prestigious Benjamin Franklin from the RSA organization for her groundbreaking work on neurogenesis. Her research into the effect of environments on the neuronal composition of the brain has profound and far-reaching societal implications.

Good video on how neurogenesis works in the hippocampus and why working out your brain helps it to improve for the long run.  Also how anxiety can inhibit neurogenesis which inhibits your ability to learn.

Researchers have shown for the first time that neural stem cells can rescue memory in mice with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, raising hopes of a potential treatment for the leading cause of elderly dementia that afflicts 5.3 million people in the U.S.

Dementia is a general term for a group of brain disorders that affect memory, judgment, personality and other mental functions. Alzheimer’s is the most common type of dementia, accounting for 60 to 80 percent of cases. There is currently no cure for Alzheimer’s.

Modified Alzheimer’s mice performed markedly better on memory tests a month after mouse neural stem cells were injected into their brains. The stem cells secreted a protein that created more neural connections, improving cognitive function.

“Essentially, the cells were producing fertilizer for the brain,” said Frank LaFerla, co-author of the study.

Lead author Mathew Blurton-Jones and colleagues worked with older mice predisposed to develop brains lesions called plaques and tangles that are the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s.

To learn how the stem cells worked, the scientists examined the mouse brains. To their surprise, they discovered that just 6 percent of the stem cells had turned into neurons. (The majority became the other two main types of brain cells, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes.) The stem cells didn’t improve cognition by becoming new neurons, nor did they act by reducing the number of plaques and tangles.

Rather, the stem cells were found to have secreted a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. This caused existing tissue to sprout new neurites, strengthening and increasing the number of connections between neurons. When the team selectively reduced BDNF from the stem cells, the benefit was lost, providing strong evidence that BDNF is critical to the effect of stem cells on memory and neuronal function.

“If you look at Alzheimer’s, it’s not the plaques and tangles that correlate best with dementia; it’s the loss of synapses, connections between neurons,” Blurton-Jones said. “The neural stem cells were helping the brain form new synapses and nursing the injured neurons back to health.”

Diseased mice injected directly with BDNF also improved cognitively but not as much as with the neural stem cells, which provided a more long-term and consistent supply of the protein.

“This gives us a lot of hope that stem cells or a product from them, such as BDNF, will be a useful treatment for Alzheimer’s,” LaFerla said.

Read the source article here

Training increases brain processing speed and improves our ability to multitask, new research from Vanderbilt University published in the June 15 issue of Neuron indicates.

“We found that a key limitation to efficient multitasking is the speed with which our prefrontal cortex processes information, and that this speed can be drastically increased through training and practice,” Paul E. Dux, a former research fellow at Vanderbilt, and now a faculty member at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and co-author of the study, said. “Specifically, we found that with training, the ‘thinking’ regions of our brain become very fast at doing each task, thereby quickly freeing them up to take on other tasks.”

To understand what was occurring in the brain when multitasking efficiency improved, the researchers trained seven people daily for two weeks on two simple tasks — selecting an appropriate finger response to different images, and selecting an appropriate vocal response (syllables) to the presentation of different sounds. The tasks were done either separately or together (multitasking situation). Scans of the individuals’ brains were conducted three times over the two weeks using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they were performing the tasks.

Before practice, the participants showed strong dual-task interference—slowing down of one or both tasks when they attempted to perform them together. As a result of practice and training, however, the individuals became very quick not only at doing each of the two tasks separately, but also at doing them together. In other words, they became very efficient multitaskers.

Read the rest of the article here.

Although the fact that we generate new brain cells throughout life is no longer disputed, their purpose has been the topic of much debate. Now, an international collaboration of researchers made a big leap forward in understanding what all these newborn neurons might actually do. Their study, published in the July 10, 2009, issue of the journal Science, illustrates how these young cells improve our ability to navigate our environment.

“We believe that new brain cells help us to distinguish between memories that are closely related in space,” says senior author Fred H. Gage, Ph.D., …

When the first clues emerged that adult human brains continually sprout new neurons, one of the central tenets of neuroscience—we are born with all the brain cells we’ll ever have—was about to be overturned. Although it is never easy to shift a paradigm, a decade later the question is no longer whether neurogenesis exists but rather what all these new cells are actually good for.

“Adding new neurons could be a very problematic process if they don’t integrate properly into the existing neural circuitry,” says Gage. “There must be a clear benefit to outweigh the potential risk”.

…

But pattern separation might not be the only role that new neurons have in adult brain function: a computer model simulating the neuronal circuits in the dentate gyrus based on all available biological information suggested an additional function. “To our surprise, it turned out that newborn neurons actually form a link between individual elements of episodes occurring closely in time,” says Gage.

Read the rest of the article here.

Quick: What’s the capital of Idaho? The name of your new neighbor? Not a clue? Maybe your brain needs a gym. At least that’s what a growing number of mental exercise systems aim to provide.

It’s no wonder we’re flocking to tune up our craniums – the estimated odds of developing dementia after age 85 are a scary one in two. And long before that, most of us notice that the name of that nice wine you sampled last night is as elusive as a good deal on health insurance.

The brain-training movement promises to help you not just find the spare garage opener or remember who won the 1988 World Series (the Dodgers), it could protect you against Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of age-related dementia.
Read the rest of this article: Keep Your Memory