Sort Your Brain Out
This book is a triumph in terms of providing just the right balance of practical advice, scientific reasoning and ultimately hope – that when armed with the right information, it is completely within all of our powers to shift excess body weight for good.
Have you ever noticed that people seem to be ageing better these days than they did a few decades ago. For years I’ve been wondering why people in their sixties don’t look as old as they used to and I think I’ve finally figured it out…
People who exercise regularly have lower rates of anxiety & depression, even boasting greater cortical thickness in the prefrontal cortex & medial temporal lobe
Drinking green tea has long been associated with relaxation and, indeed, scientific investigation has now backed this up. Furthermore, the more green tea a person consumes, the lower the risk of cognitive impairment.
I finally took the time to categorize and tally as many of my recent Tweets as I could get my hands on to clarify what topics have been hottest in recent times.
Sort Your Brain Out – endorsement: “I thought it was accessible, thought-provoking and full of useful, easy-to-follow tips about improving your everyday life through a better understanding of the brain.” Killian Fox, writer for the Observer and other publications
Exercise is good for health, we all know that. That said it is also clear that the whole world is utterly fixated on the benefits to the body. The considerable potential benefits of physical exercise for the brain are invariably overlooked. As proof of these benefits continues to trickle in and the exact mechanisms by which exercise improves brain function gradually makes itself apparent, I’m guessing we’ll find ourselves increasingly inclined to take regular exercise for our brain’s sake.
Contrast the lifestyles of people in their seventies who do and do not suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and clues about how to keep your brain ticking over nicely, well into old age, jump right out at you. Those who do not suffer with this dreaded disease tend to have been more committed to a regular exercise regime throughout their later years. They tend to have been more engaged in a wider array of social activities. They tend to have been careful with their diet in the long term, favouring a healthy Meditteranean-style diet over a typical modern Western diet. They also tend to have been more proactively involved with their local community and more motivated to seek regular mental stimulation. People are now being advised to adopt a variety of brain-healthy habits if they wish to reduce the likelihood of developing cognitive deficits that the progression of Alzheimer’s disease can, but does not always, induce.
Although we cannot halt the inexorable process of grey matter loss completely, the good news is that we can slow its progression. This month a study conducted at the University of Pittsburgh and published in the journal “Neurology” describes the influence of regular exercise on the rate of reduction of brain volume and cognitive function in 299 elderly individuals.
It was observed that those individuals of this group of average age 78 who walked in excess of 6 miles per week had a significantly reduced rate of grey matter loss and consequently a lower incidence of cognitive decline. The greater the distance walked each week, the smaller the reduction in volume over a 9 year period within their frontal lobe, occipital lobe, entorhinal cortex and critically, in the hippocampus.
This begs the question – how and why does exercise slow down the rate at which grey matter shrinks?