11-16 Stimulate
A tired mind isn't a happy mind. What can you do to recharge your batteries on a daily basis? Using different parts of your brain in unexpected ways can help, whether it's digging in your garden, reading a challenging book, rocking out to your new MP3 player--or just tossing a ball.
11. Use your gray matter
Not so very long ago, scientists thought the human brain was a lot like a just picked head of cabbage. A 20-year-old's brain, though still fresh and crisp, would never grow again. From then on, it went through a slow, inevitable decay, losing powers of decision making, memory, and multitasking, until an 80-year-old was left with little more than sauerkraut.
But now we know, thanks to leaps in neuroscience, that adult brains can grow and change. That ability may help individuals push back against the declines in perception, cognition, and motor skills once thought to be an unavoidable part of growing older. It may play a role in recovery from stroke and traumatic brain injury. And it may even help delay the devastation of diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Play time. Best of all, the brain's restorative capabilities seem to be sparked not by high-priced pharmaceuticals or mechanical gizmos but by everyday pleasures that present physical or mental challenges. Those can include tackling the New York Times crossword puzzle, analyzing The Corrections in your book group, playing a tough 18 holes of golf, or running the table in eight ball. Yes, eminent scientists say that shooting pool can be good for your brain.
"Use it or lose it," says William Greenough, a researcher at the University of Illinois who puts forth billiards as a good example of the sort of motor-skills challenge that enhances brain function. "The brain needs both physical and mental exercise." Up until the 1960s, when a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist showed that new cells grow in the memory center of adult rat brains, the presumption was that those brains could not grow new tissue. In 1988, scientists showed that adult human brains can grow new neurons, too.
Greenough has found that rats raised in an environment where they could climb, jump, and socialize with other rats had many more neuronal connections in their brains--and more new neurons--than less-stimulated rodents. The revved-up rats did better in memory mazes and other lab-rat tests. Research in rats and monkeys has shown that aerobic exercise remodels the brain, prompting the growth of new neurons and more brain synapses, insulating neurons for faster, more efficient transmission, and increases the number of capillaries. That all makes for a brain that is more efficient and adaptable. Although old rats don't show as much improvement as the youngsters do, "the brain continues to benefit for as long as we've been able to test the animals," Greenough says. That is, right up till death.
While some scientists still question whether adult brains do grow, most accept that the hippocampus, the brain's memory center, and the olfactory bulb, which controls smell, do sprout new neurons. (In 1999, researchers at Princeton University found neurogenesis in the cerebral cortex of monkeys, an area responsible for much higher thought, including executive decision making and short-term memory, and visual recognition of objects.) It's been known for decades that people who exercise regularly do better on cognitive tests than their less-fit peers. But it's only been in the past decade that scientists, using tools like MRI s, have been able to show in randomized trials that aerobic exercise remodels parts of the human brain as well, increasing brain volume and brain activity. "More tends to be better," says Arthur Kramer, a psychologist at the University of Illinois.
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