For many years, the prevailing belief among scientists and medical professionals was that humans were endowed with a finite number of brain cells at birth, incapable of generating new ones. Alzheimer’s disease was largely seen as a genetic fate, unavoidable and irreversible.
This assumption led to the conclusion that brain aging was an irreversible process. However, recent research has challenged these outdated notions, revealing the human brain’s extraordinary capacity for renewal and expansion, surpassing even the most advanced computers in complexity.
Despite the potential for damage due to injury or illness, the brain has the remarkable ability to generate new cells, reconfigure its connections, and even enlarge. With proper care and mental stimulation, the brain’s capabilities can be enhanced, making it more adept at various tasks.
A study published in The Lancet in 2024 highlights that adopting healthier lifestyle choices could prevent nearly half (45 percent) of dementia cases, thanks to the identification of 14 factors that individuals can modify.
Moreover, possessing the ApoE4 gene variant, associated with Alzheimer’s, does not seal one’s fate. Engaging in regular physical activity has been shown to significantly lower the risk of developing this condition.
And even having the ApoE4 gene variant, linked with linked with Alzheimer’s, doesn’t mean you will inevitably end up developing the disease. In fact, regular physical exercise can significantly reduce the risk.
A 2012 study by US researchers from St Louis University examined levels of abnormal amyloid proteins associated with Alzheimer’s in people who led sedentary lives and compared them with people who were highly active, both with and without the ApoE4 variant.
They found that those with the ApoE4 variant who were very physically active had the same, low level of amyloid as those who didn’t have the ApoE4 gene.
In other words, exercise alone had negated the elevated risk, at least in terms of amyloid accumulation in the brain, underlining the power of making lifestyle changes to help keep your brain healthy well into old age whatever your family background.
But this is not simply about preventing a slide into dementia in the future. I have devised practical steps you can take to make your brain sharper and quicker right now.
As a leading neurologist and professor at the Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University in the US, I have developed a simple, science-based 12-week programme to help you improve your memory, solve problems more easily and help keep dementia at bay.
My Brain Fitness Programme forms the basis of my new book, The Invincible Brain, which I am sharing exclusively with Daily Mail readers in a three-part series starting today.
The programme, which also draws on my decades of experience with patients, is based on five key pillars – exercise, sleep, nutrition, adopting a calmer mindset and brain training techniques. And it’s backed by solid science.
In a 2016 study, involving 127 patients at my NeuroGrow Brain Fitness Centre in Washington DC, 84 per cent of patients gained remarkable improvements in their objective, validated tests and scored higher on cognitive assessments in just 12 weeks. MRI scans showed that more than half had grown the size of their hippocampus – the area involved in memory – by 3 per cent.
In effect, their brains had become about three years younger in just 12 weeks.
Similarly encouraging results came from a 2020 trial involving patients of all ages who had persistent concussion symptoms months or even years after sustaining brain injuries.
More than 80 per cent had significant improvements in attention, mood, sleep and memory as well as in objective tests of cognitive functions.
Your malleable brain is also exquisitely personalised, based on your environment, experiences and the way you’ve used it.
A good example of this adaptability – or neuroplasticity – is the Iranian artist, Zohreh Etezad Saltaneh, who was born with a congenital disability that stunted the growth of her hands.
Yet she learned to cook, weave and paint with her toes – and became an artist, whose work has been shown in 60 exhibitions worldwide. Her abilities were not located in her arms and hands, but in her brain.
The important rule to remember is: what you use grows; what you don’t shrinks. Which is why the key is to continually challenge your brain.
When you learn something new or practise something challenging, your neurons develop more connections.
This was illustrated by a Swedish study involving 14 young adults who became fluent in either Russian or Arabic after a three-month intensive course organised by the country’s armed forces. The language students were compared with a group of regular university students of the same age; before and after MRI scans were taken of both groups.
Compared with the control group of regular university students, the language course ones developed more brain connections and a significant increase in their hippocampus size in just three months – while the control group showed no change.
To better understand how my advice can help you to improve your brain health, it’s helpful to take a closer look at how this mighty organ works.
Your thoughts, emotions, plans, dreams and actions all originate in your brain, beginning with neurons (brain cells) fed by oxygen and nutrients.
The intricate connecting networks, or synapses, are also vital, as are the numerous specialist ‘helper’ cells that enable the whole system to work smoothly and efficiently.
Broadly speaking, we tend to associate different areas of the brain with different functions. Your higher cognitive functions happen in the cortex – the outer layer that surrounds and communicates with all other brain regions and has an incredible ability to learn and adapt.
Meanwhile, your hippocampus plays a key role in memory and learning. You might find it helpful to think of the different parts of the brain as neighbourhoods in a bustling city. Each has its own characteristics, but they’re connected by networks – like busy Metro lines – which transfer signals and carry the constant flow of information that keeps the whole ‘city’ of your brain alive and thriving.
The principal networks are responsible for our main cognitive functions – language, the ability to focus on significant details, vision, our emotions, planning and decision-making and physical movement.
It’s also important to remember that the brain doesn’t exist in isolation: it’s intimately connected to all the other cells, organs, muscles and tissues in the body.
Under normal circumstances, your neurons and their support team work well together. Oxygen and nutrients arrive through the blood vessels, waste is cleared away via the glymphatic system during sleep, and oligodendrocytes – specialised ‘insulating’ cells in the central nervous system – ensure electrical signals race across networks.
But challenges such as obesity or uncontrolled diabetes can throw the system off balance by damaging blood vessels and limiting the supply of oxygen and nutrients to the brain.
Poor sleep interferes with the brain’s nightly cleaning system and excess stress or alcohol can disrupt its normal firing patterns, resulting in faulty operating of the brain’s networks.
For a while, specialised cells can keep things stable. But if problems persist, they can get overwhelmed, adding to inflammation that damages neurons and leading to brain fog and memory decline.
People often think of memory as recalling something from the past – a childhood memory or where you left your keys. But it’s more complex than that.
Memory is changeable and is constantly being reinterpreted through our understanding of the world and our emotions.
So how are memories formed? Research has identified four key stages:
Use my Brain Fitness Calculator to assess how your brain is currently performing and identify what you’d like to work on.
Repeat the test after six weeks and again at the end – by which point the differences should be obvious. The more strictly you follow my programme, the better your results will be.
This calculator focuses on essential brain care elements to help you discover how well you are taking care of your brain now, so that you can assess what to work on during the 12-week programme.
This memory-improving technique involves mentally placing information to be remembered in specific locations in an imagined physical space, such as a palace or building. You then mentally ‘walk’ through that space to retrieve the information when needed.
Here’s how to use a memory palace to memorise your credit card numbers:
This drill may take 30 minutes the first time you do it but, as you improve, you may easily do it in five or ten minutes.
Read more on Internewscast Journal
