Brain boost Your brain begins to shrink from around the age of 20, but while that sounds like pretty bad news, scientists have discovered that it doesn’t necessarily mean losing mental agility. The brain, they say, is able to adapt even when a person is elderly or displaying the initial signs of dementia.
It’s all down to neuroplasticity, which refers to how your brain reorganises neural pathways based on new experiences you have. In order to remember something new – how to speak Chinese or sail a boat, for example – there need to be changes within the brain to ensure that knowledge is retained.
How well the brain changes with this new information is dependent on its plasticity. But while scientists previously assumed that brain plasticity declined as we get older, new research from the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montreal, Canada, has found that this is not the case. The researchers have shown that neuroplasticity even has the potential for delaying the onset of symptoms for Alzheimer’s sufferers.
The researchers hypothesised that certain brain cells involved in other brain processes could, if trained properly, take over from other cells that aren’t functioning as they should. They came up with a training programme, using mnemonics and word lists to promote encoding and information retrieval.
The researchers then analysed magnetic resonance images (MRI), to ascertain brain activity within two different groups of elderly people: one group already showed signs of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), the other did not. They took MRIs before and after the memory training.
As expected, before the training the study participants with MCI showed reduced activation of the parts of the brain associated with memory. After six weeks of memory training, however, they showed more activation in those areas and in new areas, parts of the brain usually associated with language processing.
First published March 30, 2011