You: Staying Young: Make Your RealAge Younger and Live Up to 35% Longer. Michael Roizen F.
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brain actually loses 10 percent of its weight between the ages of twenty and ninety. We lose around forty thousand nerves per day, so by the age of sixty-five roughly one-tenth of our brain cells are gone. And the rate of loss is higher in the frontal brain region, which controls problem solving, the ability to think abstractly, and the ability to carry out multiple tasks simultaneously.
But what happens when a storm, an accident or a chainsaw-wielding hoodlum knocks out the power lines? You lose connections, so you lose power – maybe to a particular neighbourhood or maybe to a large segment of the city, depending on which ones got fried. Same goes for your brain. If something knocks out those neural connections, then small or large parts of your brain can experience a blackout, and you freak because you can’t remember that you left the car keys on the back of the toilet.
Certainly, many things can cause malfunctions in your neurological grid. Some are acute and immediate, like a concussion arising from a brain bruise. Others are more chronic, as in the case of a genetic malfunction that can cause your power lines to be rickety so they easily cut out. These are the ones that we’re mainly going to address here.
Your Memory: Don’t Fuggedaboudit
Part of our job as doctors is to tell you things straight up, because when we don’t tell the truth, people get hurt. No sugarcoating. No BS (that really stands for no bad science). When it comes to your brain, here’s a fact that’s harsher than an Arctic winter: the research shows that, eventually, everyone in America will either get Alzheimer’s or care for someone who has it.
Play Doc
When trying to determine if a family member is having serious memory trouble, ask him what he had for dinner or to describe current events, or give him three objects to remember and five minutes later ask him what they are. If he has trouble with any of those questions, it’s an indication that something’s going wrong with his short-term memory – one of the signs of a serious cognitive dysfunction.
In some way or another, we’re all going to be affected by serious change-your-life memory problems. But the other side of that statistic is this: memory disorders aren’t as uncontrollable as they seem, and the way to attack potential brain problems is by using your brain to understand them. For starters, here are some things you should know about your noggin:
Whether you’ve seen it on the news, on TV shows or within your own family, you know how dementia looks from the outside: people forget faces, names, where they live and information that seems – to the rest of the world – so easy to remember. The most frequently seen problem: getting lost on a walk home. To really control your own genetic destiny, you need to take a look at what memory loss looks like on the inside. For the record, age-related memory loss is classified in several ways. Conditions such as Alzheimer’s, dementia and mild cognitive impairment are all technically different. For our purposes, we’re tackling them all together as age-related memory problems because of the similarities in how they change people’s lives.
Your Brain: Mind and Matter
Before we crack some skulls and dive inside the brain, let’s quickly look at what memory really is: essentially, it’s the process of learning information, storing it and then having the ability to recall it when you need it – whether to solve problems, tell stories or save yourself on the witness stand.
Learning begins with those power connections in your brain: neurons firing messages to one another. Your ability to process information is determined by the junctions between those neurons, called the synapses. The ability of brain cells to speak to one another is strengthened or weakened as you use them. We’ll spare you all the biological miracles that take place between your ears, but essentially, the more you use those synapses, the stronger they get and the more they proliferate. That’s why you may have strong neural pathways for your family history or weak ones for 1980s music trivia. That also gives you a little insight into how you remember things. If something’s exciting to you, then you learn it faster – and train those synapses to make strong connections. But if the information seems more boring than the sexual habits of an earthworm, you can still learn and build those connections with repeated use.
FACTOID
Type 2 diabetes (the kind associated with being overweight) increases the risk of Alzheimer’s, probably by increasing inflammation or arterial ageing, but also because too much of the hormone insulin in the brain can stimulate beta-amyloid buildup. In fact, Alzheimer’s is now being called type 3 diabetes.
Problems arise when synapses lie dormant: the less you use certain connections, the greater chance they have of falling into disrepair (like losing fluency in a foreign language if you don’t use it for a long time). Technically, we actually learn by weakening underutilized synapses and repairing and strengthening the synapses we commonly use. So if you cook a lot and enjoy it, you’ll eventually know the recipes by heart – and learn them faster because it’s enjoyable. You build a large connecting wire, which allows for the faster flow of information. By contrast, lesser-used pathways fall into disrepair, so you lose or disable those connections. If you haven’t exercised your 1970s TV trivia synapse in a long time, then you’re not going to remember the name of the kid who played Bobby Brady on The Brady Bunch (ten points if you said Mike Lookinland before we did).
To keep your memory functioning at optimal power, you’ll need to focus on three aspects of your