Science is a human enterprise, so it is as susceptible to bias and accepted beliefs as any other area of knowledge. For years, brain researchers accepted the conventional wisdom about brain function: It couldn’t be improved. You had the brain you had developed in childhood and at some point in later life it started to decline. Unlike exercising your muscles and joints, they thought that no way existed to improve your brain’s fitness. Even as recently as the late 1990s, this was dogma, unquestioned by medical science, including gerontologists dealing with diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
But does that really make sense? After all, your brain exists in a kind of dual state: it creates and focuses your mental life, but it is also part of your physical being. Should it be the only area of your body that is unaffected by the beneficial effects of exercise, diet, meditation, and emotional fitness?
Fortunately, the answer to that question is no. The brain, far from being the inert information processor that mainstream science considered it to be a few decades ago, is a dynamic, fluid system that is infinitely adaptable if you make a consistent effort. The various centers of the brain are interwoven with a galaxy of intricate neural fibers, trillions of neurons forming hundreds of trillions of connections. This tremendously complex system is designed to receive and send signals, so it is only sensible to conclude that it is designed to adapt to the strength and consistency of those signals. It turns out that this is true, and this is one of the most exciting advances in our knowledge of the brain. Your brain possesses a remarkable property known as “neuroplasticity.”
The basic meaning of neuroplasticity is that like a muscle, the physical brain responds to consistent, rigorous stimuli in a way that does not simply grow new neural connections, but actually changes the structure of the brain in order to more efficiently use the incoming signals. This means that your brain is never too old to grow and adapt to new tasks and challenges. In fact, it has great versatility.
An example can been seen in the brains of fast readers. In the brains of some people who read and absorb written information at high speed, time produces a change in the brain such that the pathways from the centers that process optical information to the centers of higher thinking become denser with neural connections, a sort of mental superhighway to allow the quickly acquired information to pass through the brain more quickly. Researchers have found similar changes in the brains of athletes and craftspeople.
Use It Or Lose Everything
If you spent years training your thoughts with mental challenges and demanding tasks, such as learning Greek or playing the saxophone, is it not likely that your brain would be more supple, responsive, and sharp? Clearly, we can train our brains like an athlete trains his or her body. The brain is unique as an organ that can be refined through our attention to it. That is the potential we find in neuroplasticity.
Based on the Bronx Aging Study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, people with high IQs and more education have a lower risk of developing dementia as they get older. This may be because such people are more likely to engage in brain-intensive activities, or because they have more neural connections through genetic inheritance, or both. Either way, an active intellect appears to have more healthy neurons in reserve to be used when natural brain degeneration kills off some brain cells. This confirms the “use it or lose it” idea of brain health. Just as with any other part of your body, if you do not keep your brain active, its abilities will decline dramatically.
But we don’t believe that “use it or lose it” really captures the importance of keeping the brain active and demanding increasingly rigorous work from it all your life. A more accurate way to phrase the statement would be “Use it or lose everything.” As you age, your brain will decline in some ways. that is normal and is part of our evolutionary heritage; there is nothing you can do to avoid it entirely. But with so much of your brain matter underutilized, it is within your power to transform your brain through disciplined thought and action so that as you age you have reserves of brainpower to replace what you lose because of aging, stress, and the environment.
This article is excerpted from Ilchi Lee and Jessie Jones’ book “In Full Bloom: A Brain Education Guide for Successful Aging.”
