Hi,
I was thinking about you last week when pbs aired a program done in Japan on aging brains. Electrodes were used to show brain activity. Men and women who learned new things had the largest, most active thinking portions of their brains.
That's what reminded me of you.
About a decade ago there was a publicized study involving nuns in Minnesota who tended to live to 100 and above, and who also had little dementia in the community as a whole.
The article, which I think was in Life Magazine, talked about how these nuns tended to do puzzles everyday, crosswords and the like.
The nuns had all agreed to let their brains be dissected and studied after they died, and that was what gave the researchers access to so much information.
Basically, the researchers discovered that some of the nuns had brain tissue indicative of Alzheimer's, but had not exhibited the symptoms, at least not particularly.
So, what the researchers learned was that by learning new things (apparently doing puzzles is like learning new things, according to this study) the nuns had grown new pathways in their brains that reduced the impact of the pathways that were lost to the disease.
When I first learned about my brain injury, the therapist who was teaching me compensation techniques told me that I could regrow some of the nerve networks that I had lost, and that playing games that used memory and distinguishing functions of the mind helped.
Also on the recent pbs program there was a man who had something near debilitating back pain. He started walking to address the pain, which went away and he began doing marathons and winning. The program used this to illustrate a relationship between physical activity and brain function. But I forget the particulars.
Oh... there was one man who did 5 minutes of exercise each morning, that was it. And that amount was enough to keep his body and mind functioning very well.
The exercises they showed were a bit Tai Chi like, only he was holding what looked like a cylindrical weight.
(I didn't want you guys to think I forgot about you.)
I was thinking about you last week when pbs aired a program done in Japan on aging brains. Electrodes were used to show brain activity. Men and women who learned new things had the largest, most active thinking portions of their brains.
That's what reminded me of you.
About a decade ago there was a publicized study involving nuns in Minnesota who tended to live to 100 and above, and who also had little dementia in the community as a whole.
The article, which I think was in Life Magazine, talked about how these nuns tended to do puzzles everyday, crosswords and the like.
The nuns had all agreed to let their brains be dissected and studied after they died, and that was what gave the researchers access to so much information.
Basically, the researchers discovered that some of the nuns had brain tissue indicative of Alzheimer's, but had not exhibited the symptoms, at least not particularly.
So, what the researchers learned was that by learning new things (apparently doing puzzles is like learning new things, according to this study) the nuns had grown new pathways in their brains that reduced the impact of the pathways that were lost to the disease.
When I first learned about my brain injury, the therapist who was teaching me compensation techniques told me that I could regrow some of the nerve networks that I had lost, and that playing games that used memory and distinguishing functions of the mind helped.
Also on the recent pbs program there was a man who had something near debilitating back pain. He started walking to address the pain, which went away and he began doing marathons and winning. The program used this to illustrate a relationship between physical activity and brain function. But I forget the particulars.
Oh... there was one man who did 5 minutes of exercise each morning, that was it. And that amount was enough to keep his body and mind functioning very well.
The exercises they showed were a bit Tai Chi like, only he was holding what looked like a cylindrical weight.
(I didn't want you guys to think I forgot about you.)
