Big Think — Keep your brain from declining after age 30
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Every time you move your body, your brain gets what one neuroscientist calls a “bubble bath” of dopamine, serotonin, and growth factors. Here’s how to activate it.
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Neuroscientists Wendy Suzuki, PhD, Samuel Wang, PhD, and Gary Small, MD explain how movement increases blood flow, boosts growth factors like BDNF, and floods the brain with mood-lifting neurochemicals. The brain and body are in constant conversation, and plasticity means your wiring is never fixed. According to Suzuki, even ten minutes of walking can shift your brain’s chemistry immediately, flooding it in a ‘bubble bath’ of positive neurochemicals.
In other words, the way you use your body today shapes how your brain works tomorrow.
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Key Insights
What [music] you do with your body affects your brain. And what you think with your brain also has an effect [music] on the physiology of your body. It works both ways. >> [music] >> People have known that experience can change the brain ever since it became [music] known that the brain was the seat of consciousness, thought, and experience. The brain must undergo change [music] to grow and to be plastic. Memory tends to decrease with age because our brains, like the rest of our [music] body, tends to age. And function does not continue the way it [music] does when we’re young. One of the things that you can do to keep your brain happy and functioning well as you get older is to have a mentally [music] engaged lifestyle. Every single time you move your body, you are [music] giving your brain what I like to call a wonderful bubble bath of neurochemicals. Those neurochemicals include dopamine, serotonin, [music] noradrenaline, endorphins. But here’s the good news. You don’t have to be a marathon [music] runner to get this because even 10 minutes of walking will start to give you immediate benefits in terms [music] of decreasing anxiety levels, decreasing depression levels, the longevity that comes with exercise. [music] That’s what everybody needs right now. So, there are different kinds of cognitive and memory loss that occur with aging. Certain kinds of memory loss, such as forgetting where your car keys are, are [music] part of the normal process of getting older. And in fact, memory peaks surprisingly early at the age of 30 and then declines gradually with time. If you forget where your glasses are, that’s normal memory loss. If you forget the fact that you wear glasses, that’s dementia. It’s not well understood exactly what physically underlies this, although plausible candidates are loss [music] of the brain’s ability to form new connections or to easily modulate the weight of the connections between nerve cells. Those are called synaptic weights. And so, those would be candidates for why the brain seems to be less plastic in certain ways as we get older. >> [music] >> You can look in the brains of people who, after death, are diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s disease, and they have [music] plaques and tangles that appear to be either the causes of cell death or perhaps the residue, the aftermath of [music] cell death. One of the best things you can do to keep your brain alive and healthy is simply improving blood flow to the brain. Another major mechanism that’s been suggested is the secretion of a >> [music] >> signaling molecule called brain-derived neurotrophic factor. It’s a factor that’s made in the brain that causes neurons to grow. And that factor has been demonstrated to improve plasticity in dendrites. The [music] idea that exercise, by triggering the secretion of BDNF, this neurotrophic factor, may lead [music] to increased plasticity and improved brain function. When challenged, we can do more, and everyone knows this. And [music] when in the absence of challenges, we don’t necessarily reach our full potential. And the current goal is to try to [music] find ways to stave off those cognitive losses by even a few years, because as we live longer, having a few years becomes very important. The biggest problems are not so much with long-term memories, but really the short-term memories. So, [music] we can remember our first kiss when we were in high school, but we may not remember what we had for lunch. And because we have shrinking of the brain, brain cells actually start [music] to function less efficiently and and do die over time, the connections between the brain cells diminish, and the neurochemical transmitters seem to [music] have problems. So, all those kinds of physiological changes contribute [music] to problems with memory as we age. And what happens is that memory is basically stored in little neurochemical [music] packets in the brain, so they can be changed, and our
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