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Gray Matter
Want to “Boost!” Your Brain? Read On!
Perhaps it is not surprising anxious Americans will spend $80 million on “brain exercise” products this year. Not when you understand how these women and men share a dread of Alzheimer’s disease, even more than they fear cancer.
“Many cancers are curable,” they typically explain. “Alzheimer’s is lights out! It’s the mind-robbing disease.”
An estimated five million Americans suffer with incurable, fatal Alzheimer’s, while a recent study shows after age 71 one in every seven will present with some form of dementia.
Forgetting, confusion, and a tenuous grasp of reality are the hallmarks to brain anomalies; therefore cash and credit cards are maximized to carry home sudoku puzzles, computer games and programs, books, tapes, videos--all marketed and promoted as brain boosters.
Additionally, credentialed neurosurgeons are opening practices that promise Cognitive Enhancement through chemistry and surgery. For example: TMS, or transcranial magnetic stimulation.
To all of this, I simply say: “Stop!” Quit deluding yourself with unproven arguments. Instead, just exercise.
Once more, I climb into the bully pulpit to write how exercise—the bending, stretching, walking, swimming, biking: move the body kind—“causes the release of growth factors, meaning proteins that increase the number of connections between neurons” in the brain. (I quote here from medical literature.)
Simply put: this represents stimulation!
Moreover, regular, vigorous exercise leads to the “birth of neurons in the hippocampus, a brain region important for memory.” Now, I’m quoting Sam Wang, Princeton University neuroscience professor, and editor Sandra Aamodt of the journal Nature Neuroscience. They are authors of a
recent essay in The New York Times that left no doubt to their views on this controversial subject:
“Instead of spending money on computer games or puzzles,” the pair writes, “invest in a gym membership. Or just turn off the computer and go for a brisk walk.”
For the last 10 years, I have written how the day must come when doctors will write prescriptions for exercise, or be guilty of prima facie malpractice. Recently, the presidents of the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Medical Assn. joined forces to promote the initiative: “Exercise is medicine.”
Family physician Bob Sallis, leader of the Sports Medicine specialists, tells listeners that exercise remains “the easiest, cheapest, and most effective medicine” around, and that doctors must begin to preach the benefits of physical exertion. (He stopped short of telling them to “prescribe.”)
How, you properly ask, does exercise impact brain health? According to scientists Wang & Aamodt, fitness training “slows the age-related shrinkage of the frontal cortex,” an area critical to what is called: “executive function.” This refers to those abilities that guide you toward intelligent or “appropriate behavior,” and allow you to focus on a job, despite distractions.
Finally, I would be derelict if I didn’t repeat this counsel from “Biomarkers: The 10 Determinants of Aging You Can Control” (Simon & Schuster; 1991), “No group in our population can benefit more from exercise than senior citizens…Indeed, the muscles of elderly people are just as responsive to weight lifting as those of younger people…”
Then, authors William Evans, Ph.D., and Dr. Irwin H. Rosenberg wrote, “Building muscle mass in the elderly is the key to their rejuvenation (and) exercise is the key to a healthy and rewarding old age.”
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Outrageous Associations
