Save the brain with all the synapses

    Yesterday I had a chance to chat with Monir Mazaheri, a researcher at the Department of Neurobiology at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. She spoke about recent discoveries in studies of brain degradation and Alzheimer's. It turned out that there are very simple ways to develop your intellect if you are young and save it if you are closer to 60. The bottom line is that it is not necessary to do a lot of purely intellectual work, it is more important to use all areas of the brain.

    First, a little theory:
    • the brain is a system of nerve cells (neurons). Nerve cells are connected by synapses. Synapses are characterized by great plasticity, that is, synaptic connections can form, strengthen or weaken, and collapse. Learning is associated with the formation of long-term synaptic connections between neurons.
    • The brain is specialized. That is, different zones are responsible for different actions. When we speak, one zone (speech) is activated, when we present images - another, when we learn to dance - the third, etc.
    • In those areas that we do not use, synaptic connections are weakening. As a result, we forget what we once knew and were able to. Worse, if we do the same thing every day, solving monotonous tasks, entire parts of our brain are not involved and their functionality weakens. In youth, this leads to the fact that overly narrow specialist tasks from other areas suddenly turn out to be too complicated. For example, it is difficult to solve a simple riddle or draw a cat from a picture. And in old age, this leads to dementia (senile dementia), because to restore lost synaptic connections - to learn new things - is almost impossible.


    The good news is that maintaining intelligence at altitude is not at all difficult. You just need to use as many different areas of the brain as possible so that the connections in them do not weaken. What exactly to do:
    1. Talk more. Social contacts involve many different zones: after all, you need to remember what the person’s name is, imagine what he looks like, what he does, what interests him, what you talked about last time. And it doesn’t matter if you communicate in person or on the Internet. By the way, old people who have a lot of social contacts rarely have dementia.
    2. If you do everything with your right hand, start doing something with your left. This activates the opposite hemisphere of the brain.
    3. Crosswords, sudoku and other intellectual things make you strain your brain, delve into memory and restore almost lost synaptic connections.
    4. It’s good if your hobby is radically different from work. Yes, “at work I program under Windows, and at home under Linux” - this is not a radical difference. This is a direct path to the loss of functionality of a large part of your brain, and even weakening of abilities in the field of specialization. Truly complex tasks require a non-trivial approach, imagination, visualization, the use of methods from other areas, heuristics, etc.
    5. Try new, learn new. I have seen from my own experience that learning new skills can provide unexpected bonuses in completely different areas. Having learned touch typing, I suddenly became a "girl-catch-all-not-looking" from the "girl-full of hands". Now, if something falls somewhere on the periphery of my field of vision, and I can reach, in 9 out of 10 cases I will catch it.
    6. It is not necessary that all this be difficult, it would be better if it is interesting and entertaining.

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