It’s a love story between a lady who lost her memory in old age but her spouse kept by her side, despite the urging of his children. The lady would often remember him for a while, only to be afraid of the “strange” man hugging her the next second.

It got me thinking, what if I ended up like her? What sort of torture would I subject the people around me? There are little experiences that are more painful to see your loved one forget you. To lose memory of who you are. To lose your self-identity. And last but not least… to die not knowing who you are.

The movie got me thinking of my death-bed moment – I wanted to be able to say goodbye to the people around me. That’s when I truly “wake up” to the fact that my brain may need some attention.

That’s when I first began to research into the subject for the next 5 years or so. What do we need to do in order to maintain a healthy brain? Thee subject is complex. To explain it in full would literally require books. For the purpose of this article, I’ll drastically summarize the most important point. Here’s what I found: There are mainly 4 pillars of a healthy brain. They are:

1. Stress management
2. Nutrition
3. Brain exercises
4. Exercise

Let’s explore them in a little depth, shall we?

Stress Management

Did you know that your brain is built to withstand only about 30 seconds of stress? Yet most of us live in an environment of constant pressure. When you’re under stress, your brain releases of hormone called “cortisol”. Cortisol raises your heart and blood sugar but decreases immune response (making you more susceptible to diseases) and excites brain cells to death. The less brain cells you possess, the lower you mental function becomes.

This is why various studies have shown people who are under stress tend to have difficulty memorizing facts, learning new skills and even sustaining attention. It makes sense. From an evolutionary viewpoint, you experience stress when a predator approaches. At that time, would you have the mood to learn and memorize? Not likely!

There are several very effective ways to manage stress. Listening to baroque music, meditating and even an taking afternoon nap are some of the great techniques to begin with. If you don’t have the time for these, simply closing your eyes and taking deep breaths can do wonders. Try it.

Brain Food

It doesn’t matter if you’re the calmest person on earth – if you’re not consuming a healthy diet, your brain will not function at its peak. Your diet contains the building blocks of your body, without which no part of your body can work optimally.

Also called “Neurogenesis”, part of the workings of your brain is its ability to grow new brain cells, so that even if you have suffered some sort of physical trauma or you’re experiencing mental decline, it can be reversed. However, the brain can only do so if it has access to the building blocks required.

As a rule of thumb, consume more green leafy vegetables but it is important to note that vitamin B12, lack of which can cause psychosis, do not have a plant source. If you would like to know more about brain food, check out this blog post.

Brain exercises

“Neurons that fire together, wire together”. That’s the first rule of “Hebbian Learning”, currently the most accepted hypothesis as to how our brain works. The opposite side of that rule, is of course, “Neurons that no longer fire together, no longer wire together”. In effect, you either “use it or lose it”.

This is why brain exercises are so crucial. When your brain wires together, it creates what is called a “synapse”. By stimulating your brain through brain exercises, you will not only be strengthening your current synapses, you will also grow new neurons and create new synapses (again, requires the necessary building blocks). The more neurons and synapses you possess, the better your brain functions.

On the other hand, if you don’t stimulate your brain, your brain will lose its current synapses – an option most people chose.

Did you know that 60% of Americans who left college never read another book again? When was the last time you learn a new skill? How much of your time do you spend sitting down? How many of the things that you recorded in your iPhone (or any other device) can you remember?

If you don’t continuously learn, you’ll find it difficult to learn later in life. If you don’t use your limbs, you’ll find it difficult to stand and balance yourself later in life. If you don’t continuously stimulate your memory, you’ll lose the ability to remember later in life. Use it or lose it, remember?

Here is a simple brain exercise to try out. From now onward, be consciously aware of your surrounding. You’ll be amazed at just how things in your life that your brain has subconsciously filter. For example, it is a well known fact in the marketing industry that the average consumer is exposed to about 3000 sales messages each day. How many do you really notice?

In this exercise, I want you to take notice of your colleague’s shoes. His/Her belt, the things on his/her table, the nooks and crooks of the office and everything you can possibly notice. Even what is the color of the shirt the person behind you is wearing. Try this: Next time you’re in a restaurant, try asking your friend what color is the shirt the person behind him is wearing. Don’t be surprise to find out that he/she don’t know!

This type of active awareness (as contrasted to our regularly passive one) stimulates the brain and thus keep its neurons firing and wiring.

Physical Exercise

There are numerous benefits of exercise but one that is not popularly known is that it allows your brain to function at its peak. Imagine this: Our ancestors walk an average of 12 miles a day. How much have you walked lately?

When you exercise, your brain releases a plethora of chemicals designed almost to keep you addicted to exercising. Some of these chemicals calm you down. Some of them increases attention. Some keep you alert. Others, such as serotonin (often used synthetically to treat depression), allows you to be euphoric.

Exercising also fires neurons responsible for moving your limbs and keeping your balance. It, therefore, strengthens their synapses and makes sure you don’t need help moving around in old age. The good news is, nothing brutal is required. A simple 30 minute walk daily has been shown to improve IQ test scores, keep your energy level up and boost your memory.

Is it probable what your brain will function optimally? Not likely.

According to Sharp Brains, the four pillars of healthy brain functions are nutrition, exercise, brain exercises and stress management. In this blog post, I’m going to concentrate on just one, the one I believe to be one of the biggest culprit of early mental decline: Stress.

What Happens To Your Brain Under Intense Stress

A healthy amount of stress is, of course, crucial to a healthy psyche. But when you’re over your healthy limit, your brain releases cortisol, a chemical known as cortisol. Cortisol increases your heart rate and raises blood pressure. You become increasingly alert… at least for the moment.

This is, of course, a crucial system to keep the human race alive. When you’re faced with a saber-tooth tiger, you want yourself to be literally on your toes, ready to fight or run. Cortisol saves lives.

But in the long run, cortisol kills brain cells. It literally excites brain cells to death. Several studies have also shown cortisol to damage the part of your brain called the hippocampus, which is believed to be where short-term memory are converted into long term ones. It can be inferred, therefore, that stress reduces memory – a correlation that has been repeated in several studies.

And it’s not just your memory that suffers. The part of your brain that regulates stress is called the limbic system (the part of the brain that separates us mammals from reptiles). It’s also the part of the brain that controls emotion, bonding (relationships) and cooperation. According to Dr Daniel G. Amen, author of “Change Your Brain, Change Your Life“, over-activity of your limbic system can lead to paranoia and depression… among many other side-effects.

Stress literally kills.

How Listening To Music Reduces Stress

There are many ways to reduce stress. Studies have shown meditation, yoga, deep breathing and even prayer to be excellent alternative. But if you don’t believe in these “new-age” stuff, then listen up: Simply listening music works as well. Caveat: Not all music will work though.

By exposing subjects to loud music such as the various genres of rock, neuroscientists found decreased concentration, memory and even intelligence (I was skeptical of the results at first because I was a rock fan). One of the reasons is perhaps of the irregular rhythm of such music. Neuroscientists theorized that irregular rhythms that do not correlates with the brain’s rhytms is essentially noise of the brain. Background noise (such as those of refrigerator, air-conditioner and even computers), has been shown to have the same effect on the developing minds of toddlers.

Classical symphonies, on the other hand, have the opposite effect. A Standford University study found that subjects exposed to baroque music enhances the ability to anticipate events and sustain attention. MABT conducted a similar study and found that children who are exposed to baroque music did better in standard tests against those who weren’t exposed. Numerous studies have since been done on the effect of classical music on the brain and the conclusion is clear: It’s beneficial for everything from intelligence (also called the Mozart Effect) to ADD (attention deficit disorder) to happiness and of course, stress.

So the next time you feel like you’re going to explode, close your eyes and listen to some Mozart. He is great for your brain fitness.

As with most other folks in my situation, I did a quick search on Google about these so called “brain fitness programs“. Let me be clear: I was a skeptic. After all, I was taught in school (I happen to be a biology student in college) that what happens to your brain, including memory loss and your IQ, is largely determined by genetics. In other words, there’s nothing you can do to save your brain if it is degenerating (except with the use of synthetic drugs to delay the inevitable).

Thinking back, it was foolish to believe what my professors… after all, the technology at the time didn’t allow for such claims to be made. We had no machines, no MRI or PET scan. What we knew about the brain back then was purely based on the observation of the reaction of whatever we were testing. We can’t see what exactly happened in the brain.

But it’s different now.

Today, we can see what the brain is doing in real-time. Today, we can see how a particular brain is different today from one week ago.

Modern technology has allowed us to observe the different indicators of neurological health. Did it grow new neurons in this time frame? Did it lose some? Did establish new synapses? What sort of hormone is it secreting? If so, how much and how frequent?

And because of such technological breakthroughs, a slew of scientific research on the brain and its functions popped up in the last decade or so. In fact, in that period of time, we learn more about the brain than the past millennium combined! And all that new knowledge seem to confirm one fact and one fact only: That what we knew about that thing that sits in the middle of your two ears is WRONG.

The Birth of Brain Fitness Programs

That means it’s not all about nature – nurture do play a part. What you do everyday physically affects your brain. I can write a book about how daily activities influences brain growth but I will not bore you with the details. Here’s what you need to know: Your brain is just like your muscles: If you want it to grow, you have to challenge it. If you’re not growing, you don’t stay the same. The natural process of aging will make sure you degenerate.

Your brain is just like your muscles: If you want it to grow, you have to challenge it. If you’re not growing, you don’t stay the same. The natural process of aging will make sure you degenerate.

That discovery spurred the boom of an industry that is brain fitness programs. We all know that when there’s demand, enterprising souls will come along to supply it. That’s happened here, thus if you do a quick Google search on “brain fitness programs”, you’ll find more than a dozen options.

How do you know which one to choose?

That was my question when I was looking for a program to stick to. It was a tricky question to answer because, well, no one (at the time of this writing) has done any sort of testing and comparison of all the programs out there. There are two reasons for this:

1. Brain improvements are often subtle. Coming up with ways to reliably measure this change is, in itself, a tough challenge.
2. Improvements often take a period of time – sometimes years to take effect. It would thus requires lots of financial backing to undertake such a project.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t use your own common sense to eliminate some options. Here’s the checklist that I go through:

1. Are there any sort of scientific study that was conducted to test its effectiveness? If so, does the study consist of a double blind study and has it been replicated with different subjects? (If you cannot access the study, safely assume it’s fictitious.)
2. Look through the testimonials. Are their clients using words such as “feeling better” or “experience improvement”? Feeling is obviously extremely subjective and the experienced improvement can, in fact, be due to cognitive dissonance.
3. What does qualified third party reviews say about it?
4. Take their free trials. Is it fun? If it is, safely assume it’s a waste of time because it is not supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to challenge your mental capacity and whenever there’s a challenge it’s never fun. You’ll fail at most of the “games” presented in the program at your first dozens of tries before you get them right and trust me, that’s not fun.
5. Does the program offer money back guarantee? If the creators are confident the program will work for you, shouldn’t they also offer money back guarantee?

Now, if you go through all the things in the list, you’ll probably come down to two to three choices. I frankly don’t know which of them are the best but I ended up choosing Posit Science due to this article in Scientific American. I don’t have any way to objectively measure my improvements but I do know none of the people close to me ever mentioned my forgetfulness again.

I hate that metaphor. Why? Because it doesn’t reflect the true nature of your brain. You see, when modern neurology was first founded, it was assumed that the brain is like a machine. It has fixed parts and if one of those parts breaks down, there’s nothing that we can do to rectify that misfortune.

But modern researchers have shown the opposite to be true: That your brain evolves to adapt to the environment it is exposed to. Take a look at the case of Michelle Mack, the girl who was born with only half a brain.

How do you think she live her life? Struggling to survive with life support machines attached to her 24/7?

Michelle lived a relatively normal life. She speaks fluently, except when frustrated, and she walks, read and hear just fine. Yes, she did learn the basics of human life a little slower than other children, but that’s just because her brain required that extra time to adapt.

How could that be? Aren’t we taught that the left hemisphere perform certain tasks while the right hemisphere perform others? How could a girl with half a brain live a relatively normal life?

The answer lies in brain plasticity. Your brain is NOT like a microchip. It is, in fact, unlike any other thing in this world.

Brain Plasticity – The Two Edged Sword

But just like any other tools we have, brain plasticity can both be a curse or a blessing.

If you live your life constantly learning new skills, your brain will adapt and “learn how to learn”. If you live your life moving your limbs, your brain will adapt and learn how to keep them moving.

Unfortunately, of course, most people live a life of repetition. Studies have shown that about 80% – 90% of the things people think and do today, are the same things they did and thought yesterday. Add to that the fact that most people hardly ever exercise and that more than 60% of the people who left college never again read a book…

Taking brain plasticity in consideration… Is it any wonder that as people get older, they are having a hard learning anything at all? Or that they can hardly balance themselves anymore? Or that their memory are always slipping away from their grip?

Your brain fitness, depends on what you do with your brain. Sure, nutrition plays a crucial role in providing the resources for your brain to change… but if you don’t use your brain, it will adapt and turn itself off. Quite literally.