Yesterday I went to some very interesting lectures at the university on the brain and the beneficial affect on it of various things like exercise. The first one was Fit body, fit brain by Prof Winston Wybrow who informed us the brain shrinks 5% each decade from the age of 40, affecting things like some types of memory the older you get. The easiest way of fulfilling the continual requirement of the brain for energy (blood flow and oxygen) is by exercising and becoming fit. This way you can increase the blood flow to the brain by 17%. It creates new connections and new cells in the brain. This put 10 years back on to your life so why wouldn't you do it.
Research (the nurses study of l8,000) found that higher levels of physical activity were associated with better cognitive performance and there was a 20% less risk of impairment. In another study of men they found that walking more than 2 miles a day decreases the risk of dementia.
Doing aerobic as well as weight and strength exercise gave the the most benefical results especialy if carried out for 45 minutes a session as opposed to 20 minutes.
Older people from 55-80y can benefit from this with the largest gains made by the 66-70 year olds. High-fitness brains were more efficient, low-fitness brains were more conflicted and dithery. So moral of the story is keep active and fit and get the cognitive benefit of it as ;long as you can.
The next lecture I went to was entitled Being human: the science of memory, consciousness and personality and dealt with the evolution of the brain over time, how it has got bigger , relative to body size. Especially the frontal lobes have got bigger. There are a couple orucial genes out of a total of 22,500 we have in our bodies which either are efficient or non-efficent breakdowners of dopamine, and this MetMet gene is the gene that is implicated in Parkinson's , as opposed to the ValVal one which isn't.
The Celebration Choir performed again to an appreciative audience, showing what music can achieve even when people are sufferering considerable impairment after strokes or have other neurological conditions like Parkinson's.
Prof. Suzanne Purdy gave an interesting lecture after that on The language of music; research on speech and song. She said that brain disease affects the auditory system and speech impairment. Singing out loud activates both parts of the brain and regular choral sining in particular has a number of significant benefits for sustained psychological wellbeing and cognitive benefits as well as being good for one's attention, social support and mood. Singing might even improve a neurologial problem, even active listening to song and music being beneficial too, teh so-called Mozart effect. So there's hope for everyone!
I finished off the day by looking at the various stands of the various interest groups and came away feeling contented with my lot in life. What with the Never too old programme at the YMCA and the Celebration Choir I am maintaining optimum brain fitness of one sort or the other.
