Top Quotes: “Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age” — Sanjay Gupta

Introduction

“ A new study in 2018, published in the journal Genetics, revealed that the person we marry factors greater into our longevity than our genetic inheritance does. And by a long shot! Why? Because it turns out that our lifestyle habits weigh heavily into our decisions around marriage — much more so than most other decisions in our lives. The researchers, who also analyzed birth and death dates of nearly 55 million family trees that encompassed 406 million people who were born from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, found that genes accounted for well under 7 percent of people’s life span versus the 20 to 30 percent of most previous estimates. That means that over 90 percent of our health and longevity is in our own hands.”

“I like an adage I once heard in Okinawa: “I want to live my life like an incandescent lightbulb. Burn brightly my entire life, and then one day suddenly go out.” We want the same for our brains. We don’t want the flickering of fluorescent lightbulbs that signal their impending demise. When we think of old age, we think of hospital beds and forgotten memories. Neither needs to happen, and your brain is the one organ that can get stronger as you age. There’s nothing brainy about it — anyone can build a better brain at any age.”

“ Your brain is roughly 73 percent water (same for your heart), and that is why it takes only 2 percent dehydration to affect your attention, memory and other cognitive skills, so drinking just a few ounces of water can reverse that.”

“Every minute, 750 to 1,000 milliliters of blood flow through the brain. This is enough to fill a wine bottle and then some. Every minute!”

“Your brain can process a visual image in less time than it takes for you to blink.”

“ Your brain starts slowing down by the surprisingly young age of twenty-four, right before maximum maturity, but it peaks for different cognitive skills at different ages. No matter how old you are, you’re likely still getting better at some things. An extreme case is vocabulary skills, which may peak as late as the early seventies!”

“Many of us, however, mistake memory for “memorizing.” We view memory as a warehouse where we keep our knowledge when we are not using it, but that metaphor is not correct because memory is not static like a physical building. Our memories are constantly changing as we take in fresh information andinterpret it. From your brain’s perspective, new information and experiences in the future can change the memories of our past. Consider this in evolutionary terms: Being able to recall all the details of a particular event is not necessarily a survival advantage. The function of our memory is more about helping to build and maintain a cohesive life narrative.”

“The truth is we each are fairly adept at remembering some types of things and not so great at remembering others. If you struggle with remembering, say, people’s names and you’re not suffering from a physical disease or dementia, it’s usually not the failing of your entire memory system. It could be a lack of attention at the time you were being introduced and first heard the person’s name. It could also be an inefficient retrieval.”

“Alzheimer’s disease could be another potential side effect of a sugary Western diet.

People with type 2 diabetes may be at least twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, and those with prediabetes or metabolic syndrome may have an increased risk for having pre-dementia or mild cognitive impairment (MCI).& Not all studies confirm the connection, but the evidence is mounting, forcing scientists to think differently and see broader relationships when it comes to risk for brain disease. The path from a poor diet to Alzheimer’s doesn’t appear to have to go through type 2 diabetes. In other words, studies are now showing that people with high blood sugar have a higher rate of cognitive decline than those with normal blood sugar. This was true in one particularly alarming longitudinal study following more than five thousand people over ten years.”

“Your brain, like the rest of your body, changes as you grow older. While there is normal age-related tissue loss and degeneration of the synapses, here’s a new finding we all should rejoice over. In 2018, researchers from Columbia University showed for the first time that healthy older folks can generate just as many new brain cells as younger people. The researchers found that the ability to make new neurons from precursor cells in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center, does not hinge solely on age. Although older folks have less vascularization (fewer and less robust blood vessels) and perhaps less ability of new neurons to make connections, they don’t necessarily lose their ability to grow new brain cells. The key word here, though, is healthy--as in healthy individuals. It should be clear by now that to maintain neurogenesis, vascularization, and make new neural connections, you have to stay healthy overall.”

“One of the reasons children seem to learn a new language more easily than adults is that they are less self-conscious.”

“One item to note, however, is that Alzheimer’s strikes a disproportionate number of women compared to men. Two-thirds of Americans with Alzheimer’s disease are women, and we don’t have an understanding yet why this is the case or what causes women to be at higher risk.”

“Myth: You Are Dominated by Either Your “Right” or “Left” Brain

Contrary to what you might have been taught in the past, your brain’s “two sides” — right and left — are intricately codependent. You may have heard that you can be “right-brained” or “left-brained” — and that those who favor the right are more creative or artistic and those who favor the left are more technical and logical. The left brain/right brain notion originated from the realization that many people express and receive language more in the left hemisphere and spatial abilities and emotional expression more in the right. Psychologists have used the idea to distinguish between different personality types. But brain scanning technology has revealed that the brain’s two hemispheres most often work together intricately. For example, language processing, once thought to be the domain of the left hemisphere only, is now understood to take place in both hemispheres. The left side handles grammar and pronunciation, while the right processes intonation, and the brain recruits both left and right sides for both reading and math.”

“Myth: You Have Only Five Senses

You can likely name all five senses: sight (ophthalmoception), smell (olfacoception), taste (gustaoception), touch (tactioception), and hearing (audioception). But there are others with the “cept” ending, which is Latin for take or receive. The other six senses are also processed in the brain and give us more data about the outside world:

• Proprioception: A sense of where your body parts are and what they’re doing.
• Equilibrioception: A sense of balance, otherwise known as your internal GPS. This tells you if you’re sitting, standing, or lying down. It’s located in the inner ear (which is why problems in your inner ear can cause vertigo).
• Nociception: A sense of pain.
• Thermo(re)ception: A sense of temperature.
• Chronoception: A sense of the passage of time.
• Interception: A sense of your internal needs, like hunger, thirst, needing to use the bathroom.”

“Among people who are eighty-five years old, an age at which more than 30 percent have developed dementia, signs of brain decline began silently when they were between fifty-five and sixty-five years old. Similarly, the brain health of the 10 percent or so of people who are sixty-five years old and have developed dementia started to quietly degenerate when they were between thirty-five and forty-five years old. In the words of one prominent neurologist, “Alzheimer’s disease may be more aptly termed a younger and middle-aged person’s disease.”

We don’t usually think about dementia when we’re entering our prime, but we should.”

Tips

“Simply being inactive, regardless of your body weight, has been shown to be twice as deadly as being obese.”

“ Prolonged sitting — more than eight hours a day with zero physical activity — can kill you or lead to an early death. Most of that damage is metabolic. Here is what happens. When you are immobile, your circulation slows down and your body uses less of your blood sugar, which means more sugar is circulating. Being motionless also negatively influences blood fats, high-density lipoprotein (the good cholesterol), resting blood pressure, and the satiety hormone leptin (which tells you when to stop eating). Sitting puts muscles into a sort of dormant state where their electrical activity is diminished, leading to atrophy and breakdown. Moreover, the production of lipoprotein lipase, the enzyme that breaks down fat molecules in the blood, is shut down, leading to more fat circulating as well.

As your metabolic rate plummets, you stop burning as many calories. The good news is that if you’re active, even those few minutes in motion will counter the effects of being on your butt too much. The point is that while lack of exercise is a risk factor for early illness and death, simple movement itself is shown to prevent such a fate. A 2015 study out of the University of Utah School of Medicine, for instance, showed that getting up for light activity such as walking for two minutes every hour was associated with a 33 percent lower chance of dying over a three-year period. Two minutes! That’s a big boost in prevention for a short period of time. A mere 120 seconds each hour can offset the damaging effects that prolonged sitting has on the body.”

“MYTH: As you age, muscle mass is not as important as having healthy cardiorespiratory fitness.

TRUTH: People fail to appreciate how valuable muscle mass is to quality of life, recovery from illness and injury, and the ability to stay mobile and active and perform basic everyday tasks, as well as to overall metabolic health. Unlike fat, which mostly stores calories, muscle is a highly active tissue that burns calories. This helps explain why lean, more muscular people tend to burn more calories at rest than do people with higher proportions of body fat. So in addition to keeping a cardio routine that gets your heart rate up, you’ll want to continue to build and maintain muscle mass. Gradual muscle loss over time goes with aging, but you can counter this decline with strength and resistance training.”

“Ideally, and at a minimum, you’ll aim for at least thirty minutes of cardio work five days a week. You’ll want to get your heart rate up at least 50 percent above your resting baseline for at least twenty of those thirty minutes. On the other two days, try a restorative yoga class or leisure activity like walking; don’t be totally sedentary.

If you want to gain the most benefits out of exercise and lower your risk of dying prematurely, newer research points to a tripling of that 150-minute per week recommendation to a little more than an hour per day.”

“A study in the June 2014 issue of Annals of Neurology found that speaking two or more languages, even if you learned the second language years or decades after the first, may slow age-related cognitive decline. Such findings have been confirmed by others, including cognitive neuroscientist Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psych ology at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her own research has found that bilingualism can protect older adults’ brains, even as Alzheimer’s is beginning to affect cognitive function. It’s likely that the complexity of the second language acts as part of that cognitive reserve, shielding against symptoms of decline. And therein lies a key secret: The complexity of the new skill is critical; you can’t just come to class and be passive. You need to use your mind in a manner that gets you out of your comfort zone and demands more long-term memory.”

“This type of mental exercise, which demands that you focus intently and rapidly process visual information, appears to be surprisingly effective at putting off dementia.

His dream? To one day see doctors write prescriptions for video games approved by the Food and Drug Administration rather than pills to turn an aging brain into a younger one.”

“My mom completed engineering college in India and made history as the first female engineer there. It was just the beginning of her life in a male-dominated space. After reading a biography of Henry Ford, she dreamed of working for the company that he’d built. Again, my grandparents came through. They took their savings of a lifetime to send my mom to the United States in 1965. At age twenty-four, she became the first woman hired as an engineer at Ford Motor company.”

“I began studying the objective value or purpose from a medical perspective. Over the past two decades, dozens of studies have shown that older people with a sense of purpose in life are less likely to develop a slew of ailments — from mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease, to disabilities, heart attacks, and strokes. And they are more likely to live longer than people without this strong undercurrent. In fact, feeling you have a purpose in life right now might reduce your risk of future dementia by up to 20 percent. Some of the research is eye-opening. In 2017, JAMA Psychiatry published a study out of Harvard revealing that older adults with a higher sense of purpose tend to retain strong hand grips and walking speeds. That may sound like an odd thing to measure, but these characteristics have long been indicators of how quickly people are aging. You’d be surprised by the correlation between how fast you can walk and how fast you are aging. Another great predictor of health also happens to be whether you can get up from the floor without using your hands to prop yourself up.”

“[eBook readers] were less alert the next morning than people who read paper books. The problem is that light-emitting diodes (LEDs) produce quite a bit of blue wavelengths, and these are ubiquitous in televisions, smartphones, tablets, and computers. Avoid blue light for a few hours before bedtime for optimum melatonin production. Use warm wavelengths in your home LED lighting (2700–3000K is good). If you have persistent problems falling asleep, it might be easier to get eyeglasses that filter out blue light. Make sure that your clocks, nightlights, dimmers, and so on use red, or “warm glow,” lights rather than blue or green. Red light has the least power to shift circadian rhythm and suppress melatonin. Get an app that changes the color temperature of your screen to avoid blue light, particularly if you like to read in bed.

Establish bedtime rituals. Try to set aside at least thirty minutes to an hour before bedtime to unwind and perform tasks that help your body know that bedtime is coming.”

“Practices. in mindfulness are on the rise. In 2018 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report stating that between 2012 and 2017, participation in yoga increased 50 percent, from 9.5 to 14.3 percent, and the use of meditation more than tripled from 4.1 to 14.2 percent.”

“I have always loved the ancient Indian concept of creating a harmonious 100-year life by spending the third stage (around the ages fifty to seventy-five) living in a forest as part of a contemplative, tranquil lifestyle called vanprastha (life as a forest dweller).”

“Increasing fruit intake by just one serving a day has the estimated potential to reduce your risk of dying from a cardiovascular event by 8 percent, the equivalent of 60,000 fewer deaths annually in the United States and 1.6 million deaths globally.”

“As we age, our ability to perceive thirst diminishes. This helps explain why dehydration is common in older people, and dehydration is a leading cause for admission to emergency rooms and hospitals for the elderly. A good rule of thumb is that if you feel any thirst, vou have already waited too long.”

“Most of us are eating a fortified diet. Even fresh mushrooms now come “fortified” via irradiation with vitamin D. Researchers, including Pieter Cohen at Harvard, have pointed out that even with a standard American diet, we are probably not likely to be broadly deficient in very most vitamins thanks to fortification. The problem is more the quantity of what we’re eating.

When I worked on a film about the supplement industry, I was stunned at just how unregulated it is. Thus far in 2019, the FDA has issued 12 warning letters to companies that were illegally marketing 58 dietary supplements with claims to prevent, treat, or cure Alzheimer’s or other conditions. Supplement makers don’t have much of an obligation to prove their product is safe or effective before taking it to market. And as Dr. Dean Sherzai explains, it’s actually harder than you think to take the ‘good’ stuff out of food and put it in pill form. While you may be able to get the active ingredients isolated and even synthesized, real food is made up of a multitude of molecules and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface in defining what they all do. Some seemingly inert molecules may help the active ingredients travel through the body, acting as vehicles. Other molecules may help unlock receptors, allowing the molecules to activate their targets.”

“The prevalence of dementia is a lot lower in communites where turmeric is a staple in kitchens.

In 2018 a UCLA study hit the media for its stunning results: People with mild memory problems who took 90mg of curcumin twice daily for 18 months experienced significant improvements in their memory and attention abilities. They also experienced a boost in mood. This was a well-designed, double-blind, placebo-controlled study that involved 40 adults aged 50–90.”

“In the first six months after the loss of a spouse, widows and widowers are at a 41 percent increased risk of mortality. No doubt some of this increased risk is due in part to a loss of companionship. A meaningful relationship with another person brings love, happiness, and comfort to an individual’s life. In addition to psychological well-being, however, relationships have been found to be associated with a broad range of other health functions related to the cardiovascular, endocrine, and the immune systems.”

“Researchers at Michigan State found that married people are less likely to experience dementia as they age, and divorcees are about twice as likely as married people to develop dementia.”