I saw the most amazing show on PBS on Sunday. I can highly recommend it! It’s called “The Brain Fitness Program” and it explains how your brain changes with aging.
Scientists have learned so much in the past ten years in the field of neurogenesis (how and why your brain creates new neuron networks). It is essential that we keep expanding these networks so that our brain’s life span equals our body’s life span.
Guess what the worst thing is for expanding your brain’s neural networks? You guessed it! Staying in the same job too long! If you aren’t constantly challenging your brain to integrate new information and try new activities, your brain’s plasticity is suffering. Expanding your neural horizons is the key to successful brain health, especially with aging.
We need to be constantly pushing ourselves to expand into new areas of interest, not just keep doing what we’re already good at. In other words, career change is good for your brain! Your brain is actually asking you to take up new challenges! Learning new things changes your brain chemistry, and all for the better.
You don’t have to tell me this! I’ve just been through a demanding career shift in the past two years. Going from reference librarian to freelance writer may sound like a small transition, but it has been quite challenging for my 50-year-old brain. Training in a whole new field and picking it up quickly, must have created bunches of new neural networks!
I think even falling in love later in life creates some brain plasticity challenges. It forces us to re-think and re-feel our responses to our deepest emotions, and see where we’re at now. What do we believe now about love and our abilities to be in love? Has the definition of love changed for us with aging? It just boggles the mind, and apparently also causes it to happily create new neural networks to deal with these changes.
Besides learning lots of new skills, the other activity your aging brain needs is regular physical activity. Learning new skills is essential to increasing brain plasticity, but going out and taking a 40 minute walk is also key. On PBS they recommended one hour of exercise five times a week. You may have improperly assumed you were doing this for your heart and body, but your brain also needs physical activity to remain in shape.
Those that study our aging brains say don’t seek comfort and reduce yourself to only those activities you’re already good at. Seek out novelty, new perspectives, physical activities and anything that taxes your brain circuits. The companion book with this series is: The Brain That Changes Itself.
Here’s my own tip to increase brain plasticity: Start your own blog!
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January 16, 2008 at 3:12 pm
[...] growth. Would you rather stay in a crappy marriage forever, one that stunts your growth? Not me. Brain plasticity requires constant learning and change. Pushing your own personal envelope is what it’s all [...]