“The brain is wider than the sky.”---Emily Dickinson
Remember when you were in grade school and Frederick Fotheringay-Phipps, the smartest kid in your class walked in? “He’s a brain,” someone might say. It was not meant to be a compliment. When you were “a brain” at St. Patrick’s Elementary, it meant you were intelligent to the exclusion of everything else…savoir faire, street sense, romantic possibilities and athleticism. Especially athleticism. In later years, a brain became a dork, a nerd and a weenie. The brains didn’t care, they had bigger fish to fry. And fry ‘em they did, to the eventual tune of higher salaries, bigger houses and cuter wives than their tormentors. Somebody even made a movie called Revenge of the Brains.
You might want to remember all this because we’re back in grade school again with the same no-neck bullies and nincompoops and troublemakers. Somehow, they got one of their guys elected President of the United States, for crying out loud, and now, at long last, they’re trying to get rid of the brains. They’re taking away their public radio programs, bankrupting their fine arts hangouts, wiping out their debate teams. Don’t worry, though, it won’t work, just like their plans in grade school. Stupid is Forever. Sooner or later---and it’s looking like sooner---the principal will catch them waxing his car windows or pantsing a first grader in the men’s room or looking up Nancy O’Connell’s dress, and they’ll be cast off to shop class at trade school or an entry-level job at Jiffy Lube. It’s coming. It’s only a matter of time. The brains are gathering their forces. As Doctor Seuss famously said, “I like nonsense. It wakes up the brain cells.”
Faster Than A Speeding Bullet…More Powerful Than A Locomotive!…
Your brain is the most powerful and mysterious organ in your body. It controls everything from your thoughts to your emotions and processes information at lightning speed. The average person (not you, Pam Bondi) has between 12,000 and 60,000 thoughts a day; granted 95% of them are the same ones they had yesterday. 80% of them tend to be negative, but that’s a good thing---our brains are wired for survival, constantly analyzing threats to ourselves or the body politic. You know that sharp pain you get when you drink something way too cold? We call it brain freeze or sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia if you’re fussy. That’s the captain up there telling you to knock it off, he doesn’t like the abrupt temperature change. Interestingly, the brain, itself, feels no pain because it has no pain receptors, but the membranes and tissues surrounding it do and they don’t mind complaining about it.
Even though it makes up only 2% of your body weight, your brain employs a major quantity of energy, consuming 20% of your oxygen and blood supply, making it the most demanding organ in your body. If your brain goes without oxygen for just four minutes, you begin getting images of Marco Rubio doing the Time Warp. Five minutes and brain cells start dying, leading to irreversible damage. That’s why your brain celebrates when you do deep breathing and/or cardiovascular exercises.
Weight Watchers won’t like this but your brain might be the fattest organ in your body if you’re not Jabba the Hutt. The brain consists of at least 60% fat, which is why consuming healthy fats like omega-3s and 6s in fish starts your brain doing its Happy Dance. Healthy fats stabilize brain cell walls, reduce inflammation and support cognitive function, so don’t sweat the avocado toast. Another villain, cholesterol, is always getting bad grades in school but your brain actually depends on it. In fact 25% of your body’s cholesterol is stored in your brain, where it helps with learning and memory. Alas, the brain can’t absorb cholesterol from the blood, it has to produce its own, so while too much cholesterol in the body can be harmful, the right amount is vital for brain function. Tell your doctor this the next time he chastises you for eating at Cheeseburger Cheeseburger!
Cognitive Reserve
And then there’s (trumpets blare) cognitive reserve, the brain’s ability to improvise and find alternate ways of getting a job done, like figuring out why some people like Ted Nugent. It reflects how agile your brain is in pulling up skills and capacities to solve problems and cope with challenges. Cognitive Reserve is developed by a lifetime of education and curiosity. Nobody talks much about CR but the concept manifested in the 1980s when researchers described individuals with no apparent symptoms of dementia who were nonetheless found at autopsy to have brain changes consistent with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. These individuals did not show symptoms of that disease while they were alive because they had a large enough cognitive reserve to offset the damage and continue to function as usual.
Since then, research has shown that people with greater cognitive reserve are better able to stave off symptoms of degenerative brain changes associated with dementia, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis or stroke. A more robust cognitive reserve can also help you function better for longer if you’re exposed to unexpected life events such as surgery, stress or the heartbreak of psoriasis. Such circumstances demand extra effort from the brain, similar to changing gears in your race car.
So how do I get more of this cognitive reserve stuff, you ask? There must be a secret nectar or some magic beans involved, right? Sorry, but it’s the same old advice---you have to engage. Researchers at Harvard Medical School, the biggest of brains, want you to do the following things. All of them. No cheating---your brain will know.
1. Eat a plant-based diet like your hippie aunt Hilda told you to years ago.
2. Exercise regularly.
3. Get enough sleep.
4. Manage your stress.
5. Nurture social contacts
6. Continue to challenge your brain. (And that doesn’t mean answering those ten questions in Facebook that will guarantee you’re a genius. “What color were Dorothy’s slippers?” Please.)
Yeah, we know. You’ve heard all this before. You heard it before because it’s the real megillah. The Harvard braintrust advises that these factors are equal parts of a cohesive plan, they don’t work in isolation. You knew about them years ago, you just wouldn’t cooperate. And now you’re brain is getting pissed. So wake up, it’s now or never.
The Care And Feeding Of Your Brain
The speed at which you walk can reveal profound insights into your brain’s rate of aging. Slower walkers apparently have smaller brains and fundamental differences in crucial structures. How quickly you can walk from Point A to Point B can reveal a great deal about the inner workings of your body and mind. New research has shown that the speed at which you walk to class, to the mall from the parking lot or to your seat at the ballgame can predict your odds of hospitalization, heart attack and even (gulp) death. In fact, a person’s gait speed can even be used to show his or her rate of cognitive aging. Who knew? And what does this mean for the pitiful turtle?
Sure, it’s normal for people to slow down as they age, but a precipitous decline in the speed of someone’s gait can indicate that something serious is going on. “When a person’s normal walking pace declines, it’s often associated with underlying health declines,” says Christina Dieli-Conwright, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
“Walking seems like such a simple thing---most of us don’t think about it,” says Line Rasmussen, a senior researcher in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. “But walking actually relies on many different body systems working together. Your bones and muscles carry and move you, your eyes help you see where you’re going, your heart and lungs circulate blood and oxygen, your brain and nerves coordinate it all.”
According to Rasmussen, as we age, the function of these systems starts to slow down. A slower walking speed can reflect this overall decline and be a sign of advanced aging. This doesn’t just apply to older adults. In a 2019 study, Rasmussen and colleagues found that even among 45-year-olds, walking speed could predict the rate at which the brain and body were aging. “What surprised me most was finding a link between how fast people walked at age 45 and their cognitive abilities all the way back in early childhood, said Rasmussen.
The Duke University researchers looked at 904 people aged 45 who were part of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, a longitudinal research project which has followed the lives of over 1,000 people born between 1972 and 1973 in Dunedin, New Zealand. Individuals in that cohort have had their health and cognitive function assessed regularly over their entire lifespans.
“I was surprised by how much variation there was in walking speed among people who were all the same age,” says Rasmussen. “You might expect everyone at 45 to be somewhere in the middle, but some walked as quickly as healthy 20-year-olds while others walked as slowly as much older adults.”
The study revealed that 45-year-olds with slower gait speeds showed signs of “accelerated aging,” in their lungs, teeth and immune systems, comparing poorly with those who walked faster. They also had biomarkers associated with a faster rate of aging, such as raised blood pressure, high cholesterol and lower cardiorespiratory fitness. The slow walkers had other signs of physical ill health, too, such as weaker hand-grip strength and more difficulty rising from a chair.
Rasmussen and colleagues also found that slow walkers showed signs of cognitive aging, scoring lower on IQ tests, performing worse on tests of memory, processing speed and other cognitive functions. MRI scans showed that this cognitive deterioration was accompanied by observable changes in the participants’ brains. Slower walkers had smaller brains, a thinner neocortex (the outermost layer of the brain which controls thinking and higher information processing) and more white matter. Even the faces of the slow walkers were rated as aging at a faster rate than other participants. Dang!
“Well, that’s all well and good,” said Tommy Tortoise of the Benevolent & Protective Order of Loggerheads. “But some of our guys have been hanging around for 150 years or more. Our motto is ‘Slow and Steady Wins the Race. Except…you know…on the Interstate.”
That’s all, folks….
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