David Eagleman neuroplasticity advice
di Katrina Karan: David Eagleman
David Eagleman, a Stanford neuroscientist, says the way to build real brain resilience is to quit doing what you've already mastered. You have to hover in that space that's frustrating but still doable. Comfort quietly destroys neuroplasticity, and when your daily life turns into the same routine over and over, your brain actually starts to shrink. The fix is throwing small, intentional micro-challenges at yourself to keep your mind flexible. If learning doesn't come with a bit of irritation, your brain isn't really rewiring. He points to the Religious Order Study, where nuns who donated their brains showed Alzheimer's tissue damage but no mental decline while alive, they stayed socially engaged, handled chores, played games, and chatted constantly, building new neural pathways that fought off the decay. Once you get good at crosswords, drop them and pick up something harder. Variety matters more than repetition, and the goal is staying balanced between frustrating and achievable, which is the main advice for delaying dementia | follow if you want
Trascrizione (en)
What advice would you give to someone who's, I don't know, in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s? What should we do to be the best stewards of our brains? I'll tell you, it's so easy. It's to seek novelty. It's to seek challenge. So the key is, for most people as they get older, they, you know, whatever. Their lives shrink. They watch Jerry Springer. They do whatever they do. But the key is challenging stuff. So there's this study that's been going on for decades. You may know about this called the Religious Order Study, where a whole bunch of nuns in convents volunteered to give their brains upon their death. So what happened is the researchers started examining these, you know, the histological samples, and realized that some fraction of these nuns had Alzheimer's disease, and their brains were physically getting chewed up with the Alzheimer's, and yet nobody knew it when they were alive. They just weren't showing the cognitive deficits. Okay, so they do a big understanding that What was going on was they lived in the convents till the day they died. They had social interaction. They had chores and responsibilities. They played games. They had conversations. They were doing all kinds of stuff. And as a result even though their brain was physically degenerating with the ravages of the disease they were building new bridges new roadways all the time And as a result they were able to essentially fight back against the degeneration of the tissue. This is the important thing, is to always seek challenges. Go ahead. I was going to say, is it challenges that themselves vary? So if someone finds doing a crossword challenging, but they do it every day and keep doing it, is that good? Or is that actually, or playing bridge every week or something like that? Or is it actually much better to mix that up and actually know I'm going to travel to a new place and whatever? As soon as you get good at the crossword puzzles, you got to drop that and do something that's hard. The key is to be between the levels of frustrating but achievable. And that's where you always want to keep yourself in life. And as long as you're there, as long as you're there, you're doing the best thing you can do for your life. I mean, this is, I'm not- If you're between frustrating and achievable, you're always frustrated and never achieving. That's to say. Yeah, it's funny because there's so much that we know, so much stuff pouring out in neuroscience labs, but this is still the key, the single piece of advice really that we have for putting off dementia.
