Keep your brain young

At first keeping our brain young might seem like a strange and impossible idea but huge advances in our understanding of the brain from the field of neuroscience is yielding fascinating results. It is obvious that our brain is biologically the same age as our body, but what if we could improve its function so that it operates at a level five or even more years younger than our biological age? What if you don’t have to join an exclusive gym with cutting edge machines from the world of science fiction or take exotic drugs or supplements to achieve this? What if it doesn’t have to cost you a cent? Would you be interested? I know I would, and my response would be- “I’m signing up for this”!

Luckily this isn’t something we do have to sign up for. There is no secret handshake club we need to join, and we don’t need to access information in difficult to understand scientific journals and follow processes that are overly time consuming and difficult. Researchers in Canada have published a paper in  the journal “Neuroscience” which clearly describes how they tested this approach on healthy older adults and the results were very exciting for those of us who want to keep our brain functioning well for as long as possible.

So here it is! Simply do an hour or two of reasonably demanding aerobic exercise a week. It doesn’t matter what the exercise is, just as long as it increases your heart rate and gets you breathing more heavily, both signs that you are working at improving your aerobic capacity. In return here is what you will get for your effort, an improvement in brain function equivalent to up to five years younger than your biological age and that is after only 6 months on the program. The experiment is still running, and improvement could be even greater over a longer period of time.

I have written before in this column about the wonderful benefits of moderate exercise on health, wellbeing, sleep, emotions and many other areas, this just adds one more benefit.  So, what are you waiting for, dust off those sneakers or walking shoes, pull on an old windcheater and some trackie pants and get out there! And when you see me walking, running or cycling around the Mitchell River walking track or the Eastwood Billabong say gday and give me a wave, a thumbs up or a wink as you join in.