Getting Smarter With Age

I was talking with a friend of mine about her father. He doesn’t have dementia, but he just isn’t as sharp as he used to be. Obviously, my friend is sad about this and worried that she too will lose her mental acuity as she gets older. When I explained that she could actually get SMARTER with age, she was surprised.

I’d like YOU to know how to get smarter with age, too. The solution is so simple.

A Slow Decline Is Not Inevitable
Let me start by saying that most people simply accept the notion that their brains (and memories) will shrink with age. In fact, MRI scans show that an area of the brain called the hippocampus (our memory center) often does, in fact, get smaller with age. But hippocampal and memory shrinkage are NOT inevitable.

Researchers have found that new growth in brain cells (called neurogenesis) is enhanced under the influence of a protein known as BDNF, which is produced in animals when they get aerobic exercise. We now have solid evidence that the same thing happens in humans.

Neuroscientist Kirk Erikson and his team from the University of Pittsburgh followed 120 adults over the span of a year. Half of the group were given a stretching program to perform three times per week, while the other half did aerobic exercise three times per week. After one year, the two groups were evaluated with the following:

MRI scans to see the size of the hippocampus,
serum blood tests for levels of the protein BDNF
And tests for memory function.
The Findings
The results of the study, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, were astounding:

Major Finding #1: The stretching group had a DECLINE in all 3 areas studied.
Major Finding #2: The aerobic group showed improvement in memory, increases in the size of their hippocampus, and increases in their blood levels of BDNF.

The Bottom Line Is
Aerobic exercise — which can be started at any age — increases the growth of new stem cells in the brain, which grow into fully functioning neurons and lead to better brain function. My recommendations are:

Recommendation 1
Get 20 minutes of aerobic exercise six times per week.
Shoot for a heart rate of 180 minus your age (this is really easy). So if you are fifty, your target heart rate for aerobic exercise is 130 heart beats per minute.