Unauthorized use is prohibited.įinally, aging itself prunes some of the brain’s neural thickets, eliminating some neurons and leaving the remaining ones susceptible to the cumulative effects of a lifetime of exposure to toxins and other natural chemical agents.Īnd yet, practically everyone knows a person who has lived to 80, 90, or beyond while remaining mentally healthy. “We’re saying that if you use your brain, you can change it as much as a younger brain,” she said. Older brains take longer to respond to healthy living, but they do respond. Diamond took comfort in her findings that the brain can change at any age. What works for mice, dogs, horses, and monkeys works for humans as well. The structure of the brain remains remarkably similar for all mammals. Old rats had brains they could reshape in response to new experiences, a condition known as plasticity. She chose to work with rats in middle age and older, equal to ages between 60 and 90 in humans. Learning strengthens the organ of the brain just as exercise strengthens muscles in the legs, arms, and abdomen.Īs revealing as Diamond’s research was, it had a twist: She didn’t experiment on young rats. Diamond had gathered concrete evidence that what goes on in the mind manifests itself in the physical state of the brain. And they had more blood vessels to carry vital oxygen to keep those connections firing at peak efficiency. The enriched-brain rats had more neural connections, a sign of greater mental activity. Their cerebral cortices-the outer, wrinkled shells that are home to neural pathways that make sense of the world-were thicker than those of the unstimulated rats. ![]() (Life’s not fair, especially for a rodent.) Rats that had enjoyed the richer learning environment and had won the maze races exhibited markedly different brains from those in the control group. She put both winners and losers under the knife to examine their brains. When she pitted the two in timed contests in which they ran the same mazes, the rats that had lived in the mentally and physically invigorating environment performed much better.ĭiamond then did what she could not do to humans in a similar experiment. They had toys and balls for play, challenging mazes to explore, exercise equipment to get blood pumping to their muscles and their neurons, and best of all, other rats to share their experiences. She enrolled the second group in a version of rat school, complete with recess. ![]() No rat games, no rat puzzles, no rat get-togethers to break the boredom. They ate simple rations to keep them alive from day to day, but their brains received little stimulation. The first group was confined to the equivalent of a gray isolation cell in a maximum-security prison. In the 1960s, Diamond compared two groups of lab rats. ![]() Tale of two ratsīrain researcher Marian Diamond is certain it’s never too late to improve your brain function, and here’s why.
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