Your Brain The Secret To Good Health?

It’s running the show, you know, so you need it to be in top shape if you want the rest of your body to be. And the incredible truth is that it’s always ready and able to get stronger. Here’s how.

- Carlin Flora

You know the feeling: that moment when you reach the basement and think, Wait, why did I come down here? You wonder if this is how it starts—the slow creep toward a life of Matlock and misplaced dentures. Next time, before you panic, remember this: The brain is constantly changing, forging new neurons and connections throughout your life. Which means (brace yourself: good news about getting older here) you can become sharper and healthier at any age.

The shift in the way experts think about the brain started back in the 1960's, when a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, discovered that rats that lived in “enriched” environments, with toys and other rats to play with, had more gray matter in parts of the brain related to visual and motor skills than those that were kept in small cages. Her fellow scientists were skeptical that our brains were anything but fixed for life. It has taken a few decades and a mountain of evidence, but now it’s fully clear that the brain can in fact be shaped and improved, says Wendy Suzuki, Ph.D., a professor of neural science and psychology at the Center for Neural Science at New York University. “We know, for example, that aerobic exercise can generate new cells in the hippocampus, which plays a large role in memory,” she says.