HOW TO PROTECT YOUR BRAIN

EVERYTHING WE KNOW NOW, AND WHAT WE HOPE AND PRAY IS COMING.

- BY LIZ BRODY

Last spring, Marsha Friesen lay in an MRI tube racking her brain. She might as well have been doing memory dropsets. The former high school English teacher had driven 45 minutes from her home to Stanford University, and now a researcher was giving her words like table and telephone, each with a photo projected above her inside the scanner. After two hours in there she was sprung, and they showed her about 100 words again one by one, asking her to recall whether each had been paired with an image of a person or a place. “It sounds crazy, but it was very tiring!” she says.

For nine years, Friesen, 78, has been part of the Stanford Aging & Memory Study (SAMS), which follows cognitively fit older adults in hope of finding the secret to staying that way. And hats off to her. But listening to Friesen’s tales of the tube is enough to make anyone over 45 break out in a cold sweat. It's as if you get to a certain age, and you've been so focused on keeping your breasts scanned, gut healthy, weight under control, and hot flashes tamed that suddenly you realize, “Oops! I forgot I have a brain”—and now it’s in danger of eroding like a coral reef.

It turns out, our gray matter should be a top priority. According to research that came out this past July in Nature Medicine, of all the organs in the body, including the heart and kidneys, the brain (along with the immune system) is the most predictive of overall mortality. If you want to live long and well, “a combination of a young brain and a young immune system is really what you want,” says one of the study's lead authors, Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, a professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford and director of the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at the university.