Rewiring Your Brain
Why would you want to rewire your brain? Because the evidence suggests that doing things that cause basic changes in what you know or can do may be the most effective things you can do to increase your brain fitness.
Research evidence shows that things such as learning a new language, playing a musical instrument, and even traveling may be helpful in improving your brain’s fitness. It’s likely that these kinds of activities may be the most useful in stimulating new connections in the brain.
Dr. Michael Valenzuela at the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia, for example, has shown that life experiences that include mentally stimulating activities may reduce risk for developing cognitive dysfunction later in life. He developed the Life Experiences Questionnaire to evaluate these kinds of experiences. Valenzuela and his colleagues showed that people with more stimulating life experiences were less likely to show atrophy of a key area in the brain, the hippocampus. It’s essential for new memories, and is one of the areas that is affected early in people who develop Alzheimer’s.
Having the kinds of experiences that can make you look at things differently, develop a different perspective, or acquire a completely new ability, may help you not just in a psychological way. More and more, we are coming to believe that stimulating mental experiences can actually change the brain in positive ways.
Reference: Valenzuela MJ, Sachdev P, Wen W, Chen X, Brodaty H (2008) Lifespan Mental Activity Predicts Diminished Rate of Hippocampal Atrophy. PLoS ONE 3(7): e2598. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002598
