Here’s a Wall Street Journal article that AOL is featuring, so you don’t have to be an online suscriber to the Journal to access it.
Interested in slowing down your loss of brain function as you age? The evidence is piling up that you do it through physical exercise (mainly aerobic) rather than mental gymnastics.
How to Keep Your Aging Brain Fit: Aerobics – AOL News
As brains age, normal wear and tear starting in middle age causes them to process information more slowly, which means it takes longer to make judgments and grasp complex information. Older brains also take longer to switch from one task to another and are less adept at "multitasking" (such as driving while simultaneously tuning the radio and checking the tailgater).
The search for ways to slow down mental decline and detrimental brain changes that come with age has taken an unexpected turn lately. Popular wisdom, as well as some scientists, had long held that the way to stay mentally sharp was to do mental gymnastics. Crossword puzzles, reading, taking up a musical instrument and generally challenging the mind were supposed to stave off the mental ravages of old age.
That has been hard to prove. But support for the brain benefits of physical exercise has become stronger. A number of earlier studies showed that elderly people who take up aerobic exercise show improved cognitive function after a few months, says Arthur Kramer of the University of Illinois, Urbana: Their working memory is better, they are nimbler at switching between mental tasks, and they can screen out distractions better than people who did not get exercise training.
Now he and colleagues have discovered what may be the basis for these improvements. As little as three hours a week of aerobic exercise increased the brain’s volume of gray matter (actual neurons) and white matter (connections between neurons), they report in the November issue of the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences. "After only three months," says Prof. Kramer, "the people who exercised had the brain volumes of people three years younger."
Until 1998, neuro-dogma held that old brains do not grow new neurons. A study on patients in Sweden overturned that assumption. But researchers did not know whether people could do anything to boost this "neurogenesis," or even whether doing so would have cognitive benefits. The Illinois study is therefore the first to discover that older brains can indeed rev up their production of new neurons (no one has studied whether younger brains can), and it is apparently enough to make a real-world difference. Studies in both people and animals have linked increases in brain volume (which occur with some drugs) to improvements in thinking, remembering, cognitive flexibility (thinking outside the box) and perseveration (not getting stuck on one thought).
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