How Neuroplasticity Rewires Your Brain to Prevent Dementia

[00:00:00]It's the year 1995. Cs is an eight-year-old girl  who went on a beach vacation with her parents.

[00:00:05]The whole family was looking forward to the  trip and they enjoyed the great weather.

[00:00:09]But little did the family know that their  whole life would change during this trip.. one morning the girl's foot began shaking.  Her parents were concerned and rushed to the next hospitals where doctors conducted  first tests. When the doctors made a diagnosis the family was devastated. CS suffered from a  rare disorder called rasmussen's encephalitis.

[00:00:28]In this disease the immune system attacks  parts of the brain which causes seizures.

[00:00:33]The doctors proposed the only viable option  to stop the seizures: removing one half of a brain. A few years later cs just finished high  school and achieved several outstanding honors with parts of the brain being removed. Wow how  is it possible? My name is Clemens and today we'll talk about neuroplasticity how we can make a  smarter and how we can fight alzheimer's disease.

[00:01:00]Back to the beginning of the story. The  girl suffered from a rare disorder called rasmussen's encephalitis. The exact causes of  this disease are still debated but somehow the immune system recognizes the own brain  as an intruder and starts to attack it.

[00:01:14]What is quite special is that often only  one half of the brain is being attacked.

[00:01:18]Affected brain regions then get swollen and  partially die off. This process then causes seizures. In cs case the right side of the brain  was being attacked and so the only viable option was to conduct a hemisphereectomy and this means  that they had to remove the diseased brain half.

[00:01:34]Initially the parents did not agree to this  procedure as of course there are many risks if we remove certain brain regions. They feared  that the surgery might change her personality destroy her memory and make her permanently  disabled. You see the right brain hemisphere performs many important tasks and is involved  in attention memory reasoning and coordinating the left arm and leg. Having local brain damages  can already be detrimental but losing the entire right part of the brain can have unforeseen  consequences. So the family went back home.

[00:02:06]But then her condition worsened. She experienced  up to 150 seizures a day she vomited she had many troubles. So eventually they had to agree  to the surgery. The surgery took 14 hours and then.. the child woke up. She had a horrible  headache but otherwise her body tolerated the surgery extremely well. Her memory was fine her  attention span as well and after rehabilitation she learned to control her left arm and leg. Over  the next years she just didn't finish school but also university and became a speech pathologist.  You can read her story online the link is in the description. So somehow our brain could nearly  entirely compensate for losing the right health.

[00:02:44]How?! As we grow in size our brain grows as well  but at a certain point though our brain doesn't largely make any new brain cells anymore. But  despite the fact that we do not constantly grow new brain cells we can still learn new things. We  can learn new skills new languages learn to drive a car or learn fun facts from your favorite small  science youtuber (thanks). And the fact that we can do all of that is due to a phenomenon called  neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity means that our brain cells form new brain connections. Whenever  we learn something new certain brain cells are active at the same time. If we now repeat the  same thing a couple of times the same brain cells are active over and over again which triggers the  formation of new connections. Neuroplasticity can also be summarized in a sentence "cells that fire  together wire together". And this sentence is so often used in biology lectures you can call it the  despacito of neurosciences. witty joke check. In the aforementioned case we've seen a girl that  has lost her complete right brain hemisphere but after a while of training her remaining  brain hemisphere neuroplasticity led to new brain connections and she could partially compensate  for the lost brain areas. Neuroplasticity of course doesn't only happen in such dramatic  cases but every time we learn something new.

[00:03:58]Neuroplasticity is amazing but can we use it for  example to make us learn more efficiently? And can we use neuroplasticity to fight alzheimer's  disease? You know where this is going.

[00:04:15]Imagine you're in the streets  of london uk. Take a deep breath ah air pollution. London is a historic city and  like many historic cities has complicated streets.

[00:04:26]On these streets we find a class of special  people cab drivers. Cab drivers drive through the streets all day they have to navigate through  busy streets and they have to find shortcuts.

[00:04:36]A couple of years ago scientists conducted  magnetic resonance imaging to analyze the hippocampus of taxi drivers. The hippocampus is  a part of the brain which is involved in memory and in navigation. What the scientists found  out is that the hippocampus of cab drivers is larger than normal. Navigating all day through  the streets of london has changed their brain in the sense that neuroplasticity has been activated  making the hippocampus bigger. And the fact is that we can all trigger neuroplasticity to rewire  our brains and make us "smarter". And the good thing is that we can do it and start at any time  there is no age limit to that. So if you want to start here's what you can do: number one learn new  things (obviously). By default learning new things make new brain connections. But in the end you  will not only learn new skills but your resulting neuroplasticity also overall changes your brain.  Learning a second language for example has been shown to facilitate the formation of new brain  connections between various brain regions. iIn other words learning second languages doesn't only  help you with your reading comprehension but also multitasking and problem solving. It has also been  shown that learning a second language improves the attention span of people. Here it is hypothesized  that a bilingual person must actively suppress one language when speaking another. So neuroplasticity  can lead to more global changes in your brain.

[00:05:51]Besides actively learning new things you can  also actually trigger neuroplasticity with the right food and exercise. Some studies suggest that  diets rich in polyphenols promote neuroplasticity in several brain regions. Polyphenols are found  in fruits vegetables and tea and it is suggested that they support the metabolism of brain cells.  This and overall helps the function of brain cells and to form connections more easily. Fasting has  also been shown to activate pathways in the brain which helps to improve neuroplasticity. Here  right now it seems that intermittent fasting provides the most benefits. Getting regular  exercise also promotes neuroplasticity.

[00:06:26]People who regularly exercise throughout their  lives have an overall increased volume in their hippocampus and a bigger frontal temporal and  perito lobe. And as i'm writing the script right now it's actually crazy how many positive  effects a healthy lifestyle can have i mean think about our aging video. We've seen how diets  fasting and exercise might help to slow down aging in cells and here the same mechanism also helped  neuroplasticity. So i guess we should just try to stay fit guys. And last but not least stress  management also helps to promote neuroplasticity.

[00:06:57]Of course life is stressful we all know that but  we can try to minimize the stress to some degree at least because this can also help to shape  our brain. iIn one study participants underwent meditation training for eight weeks. Their brains  were scanned before and after the training and it was found that those who have reported a reduction  in stress also had a reduction in their amygdala.

[00:07:18]They amygdala is the brain region which handles  emotions and also have to deal with stress and it seems that neuroplasticity has actively  modelled this region upon stress management.

[00:07:28]So you see that we can all trigger neuroplasticity  and help to train our brains. And this might not only help us in our day-to-day lives but  also help us to fight age-related diseases.

[00:07:42]Dementia is one of the greatest medical challenges  of the 21st century. Over 55 million people suffer worldwide from a form of dementia and this number  is expected to rise. Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia. We all know how  terrible this disease is. We might forget where we left our keys or we might feel a bit irritated. It  becomes harder and harder to learn new things and we become more confused. Within the brain we start  to find small damages which spread over time.

[00:08:09]In more advanced stages alzheimer's disease  patients are unable to communicate and cannot swallow properly anymore. oOther complications  such as pneumonia might occur and the disease becomes life-threatening. Most of us are afraid  to suffer from alzheimer's disease one day or have any relatives suffer from the disease. And  although there is no cure for alzheimer's disease there are some steps we can take to lower the  risk of getting it. And one of these ways is neuroplasticity and training your brain. Education  has been shown to counteract alzheimer's disease.

[00:08:39]In people with at least a high school education  the rate of dementia has fallen nearly half since the 1970s. Education and the resulting training of  the brain leads to what we call cognitive reserves meaning that the brain can compensate for some  of the damages caused by alzheimer's disease. For the same reason people who have learned a second  language or an instrument in their teen years also have a 30 % decreased risk to develop mild forms  of dementia. So this means if you try to learn constantly new things throughout your  life you have a lower risk to develop alzheimer's disease. Of course there is still  a risk because nothing in biology is absolute but the risk is lower. Some people still will  develop some form of dementia but also here we can do something with some form of brain trainings.  Music therapy for example has been shown to provoke neuroplasticity in alzheimer's disease  patients. In one study the so-called mozart effect has been used to treat dementia patients over  the course of six months. The patients listened to mozart in the morning and pachebel in the  evening and regularly had to do tests. The results showed that music therapy helped to improve the  abstract thinking of alzheimer's disease patients.

[00:09:42]Another study has shown that singing familiar  songs or songs the patient has known in the past can help to improve the self-consciousness.  And then karaoke also has been shown to improve symptoms in dementia patients and that's kind of  cool. They're different forms of music therapy but they overall improve attention memory orientation  and the executive function of alzheimer's disease patients. But what i want to point out here is  that there is also another very important factor of these therapies and that is the improvement  of mood music therapies help to decrease anxiety and depression in dementia patients. It has been  shown over and over again and the impact is very important. Upon starting music therapy alzheimer's  disease patients are less secluded and they interact more with their environment. And these  interactions can also help to train their brains.

[00:10:29]It makes perfect sense to have such therapies  and this is not my opinion but they help to increase the overall mood and they also help  to combat the disease itself. So let's see how available they will become in the next decades.  Although our brains stop growing once we reach adolescence we can still positively impact the  structures in our brain. We can try to learn new things new languages sports or hobbies and be  creative. This helps us not only by reducing your risk to develop certain diseases later in life  but it also can make us happy and that's all we want in the end right? Dang that was cheesy. But  for now i hope that you enjoyed this video. If so feel free to like it and comment how  you train your brain let us all know that it's interesting or just post some random stuff  it's a free country. And with that i'll see ya!

[00:11:16]If you're interested in a similar topic  where we discuss how a baseball accident made a genius or how we might reverse  aging you might like these videos!