The Executive Brain and How our Minds Can Grow Stronger

Last week I had the plea­sure to meet with our sci­en­tif­ic advi­sor Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg, renowned neu­ropsy­chol­o­gist and author of The Exec­u­tive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civ­i­lized Mind and The Wis­dom Para­dox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As Your Brain Grows Older 

Let me sum­ma­rize some of the key over­all research find­ings out­lined in the books:

-  Our brains enjoy Life­long Brain Plas­tic­i­ty: until recent­ly, a pop­u­lar mis­con­cep­tion was that  neu­rons die through life and do not get replen­ished. Now, neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis, or the abil­i­ty of our brains to cre­ate new neu­rons until the very day we die, is proven.

- Intense men­tal chal­lenges pro­vide extra resis­tance to age­ing and improve pat­tern recog­ni­tion and brain “effi­cien­cy”, this is, the abil­i­ty to take on sim­i­lar chal­lenges with reduced meta­bol­i­cal demands

- Our men­tal activ­i­ty influ­ences the gen­er­a­tion of neu­rons and where they go. The func­tion­al capac­i­ty of our neur­al net­works depends on the num­ber of neu­rons and their con­nec­tions-both short and long

- Exer­cis­ing our brains is as impor­tant as exer­cis­ing our bod­ies. “Use it or lose it” came from ath­let­ics to brain sci­ence. Even bet­ter, now we know that“Use it and get more of it.

-  The path­ways that con­nect the frontal lobes with the rest of the brain are slow to mature, reach­ing full oper­a­tional state, and there­fore social matu­ri­ty, between the ages of 18 and 30.

- Inten­sive neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty-based pro­grams can pro­duce good results in as short as 3 months if well-targeted.

- The rate of devel­op­ment of new neu­rons can be influ­enced by phys­i­cal and cog­ni­tive activities.