bilingual-brain

Build Your Cognitive Reserve: An Interview with Dr. Yaakov Stern

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Yaakov SternDr. Yaakov Stern is the Divi­sion Leader of the Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science Divi­sion of the Sergievsky Cen­ter, and Pro­fes­sor of Clin­i­cal Neu­ropsy­chol­o­gy, at the Col­lege of Physi­cians and Sur­geons of Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, New York. Alvaro Fer­nan­dez inter­views him here as part of our research for The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness book.

Dr. Stern is one of the lead­ing researchers of the Cog­ni­tive Reserve the­o­ry, which aims to explain why some indi­vid­u­als with full Alzheimer’s pathol­o­gy (accu­mu­la­tion of plaques and tan­gles in their brains) can keep nor­mal lives until they die, while oth­ers with the same amount of plaques and tan­gles dis­play the severe symp­toms we asso­ciate with Alzheimer’s Dis­ease. He has pub­lished dozens of peer-reviewed sci­en­tif­ic papers on the subject.

The con­cept of a Cog­ni­tive Reserve has been around since 1989, when a post mortem analy­sis of 137 peo­ple with Alzheimer’s Dis­ease showed that some patients exhib­it­ed few­er clin­i­cal symp­toms than their actu­al pathol­o­gy sug­gest­ed. These patients also showed high­er brain weights and greater num­ber of neu­rons when com­pared to age-matched con­trols. The inves­ti­ga­tors hypoth­e­sized that the patients had a larg­er “reserve” of neu­rons and abil­i­ties that enable them to off­set the loss­es caused by Alzheimer’s. Since then, the con­cept of Cog­ni­tive Reserve has been defined as the abil­i­ty of an indi­vid­ual to tol­er­ate pro­gres­sive brain pathol­o­gy with­out demon­strat­ing clin­i­cal cog­ni­tive symptoms.

Key take-aways

  • Life­time expe­ri­ences, like edu­ca­tion, engag­ing occu­pa­tion, and leisure activ­i­ties, have been shown to have a major influ­ence on how we age, specif­i­cal­ly on whether we will devel­op Alzheimer’s symp­toms or not.
  • This is so because stim­u­lat­ing activ­i­ties, ide­al­ly com­bin­ing phys­i­cal exer­cise, learn­ing and social inter­ac­tion, help us build a Cog­ni­tive Reserve to pro­tect us.
  • The ear­li­er we start build­ing our Reserve, the bet­ter; but it is nev­er too late to start. And, the more activ­i­ties, the bet­ter: the effect is cumulative.

The Cog­ni­tive Reserve

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez (AF): Dear Dr. Stern, it is a plea­sure to have you here. Let me first ask you this: the impli­ca­tions of your research are pret­ty broad, pre­sent­ing major impli­ca­tions across sec­tors and age groups. What has been the most unex­pect­ed reac­tion so far?

YS: well…I was pret­ty sur­prised when [Read more…] about Build Your Cog­ni­tive Reserve: An Inter­view with Dr. Yaakov Stern

Brain Health for lawyers

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The Com­plete Lawyer, a legal pub­li­ca­tion dis­trib­uted to bar mem­bers in sev­er­al states, just pub­lished an arti­cle on Ten Impor­tant Truths About Aging: How we age is at least par­tial­ly under our con­trol, By Elkhonon Gold­berg and Alvaro Fernandez.
We were hap­py to con­tribute to the ongo­ing debate about ethics and aging in the legal pro­fes­sion, build­ing on our pre­vi­ous post on the topic.
What are those “Ten Truths”? Well, here you are the outline:
  • Neu­ropsy­chol­o­gy Indi­cates That We Can Con­trol Our Aging
  • Aging Means Life­long Devel­op­ment, Not Auto­mat­ic Decline
  • Some Skills Improve With Age
  • Some Skills Need To Be Con­tin­u­ous­ly Nur­tured And Trained
  • Not All Instances Of For­get­ting Are Of Equal Concern
  • We Are In Con­trol, To A Large Extent
  • There Are Four “Pil­lars Of Brain Health”
  • Cross-Train­ing Our Brains Builds Up Cog­ni­tive Reserve
  • Com­put­er-Based Brain Exer­cise Pro­grams Can Help
  • Embrace “Good Stress”; Elim­i­nate “Bad Stress”
  • Retire­ment Is Overrated

Here is the full arti­cle: Ten Impor­tant Truths About Aging. We hope you enjoy it. The impli­ca­tions, for peo­ple of all ages, are sim­ply astound­ing. Anoth­er relat­ed post is The way we age now.

We are look­ing for more oppor­tu­ni­ties to reach more peo­ple with these impor­tant top­ics, so let us know if you have ideas!

Keep Your Brain Nimble as You Age and Brain Fitness Events

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Some good links today:

1) Keep Your Brain Nim­ble as You Age
MSNBC — May 13, 2007
“If using your com­put­er as a men­tal gym sounds good to you, SharpBrains.com’s Fer­nan­dez sug­gests ask­ing a few ques­tions first to deter­mine a product’s…”

2) Great blog by Stan­ford Busi­ness School’s Jack­son library, includ­ing an announce­ment of an upcom­ing lec­ture there by our very own Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg and Alvaro Fer­nan­dez Pump­ing I.Q., not Iron

3) Some blog car­ni­vals (col­lec­tions of blog posts around spe­cif­ic topics)