What Boosts the Brain?

06/22/2011

Life is your seesaw. You may not stay balanced long, but you can aim for a high after every low.
Dr. Sanita Belgrave, Family Medicine Specialist and World Literacy Ambassador for Barbados

The brain is big at newsstands. Magazine headlines proclaim, "Food to Grow Your Brain," "Three Steps to a Better Brain," "How to Benefit from New Brain Discoveries." Yet a 2010 evaluation of purported ways to maintain or improve cognitive function conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and reported in Newsweek (January 10, 2011), found that nearly all such claims are groundless. Claims (some even carried in ExchangeEveryDay) for the brain boosting power of various vitamins, anti-oxidants, fatty acids, statins, ibuprofen, and having a large social network are all unsupported by credible research.

In its comprehensive review of brain research, NIH did find one input that had a positive impact on changing the brain -- attention. "...Attention is almost magical in its ability to physically alter the brain and enlarge functional circuits....That might explain why skills we're already good at don't make us much smarter: we don't pay much attention to them. In contrast, taking up a new, cognitively demanding activity -- ballroom dancing, a foreign language -- is more likely to boost processing speed, strengthen synapses, and expand or create functional networks."

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