Unfortunately,
as we go through life, we lose some of our neurons and the number that go will
depend on things like diet and not doing all those things that our family
doctors keep nagging us about. However, we do have a lot of them and they
normally don’t disappear very rapidly.
From
this point there is good news and bad news. The good news is that we make more
in our hippocampus at a steady if not rapid rate. The bad news is that a lot of
these die off in a week or two, so this is something that we need to pay
attention to.
So
what to do? We have to use them. They like to be useful and well exercised. We
exercise them by putting them to work, and to do that, we have to learn new
things. To study this Nokia et al from Rutgers U employed a team of adult male
lab rats and trained them to wink in response to pulses of white noise, (well
blink really) (1).
They
were taught to give a trace blink or a long delayed blink. The electrical
activity in the brains was measured and finally their new neurons were checked
out and found to be surviving. The electrical oscillations in their hippocampi
at around the 10 Hz range showed that they were learning.
The
important thing is that learning new things sets up new neurons for a
long life. If you change the task that has just been learned, you save more new
neurons from ending up on the scrapheap rather than just exercising the ones
that had just been deployed on the first version.
For
us non-lab rats, our best strategy is not to just do crosswords (that’s the
same task over and over,) but to try taking on something more difficult. Like
learning to play a musical instrument and then try to learn more and more
difficult pieces.
There
are other things to take up too if your family or neighbors have trouble with
your new violin or trombone. They don’t have to be loud. The result of the huge
memory training that London cabbies go through is an increase in the size of
their hippocampi as they learn all the back streets, alleyways, one-ways, and
building locations (2).
- http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0031375
- http://james-goodwin.blogspot.com/2011/12/building-knowledge.html
