Could we change our brain's age?

How much of the outside can change the age of your inside? Media have been convincing us in both its sublime and invasive ways that we need not look our age. I am not sure how successfully they have scientifically proven that outside of the celebrities whose genes should be the ones primarily thanked for their youthful looks. We certainly welcome real efforts to keep ourselves from looking like wrinkled grapes when we get older but I am a lot more worried about age eventually reducing my mind to a grape smoothie. What could possibly help in this seemingly inevitable breakdown? Would the way we live and interact with each other, or even the design of our spaces affect it? Would these be able to help slow or even reverse the aging of our brains?

In last month’s issue of Experimental Gerontology, scientists from the Arizona State University and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences published a study that showed that when older bees who used to forage took care of the larvae in the hive instead of moving on to forage, their brains reverted to being young — they regained the capacity to learn new things.

Bees really spend some time taking care of “baby bees” or larvae. But after some time, some of them fly out to find food. The scientists have observed that those that do, aged very quickly in terms of worn wings, hair loss, and also lose the capacity to learn. But when the scientists intervened by removing the “nursing bees” so that the old foraging bees were “forced” to take care of the larvae, their brains regained the youthful capacity of the brain to learn new things.

I can hear many of you saying “yeah great but I am not a bee.” Well, that concern did not escape the scientists. They checked the protein in the brain that seemed to have changed when the bee brain reverted to being young and it is a protein called Prx6, a protein that we humans also have. This is the kind that protects against dementia, including Alzheimer’s. And that is why this study made it to the news. It is proof that we may not solely rely on drugs to retain or even reverse our brain tendencies in terms of its capacity to learn. This research shows that “outside,” i.e., a social experience, could change your inside or the “givens” including your genes and how they are programmed to work and to make you last or shall we say, fade from life’s active commission.

A week or two before I read about the bee experiment, I came across what seemed to be a landmark experiment that might have, in one way or another, led to this research on what could we do that could change our brains, including this research on bees. It was conducted by a Harvard psychology professor named Ellen Langer in 1979. In it, she had a group of men in their 70s go for some kind of nostalgia retreat but not before they were tested in terms of their strength, posture, eyesight and memory.

Langer told the men that for that week, they have to act like they were 20 years younger. To test whether “place” helped, the design of the space was also changed toward this end. There was no one at the retreat site to help them alight the buses or to carry their luggage. There were also no extra aids like rails to help them move around. The space was strewn with objects that were circa 1950s and the men were told to reminisce using the present tense in their conversation without mention of any event that occurred after 1959. The effect, as reported, was radical as the participants started to walk faster and several of them even did without their walking sticks. Langer did not check their brains but she showed that the men improved in their dexterity, speed, memory, blood pressure, eyesight and hearing. When they were encouraged to act “as if, as the psychological principle is called, they really behaved like men 20 years younger.

We are often told to “act our age.”  We have mostly caged the entitlements of youth or old age to a certain set of expectations within our families and culture. But these experiments have shown that there may be a way to turn our “braintime” back. In physics, Einstein’s Special Relativity means that the closer you get to the speed of light, the younger you will be relative to others who maintain their speed. It seems that there is a parallel principle at work in our brains: if we try harder to defy what seems to be established for us in terms of our chronological age, then we also become younger compared to those who will not do something other than what they expect of themselves or what others expect of them in terms of their age.  

“Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote that in 1951 and I hear that in many memorials to older people who have passed on. Now we could add to that: old age could rage with deeds of youth and there may be a good chance it will turn back time’s hands where it really matters — in our own minds.

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