We've been exploring how the brain copes with both
aging and how it responds to fitness training. Or aerobic fitness training; walking is the
main intervention we use. With our older adults, in that body of studies, we ve looked at changes
in brain structure using magnetic resonance imaging, finding that older adults who participate
in these programs expand the volume of the number of the areas of cortex, both areas
of grey matter and of the cell bodies and of the neurons, the supporting structure as
well as the white matter or the interconnection the neurons or the cell bodies. In a variety
of areas from the prefrontal cortex, temporal cortex, as well as an area called the interior
combattere that allows the brain to communicate between the hemispheres, so there've been
increases in structure. We ve also looked at changes in function as a function of these
fitness training interventions using functional magnetic resonance imaging and with our colleagues
Monica Fabiani and Gabrielli Gratone near-infrared spectroscopy and event related optical signals
and what we found there is that older adults again who go through a six month training
period, three days a week, about an hour a day walking start out slow, go faster; nobody
winning any race this year but certainly they re walking further and faster. But after the
six month period, the networks, the neural networks that support the perceptual and cognitive
abilities, tend to become more efficient. Actually they look more like the neural networks
that are observed for young people, much younger people. So that's an interesting finding.
More recently, we ve been doing a year-long study that is fifty weeks, three times a week,
or a hundred and fifty sessions and assessing changes in cognition with behavioral measures,
brain structures, and brain function with MRI and functional magnetic resonance imaging.
Over the course of the year, before six months, and after the intervention and finding some
very interesting changes in targeted areas of the brain and were almost done with that
study; we'll be done in about another six months. So they re a multitude of changes,
the behavioral level, the brain structural level, and at the brain function level with humans.
We do a variety of projects both at the Beckman
Institute and collaboration with others pretty much throughout the United States and across
the world on cognitive training. We've looked at very specific programs of training,
we've come up with to train older people in the ability to multitask given the demands in
today's world that we do many things quickly or switch quickly among tasks. And we've had
some success there in adaptive individualized training, computer-based training of older
adults. More recently, we've looked at the utility of off-the-shelf video games. We used
a video game called Rise of Nations , which is a strategy based game and we asked whether
we could train higher level cognitive abilities that fall under this general heading of executive
control; planning, scheduling, dealing with ambiguity, multitasking, working memory, by
virtue of having these older adults practice this game for about three or four weeks and
we found some very promising data there, that we did find some benefits on some standard
neuropsychological tests. We also do work with our collegues at John's Hopkins on our
really unique program called Experience Corps, in which older adults who are pretty low fit,
older, seventy five years of age, poor education, eighth grade level on average, poor socioeconomic
status and in the present case, a hundred percent African-American women. We get them
involved in a program in which they're trained to provide literacy support, numeracy support,
behavior management support, and library support in kindergarten through third grade. They're
trained for several months. They go into the schools in teams of about ten to fifteen.
They work fifteen hours a week with the kids, the kindergartners through third graders and
we assess them both with behavioral measures of various aspects of cognition as well as
brain measures using the MRI systems available at the hospital complex at John's Hopkins
and we found similar facts to what we found with our fitness interventions and when you
think of Experience Corps, it's truly multimodal. It involves becoming more physically fit,
those little chairs we used to sit in when we were kids. Imagine being seventy five and
frail and popping up, up and out of those chairs. Certainly social, they work with other
people, they work with kids, they work with teachers, a lot of these people are pretty
isolated that are in this program. It's cognitively and emotionally challenging; so it really
incorporates a multitude of aspects of lifestyle that we know from a variety of different studies
that have studied social interaction and physical activity and intellectual challenge separately,
are good for us and prove cognition can ward off at least, to eliminate, extent neuro-degenerative
diseases like Alzheimer's disorder, but it's all put together here; it s all conglomerated
or integrated as it is in most real world tasks and it's something people really enjoy.
Generally one of the problems with a lot of these interventions is that, especially physical
activity training or physical fitness is that people become disinterested or life gets in
the way and they no longer participate so participation rates tend to decline with time,
especially in physical activity training. With the Experience Corps project at John's
Hopkins, we had ninety five percent maintenance rates, so ninety five percent of people who
started, finished because it s something that s meaningful to people. So those are some
of the cognitive and multimodal programs we ve been involved and there are others. 0:05:50.560,0:05:55.230 Exercise tends to provoke a number of changes or engender a number of
changes including building new connections among neurons called synaptogenesis, building
new vascular structure to deal with increased demands called angiogenesis, even constructing
new neurons from adult stem cells, or progenitor cells, that s very limited, occurs mostly
in two regions of the brain and the hippocampus as been an area that s been studied. So a
number of structural changes that lead to more efficient neural networks but also increases
in gene expression of proteins such as neurotrophins. There are a number of these neurotrophins
that are neuro protective and they engender the structural changes. So although there
s still much to be learned, we've learned quite a bit from nonhuman animal research
about the molecular and cellular that takes place with fitness change training or just
a variety of different training scenarios with young organisms as well as older organisms.
Well,as my daughter said about ten years ago now
when we I had a little article written about us in USA today: Be smart, Exercise your heart,
that was her sound bite; that I think she was seven when she was published by USA Today,
not bad. But I like it because what it suggests is that you can get smarter in a sense that
as you can improve various aspects of perception and cognition if you take a walk or take a
few walks. Many people ask me well, do we really have to get involved in running or
lifting weights or do we really have to sweat a lot. Sweating works but you don t have to,
you just have to do more than what you re doing. So, the intervention we use is walking
and people come into our program and they don t walk much. In our society, in the United
States, we don't walk much. Some cultures walk more than we do; if you get involved
in walking further and maybe a little bit faster with friends and that s pretty much
what it takes. So it's not overly challenging; nobody's winning triathlons or Senior Olympics,
that'd be great if they were; but it's really pretty moderate exercise and there s no good
reason not to do it. Even if you ve got physical conditions that make it hard to walk, swim.
Ride a bike. There are many options. I actually meet people in the street that talk about
this research on fitness training, its effect on brain and cognition and that's the literature
that we've contributed to here at the Beckman Institute. So I think people are starting
to hear about it. It used to be that physical fitness was talked about with respect to maintaining
a healthy, harder, healthy body and that s all true. It really has a multitude of effects,
but it also allows you to maintain a healthy mind and brain and I think it s getting out
there in a variety of different forms from print media, to blogs, to web videos, to the
evening news and I hope people are taking it seriously. I do.