Canyon Ranch 30 Days to a Better Brain: A Groundbreaking Program for Improving Your Memory, Concentration, Mood, and Overall Well-Being - Hardcover

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Richard Carmona, MD, MPH, FACS, is the President of the Canyon Ranch Institute, Vice Chairman of Canyon Ranch, and the Distinguished Professor of Public Health at the University of Arizona. He also served as the seventeenth Surgeon General of the US from 2002 to 2006.

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Canyon Ranch 30 Days to a Better Brain

Chapter 1

HOW THE BRAIN WORKS

If you’ve been taking your brain for granted, you’re not alone. Most people assume their brain is working just as well as ever, even as they get older. But the reality can be far different.

The brain is a highly responsive organ that is involved in every internal function of the body, from regulating metabolism to controlling balance and coordination to governing our sex lives and, of course, all the activities associated with the senses and the mind, particularly mood and memory. The brain’s functioning is central to the concept of the mind-body connection, the way the body’s health responds to our thoughts, feelings, and actions. This connection illustrates how our emotional life can both positively and negatively affect our physical health and how our physical health can affect our mood and cognition. The truth is that the brain and the rest of the body are one unit of health; the brain is affected by many of the same diseases and conditions that distress our physical health. At the same time, it is also susceptible to aging and even injury.

Monitoring the brain’s health is not always as obvious or easy as evaluating changes to the rest of the body. Many of us notice the aches and pains as well as the signs and symptoms of physical aging. You know when you’ve put on weight even though your diet hasn’t changed, and you can tell when your joints hurt more than they did last year. But you might not notice that your thinking has slowed down or your attention is not sharp or your moods or anxiety levels have changed. This is mostly due to the fact that the brain is hidden from our view; we can’t see it aging as clearly as we can see the gray hairs coming in or our jawline slackening.

The brain also has enormous biological reserve, the extensive backup plan to keep all aspects of your health—physical as well as emotional—running smoothly. This reserve allows the body to continue functioning as we age and gives us a false sense of security in terms of our cognition; we actually can get by with substantial loss of brain function without realizing that changes have occurred. This reserve makes it very difficult to recognize if there has been a slowing in our mental capacity until there is a significant change. Yet unfortunately, once you do notice, it means that the underlying problem that has caused this change has been going on for a very long time.

The good news is that just like the rest of your body, your brain can get better. By starting a program based on improving your brain health now, you can begin to recognize subtle changes and have the opportunities to enhance your brain’s capabilities so that it can serve you well now and for years to come. Science has only just recently confirmed what we at Canyon Ranch have believed all along: your lifestyle can influence your health. This research has blossomed into a new field called epigenetics, which suggests that it is possible to alter one’s genetic destiny by changing nongenetic factors—such as lifestyle choices. These specific behaviors can actually cause a person’s genes to turn on or off without changing the underlying DNA sequencing. In other words, to a very large extent, you are in control of your own health. And nowhere is this more exciting to consider than in terms of your brain’s potential.

This book is meant to set you on the path to better brain health. We believe that this is the highest pursuit in wellness that you can become engaged with, because you really can’t be healthy without a healthy brain. And it terms of your longevity, your brain’s functioning is as important as that of any other organ in your body, including your heart.

We all hope for and have come to expect to live long lives. A hundred years ago, the average person could expect to live between forty-nine and fifty-one years. Today if you are in good health, it’s reasonable to assume that you will live well into your eighties and even beyond. Medical technology is one of the underlying reasons for this enormous increase: we have easy access to a host of treatments and procedures that can keep our internal organs and bone structure from failing. However, our ability to increase longevity has not fully addressed many of the problems associated with an aging brain. The truth is, half of the people who reach eighty-five years of age will have some form of dementia or cognitive dysfunction. This knowledge alone is exactly why improving brain health is so critical: we want not only to maintain a vibrant, healthy body for years to come but for those years to be of the highest quality. And the only way to ensure that is by maintaining—or even enhancing—a vibrant, healthy brain. By doing so, you’ll increase your capacity to live life to its fullest every day.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR BRAIN

The brain is a complex and sophisticated organ, and to work on improving its health, it’s important to understand both its structure and how it functions. On the smallest scale the brain is made of 100 billion individual neurons, or brain cells. Neurons are the electrically excitable cells that process and transmit information to each other through neurotransmitters, or brain chemicals. Together, these neurons and neurotransmitters form a specialized network that governs how we feel and think.

Each neuron is composed of a cell body, dendrites, and one axon. More than 150 different types of neurons exist, so they are some of the most diverse cells in the human body. Dendrites and axons are thin structures that branch off the neuronal cell body. Each cell body is surrounded by multiple dendrites, but never more than one axon. In simplest terms, one neuron’s dendrite connects to another’s axon, but the two do not completely touch. With 100 billion neurons, this allows for 100 trillion connections between them. Each connection creates a synapse, the place where the chemical and electrical signals of the brain are sent and received.

The axon is protected by a myelin sheath, an insulation barrier much like the material surrounding an electrical wire. The myelin sheath helps the axon hold on to its chemical message until it’s delivered to the next cell.



A NEURON OR BRAIN CELL

The brain’s function is measured by how well your neuronal network is working: Are the neurons hooked up to each other in the right way? Are they making the same or new connections? Are there any short circuits? And most important, how quickly can they transfer information? This transmission is referred to as brain processing speed. Damage to any part of this system limits or prevents the neuronal message from transferring from one cell to the next. Speed, then, is important in the sense that it is necessary for maintaining the information traveling through the axon so that it can be relayed to the next neuron. A normal brain responds to stimuli at a speed of at least one-third of a second. Typically, we lose seven to ten milliseconds of brain speed per decade from age twenty on. The difference between a resourceful mind and senility is only one hundred milliseconds. When this loss occurs, the neurons can no longer fire their chemical messages fast enough to affect the actions they were governing. That is why as we age we move more slowly, misjudge distances, and make mistakes.

This loss of brain speed is one of the main causes of mild cognitive impairment, or MCI....