I I recently asked myself if I still have a healthy brain as I grow older. I hold a professor in a neuroscience section. However, it is difficult for me to judge whether a particular brain, including myself, suffers from primary nerve production.
However, my new study shows that part of your brain increases with age rather than decline.
The reason for measuring nervous production is very difficult because it is how complicated the measurement of small structures in our brain.
Modern neural imaging technology allows us to detect brain tumors or identify epilepsy lesions. These anomalies are several millimeters and can be depicted with a magnetic resonance imaging scanner (MRI) that is about 30,000-60,000 times stronger than the Earth’s natural magnetic field. The problem is that human thinking and perception act on a smaller scale.
Our thinking and understanding happens in neoocortex. This outer part of our brain consists of six layers. When you feel touched, the layer of four of your sensory strata is activated. This layer is a width of a sand grain – much smaller than what MRI scanners in hospitals can usually depict. When you adjust your body, for example, by trying to read this text, instead of feeling pain from your bad back, layers of five and six sensory strata are activated – even smaller than layer four.
For my study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, I had access to an MRI 7 Tesla scanner that offers five times better image resolution than standard MRI scanners. This makes photos of good scale brain networks visible during understanding and thought.
Using a 7 Tesla scanner, my team and I examined the sensory cortex in healthy adults (about 25 years) and healthy adults (about 65 years) to better understand the brain. We found that only layers of five and six, which modulate the perception of the body, show the signs of age -related degeneration.
The layer four, which needed your body to feel touched, grew up in healthy adults in my study. We also did a comparative study with mice. We found similar results in older mice, so they also had a more prominent layer than younger rats.
However, evidence of our study of mice, which includes the third group of very old rats, showed that this part of the brain may become more advanced at old age.
Current theories assume that our brain is smaller. But my team’s findings are somewhat inconsistent with these theories. This is the first evidence that some parts of the brain grow older with age in ordinary adults.
The older adults are expected to be more susceptible to touch and pain with a thicker layer, and (due to the reduction of deep layers) are difficult to adjust such emotions.
To better understand this work, we studied a middle -aged patient who was born without an arm. The patient had a smaller layer of four. This shows that their brains have received less motivations than two arms and thus created less masses in layer. Parts of the most commonly used brain create more synapses, so they have more mass.
The old adult brain appears to maintain at least what they use rather than systematically destructive. Brain aging may be compared to a complex machinery in which some components are often well -used, while others, less commonly used. From this point of view, aging is an individual brain formed by our lifestyle, including sensory experiences, reading habits, and cognitive challenges in everyday life.
In addition, this shows that the brains of healthy older people maintain their ability to coordinate with their surroundings.
A lifetime of experiences
There is another interesting aspect of the results. The pattern of brain change we found in older adults – a stronger sensory processing zone and a reduced modulator area – shows similarities to neural disorders such as autism spectrum disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Neural disorders are characterized by increasing sensory sensitivity and decreased filter abilities, resulting in problems in concentration and cognitive flexibility.
Does our findings show that aging leads to neurological disorders? The elderly adult brain is formed with a lifetime of experience, while nervous people are born with these brain patterns. So we can know what impacts have on brain mass construction with age.
However, our findings give us clues to why older adults sometimes have trouble compatibility with new sensory environments. For example, in such circumstances with a new technical device or visiting a new city, reducing the modulating capabilities of layers five and six may be especially revealed and may increase the likelihood of inactivity or confusion. It may also explain the reduced abilities for multi -tasks with age, such as using a cell phone while walking. Sensory information must be adjusted to prevent interference when doing more than one task.
Both the middle and the deep layers of the myelin had more, a protective layer of fat that is very important for nerve function and communication in old mice as well as humans. This shows that in people over the age of 65, there is a compensatory mechanism to eliminate the moderating performance. This effect seemed to be decomposed in very old mice.
Our results provide evidence of one’s lifestyle power to form an aging brain.
Esther Cohen is a professor of neuroscience at Tübingen University.
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