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Relax Folks! It's a new Rotary Year
and our first guest speaker for the year gave us plenty to think about.
Exercising the Brain – Duncan Ferguson
Do not worry too much about finding brain function fading with getting older. Tuesday’s rotary meeting speaker, Duncan Ferguson, offered hope for the 99.9 per cent of people who can be helped to resist brain deterioration with a new form of brain training. Ferguson is the sales and marketing chief of Navon Brain Fitness, an Australian brain training company that is partnered with CogniFit, an Israeli company that developed a computer program CogniFit that worked on rejuvenating brains.
Close attention from the 64 members present was obvious as Ferguson showed a short film of some nuns who had donated their brains to medical science. The remarkable point of the donation was the clinical deterioration of their brains with Altzheimers disease but their obvious normal functioning in their community in the United States. It was the functional ability of the older nuns despite the full onset of altzheimers disease that formed the basis of a new approach to resisting the effects of ageing.
Ages in the 90s and over 100 years old were not unusual in this convent but it was not so much the age as the full functioning of the subjects as they performed their usual tasks that provided interesting material. Film showed the nuns involved in physical exercise and performing certain cognitive functions at normal levels in spite of their great age and what was found to be full blown Altzheimers Disease later. A centenarian was knitting and remarked that `getting one part wrong early meant trouble later’. She was knitting what looked like a circular pattern such as a jumper sleeve or a sock.
Among the important aspects of retaining cognitive acuity was the social interaction that was vital to brain health, the sense of community in the nuns’ convent being obvious in the film. Mixing with a variety of people was important to the brain if it was to retain all its functions.
``The thinking in the 1990s was that brain cells gradually died and were not replaced,’’ said Ferguson adding that ``today we realize cells can be rejuvenated and the onset of their deterioration delayed with brain exercises.’’ Cells could be replaced or retrained to perform different functions and he suggested it was important that the brain be given a series of new challenges as it aged to keep it active. Cells that performed the same functions everyday gradually lost their ability to keep performing familiar tasks. ``It is a bit like the two iron in your golf bag. You do not use it much so you may forget it is there. It is important to give yourself new tasks such as using the other hand to butter your toast in the morning to provide a variation in your usual routine to usefully energise the brain,’’ said Ferguson.
Diet and exercise were necessary to provide some of the materials for rejuvenation – higher oxygenation of the blood and the raw materials for strengthening the shielding around the neurons so their messages could continue to flow strongly.
Ferguson showed slides of highly magnified brain parts such as dendrites and axons as he explained the way the functions of these were capable with the right conditions of resisting the depredations of time. Insulation through the application of a greater depth of myelin – the insulation of the nerves – was a major beneficiary of exercise and diet and formed an important part of the physical aspect of resisting deterioration. Russian tennis players were, Ferguson said, trained repetitively at one point to perform tennis strokes so that even when they were tired they could mechanically yet skillfully produce the right responses to the movement of the ball.
The development of Nerve Growth Factor was important and this came from nutrition, exercise and interaction between people.
The functional aspect of the brain – its being used for a variety of tasks – led Ferguson to talk about Navon, a company in which he was a shareholder, that provided computer based exercises that challenged the brain to promote rejuvenation and postpone declining function. A series of tasks were contained in a computer program developed by an Israeli scientist who developed the program from his specializing in medicine in stress relief. He had grown up in Nazi Germany, hidden in convents there, with the opportunity to observe stress.
Ferguson said the Israeli was called by some the Einstein of Israel and he had developed the brain challenges – with encouragement built into it for the subjects to lead them to participate in the tasks with more enjoyment – to further the development and retaining of the brain.
Things that promoted continuing brain development included learning a new musical instrument (new president Bill Goodwin obliged with a rendition on his ukele of the Theme from Camberwell Market that backs Sunday announcements there) or learning a new language. Travel was also useful to spark up a tired brain. He said that social interaction was a key to the brain’s continuing strong functioning referring back to the convent community and its ability to hold off the effects of age.
The Editor
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