[MUSIC] [TOGA]: The brain is what makes humans human.

It's central to everything about us.

The ability to learn things new, to experience new things.

It's all between my ears.

[BANFIELD]: The brain is our command center and it's imbued with an incredible gift.

It can change its structure and function through a process called neuroplasticity.

[MOFFETT]: We used to think that the brain was set up the way it was set up.

But it turns out, the brain can adapt also.

And if it's given a different set of circumstances, it'll change.

So, if we accepted that we've been able to learn, we probably should have known a long time ago that this was true, right?

I mean, learning is probably another way of saying plasticity.

[BANFIELD]: Because the brain actually can control its own changes, it allows any of us to harness its power in our lives.

Gaining control over our brain's plasticity allows us to reimagine what we conceive of being possible.

[FENTON]: I think that a lot of people who are studying plasticity, ultimately are trying to understand the nuts and bolts of that nerve cell communication, and when we understand it well enough, we'll explain things like memory.

We'll explain all of these things that we consider learned, are ultimately functions of what brains do.

And the way brains achieve that stuff that we consider learning is through plasticity mechanisms.

[CHIBA]: All of our activities change the brain.

And the idea is that an optimized brain changes to meet the demands of the environment.

And so we have to be careful what demands we place on ourselves.

[SCHWARTZ]: Neuroplasticity becomes a very deep, rich subject matter because you're not just studying the effects of external environment on the nervous system but in human beings uniquely, neuroplasticity can be directed by the person's awareness of their own inner life.

[MERZENICH]: The understanding of our brain is an understanding of ourself.

And it's absolutely transformative.

It changes everything.

This might be the greatest, single broad achievement contributed to by thousands of scientists.

So many people don't realize that a revolution has occurred.

[BANFIELD]: Join me, Ashleigh Banfield, as we explore this incredible untapped power to transform our lives for the better, even as we age -- in The Brain Revolution.

[MUSIC] [BANFIELD]: Hi, I'm Ashleigh Banfield.

The human brain -- it weighs only about three pounds, yet it fundamentally controls and shapes our entire life.

The brain is also perhaps the greatest scientific mystery, one that we've barely scratched the surface of truly understanding.

In this program, we're going to delve deep into that mystery and show that there are tangible actions that anyone can do right now to take control.

Think of them as the pillars of The Brain Revolution.

Number 1: Master the building blocks of plasticity, Number 2: Harness the tenets of learning.

Number 3: Create optimal brain health, and Number 4: Drive positive changes with life-long learning.

By using the pillars, you can change your life and create your own Brain Revolution.

And as the neuroscientists we spoke to told us, repeatedly -- it is never too late to make significant changes with dramatic impacts.

So, let's get started - by first gaining a better understanding of the roots of neuroplasticity, also known as "“brain change.

"” [BEGLEY]: People, I think, get the impression about science that it's, one revolution after another, but it's really not.

Science is very conservative.

So the few pioneers when they conducted their initial experiments suggesting that, in fact, the adult brain can change in a dramatic way.

They were dismissed.

[BANFIELD]: These original pioneers pressed on and proved that the brain could change its structure and function through our own direct engagement and interaction.

[BEGLEY]: One of the pioneers has been Michael Merzenich.

He did some of the earliest work showing that mere behavior can change the way the brain is structured.

And his main contribution was to show that you didn't have to have something as dramatic as a brain injury, or any other kind of trauma.

But instead, just the way you behave that could remap the brain.

And that was the first indication that just normal living, again just behavior could lead to a significant change in the adult brain.

[DOIDGE]: Mike Merzenich is the person who's made, uh, the most ambitious claims for what brain plasticity can do.

And you have to pay attention to what he says because he's already done some absolutely remarkable things.

He was involved in pioneering the cochlear implant.

[BANFIELD]: A cochlear implant is an electronic device that can partially restore the brain's speech reception, a person's ability to hear.

Unlike hearing aids, which amplify sound, a cochlear implant converts and processes sound and delivers those electric signals directly to the auditory nerve.

[DOIDGE]: It's just like a substitute hearing apparatus.

And if you think about it, if you attach a little machine to your brain, the only way that the brain could begin to decode the signals from that machine would be to somehow or other reorganize itself because it's not natural.

[BANFIELD]: Because of the brain's ability to change and adapt - its neuroplasticity -- it turned out that the quality, or the type of encoding coming from the cochlear implant didn't matter to the brain.

From the brain's perspective, over time, it seemed to be just like it was before the patient lost their hearing.

[MERZENICH]: And that's why a person with a cochlear implant with an acquired loss relearns language so fast.

I knew it wasn't a miracle of our engineering.

I knew that was pretty primitive.

Compared to what the intact ear does, they're crude as hell.

And yet, they worked so marvelously.

And they worked with clearly the brain making adjustments to the crude signals that were being delivered to it.

[BANFIELD]: In addition to Dr. Merzenich's work on the cochlear implant, there were parallel efforts by researchers in Australia and Austria.

These development teams used substantially different encoding strategies.

But all of the approaches engaged a part of the inner ear that normally only represents high, squeaky sounds.

The brain correctly interpreted the information and made sense of it - it didn't care how that information came in!

As the researchers further investigated the activity in the brain of the cochlear implant recipients, they noticed something else unusual -- that the visual cortex was activated during the act of hearing.

[FRACKOWIAK]: These are normally sighted individuals.

Normal people never activated their visual cortex when they were listening to things.

So, what the heck was going on?

[BANFIELD]: In the case of the cochlear implant patients, they were associating the visual input of their speech-therapist's lip movements with the auditory input that was now coming into their brain from the cochlear implant.

[FRACKOWIAK]: What turned out was that it looked as though the visual cortex was capturing information that was sending to the auditory cortex, which was capturing very sparse information about the auditory world but was now able to tune itself through the visual information.

And so you were reinforcing essentially one system with the other.

That is a fascinating insight into plasticity of course.

[MERZENICH]: And then the patient comes in one day.

And the patient tells us that he's beginning to hear, quote everything.

And you can't imagine how exciting that is.

It took a while for us to realize that it wasn't our device that accounted for this, in a sense, miracle.

What would accomplish this, of course, was the brain and its plasticity.

The brain made adjustments.

And because we were delivering enough information to the brain, the brain basically, in a sense, learned how to reinterpret it.

And the amazing thing that happened was that when hearing and understanding was recovered, the person told us that it sounded just like it sounded before they lost their hearing.

[MUSIC] [BANFIELD]: The success of the invention of the cochlear implant showed the promise and power of brain change.

Plasticity is a fundamental characteristic of all brains.

Understanding that the brain can change is the basis for The Brain Revolution.

It provides a powerful tool for improvement at any age, particularly when you can expand capabilities with "“Positive Plasticity.

"” [MERZENICH]: There is an organic way to drive the brain in a corrective direction, right?

And that's to engage it in positive plasticity processes.

This is revolutionary.

It's revolutionary because we're finally getting to the way the brain itself controls change.

So now we control that process.

We understand how to manipulate that process.

We can drive the brain more powerfully, more effectively, more completely in a corrective direction.

I think that ultimately this will substantially supplant medicine as in contemporary medical strategies as it relates to how we think about correcting brain function.

[BANFIELD]: Plasticity means that the brain can be reshaped and remodeled.

While we would like to think that all changes can be positive, they can just as easily be negative -- if we're not careful.

[DOIDGE]: If I've learned anything by studying brain plasticity, it's that each time you repeat the bad habit, your brain wants to repeat it even more.

The good news is that as you start to develop good habits, each time you repeat them, you get better at persevering.

Now that would be great if we could just all develop good habits all along.

The problem is in life that sometimes what is a good habit umm, in one situation is not necessarily good in another situation.

So, we're often ill prepared because of this aspect of our brains to new situations.

[BANFIELD]: One example that highlights the danger of negative plasticity is the response of pain in the brain, and in particular, with regard to the condition of chronic pain.

[CHIBA]: We can develop plastic pain circuits.

There's something called neuropathic pain, that is really aberrant plasticity, where even though the source of the pain may be gone, it reiterates through those circuits, and maintains the experience of pain.

[DECHARMS]: One of the things that's very challenging for many pain patients is they say, my family doesn't believe me.

My physician may not believe me, I'm not even sure I believe myself, because I've had this experience of pain for so long, but there's no physical manifestation that anyone can see.

Chronic pain is an enduring ongoing signal, it changes the nervous system, and it can change it in ways that amplify further the chronic pain.

[BANFIELD]: To counteract the negative plasticity that is occurring in a chronic pain patient, Dr. DeCharms is using new technology to help turn that equation around with positive plasticity.

[DECHARMS]: We hope that we can take that process of plasticity that carves pathways in the brain and reverse it or change it.

[BANFIELD]: Using real-time brain-scanning technology allows a patient to visualize their pain - and then, use their brain to help control the expression of it.

[DECHARMS]: We give them the ability to look at their own brain processes in real time and try to control them.

So, when a patient sees a fire go up as a way of depicting what's happening in their brain, that's intuitive to many people.

We have found in initial results that patients are able to produce, in some cases quite significant decreases in the pain that they experienced both in the scanner when they're deliberately trying to control their pain, but also outside of the scanner on an ongoing basis.

It may be that people can learn how to produce lasting changes in their pain through this approach.

[MUSIC] [BANFIELD]: To retain positive change, neuroscientists believe in the adage of "“Use it, or lose it.

"” This applies more deeply to the machinery of the brain.

The brain is acutely attuned towards learning, so in order to keep the machinery functioning at its best, we need to push the brain to learn.

While in the early part of life, this learning is functioning for most people almost without effort, as we acquire new abilities and skills.

But at some point, that balance shifts and we're using the skills we know rather than adding to our repertoire.

[MERZENICH]: We become users of mastered skills and abilities.

And there's relatively little new learning going on.

We're comfortable in our lives.

We're no longer in an active learning mode, as we were when we were younger.

The brain is a learning machine.

And the only way it can really sustain its performance, in a tip top way, is by continual attention to the details of how we receive information and manipulate it and use it.

How we control our actions or our thoughts and so forth.

Now all of that is, from a learning perspective, is largely in our past.

It's crucial that we maintain active learning, a schedule of active learning, it's crucial that we work on the details of how we receive and manipulate information to the end of our days, if we really want to maintain our faculties in high order.

[BANFIELD]: One way to maximize learning -- particularly as we age-- is to directly confront these negative changes.

[SEIDLER]: You can think about healthy aging.

Sensory systems are degraded, they become noisier, and you may have some sensory conflict.

The way to resolve this or to help deal with it, is the opposite of what you might want to do, right.

So, if you're feeling dizziness or you're feeling like your balance is impaired as you're aging, many people then limit their activities.

They self-limit things that might challenge their balance or cause them to fall, when in fact, what you really need to do to resolve these conflicts is place yourself in those challenging conditions.

So, go to an exercise class, or do things that challenge your balance.

Make sure you're doing it in a safe way where you're not going to have a fall, but don't avoid those activities.

[BANFIELD]: This is the heart of use it or lose it - don't shrink from a challenge.

The easiest way to ensure that we're maintaining our learning machinery is to create a schedule of active learning.

[TOGA]: The brain requires us to learn new things.

They should be difficult -- engaging in a social interaction that causes us to think, try to understand a concept that we didn't understand before, to learn a new behavior, learn a new task.

And as you get older, we don't want to get lazy.

We want to constantly push ourselves and learn new things.

Because the metabolic demand that's a result of that effort is important to us.

It's, it provides additional health.

It provides perhaps additional cognitive reserve.

[BEGLEY]: What's so encouraging about the discoveries in neuroplasticity is that indeed the brain we're born with, even the brain that we exit childhood with, need not be the brain that we have forever, that there are changes that can undergo as a result of the choices you make and the life that you lead, whether it's to learn to play the piano, whether it's learning to meditate, whether it's learning, just something as simple as thinking your thoughts differently.

All of those leave indelible changes on the adult brain.

Changes that can be measured in brain imaging machines and just by how you behave, how you act, how you feel and think.

So the discoveries of neuroplasticity are terrific, beneficial and optimistic.

[MERZENICH]: Everything we do that's important to us to make ourself healthier, to improve our chances for success, to improve our chances for happiness.

All of these things are plastic.

All of that is within our power to achieve and I think we will achieve it.

And I think there's nothing more important that's occurred in science or in life that relates to the quality of human lives than this, maybe ever.

So, take it to heart.

Believe it.

It can change your life for the better.

[BANFIELD]: The Brain Revolution is a hopeful ray of light that goes against some long-held beliefs.

You can change your brain - no matter your age or situation.

And with that knowledge, you can put into practice the keys of brain plasticity to aim the trajectory in a positive direction.

When we come back, we'll learn the tenets of learning and how we can build optimal brain health to supercharge your Brain Revolution.

[BANFIELD]: We're back with The Brain Revolution.

I'm Ashleigh Banfield.

So far, we've learned that the basis for The Brain Revolution is neuroplasticity - the power of brain change-- and that it's imperative for each of us to take control of this power if we're to enact positive change in our lives.

We also need to harness our brain's learning mechanisms on a continual basis in order to keep it in shape.

Underlying all learning is a system of motivation.

[TOGA]: The brain is designed to receive rewards and punishment.

So, we have circuits in our brain that are developed so that we perform certain tasks.

I mean, think of when you get hungry.

When you get hungry, you're going to eat.

We respond to social reward as well.

It's a much more sophisticated cognitive response to encouragement and to appreciation for doing something.

And so that motivates us to do it again.

[BANFIELD]: The learning mechanisms or the tenets of learning - Attention, Memory, Processing rate and Sequencing are critical.

It's the second pillar of The Brain Revolution.

These tenets also go by an easy-to-remember acronym -- "“AMPS.

"” And just like an amplifier for your brain, if you plug them in, you can supercharge positive plasticity in your life.

Let's take a look at what makes The A - attention - so important.

[MERZENICH]: One of the critical factors that controls change in the brain is attention.

So, the brain has a way basically of turning a spotlight on the things that you are, quote attending to.

Attention is actually regulating what is allowed to change.

I only change things that I'm aware of, that I'm attentive to, right, and is a function of the focus of my attention.

That's why it's so crucial when you're in a learning mode, attention be focused, sharp, serious ideally, because those are the conditions of relatively strong enabling of change, relatively selective enabling of change that drives positive learning.

Positive brain change.

[BANFIELD]: Psychologist Jeffery Schwartz pioneered a way of navigating our plasticity that he calls "“directed attention.

"” His landmark studies with patients with obsessive compulsive disorder demonstrated how this works.

[SCHWARTZ]: Obsessive compulsive disorder is the absolute hallmark of a neuropsychiatric condition.

What you need to do is teach people that they don't have to have their attention completely dominated by those brain malfunctions.

If you can teach a person to recognize and the term I use is relabel and say, "“That's not me, that's my brain.

"” That turns out to be a very, very powerful statement.

Once they realize "“That's my brain sending me a false message,"” that empowers them to make a different choice about how to focus attention when that bothersome feeling comes.

And these choices that a person can make to not respond to what their brain is telling them to do.

focusing attention differently, we now know that changes how the brain works.

Self-directed neuroplasticity.

[MUSIC] [BANFIELD]: Attention puts a spotlight on information that is taken into the brain.

How we're able to use that information throughout our life relies on the second part of AMPS - Memory.

[TALLAL]: Clearly memory's important because if you paid attention to something and you got it, but you didn't remember it, it's not going to really allow you to build over time this base of content.

[CHIBA]: So, as we go through the environment, and something's different than we remember, or slightly perturbed from what we expected, then we upregulate our attention, and we learn more.

So, the two are continually interacting.

[TOGA]: Plasticity has changed the brain in a way that we can begin to make these comparisons and add to it, constantly adding information to brain and comparing it to past experiences.

[BANFIELD]: How the brain physically retains memory has been the focus of modern research.

Certain physical structures in the brain we now know are directly related to memory.

One such structure is the hippocampus.

[FENTON]: The hippocampus is very good at indexing memories or experiences as they come in.

And the idea here is when you recollect something and you, you express an experience as if from memory, what you're actually doing is reconstructing that experience.

You're not storing it as if the camera and auditory tracks were recording it.

In retelling it, in recalling it, you're actually reconstructing that memory.

Rebuilding it.

Which makes it subjective, actually.

[BANFIELD]: In that way, memory is a process that is not limited to a single structure.

As a process, the power of memory is more than just recall.

[CHIBA]: What's super interesting about memory is it allows us to form predictions.

So, if we remember something in the environment then we know what to predict at the next time step.

And that aspect of prediction is really one of the key functions of the brain.

[BANFIELD]: How we retrieve information stored in memory and how well we're able to execute actions is often determined by the third tenet of learning - the brain's processing rate or speed of processing.

[CHIBA]: Speed of processing is a concept that really gets at the idea of how quickly you can respond to something that you've sensed or perceived.

Like the shutter speed of the cortex, so that it can follow with high fidelity, all the things happening in the outside world.

[EDWARDS]: Our speed of processing can start to slow down as early as 25 years of age.

And that affects everything that you do in your daily life, how quickly you can take in information, how well you can make decisions.

[MERZENICH]: It's about increasing the fidelity with which the brain represents information, because that's the basis of it recording it accurately.

And in generating a strong record that will be sustained and be recoverable.

[BANFIELD]: Finally, how events are correlated within the brain in time, or sequencing, puts all of the elements of learning together, not just conceptually, but also from a neurological perspective.

[CHIBA]: Time is just a pervasive feature of our world.

It's inescapable.

And what that does is create an order of events.

So, inherent in everything in life are sequences.

The brain is a sort of sequencing machine, because it keeps track of the ongoing record across time.

And our brain learns to predict what comes next.

The basic function of keeping sequences straight is very, very important to just about every aspect of learning.

As we continue to repeat, continue to repeat, what happens is it becomes sort of a, an optimal prediction machine.

And we can go very, very smoothly through the sequence in a very refined way.

[BANFIELD]: Through repetition and practice, the brain fine tunes its sequencing in all of its actions.

[SEIDLER]: You know, if you think about practicing your golf swing and the timing is slightly off.

Part of practicing and getting the timing just right can be myelination of, of nerve pathways to make sure the signals arrive at the precise time.

[BANFIELD]: One striking example of the peak combination of these individual elements is evident in the work done by a simultaneous translator.

A simultaneous translator has to listen with high accuracy, and not just perform a word for word translation, but actually the interpretation of what a person is saying in order for it to be understood.

[MERZENICH]: Someone that skilled in simultaneous interpreting, they have this amazing ability to basically talk without having what they hear substantially interfere with their ability to continue to talk and make sense.

[BANFIELD]: Thus, the simultaneous translator harnesses attention to suppress certain things while focusing on others.

Additionally, she has to switch her focus incredibly rapidly, demonstrating a speed of processing that highlights this tenet of learning.

She also utilizes processing speed in conjunction with her system of memory.

[POEPPEL]: In some sense, the really incredible achievement of the brain in general and her brain, in particular, for this kind of task is the way to flip back and forth between stored information.

Her brain is organized in a way that reflects this incredible capacity to store complex information and let it form relationships between sets of representations.

[BANFIELD]: While we might not all become simultaneous translators, we can all hone the tenets of learning, in particular during the acquisition of new skills that will lead towards optimal brain function.

[TANZI]: Every time you learn something new, you make new synapses, new connections, and because learning is based on associating the new thing with what you already knew, you strengthen the synapses you already had.

So, you're strengthening your neural network, your neural architecture.

[CHIBA]: We also express growth factors on an ongoing basis and this enables neurons and pathways to grow out towards other neurons and pathways and get the neural chemicals there that they might need.

[BANFIELD]: Keeping the neural architecture functioning well requires that we also focus on something beyond just the tenets of learning - the body.

That's the third pillar - creating an optimal environment for brain health.

The brain and the body are intimately connected; what's good for the body, is also good for the brain - and vice versa.

Learning actually changes the brain physically.

[MERZENICH]: There are strong impacts from the physical body that play into the health of the brain itself.

This is very, very beautifully established.

Also, you want to be able to carry yourself around to the world, and experience it and use it, of course, your physical body in your engagement and all of these new activities that you're going to apply it to, to your neurological benefit.

People tend to separate physical health from brain health.

Nobody told the body or the brain about this separation.

What the status of your brain health is very strongly influencing, your physical health in the body.

The status of your physical health in the body is very strongly influencing the health inside your skull.

They're not separable.

[TOGA]: If we look at a trained individual versus somebody who's trying to perform a task for the first time, we can see that the blood flow requirements are far greater in that novice versus the practiced individual.

And as the novice learns the task, the metabolic demand goes down.

[MERZENICH]: Just like the body, the physical body, when you exercise the brain in things that matter to it, you improve its physicality.

Using brain training strategies, you actually increase the operational power of the autonomic nervous system.

And through that you actually increase the ability of the body to respond to changing circumstances in life.

And through that you actually change the way the autonomic nervous system is controlling your immune response.

So if something comes down the path like a Covid infection, the immune response is more powerful.

It's not just about brain health.

It's about health.

[MUSIC] [BANFIELD]: One way to improve your brain's function is to improve your body's function.

A proven way to do this is through incorporating the power of exercise into your life.

[CHIBA]: Exercise is one of the best things you can do for your brain.

There's a lot of evidence that aerobic exercise leads to the birth of newborn neurons, even as an adult, in an area of the hippocampus that's involved in learning and memory.

It also leads to the release of growth factors and it also leads to a decrease in cortisol, which is a stress hormone.

So that it's very good if you're dealing with anxiety.

It's good for the cardiovascular system and the vascular system of the brain.

And it's also good for the motor system, which is at the center, actually, of all actions of the brain.

[BERNARD]: When I was seeing patients on a daily basis, they'd say, "“Dr.

Bernard, what can I do to enhance my life?

"” And my response would be, "“If there's anything you can- exercise.

"” If there is a fountain of youth, that can make a difference for people.

[BANFIELD]: While it may not be the fountain of youth, precisely, exercise has been shown to actually cause the growth of new nerve cells - no matter what your age.

[BEGLEY]: Something as simple as an hour of aerobic exercise five times a week will dial up the rate of production of new neurons in the brain, particularly in a region that controls memory.

But interestingly, it has to be exercise that you undertake voluntarily.

You know, the mindset that you enter into an activity with really is crucial for the benefits for the effects of that activity.

[PA]: We know that if we can help the body get healthier, that we are also helping the brain get healthier.

So it's really what the mantra, that what's good for the body is good for the brain.

[BANFIELD]: Another factor to take into consideration when creating optimal brain health is managing the level of stress in the body.

[HILL]: Many of us look at stress as being motivation.

It is the part of life that, you know, really gets us going in the morning, it's this ability to think that we can handle the stress, that we have a sense of control over the stress that we perceive.

[BANFIELD]: There are proven strategies that can make a difference in how stressed out you feel, and how much of that your brain suffers from.

[BEGLEY]: People who are more content with their lives, who are happier, who have just a greater level of well-being, they have a much higher level of activity in the left prefrontal region, which is just behind your forehead, compared to the right prefrontal region.

There are a number of meditation techniques that focus on your level of contentment, your level of well-being.

Through mental training, you can shift the pattern of activity in your brain toward, in this case, a pattern associated with contentment.

[CHOPRA]: So stress management can be many things, you know?

Watching a movie which has lots of humor of course.

Sleep itself reduces stress.

But meditation is the most effective thing.

Meditation restores what we call normal aging.

Because much of what we see in society is accelerated aging because of stress.

[CHIBA]: I like to think with my body to put my feet firmly on the floor, and feel them even underneath me and grounded.

And it sounds very silly, but that's the-- that's the center; we're bilateral beings.

And if you get re-centered, literally physically, it does help you reset.

[TANZI]: Stress is a killer.

A meditation practice can do wonders, but also a killer in stress is expectation.

Just too high an expectation of yourself, of others or others expecting too much from you.

Learn how to manage that.

[MERZENICH]: And we also know that when you train your brain, you can actually drive improvements of the machinery that's controlling or reacting to stress.

Commonly, the brain is dominated by emotional over responding.

You become hyper reactive, because you've been trained to be hyper reactive by having a stressful life or a stressful period in life, right?

So, you need to bring that back in control.

And you need to relatively fastly be able to go back into the thinking side of operations in the brain and away from the emotional responding side.

You need to deal with those stresses for sure, but you also need to deal with your ability to control your reactions to them.

[MUSIC] [BANFIELD]: Creating the optimal environment for the brain puts us in a better position to use our brain effectively and lead more purposeful, healthier lives.

We are at the dawning of The Brain Revolution.

[MERZENICH]: Just as a physical fitness revolution swept through American culture, so too, will a brain fitness revolution sweep through American culture.

After all, what is more important to us in our in our life, than maintaining our independence from the perspective of our brain's operation?

I see so many people that struggle needlessly, or you could say, could have a better life or a stronger life, if they just understood that they have these resources to help themself.

But you can do a lot for yourself to make life better for you.

And you can do a lot for yourself to keep yourself safer and, and to extend your life, and to extend the life in which you're really in control of it.

That's my motivation.

It's all about helping people.

[BANFIELD]: We can all create a more optimal environment in which our brains can thrive as we age.

When we come back, we'll see how to take that to the next level by creating our own personal Brain Revolution with a strategy of life-long learning.

Please stay with us.

[BANFIELD]: Welcome back to The Brain Revolution.

Hi, I'm Ashleigh Banfield.

So far, we've seen the basis of the Brain Revolution involves mastering the landmark discoveries in neuroplasticity.

And that we can use neuroplasticity to supercharge the tenets of learning within us to create positive brain change.

In order for any of those changes to be significant or lasting, we need to create and maintain optimal brain health.

The final pillar of the brain revolution is crafting a strategy to drive positive changes through life-long learning.

You can take the strategy of life-long learning one step further by creating a schedule of active learning.

Active learning is also known as cognitive training.

It's an efficient way to drive the tenets of learning in a positive direction through the power of plasticity.

[CHIBA]: The way that training can help is through sort of smart systems that act like a person where they sense us so well, that they know exactly what we need at the next time point.

And what it does is scaffold incremental learning so that it sort of takes the learner on to exactly where they need to be.

[DECHARMS]: Just like you can increase the strength of your body, increase its abilities, you can do the same thing with your brain you can increase the strength of functioning of particular parts of your brain that mediate particular functions and thereby you may be able to improve your abilities in those functions.

[PA]: We know that things like exercise and cognitive training may have really beneficial effects in the brain.

So, the growth of new neurons, decreasing stress levels, and actually helping the connections of neurons become strengthened.

[MERZENICH]: People don't distinguish what's meant by cognitive training, because there's a rich variety of ways that people have approached it.

Many people start with the behavior and the behavior losses.

They say, I can't remember; I better practice remembering.

And that's not that that has no value; that does have value.

But it doesn't fix the machine.

And we're trying to fix the machine.

We're fundamentally interested in health.

And we're actually trying to improve, you could say, the machinery of the brain, and its operational powers and capabilities.

[BANFIELD]: Cognitive training can take many different forms.

A group of researchers at Northwestern University has discovered that one strategy of brain training helps address a specific type of dementia called Primary Progressive Aphasia.

They produced significant improvements in quality of life with their patients when they used a training program called Communication Bridge.

[ROGALSKI]: Alzheimer's is one type of dementia.

But there are different types of dementia that target what we call different areas of cognition.

Primary Progressive Aphasia is another dementia syndrome, where instead of memory being affected there's change in language.

So, you can imagine this as the tip of tongue phenomenon we all feel when we can't remember someone's name, or we can't remember that word we're trying to think of.

But imagine if that happened to you every day, in every conversation you had.

[DIANE]: It was back in 2011 as we were driving on the road, I was looking at this building in a farm, "What is that?"

[MIKE]: She asked, "“What- what are those round buildings called?"

And I said, "Silo."

And for the next two years before we got her diagnosis, every word she couldn't come up with, I just said, "Silo."

And- [DIANE]: We called that as a game.

When I was missing a word, "Silo."

[MESULAM]: The brain has a lot of plasticity.

And so, parts of the brain can potentially take over the function of areas that are injured.

But, by and large, what happens is that the brain learns different strategies for reaching the same goal.

And that's where speech therapy and Communication Bridge come in.

And these approaches can be very effective in helping the patients communicate, increasing the quality of life for the patient, for the family.

[ROGALSKI]: I think an encouraging message here is don't give up.

Diane's a perfect example of someone who is trying to maximize all of the strengths that she has, and she's doing a beautiful job of that.

And it, it's a real good example of how if you kind of push the brain, the idea that she's been able to regain some of those words is incredibly meaningful to her daily life, which is the most important thing.

[MUSIC] [BANFIELD]: Perhaps one of the most dramatic examples of the power of cognitive training can be seen in the methods used in recovery from stroke that engage both the body and the brain.

[BEGLEY]: What Edward Taub at the University of Alabama-Birmingham discovered was that, in fact, you can retrain people to regain use of let's say the arm or the leg, or sometimes even speech, depending what region of the brain has been damaged in the stroke.

He learned that if you constrain the good arm, so that the patient doesn't rely on it, but instead, through intensive therapy, which is about eight hours a day, five days a week for a couple of months or more, but just encourage and coax and urge that stroke patient to use the seemingly paralyzed arm which sounds paradoxical, but they can.

They can make tiny little movements.

And if they build on those, they can regain function.

[BANFIELD]: This therapy was called "“constraint induced"” or CI Therapy.

[TAUB]: The main theme of CI therapy, "You either use it "or you lose it.

"And if you've already lost it, that's okay, you can get it back if you keep trying.

"” [SCHWARTZ]: It shows how much effort and how much focused attention really, really, really do make a change in how the brain is wired and how huge the implications of that are in, in people who have had stroke and related types of brain injury.

[BANFIELD]: The goal of training is to create greater resilience in the brain as we age.

When implemented alongside the pillars of The Brain Revolution, the results can be dramatic.

In a landmark research project called The ACTIVE Study, scientists discovered that cognitive training could even help stave off dementia.

[EDWARDS]: We've been investigating a certain kind of cognitive training that we call useful field of view training, and how it helps older adults age well.

And recently, we found, from a large multi-site clinical trial, that this particular intervention reduced the risk of dementia up to 33% across 10 years.

[BANFIELD]: The central cognitive exercise that Dr. Edwards and her team used, called Useful Field Of View, has been studied longitudinally for over 30 years.

To test the results of the training, researchers put participants through a driving simulator to see if their reaction times had changed.

[BALL]: We find that people are stopping much more quickly to hazards that are coming in from their periphery, after they're trained than before they're trained.

[BANFIELD]: The ACTIVE Study started with a large sample of healthy older adults.

They all improved on the training related tasks.

But as the study went on, the researchers discovered something even more exciting about its impact on the brain.

[EDWARDS]: It wasn't until a year or so down the line that we started to see that the training was actually helping the older adults maintain their abilities longer.

[MERZENICH]: People benefited in different ways.

For example, people improved after they were trained in their driving ability.

And they improved to a level in which they only had about half as many driver caused traffic accidents, which is a big, you could say, "“real world consequence"” of training.

They got faster at everything they did in life.

[EDWARDS]: I think it's clear that not all brain training is the same.

Thus, it's important to find a program that has research behind it.

There are very few training programs that have found that everyday functional benefits that we've seen with the Useful Field of View training.

This training is the only intervention to date, pharmacological or non- pharmacological, so medicine/non-medicine, that has been shown in a clinical trial to reduce the risk of dementia.

A lot of times people come to me and say, can you please help my mother?

Can you please tell my father?

They have dementia.

And my answer is very commonly you need to start doing brain training now.

[BANFIELD]: Incorporating the pillars of The Brain Revolution in your life doesn't have to be difficult, either.

Experts in public health know that making any changes in lifestyle requires some effort, but you can make those changes gradually and still reap the rewards.

[BERNARD]: You tell a person who's not been active at all in their life, a couch potato, that they need to get up and start exercising.

You know, there's a tendency to do this temporal discounting.

"I'll do it tomorrow."

Because it's, it's not as much of an effort to say I'm gonna do it tomorrow versus today and then tomorrow comes, you're gonna do it tomorrow still.

So how do you get, get around that?

You work with the person and you figure out what's important to them and do it in baby steps in an incremental fashion.

[BANFIELD]: In fact, the improvement in learning functions best with incremental adjustments.

We often associate these small changes with learning physical activities, like sports.

[CHIBA]: The ball can be thrown at a certain speed, and we catch it and then it gets thrown faster and faster and faster.

We're very used to learning sports that way.

But we're not very used to learning cognitive skills that way, but it works quite effectively, also.

By meeting the learner where they are, and bringing them up incrementally.

[BANFIELD]: Taking small steps can lead to big changes.

That holds true for the research surrounding the aging brain, as well.

The Brain Revolution is only just beginning - researchers believe that new therapies and strategies are just around the corner.

[BERNARD]: In this area of neuroscience, Alzheimer's disease in particular, it's extremely exciting.

20 years ago, in order to make the diagnosis, a person had to die and you had to look at an autopsy.

Now, we have tools that in the research setting can allow you to see the changes of Alzheimer's disease, years to decades before people develop symptoms.

[MERZENICH]: I'm very proud of that my colleagues and I have been able to help so many people have a better life because of this science and its translation into the world.

[BANFIELD]: The neuroscientists and researchers that we spoke with were optimistic about the future.

But we don't have to wait for the future!

You can follow a three-step action plan for maximizing your own brain health right now.

This is the blueprint for your own Brain Revolution.

Step 1 - Engage!

Stay engaged in your life by learning new skills and keeping your old skills involved, too.

[GEULA]: One has to engage.

And if one can continue to do types of work that require cognitive abilities and cognitive exercise, that would be very important.

And, you know, there are also some epidemiological studies that suggest that those who are constantly engaging their mind are less susceptible to these age-related and particularly dementia.

[CHIBA]: As we become older adults, we often forget to engage in learning the same way we did when we were children.

And that is, starting from the smallest level of learning, and incrementing it up slowly.

And it's not the learning problem as much as the expectations that something is going to be much more readily achievable than it was when we were young.

[SCHWARTZ]: The common denominator of all the things that push back against aging and slow it down and, and, and allow the brain to keep its, its youthful vigor longer have to do with being active and engaging in interesting things to work on.

[BANFIELD]:Step 2 - Exercise.

Add movement or physical exercise into your life to create new brain cells, improve body health and circulation, and even reduce stress.

This helps create a foundation for optimal learning.

The brain-body connection is real and keeping it strong supercharges your Brain Revolution.

[SCHWARTZ]: The common factor that's easy to remember is keeping active!

I mean, keeping active, you know, physical activity does also lead to mental activity and obviously vice versa.

[SEIDLER]: The brain is just as malleable in response to what you choose to do with it and what you choose to do with your life, right?

So, you choose to take up a sport or exercise.

Again, it's not just good for your cardiovascular system, it's good for your brain and, and partly that's the connection between the cardiovascular system and the brain.

So you get increased capillarization, not just in your muscles but also to your brain.

And then this can enhance how your brain is working, how it's functioning, how it's learning, and how it's maintained throughout your life.

[BANFIELD]:Step 3 - Train.

Harness the power of life-long learning with strategic cognitive training, not only to keep your brain running smoothly, but to potentially improve its function as you age.

[MERZENICH]: Well guess what happens when you exercise the brain?

It's not just about sustaining yourself in a mentally active and effective mode by continuing to grow your powers in your brain in life.

It's not just about keeping your wits about you.

It's also about increasing longevity.

It's also about brain contributions to physical health.

[EDWARDS]: We need to be working on keeping our brain functioning as well as it can, as early as we can.

I really think that everyone should start by 50 years of age.

And if you have a family history, a strong family history of Alzheimer's or dementia, start earlier.

Do everything that you can to keep your brain functioning as long as you can.

There are few if any negative aspects of doing this.

You're challenging yourself, you're getting better.

There's other potential benefits.

There's evidence that it may improve your mood.

There's evidence that it may protect against depression.

And it's not that time consuming.

[laughs] [CHIBA]: I think it's important to maintain an interest in learning as we get older and engage in active learning episodes.

If we're homebound that might be on the screen, it may be over the telephone.

It could also be calling someone in and learning a new language.

It could be learning how to dance or learning music.

All of these things are great for us.

[BACH Y RITA]: When I was 65, and I cut down to four days a week work.

I said, "“I'm going to learn how to play golf.

"” This implies a whole series of very complex physical movements.

I'd never done this before.

I'm having fun at it, and I play the game now.

I have the swing, and I can direct the ball.

I was able to train my brain to work with my muscular system.

The trick is to keep going to keep doing.

That's why I'm taking classes myself now at the age of 71, and I think people have to keep doing that.

And the more they stimulate the brain, the more the brain will respond.

We give up too easily and it's, it's a mistake to give up.

It's the struggle, also, that gives, gives some pleasure in life.

[MERZENICH]: We have inside our head the power to at least be mentally younger.

So, I mean everyone's looking for the drug that could save them.

Why would you wait a minute, if there's something you can do now?

You know, that's, that's the reality.

[BANFIELD]: You don't have to follow the traditional trajectory of life.

You can take steps to make a difference to the advantage of your brain by implementing this action plan for The Brain Revolution.

It takes a little bit of effort - but that small effort can yield enormous dividends from the perspective of your brain.

Every day is another opportunity for incredible positive transformation for all of us.

Lead a life that's more vibrant than ever -- and reap the benefits that await you.

I'm Ashleigh Banfield.

Thanks for joining me for The Brain Revolution.

[MUSIC]