Sunday, July 15, 2007

Maintaining brain health through learning

Learning finetunes our brain.It is biological. We can change our brain just by learning .

Remarkable.Is itn't ?

Learning increases the following in the brain :

Synaptic connections.( Information passes via neurons through a gap between them called synapse)

tiny blood vessels (called capillaries)

glial cells (support cells for myelin)

Myelination ( a lipid sheath that surrounds the axons of neurons)

Birth of new neurons

New proteins

“The adult brain, and even the adult aging brain, is fine-tuned by experience in both its performance and its abilities, essentially organizing itself in accord with its experience to prepare for the future,”says William T. Greenough, Ph.D., a Dana Alliance member and
neurobiologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.



This capacity of the brain to structurally adjust itself to reflect our life experience—which scientists called plasticity—is what enables us to earn and to change the brain by learning.


What you do today and every day for the rest of your life can make a real difference in keeping the engine of learning tuned up and running smoothly throughout all of your tomorrows. By minding your brain, you can reap the rewards of learning throughout life.


Dana foundation on Learning throughout life gives more details.There are tips to enhance memory too by asking us to

Pay attention to what we do


Stay focussed


Repeat it


Write it down


Visualise it


Make associations


Stay organised


plan and prioritise.


True. Knowledge comes,wisdom lingers.