But wait! Is that the truth, or is it a medical myth? What do you think?
It’s a myth. And you need to bust it if you have it. We need to update our beliefs!
Science used to say that when we lost brain cells they were gone, and that aging just meant the brain was naturally losing brain cells through attrition and there was nothing we could do about it, and that was why our memory got worse. It was the pat explanation.
How sad!
That didn’t make sense to me because the rest of the body regenerates. WHY would God set up this wonderful self-generating system and NOT have that system extend to the brain? Doesn’t make sense, especially since the brain is so important. It would be like creating a car that can repair everything on itself except the engine. Oops. Forgot that part?
So, I figured that we just hadn’t discovered that it could yet, and I was right!
First science said “Oh look! Rat brains can make new brain cells. But not humans.” That made me frown. Come on. God would give a regenerating program to a rat brain and NOT to us? What sort of great cosmic joke is that? Give science enough time though, and it will come up with new conclusions.
Remember-it's only true until it's not true.
Now science says “Hey! Guess what! The brain is constantly making new brain cells, and if we don’t use them they are trimmed off”. Ah now, that’s a bit different isn’t it? The brain makes new cells in one area, and they migrate to other areas on an as needed basis. It’s like this factory that is continually turning out blank slates that can be used anywhere. Thousands of new brain cells are made daily which means you can be constantly expanding and growing your knowledge and abilities. These cells seem to play a big role in deepening our associative memory that is based on comparative experience, and many if not most of these cells are used in the Hippocampus, which is our memory base.
So what's the new belief? Your brain and it's memory capacity CAN, in fact, be getting BETTER WITH AGE, not worse. Ah!
Now this isn’t new information, so why aren't we all operating off it? It was in the 1990s that science made this earth shattering observation! Scientific American published that both Swiss and American neuroscientists had made the same discovery-that human brains are constantly making new brain cells. Even old brains.
If “use it or lose it” works for muscles, why not for the brain? That makes sense! What a great system! What the body is doing in one area, it does again in another. Stem cells work the same way in that they are little blank slates that the body can use anywhere, and what we know about the body is that the same system is replicated over and over everywhere. If the body/mind is doing something in one place it may also do the same ‘system’ or technique somewhere else. Pattern recognition could play a much larger role in decoding the human potential than I think is happening.
What keeps these cells alive? Challenge. Intellectual challenge my friends! Learn something new every day - now there's a challenge! Maybe our brains are just fine, we just aren't in school anymore, we are bored at our jobs that have become routine and our brains are churning out all these new cells that have no new job so they are sloughed off?
Save your brain-learn something new!