While researching anti-depressant drugs Professor Perry Bartlett, of Brisbane’s University of Queensland, his team, and their co-team in Beijing, discovered that anti-depressant drugs don’t work unless, and until, new brain cells are generated. Can we generate new brain cells on demand?
Their research indicates that anti-depressant drugs typically don’t work for the first month because new brain cells need to be created for the drugs to work. Specific drug biochemistry appears to trigger cell production. When the new brain cells form, become active and are included in the circuitry, then the effect is felt as a lift of depression. So specific biochemistry stimulates production and assimilation of new brain cells and it seems making new cells is the answer to depression.
Much research is going into discovering how the brain works, how to boost your brainpower, and how to support and integrate your new brain cells.
Not so long ago medical dogma proclaimed that brain cells in adults progressively die and cannot be replaced. You were doomed to a gloomy old age with health deteriorating and no possibility of a reprieve. In more recent times scientific researchers have provided the evidence that totally negates that old dogma.
It is clear your brain can grow new cells, can rewire itself and make new connections, build whole new networks, all while running your entire body efficiently and effectively, day and night. For this massive amount of activity your brain requires constant energy supply with good blood flow to and from your brain to bring in fresh nutrients and remove waste. So what about new brain cells?
It’s not just medical drugs that stimulate new brain cell production, of course. Your brain is designed to grow new brain cells on demand, as you take on new tasks, new learning, new experiences, and as old cells die and need to be replaced. But – more that 50% of new brain cells die according to the research findings.
Now scientists are researching how to keep more new brain cells alive and active. Key elements to create an enhanced internal environment include physical exercise, brain food and antioxidants, stimulants, brain games, music, meditation.
Alvaro Pascual-Leone is a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Centre for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He says, “The brain changes with anything you do, including any thoughts you might have.”
Dr Amir Loas of Case Western Reserve University Medical School in Cleveland says, “Read, read, read … anything that stimulates the brain to think. Also, watch less television because your brain goes into neutral,” he said.
Your brain is very plastic, meaning able to be moulded or formed, and is shaped by the experiences you have. According to researchers Henry Markram and Jean-Vincent Le Bé the brain is in a constant mode of change, reinforcing some circuits and pruning others, “where a new experience triggers a burst of new connections between neurons, and only the fittest connections survive.” This is neuroplasticity. The message is use it or lose it.
… Our brain is designed so we can choose to keep growing in new ways all our lives, build new brain cells on demand and new networks, and uncouple and disintegrate unused or no longer needed circuitry. Thank goodness for that too. We can let go of old hurts, painful experiences so the pain is gone but the lesson remains. We can and do learn.
Cheers
Anna