Spark

Among those with the least cognitive decline over a four-year period, three factors turned up: education, self-efficacy, and exercise.

A memory, scientists believe, is a collection of information fragments dispersed throughout the brain. The hippocampus serves as a way station, receiving the fragments from the cortex, and then bundling them together and sending them back up as a map of a unique new pattern of connections.

Broadly speaking, the prefrontal cortex organizes activity, both mental and physical, receiving input and issuing instructions through the brain’s most extensive network of connections. The prefrontal cortex is the boss.

When we exercise, particularly if the exercise requires complex motor movement, we’re also exercising the areas of the brain involved in the full suite of cognitive functions.

BDNF is a crucial biological link between thought, emotions, and movement.

Learning requires strengthening the affinity between neurons through a dynamic mechanism called long-term potentiation (LTP).

Once it became clear that BDNF was present in the hippocampus, an area of the brain related to memory and learning, researchers set out to test whether it’s a necessary ingredient in the process.

What we now know is that the brain is flexible, or plastic in the parlance of neuroscientists—more

When we learn something, whether it’s a French word or a salsa step, cells morph in order to encode that information;