The Healthy Brain

Optimize Brain Power at Any Age

Aileen Burford-Mason

• Publisher: Patrick Crean Editions
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781443447799
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Nutrizione, dietetica e bariatria

The Healthy Brain makes the compelling case that most people’s brains are underperforming because they are undernourished. As the most metabolically active organ of the body, the brain’s nutritional needs are ten times higher than those of any other organ. That means the brain is the first organ to falter when it is improperly fed.

Well respected for her ability to take complex nutritional research and translate it into clear, evidence-based guidelines for the safe, effective use of supplements, Dr. Burford-Mason offers step-by-step guidance on how to implement dietary changes and select appropriate supplements for optimal brain power at any age. She makes liberal use of real-life case histories from her practice and summarizes leading-edge scientific research to support her advice.

The immediate payoff of adopting Dr. Burford-Mason’s strategies is a noticeable increase in brain vitality: better mood, focus, creativity and workplace performance, and an improved capacity to enjoy life, sleep soundly and cope well under stress. The long-term benefit is that these same dietary changes have shown the most promise in helping us avoid Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.

The Healthy Brain argues that feeding the brain properly is a lifelong project, and that memory and cognition in later life depend on the care and feeding our brains receive throughout our entire lives.

PART 1

The Brain—A User’s Guide

CHAPTER 1

A Journey across Time

I, George Bush, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim the decade beginning January 1, 1990, as the Decade of the Brain. I call upon all public officials and the people of the United States to observe that decade with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.

It is July 17, 1990. In the White House, George H.W. Bush has just signed Presidential Proclamation 6158, designating the decade beginning January 1, 1990, as the Decade of the Brain. The previous fifteen years have seen extraordinary advances in brain imaging technology; it is now possible to look inside a living brain and visualize how it works. With innovative technology in place, the time is ripe for a grand political gesture—an initiative that will see an unprecedented flow of government and private funds into brain research.

This new initiative has tremendous appeal. Doctors are hopeful that the injection of substantial funds into brain research will generate a better understanding of what goes wrong in a range of mental health disorders—from depression and autism to schizophrenia, epilepsy, drug addiction and dementia—and lead to new and improved methods for treatment and prevention. And since mental illness consumes a substantial and growing chunk of health care spending, governments and health economists definitely agree.

For the rest of us, this decade begins an enduring love affair with brain science. Compared to all previous history, knowledge about the brain and its inner workings doubles during the Decade of the Brain. New findings are enthusiastically and often sensationally covered by the media. Scientists respond to increased media attention by writing popular books explaining their highly technical work—books that in turn create a better-informed lay audience eager to learn more.

Our curiosity is piqued. How does the brain control our actions, our thoughts, our feelings? Can all this new science make us smarter, or alter the course of lifelong depression or anxiety? Can we begin to understand what was going on in the brain of a beloved friend or family member who took their own life? Can the growing body of information on the brain and its workings finally help us figure out what makes us “us”?

Command central

The quest to understand the human brain and how it controls our physical and emotional functioning is as old as written human history. The ancient Greeks had little understanding of basic brain physiology and anatomy, and the arguments of the day were mainly philosophical: What part of the brain housed “common sense”? Which areas controlled memory, reason and imagination? What was the relationship between the brain and the soul, spirit or mind? Where was the soul located?

Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 375 BC) believed the brain was the seat of intelligence and responsible for all our senses. “Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, grieves and tears,” he declared. However, not many years later the views of another prominent and influential Greek, Aristotle (384–22 BC), would dominate. According to Aristotle and his followers, it was not the brain but the heart that defined the essence of who we were. The heart alone was the source of our intelligence. The brain was merely a cooling device, useful only because it acted as a safety valve to release the copious amounts of heat generated by our hard-working hearts.

Not needed on the journey

The ancient Egyptians also placed little value on the brain. In common with many early civilizations, the Egyptians practised mummification and preserved the body after death. They believed that the physical body would be resurrected in the afterlife, and so it had to be conserved intact, and as perfectly as possible.

The process of mummification was long and laborious. The internal organs were removed first because they quickly decomposed. These were separately embalmed. The only organ left intact inside the body was the heart. As the source of the intellect and emotion it would be vitally important in the afterlife. The body, together with its undisturbed heart, was then dehydrated and embalmed. The other internal organs were later returned to their original locations and the body wrapped in many layers of linen strips. Amulets were placed between the layers to protect the body during its journey into the next world.

The only organ discarded in the process was the brain. The ancient Egyptians believed they could get along perfectly well in the afterlife without a brain.

Moving away from superstition

The Islamic Golden Age (in the seventh to thirteenth centuries) saw the emergence of many new ideas in technology and medicine, and fanciful assumptions gradually began to give way to a more systematic and scientific approach to unravelling the brain and its secrets. The great Arab physicist and pioneering scientific thinker Alhazen (965–1040), best known for his descriptions of how the eye transmits images to the brain, was the first to suggest that any ideas about how the brain works should be discarded unless they could be confirmed by observation and experiment. “The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them, and questions what he gathers from them; the one who submits to argument and demonstration and not the sayings of human beings whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency,” he wrote.

This was the beginning of what we know today as the scientific method.

During the Renaissance, many scientists were also accomplished artists. As meticulous dissections began to reveal human anatomy in greater detail, each new discovery needed to be documented and illustrated. And so the arts and sciences flourished side by side. The most famous example of this marriage of art and science is artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). A self-taught anatomist, da Vinci initially studied physiology and anatomy so he could reproduce the structure of the human body more faithfully in his paintings. But he also had an interest in the structure of the brain, and made detailed and beautiful drawings of it.

At this time, labels were given to different parts of the brain that we still use today. The cerebrum (Latin for “brain”), located in the front area of the skull, occupies about two-thirds of the brain’s total mass. Consisting of two hemispheres, a left and a right, the cerebrum controls higher brain functions like thought and action. The cerebellum (Latin for “little brain”) is located at the back of the skull and controls movement and balance. The medulla lies in front of the cerebellum and regulates the involuntary processes of the body, including blood pressure, heart rate, digestion and breathing.

When wrinkles are a good thing

One of the earliest and best-known anatomy textbooks, De humani corporis fabrica (On the workings of the human body), published by Andreas Vesalius in 1543, was the first book to clearly distinguish two different types of brain tissue, based on colour: the grey matter or cerebral cortex, which forms the outer layer of the brain, and the central white matter.

This text also includes the first accurate drawings of the surface of the brain: the many wrinkles that form grooves (sulci) and ridges (gyri) on its outer aspect. The early anatomists had thought these convolutions were random, and similar to the worm-like coils of intestine that spilled out of the abdomen when they cut it open. Vesalius himself did not think these peaks and troughs were anything special: “There is nothing unusual about man’s brain, and these convolutions appearing in its substance are also to be found in the brain of the ass, horse, ox and other animals which I have examined.”

By the end of the sixteenth century, however, it was clear that in this regard, Vesalius was mistaken. The surface convolutions are neither random nor in loose coils, but are firmly attached to the deeper parts of the brain. And they are more extensive among the higher animals. Comparing the brains of different species, as the cerebrum gets larger, the convolutions become increasingly more elaborate. Engravings from the period show a clear evolutionary progression: the beaver brain is smooth, the fox brain has five convolutions, the horse brain has more indentations than the sheep, and the elephant brain more than the horse. But no animal brain shows more complex convolutions than the human brain.

Bumps, lumps and personality

In the early part of the nineteenth century Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), a German anatomist, was a name on everyone’s lips. Skilled in anatomy and dissection, he was the first to identify the cranial nerves—twelve pairs of nerves that exit the brain through openings in the skull, rather than through the spinal column. Some of these nerves, he showed, control sensory organs, some control muscles, and others are connected to glands or internal organs like the heart and lungs. This discovery was an important and lasting contribution made by Gall to the evolving science of neurology.

But Gall’s work on the cranial nerves was not what attracted the most attention—rather, his theory of phrenology made him famous and wildly popular with the general public. The brain, in Gall’s theory, was not one organ but many, each found at a specific site in the brain’s convolutions, and each controlling different emotions and mental functions. Because the shape of the skull followed the convolutions of the brain itself, he believed, the size and shape of the skull—its bumps, lumps and indentations—could be used to identify individual personality traits and mental strengths and weaknesses.

Gall examined the heads of groups of people he felt occupied the behavioural extremes of society—criminals and clergymen, for example—and mapped out the regions he thought governed particular qualities like deviousness and criminality, honesty and conscientiousness, and even artistic gifts like musicality. Feeling each other’s bumps, or having one’s bumps read, became a popular pastime—a Sunday afternoon parlour game. Even Queen Victoria is reported to have invited a phrenologist to read the heads of her many children, looking for insight into their talents and temperaments.

By the mid-nineteenth century phrenology was big business, especially in America, where phrenology institutes were established in most major cities. Phrenologists claimed they could diagnose illness and calculate future disease risk. Couples used it to test their compatibility before marriage, and businesses to screen job applicants. It was even suggested that politicians be tested by a phrenologist before standing for public office. Expressions we still use today, such as “highbrow,” “lowbrow” and “you need your head examined,” come from that period.

The demise of phrenology and the birth of psychology

The only trouble was that Gall, for all his skills in dissection, was not a good scientist. His original work had been highly selective, reporting only the subjects that confirmed his theories and dismissing all evidence to the contrary. French physiologist Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens (1794–1867) made it known that he was angered by what he considered to be the deception of the public by pseudoscience. He was eventually commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte to test Gall’s popular theories. Using animal experiments, Flourens proved Gall wrong, and phrenology was dismissed as so much hocus-pocus.

However, these public disagreements about phrenology and the relationship between the shape of the skull and brain function eventually led scientists back to thinking about the nature of the many wrinkly convolutions on the cerebral cortex. Why were they more numerous and complex in humans compared to other mammals? What were the evolutionary pressures that led to their formation? Carl Wernicke (1848–1905) suggested that they were the result of increasing brain size. As we got smarter and our brains increased in size, brain growth was limited by the size of our skulls. When the brain could not expand outwards because of space restrictions, it expanded inwards.

By the end of the nineteenth century, detailed maps showing the structure and function of the various parts of the brain began to emerge. The forebrain, containing the cerebral cortex, was the seat of feelings, learning and memory. Information from our eyes, ears and other sensory organs was processed first by the midbrain and then relayed to the forebrain. Language was shown to be localized in the left hemisphere of the brain, while involuntary functions like breathing and digestion were located in the hindbrain, with most of the cranial nerves.

In the late 1800s, renewed interest in how the mind affected behaviour gave birth to a new discipline—psychology. German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) was one of the first to take a systematic approach to studying abnormal mental states, using measurable phenomena like attention span and reaction time. Mental processes, he argued, could be analyzed and tabulated in much the same way a chemist analyzes and categorizes chemical compounds.

Wundt also made an important contribution to evolving scientific methodology. He insisted that all experiments should be carried out in carefully controlled conditions and thoroughly described so that they could later be reproduced by other scientists. If a result wasn’t reproducible, it was unlikely to be true.

Interestingly, recent scientific analyses suggest that as much as 50 per cent of scientific endeavours published today—even in leading medical journals—may be unreproducible and therefore potentially misleading.¹

An accidental experiment

In the Warren Anatomical Museum on the campus of Harvard University Medical School, a glass case houses an odd group of items: the skull of a man, an iron mask of the man’s face and a long metal rod. The skull and face mask belonged to Phineas Gage, a construction worker. The metal rod is a tamping iron, used to cram dynamite into crevices and holes bored into rocks before detonating it to level the rock face for building purposes.

In 1842, twenty-five-year-old Gage is the foreman of a crew cutting a new railroad bed through the undulating granite of Vermont. While he is using the metal rod to pack dynamite into the rock, the dynamite suddenly explodes, sending the rod skywards. The rod pierces Gage’s cheek, penetr...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Brain—A User’s Guide
• Part 2: When the Brain Stalls
• Part 3: Back to the Beginning
• Part 4: Making Brains Last a Lifetime
• Part 5: Planning Strategies
• Appendix: Fruit and Vegetable Diary
• Acknowledgements
• Endnotes
• Index
• About the Author
• Praise
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher