Recap: How exercise slows brain ageing | Dr Wendy Suzuki

Hello, and welcome to Zoe recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today, we're asking how can we boost our brain? Our brain is a living morphine organ that is constantly responding to the stimuli we feed it. So the big question is, what sort of stimuli will keep our brain strong and healthy? Is it brain puzzles? Supplements? Neuroscientist, doctor Wendy Suzuki, believes the most powerful way to support your brain is by simply moving your body. And she's joining me today to explain why. As we get older, basically, this organ can get less efficient. Do any parts of it shrink, or is it just that it stops working as well? So lots of different things happen. There are loss of synaptic connections. Synapses are the connections between individual brain cells, and it's not so much people think, oh, there's widespread cell death. Cells aren't dying in normal aging. It's usually the synapses that leave and then are damaged. And that's the most common thing that's happening with aging. So, basically, the connections between the different cells in my brain, there were lots of them and there's less. Mhmm. And losing those somehow Yes. Reduces how well it works and processes every part. So is it possible to do anything to prevent the loss of these, you know, connections between these cells, prevent this damage to your brain as you get older? Yeah. So this is, kind of the topic that I've studied for the vast majority of my career, which is the area of brain plasticity. How things in the environment, things that you do, how you live your life, how it affects literally the anatomy, physiology, and function of your brain. And there's two flavors of brain plasticity, positive brain plasticity, where the experiences that you give yourself can increase size, increase function, and negative brain plasticity, which we just talked about. PTSD, long term stress can take those connections away, can make, sizes smaller in particular brain areas. And are there real scientific studies that have demonstrated this? Absolutely. For all the musicians out there, it's clearly shown that long term practice at a level of a, you know, professional musician will increase the size of your motor cortex specific for that. You know, if it's if you're a violinist, it's the left hand that that gets so much work. If you're a pianist, it's it's both hands. That will change the size and representation of those motor areas that you are working. So my mother made me practice, an instrument every morning, like, from when I was, like, four, and I kept doing this until I I was grown up. And then I dropped it quite fast after I last time. I'm sorry, mom. Have I got any long term benefit from that, or is the fact that I've dropped it now means that I, like, lost out on any …