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The Brain: Not a Muscle But Just as Mighty
30 Plays1 month ago
In this episode of Neuroblast!, Athena and Tracey debunk the myth that the brain is a muscle. They explain the brain's true nature, its ability to adapt through neuroplasticity, and how we can "exercise" the brain by learning, solving problems, and maintaining good sleep and nutrition for optimal function.
Original music by: Julian Starr
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Backgrounds
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Neuroblast, the podcast to where we flex our neurons, not our muscles.
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello, I'm Athena Stevens, actor, writer, and neuroenthusiast. And I'm Tracey Tokuhama Espinosa, an international educational consultant, and I teach a course at Harvard called The Neuroscience of Learning.
Is the Brain Really a Muscle?
00:00:31
Speaker
Today, we are tackling the myth, the brain and the muscle, which Tracey, I don't even know how this one you got started because I had to study muscle in grade school and we learned about smooth muscle and cardio muscle. No one ever talked about the brain it being a muscle, so where on earth did this get started and why?
00:00:57
Speaker
that is a great question and it has to do believe it or not with the invisible nature of the brain so you know you can feel your muscles and you can feel your heart rate and you can feel other organs you can breathe your lungs and you can feel you can feel other organs in your body at work but you cannot touch your brain. Ah. Very few humans have touched a brain or seen their own brains, right? And so um the best things that we have as human beings when it comes down to the unknown is to use analogies. And one of the best analogies ah for, you know, a brain part would be a muscle because you do exercise it, it does get stronger and all the rest of that. And so basically because of its invisible nature and because
00:01:43
Speaker
We were left with nothing but analogies to sort of describe it to young people or kids or adults even. um I think that this muscle idea has really caught on. Unfortunately, it's been echoed over and over and over again so many times that people You know how people believe believe things to be true just because somebody says it a lot of times? Well, that's what's happened with this. People have begun to think that your brain is a muscle, which is so, so incorrect on so many levels. On the one hand, I get it.
00:02:13
Speaker
work your brain or flex your brain sounds a lot more um intensive than actually a neuro. It's only become very common to have in your vocabulary to understand plasticity, neuroplasticity, which is really what we're talking about when you're flexing your brain, right? When you're making these new connections.
00:02:36
Speaker
It's only become common knowledge to have that vocabulary, ah you know, only over the past couple of years. And still a lot of people are unclear about what that really means. But this neuroplasticity or brain's ability to adapt and learn and create new connections is really what people imagine when they think of, oh, this muscle getting stronger, right? Yes. And also I wonder if there's not some sort of element of us trying to control our brains, control the improvement of our brains, just like what we do in physical
Complexity of Brain Health
00:03:12
Speaker
fitness. People like to have, you know, routines and workouts and what is it that I can do to, you know, stay fit or whatever. And they presume the same thing. They'd like to think that it would be as easy to keep your brain in shape, right? But brain health is a lot more complex, actually. There's a lot more to it. And probably the biggest reason is
00:03:32
Speaker
of all of the organs in your body the brain is the most you know energy hungry as we talked about before but more than that your brain has more distinct or different types of cells in it than all of the other organs combined like if you take your liver and your kidney your heart and all this other stuff and you put them all together you're not going to get as many different types or distinct types of neurons that sort of piece it together the brain has about 252, I think it is, or 54 distinct types of neurons, which is absolutely fascinating. It's more than any and all of the other organs combined. So it just shows how complicated your brain is compared to all these other organs in your body and much more difficult to keep in good shape than a typical muscle, for example. So let's zoom out just a second because we've immediately done that thing that you and I do where we you zoom into the smallest detail. What is our brain? What is it really?
00:04:38
Speaker
Their brain is a huge mixture. Well, a lot of people like to think um there's a lot of liquid there. So believe it or not, there's a lot a lot more um water to it than you'd have ever think. But there's tissues. The cells that we talked about range from different types of neurons and glial. There's just as many glial cells, which is kind of um people have described it as being sort of the glue that things keeps things together. But it's a lot more complicated than that. Glial cells are amazing cells in your body that actually also serve as almost the trash collectors that take away waste and and move between um ah the different parts of your brain to take away waste and and put it into the bloodstream and and wash, clean things up. It's definitely not a muscle. So the different tissues, the different parts of the brain are made up mainly of these cellular structures um and the different types of tissues, the different layers, there's several layers within
00:05:34
Speaker
the brain itself. um It's actually how this analogy of how you strengthen it comes about. And there's a very natural process of you know how your brain develops over time. There's many more ways when you have so many intricate substructures, many more ways things can go wrong than with just typical muscle structures. So you have to really be aware of how these different things that influence brain health.
00:06:00
Speaker
I do feel like the more I learn about the brain, it's almost like this ever increasingly complicated machine.
The Dynamic Nature of the Brain
00:06:10
Speaker
And the second that we think of this does X.
00:06:17
Speaker
we go, but now, and hang on, it also does Y, and and, oh, look, it's also lighting up in A, B, and C. And and it's it so much more complex because in, say, for example, you have a difficulty with some part of your muscle yeah in your leg. Your body typically compensates, right? And if you you're you're hurting on your left knee, your your right leg will try to compensate, and you'll try to You'll have different ways that your entire body tries to come into balance. Well, in your brain, what's absolutely fascinating is if a certain neural circuit isn't working for some reason, let's say somebody's had a stroke, um those actually die. But what you could do
00:07:02
Speaker
is forge new connections. And they could even be in very different parts of the brain, maybe in contralateral hemispheres and different hemispheres of the brain from what you'd expect when that person is recuperating. So we know that it's not necessarily ah you know the same as how your body would compensate for deficiencies you know in terms of muscle structure.
00:07:23
Speaker
But your brain is actually forging new neural networks, neural connections. These are between groups of neurons and groups of neurons having these synaptic connections that forge these networks in your brain. And that happens um millions of times a day um and you lose, you know, tens of thousands of these ah connections as well every day. so you're You're constantly, you know, cleaning up and and changing and rewiring that beautiful structure of your brain, which is very distinct from the way that we build muscle.
00:07:55
Speaker
and about ideas a medium for that half about iy and don't know i ah jane find out my brain All the younger people are going, wait, you didn't see that woman from Frankie and Grace? What can we do to exercise this organ that is a collection of network themselves and not just a piece of steak?
Essential Activities for Brain Health
00:08:24
Speaker
Well, your brain cannot not learn. So that's one thing that's fantastic. So just putting your brain out into the environment, it actually is taking in signals all the time and always learning and comparing and contrasting what is already known in the past. And so there is learning going on even when we're unconscious of it. But if we want to take matters into our own hands and strengthen um our our our or improve our brain health in general, we know that all learning depends on memory systems and attention systems. So anything that's extending your ability to pay attention or to create memories is fantastic. um Little things that you might do um
00:09:02
Speaker
ah start to doing practicing a foreign language or do the crossword puzzles or things like that, that keeps your brain active. Probably the best thing you could ever do is learn a foreign language and and and interact with other human beings. That's always scaling it up. You can never perfect those kinds of things, which is why your brain is always you know building stronger and stronger and deeper and deeper connections based on those kinds of things. so that's ah Those things are fantastic. The worst thing you can do is just be sedentary and passive and let the world you know take you on and you don't do anything with it. not Nothing against television, but there's absolutely nothing going on there unless you're talking back to the TV. but
00:09:44
Speaker
that social exchanges are far more important because that also involves you anticipating and negotiating what you think another person might be thinking about the things that you're saying and that kind of of is a a social negotiation is also incredibly amazing for keeping your brain fit and healthy and alive in the real world context. Really don't disengage. There is a tendency If you're getting older, if life is harder, if you're depressed, um if you're struggling in any number of ways, there is a tendency to think age either out of fear or because the world is so overwhelming that that is all you can do. And we'll talk about trauma and a later as I start, but please, particularly if you have older family members
00:10:40
Speaker
keep them engaged. Even if they are persnickety and tragedy and kind of a thing to deal with, you really do need to keep that brain engaged and active in order to keep that person alive. Absolutely. And there's a ah wonderful advice by a guy named Art Costa. and yeah he He developed this concept of habits of mind, but one of the habits of mind is to to view the world with wonder and awe and just sort of practicing how something old might be new again. You know that that walk you take and you look up and the tree has changed colors and it's a little bit different than it was yesterday. Just your power of observation that's paying attention right to your world. So
00:11:28
Speaker
Interacting and engaging with other people is huge. um Learning to see, again, is really important. And I think that another angle to this, a good friend of mine, Mariel Hardiman at Johns Hopkins, pointed out this huge role of creativity and just just enjoying other aspects of life that maybe in your busy time, you know you don't have the time for music or arts or things like that. But actually appreciating that, but also engaging at that.
00:11:56
Speaker
um in your free time is also a great way to challenge your brain to do things that are very different. Creativity is so aligned with intelligence in the brain and um your ability to stretch that is very, very beneficial to the brain as well.
Foundations for Brain Health
00:12:12
Speaker
so key takeaways. The brain isn't a muscle, but it can still be trained in its own way through learning and new experiences and initiating in society. Would you say that's fair? Excellent, and I would add to that those two points
00:12:34
Speaker
the mind-body connection is huge. So on top of this social interaction of yourself and the world, I would also say that good nutrition, learning how to sleep well, and also, um you know, just basic general physical activity are all so important in basic brain health. And that's something that um should be a part of, I would say of every, hopefully every primary school's education, that kids learn that so that throughout your life, you're really taking care of your brain and maximizing its potential throughout your
Encouragement and Preview of Next Episode
00:13:05
Speaker
life. Indeed, and if any of you were looking for a sign from above or voice to take a class or sign up for a new activity or read book we are your voice a your and ideas. Do it!
00:13:23
Speaker
It's good for you. I can't echo that anywhere. That's a wonderful recommendation. In fact, many of the people who take the the course at Harvard, um we have started to get a lot and a lot more um high school kids and, on the other end of the scale, retired people. and So people who anywhere between 17 and 77 are all saying, I love my brain. I want to take care of it better. How do I do that? And so um being more engaged in the world, being curious, feeding that curiosity is a really huge part of brain health. Very good. All right. We will see you all next week when we will be tackling the best of left brain versus right brain. Are you really only one or the other?
00:14:09
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to Neuroblast. Remember, keep those neurons fighting just like they used to keep the home fires burning. And we'll see you next time.