Makes your brain act younger

At least for a little while ...

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Makes your brain act younger (at least for a little while)

Do things like this ever happen to you?

• Someone asks you about a restaurant nearby. You love it, you tell them; you go there all the time. Then, you realize the last time you actually visited was several years ago.

• You come up with a fantastic business idea. But then you go to share it with a colleague, and you realize as you share it that you’ve missed several big holes.

• Perhaps most on the nose: You’re trying to remember some of the minutiae of everyday life — a password, or a routine that you’ve done hundreds of times — and yet, you draw a blank. You start to worry. Is your brain just getting older?

Time catches all of us eventually. But what if I were to tell you that a new study suggests there’s a simple thing you can do every day that can improve brainpower and restore cognitive health, to the point that your brain functions as if it were several years younger?

Writing in the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine, researchers at the Penn State College of Medicine say they may have found just such a thing.

In short, after putting together a study of middle-aged people who simply participated in “everyday movement,” which didn’t even have to be intensive exercise, but instead things like walking a dog or doing chores, wound up with improved brain function.

Specifically, according to a statement released with the study: “improvement in cognitive processing speed equivalent to being four years younger.”

As study lead Jonathan Hakun, assistant professor of neurology and psychology at Penn State and the Penn State College of Medicine, put it:

You don’t have to go to the gym to experience all the potential benefits of physical activity. All movement is important.

Everyday movement counts as a source of accumulated physical activity that could be credited toward a healthy lifestyle and may have some direct impact on cognitive health.

Before we dive in deeper, let’s clarify a distinction. We’ve seen lots of studies suggesting that long-term brain health might be improved as a result of exercise.

Heck, one of my favorite studies suggests that exercise can reduce people’s risk of death from any cause, during any given year by as much as 27 percent.

The difference with this study, however, is that it suggests improved brain function in the short term. Take the dog for a walk in the morning, enjoy “improvement in cognitive processing speed” after lunch, so to speak.

As you’ll see, the researchers really were focused on how exercise affected brain power in the here and now.

• In short, they studied data from 204 participants, all of whom were residents of the Bronx, New York, and between the ages of 40 and 65.

• Over the course of nine days, the participants checked in six times each day: reporting their level of physical activity since the last check-in, and asked to play two brain games, one assessing working memory and the other assessing cognitive processing speed.

• Sure enough, cognitive processing speed increased after participants reported having had at least some physical activity since their last check-in.

Oh, and I don’t think this is a replacement for serious exercise. It’s more about adding something simple and pleasant to your daily routine.

“We get slower as we age, both physically and cognitively. The idea here is that we can momentarily counteract that through movement. It’s compelling,” Hakun continued. “There’s the potential for a brief walk or a little extra movement to give you a boost.”

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7 other things

• Elon Musk lost his bid to get his $56 billion CEO pay package from 2018 reinstated on Monday when a Delaware judge upheld her prior ruling that the compensation plan was improperly granted. Musk can appeal the decision to the Delaware Supreme Court. Despite the setback, Musk has seen his net worth jump $43 billion in less than one month since Donald Trump's election victory. (CNBC)

• Many social drinkers who take obesity medications, such as Wegovy or Mounjaro, say they don't enjoy alcohol as much. A new study of WeightWatchers members who take obesity drugs — and were in the habit of drinking — finds about half of them cut back after they started the medication. (NPR)

• A new lawsuit filed by a current Apple employee accuses the company of spying on its workers via their personal iCloud accounts and non-work devices. The suit alleges Apple employees are required to give up the right to personal privacy, and that the company says it can “engage in physical, video and electronic surveillance of them” even when they are at home and after they stop working for Apple. (Semafor)

• How U.S. police departments are starting to use artificial intelligence to write crime reports. (CNBC)

• Hallelujah! Bibles are a bright spot in books this year. Worries about the economy, conflicts abroad and uncertainty over the election pushed readers toward the publication in droves. Bible sales are up 22% in the U.S. through the end of October, compared with the same period last year. By contrast, total U.S. print book sales were up less than 1% in that period. (WSJ)

• Oh man: A family in southern Connecticut lost their more than $4 million waterside mansion after authorities say a turkey fryer caught fire inside the home's garage on Thanksgiving Day. The fire took place at a home alongside a large pond in Weston, a city about 65 miles southwest of the state's capital of Hartford. They had 40 guests at the time; fortunately, nobody was injured. (USA Today)

• A man with a metal detector in Australia held onto a rock he thought contained flecks of gold for several years, and has now learned that the roughly 40 pound object is actually a roughly 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite. "You’re looking right back to the formation of the solar system here," said geologist Dermot Henry. (NY Post)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Zoshua Colah on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this Inc.com. See you in the comments!