This is your brain on 7 things

I seem to like that number.

What do some successful people truly fear, when you get past the pleasantries and start getting real?

Photo by Maximilian Csali on Unsplash

• Some fear they won’t be as successful in life as they think they should be.

• Some fear they won’t be as effective at providing for their families and leaving as worthy a mark as they’d like.

• And some fear growing older — specifically the fear that they might face health challenges that could hold them back, with cognitive issues or memory loss becoming an even greater fear with each passing year.

That’s why this is a good time to talk about the last fear on the list. Because every year, I review scientific studies, one after the other, put out by researchers who try to determine how memory works, how to stave off cognitive decline, and what simple habits might help.

Here are a few of the most recent ones we’ve featured:

Habit 1: Take a multivitamin.

This is probably the easiest habit on the list, and it’s one that I adopted for myself immediately after reading it. (I should have earlier, but let’s just admit that the list of things I “should” do is not exactly short.)

Writing in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers at Mass General Brigham say they’ve determined that simply taking a multivitamin each day has statistically significant cognitive benefits.

“Cognitive decline is among the top health concerns for most older adults, and a daily supplement of multivitamins has the potential as an appealing and accessible approach to slow cognitive aging,” said Chirag Vyas of the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, lead author.

Habit 2: Sleep well.

Getting enough sleep is important, but writing in the journal Neurology, which is the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, researchers said they found support for the idea that quality of sleep is just as important.

They studied 526 people with an average age of 40 for 11 years, and examined their sleep quality, duration, and cognitive and memory abilities. Participants were asked to wear monitors to track their average sleep time, and to track bedtimes, wake times, and sleep quality. They were also asked to take cognitive tests.

In the end, of 175 study participants who had the most disrupted sleep patterns, 44 had “poor cognitive performance” a decade later. By way of comparison, only 10 of the 176 people who had the least disrupted sleep had similar poor cognitive performance.

Habit 3: Practice a second language.

Sadly, this habit is a bit more “do as I say, not as I do” for me, simply because I’m one of those classic “one language only” Americans.

But, as summarized by Jaya Padmanabhan in The New York Times, researchers at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Bonn and with other European institutions studied the experiences of 746 participants and found that bilingualism led to better results on cognitive tests later in life.

A caveat on this one is that the advantage really did stem from learning a language before age 65; attempting to become bilingual after that age had no effect.

Habit 4: Exercise before learning.

OK, now we get back to an immediate, just-before-you-learn habit: exercise.

Writing in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, researchers from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark said they ran an experiment on 67 men between the ages of 18 and 35, in which they had participants exercise either before a cognitive activity, after it, both, or not at all.

The results, as you can probably imagine since I’m citing it: Those who exercised at all did better at remembering the skills involved with the game during a follow up exam seven days later than those who hadn’t exercised at all.

And those who exercised both before and after the task performed better a week later than everyone else.

Habit 5: Drink a lot more coffee.

People have been drinking coffee since the 15th century, but the past few years have seen a flood of new studies suggesting that drinking coffee (copious amounts of it, in many cases) improves longevity and brain function, while also combating some of the most common and feared adult health issues.

Truly, there are a lot of these to consider, but let’s cite just three of the most comprehensive we’ve examined:

• A double-blind study out of Johns Hopkins University and published in the journal Nature Neuroscience found that giving study participants a 200-milligram caffeine tablet was correlated with better performance on memory tests. “We’ve always known that caffeine has cognitive-enhancing effects,” said the lead author.

• And a massive study of nearly 500,000 British adults published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that those who drank at least two to three cups of coffee per day — and as many as eight cups — were “about 10 percent to 15 percent less likely to die” of any cause during the 10-year study period than those who didn’t.

• A study of the coffee habits of 12,583 people in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association found that those who drank four or more cups of coffee per day were doubly likely to avoid physical frailty into their 70s.

Habit 6: Eat these specific and somewhat surprising foods.

At the top of the list, in terms of both benefit and surprise: wasabi.

Writing in the journal Nutrients, researchers from Tohoku University said they recruited 72 Japanese adults and asked them to take either a daily tablet containing a biochemical known as 6-MSITC, which is found in wasabi, or a placebo tablet, for a period of 12 weeks.

Interestingly, both the patients taking the wasabi tablets and the placebo experienced improved working memory and episodic memory. But the wasabi-tablet subjects saw a much higher increase: an increase of about 18 percent higher episodic memory recall.

We’ve also seen recent studies suggesting cognitive benefits from eating foods like mushrooms, dark chocolate, cinnamon, and all kinds of vegetables.

Habit 7: Read for pleasure.

Writing in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Psychology, researchers from the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign teamed up with a local library to identify a series of books that had the potential to really suck readers in, as they put it.

Then, they recruited 76 older adults, and divided them into two groups.

One group was loaned iPads that had the recommended books preloaded onto them. The other group was given iPads with preloaded games including word puzzles.

Results, according to the researchers’ statement:

The results were incontrovertible: In comparison to the puzzle group, the group that read books for eight weeks showed significant improvements to working memory and episodic memory. In other words, the study demonstrated that regular, engaged reading strengthened older adults’ memory skills.

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7 other things …

• A comedian’s offensive remarks at the Trump rally Sunday night, including calling Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage" and saying Latino people have so many babies because "they don't pull out," sparked outrage among Florida Republicans, home to the largest population of Puerto Ricans in the continental U.S. "This is not a joke. It’s completely classless and in poor taste. Puerto Rico is the crown jewel of the Caribbean," said U.S. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Florida). (Miami Herald)

• Former President Trump bragged about a "little secret" between him and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) during the same rally, saying it will be revealed after Election Day, sparking concern that it relates to the idea of the GOP-led House determining the presidency through a contingent election. "By definition, a secret is not to be shared," Speaker Johnson said afterward, "and I don't intend to share this one." (Axios)

• Elon Musk’s "America" PAC released a crude, sexist attack ad on Twitter/X that repeatedly said Vice President Harris is “a c-word.” The ad flashes an image of a cat with a meow sound, an innuendo for the word, before the voiceover reveals that the “c-word” in this instance is supposed to refer to, "communist." (Politico)

• More than 200,000 Washington Post readers have canceled their subscriptions, representing 8% of paid subscribers, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Harris for president. (NPR)

• Ballot boxes in Oregon and Washington were set on fire with incendiary devices early Monday in what authorities believe are connected incidents, police said. The two arson incidents, which occurred near the Oregon-Washington border, are also believed to be connected to a third ballot box incident that occurred earlier this month in Vancouver, Washington. Elections officials said they are contacting the three impacted voters so they can receive replacement ballots. (ABC News)

• Republicans asked the U.S. Supreme Court Monday for an emergency order that could result in discarding thousands of Pennsylvania mail-in votes, which are thought to favor Democrats. The lawsuit seeks to overturn a state supreme court ruling that says mail voters who forget to include "secrecy envelopes" with their ballots can cast provisional ballots in person, instead of their votes simply being thrown out. (AP)

• An investigation by French newspaper Le Monde found that the highly confidential movements of U.S. President Joe Biden, presidential rivals Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and other world leaders can be easily tracked online through the fitness app Strava, that their bodyguards use. The Secret Service says it doesn't believe was compromised. (Stars & Stripes)

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Thanks for reading. Photo credit: Photo by Allen Taylor on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments!