Our Amazingly Plastic Brains

Mental and physical exercise can keep the brain fit and help it recover capacities lost to disease and trauma.

Can the brain heal and preserve itself—or even improve its functioning—as we get older? For some time, many scientists have tended to think of our brains as machines, most commonly as computers, destined to break down over time under the strain of age and use. In recent years, however, research in neuroscience has begun to show the inadequacy of this metaphor for describing the physiology of the brain. It turns out that our brains, like our bodies in general, are far more likely to waste away from underuse than to wear down from overuse.

As people reach middle age, exercising the brain and the body to which it is attached—keeping both active—becomes more important. It is one of the few reliable ways to offset the natural wasting process and the damaging influence of our unnaturally sedentary modern lives. It also points to new possibilities for the brain to heal itself in the face of disease and trauma.

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