Continuing The Series On Brain Plasticity By Guest Author Anna Kucirkova

Given the right conditions, plasticity lets the adult brain keep growing. Some functions do slip with age, but that decline isn't the whole story. The brain can be nudged back toward sharper performance when you give it the right kind of work.

Think of targeted exercises as a way of keeping the mind in shape. People recovering from brain damage sometimes retrain themselves toward better function, which tells you how much room there is to work with. What matters is figuring out which functions you want to improve and then finding the exercise that actually reaches them.

Researchers point to several practical ways of putting plasticity to use.

The Society for Neuroscience notes that going without food for a stretch raises synaptic plasticity, lowers the odds of neurodegenerative disease, pushes new neurons to grow, and sharpens thinking. Fasting triggers a metabolic change that drops the body's leptin, and that drop acts as a chemical cue telling neurons to generate more energy.

New places do something to the brain. Drop it into surroundings that are unfamiliar and a little demanding, and neurogenesis picks up. Paul Nussbaum, a neuropsychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, puts it this way: those new and challenging situations cause the brain to sprout dendrites. You don't need a week abroad for the effect either. A weekend drive to a city you've never visited does the job.

Memory training builds connectivity across the prefrontal parietal network, and it can slow the kind of memory loss that tends to arrive with age. Mnemonic tricks pull together visualization, imagery, a sense of spatial movement, and rhythm or melody, which means they light up several regions of the brain at once rather than one.

Look at the brains of musicians and you'll see tight links running between separate areas. The explanation neuroscientists give is that playing an instrument is a multi-sensory act: motor movements get tied to particular sounds, and memorizing the visual patterns of music spins up fresh neural networks. Keep practicing something new and the sheer repetition hands plasticity the material it needs.

Switch to your non-dominant hand for everyday chores and you start laying down new neural pathways. The habit strengthens the wiring between brain cells. There's research tying non-dominant hand activity to steadier emotions and better impulse control, too. Brush your teeth or stir a pot with the other hand sometime and see how the brain handles it.

Reading fiction leaves a mark. After participants finished a novel, studies recorded heightened and lasting connectivity, with extra activity turning up in the region that governs physical sensation and movement. The reasoning is that a novel can physically transport you into its invented world. Slipping into that mental state turns out to be part of how we learn to manage the tangle of real social relationships.

Picking up new words fires the brain's visual, memory, and auditory systems together. The thinner your vocabulary, the greater the chance your cognitive skills are lagging.

Sleep carries its own payoff. Research describes it helping learning stick by growing dendritic spines, the tiny bumps that link brain cells and let information cross the synapse. Land seven or eight hours a night and the brain holds onto what it took in during the day.

Pick one of these and run with it. The notion that aging simply drains brain function doesn't hold up well against what any of them can do. The final part of this piece goes up next week.

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