A Magnificent Mind Starts with a Healthy Brain

ESSENTIAL STRATEGIES

Brains run the world. They run the stock market and the local market. They run huge corporations and the mom-and-pop shop down the street. Brains run churches, banks, hotels, tennis clubs, dry cleaners, professional basketball teams, Internet dating services, and universities. Brains run marriages, choirs, homeowner associations, and terrorist groups. Your brain runs you and is significantly involved in running your family. Yet even though the brain is involved with everything we do at work and at home, we rarely think about or honor the brain. There is no formal education about the brain in MBA programs, no brain-training programs at church, no brain exercises in customer service or management programs, and no real practical education about the brain in school. The lack of brain education is a huge mistake, because success in all we do starts with a healthy brain.

The characteristics of a magnificent mind include personal responsibility, clear goals, good attention, consistent effort, effective social skills, impulse control, motivation, integrity, and creativity. Yet few people realize that all of these are brain functions. A healthy brain makes these characteristics easier to incorporate in your life, while a damaged or struggling brain makes these much harder. Taking great care of your brain is essential to a magnificent mind. Here is an example.

In one of the graduate psychology courses I taught I asked for volunteers for our healthy brain study. By the year 2000, we had amassed tens of thousands of SPECT scans for clinical reasons, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety, depression, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, brain trauma, marital strife, and violence. To further our research efforts, we needed to build a large normal database to compare our clinical studies. I solicited normal people wherever I went. Surprisingly, they were not that easy to find. Christy, one of my favorite students, came up after class very excited. She said, “You have to scan my eighty-two-year-old grandmother, Anna. She is one of the most normal people I know. You will love her.” On Christy’s advice and with her grandmother’s agreement, we screened Anna and indeed found her to be healthy (see Image 2.1). She met all of the criteria for the study: she had not suffered from psychiatric illness at any point in her life; there was no history of substance abuse, brain injuries, or first-degree relatives with psychiatric illness; and she was not on any medications. Anna had been married for fifty-eight years and was a loving wife, mother, and grandmother. She had a sharp, curious mind and was active in her church and community. She had solid relationships that spanned many years. Anna never drank alcohol, never smoked, and tried to eat healthy. She has one of the healthiest brains I had ever seen, out of nearly fifty thousand! Her brain fit her life.

Image 2.1: Anna’s Eighty-Two-Year-Old Healthy Brain SPECT Scan
Full, even, symmetrical activity

The First Steps to a Healthier Brain

Most of us are never taught about how important the brain is, so we go through life thinking about everything (weight, skin care, finances, children, Internet dating, vacations, careers, sports) but this critically important organ. I live in Newport Beach, California, the heart of Orange County. We have often been called the plastic society because we have more plastic walking around our streets and beaches than almost any other place in the world. I often say that we care more about our faces, our boobs, our bellies, and our butts than we do our brain. How stupid is that? When you really want to change, the place to start is with your brain. In the rest of this chapter I will tell you the first six things you should do to improve your brain health.

1. PROTECT YOUR AMAZING BUT FRAGILE BRAIN

The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. It is estimated that the brain has one hundred billion nerve cells and more connections in it than there are stars in the universe. Even though the brain consists of only about 2 percent of your body’s weight, it uses about 25 percent of the calories you consume. If you take a piece of brain tissue the size of a grain of sand, it contains a hundred thousand neurons and a billion connections all communicating with one another. If you are not thoughtful, the brain loses an average of eighty-five thousand brain cells a day, or one per second. Information in the brain travels at the speed of 268 miles per hour, unless of course you are drunk, which really slows things down. The brain is the organ of loving, learning, behaving, intelligence, personality, character, belief, and knowing.

The brain is also very soft and it is housed in a really hard skull. Most people think of the brain as firm, fixed, and rubbery. Yet that is not how it is inside your skull. That is how it is once it is fixed in formaldehyde on the pathologist’s table. Inside your skull the brain is comprised of 80 percent water and is the consistency of soft butter or custard, somewhere between egg whites and Jell-O. In Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, neurosurgeon Katrina Firlik describes the brain “like tofu, the soft kind, which when caught in suction during surgery slurps into the tube.”

Your soft tofulike brain is housed in a really hard skull that has many ridges. These ridges damage the brain during trauma, so why would you ever let a child hit a soccer ball with their heads, play tackle football (even with helmets), skateboard, or snowboard or ski without helmets? Unless you didn’t like them, why would you buy your teenagers a motorcycle or take them four-wheeling in the desert? From a neuroscientist’s point of view, these are dangerous activities that could grievously injure the brain. Sports like boxing, football, motocross, and cage fighting are simply not worth the risk. The brain loves physical activity and it is better to think about safer brain sports such as tennis, table tennis, track and field (although not pole vaulting), and basketball.

A 2007 study by John Adams and colleagues at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine found that hitting a soccer ball with one’s head may be linked to long-term brain injury and memory problems later in life. Researchers found evidence of reduced gray matter in the brains of male college soccer players, compared with young men who had never played.

The single most important thing I have learned from looking at tens of thousands of scans is that mild traumatic brain injuries change people’s whole lives (by damaging their brain) and no one knows it. The brain-injured person often subsequent to the injury suffers from emotional, behavioral, or cognitive problems that may lead him to a psychiatrist or psychologist, who typically never looks at the brain. Problems that are physically based are often considered psychological. If you never look at the brain, you will likely miss what many researchers have called the silent epidemic. There are two million reported new brain injury cases every year, and millions of others that go unnoticed.

When I first started the imaging work, I saw a lot of brain injury patterns on scans. When I asked patients about a history of head injuries they denied them. When I pressed, a whole new world opened up. I found out that people often forgot significant injuries. I had to ask them three, four, even ten times. Many people forget or they did not realize that they have had a serious brain injury. You would be amazed by how many people after repeatedly saying no to this question suddenly get an “aha” look on their face and say, “Why yes, I fell out of a second-story window at age seven.” Or they tell us they went through the windshield of a car headfirst, had concussions playing football or soccer, or fell down a flight of stairs. Not all brain injuries, even serious ones, will cause damage—there is an interaction between genetic vulnerability and trauma. Moreover, the brain is buffered by the cerebrospinal fluid that bathes it. Still, damage can occur more than most know.

So many of the troubled people we see at the Amen Clinics have had a brain injury (or two or three). Damaging your brain may limit or impair your ability to be successful in any area of your life. People who have experienced head injuries have a higher incidence of drug abuse, alcoholism, mood problems, divorce, domestic violence, arrests, financial problems, and every other type of trouble that leads to failure. Be smart. If you want to be your best, protect your soft brain.

2. DO A BETTER JOB OF TAKING CARE OF YOUNGER BRAINS

Most people think that we become adults when we turn eighteen years old. That is a societal definition, but it is not true from a brain science perspective. The prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that makes us most human (forethought, judgment, impulse control, learning from our mistakes—the stuff of maturity), does not finish developing until we are about twenty-five years old. The insurance industry knew this long before neuroscientists, as twenty-five is the age when your car insurance rates go down because you become a more thoughtful driver.

As the brain matures, nerve cells become wrapped in a white, fatty substance called myelin (a process known as myelinization). Like wrapping copper wires with insulation, myelin protects and helps nerve cells work up to ten times more efficiently. Myelinization starts from the back part of the brain and works forward. The occipital lobes, involved with vision, myelinate within the first few months of life, so we can see more detail. It is not until we are much older that the prefrontal cortex becomes myelinated. Current research, including ours, suggests it is at about age twenty-five. From a study we did at the Amen Clinics, involving more than sixty-three hundred patient scans, we found that the activity in the prefrontal cortex does not become stable until we are in our midtwenties.

Why is this so important? Since the brain is not finished developing until we are in our midtwenties, we should be doing a much better job protecting our teenage and young adult brains. Too often parents give up on their teenagers and do not supervise what they eat, allow them to get little sleep, don’t get terribly upset about early drinking or marijuana use, and permit them to drive in unsafe vehicles. We allow our kids to go away to college too soon, where they engage in brain-destroying behaviors, such as heavy drinking, nonstop violent video games, Internet gambling, and pornography, and we are ready to toss them out of the house when they are eighteen, if they irritate us. I know my three adult children (ages thirty-one, twenty-six, and twenty-one) have much better judgment now than they did at age eighteen. I can certainly say the same thing about my own behavior. Once this brain research was released, the Supreme Court banned executing murderers who committed their crimes when they were teenagers.

Take this concept a step further. Parents spend billions of dollars each year trying to help their children be successful. We spend money on private schools, summer camps, and lessons of all sorts, including martial arts, athletics, music, and dance. We spend time tutoring them or hiring tutors for them. With all the time and effort spent on helping them be their best, we should not forget the most important organ that actually tells the body how to hit the golf shot, remembers the karate kata, hears the prosody of music, and improvises in modern dance. Spending time and money on youth brain health is one of the smartest investments in your child’s, teenager’s, and young adult’s future. Some simple things to do for children and teens is to teach them about the importance of their brain, how to take care of it, protect it, feed it properly, get enough sleep, avoid toxic substances such as drugs or alcohol, and share the major concepts with them from this book and another of my books, Making a Good Brain Great. Once properly educated, I find children and teens are much better at taking care of their own brains.

3. BOOST BLOOD FLOW

Blood is especially important to the brain. Even though the brain is composed of only 2 percent of the body’s weight, it uses 20 percent of the body’s blood flow and oxygen supply. Blood flow to the brain is rarely thought about as important by the general public, unless a disaster strikes, such as a stroke or an aneurysm. Yet good blood flow is absolutely essential to the brain’s health. This is one reason I favor brain SPECT as our primary imaging study. It specifically looks at blood flow patterns in the brain.

Blood brings oxygen, sugar, vitamins, and other nutrients to the brain and takes away carbon dioxide and other toxic waste products. Anything that limits blood flow prematurely ages all of your body’s organs. Consider the skin of smokers. Most people can tell if someone is a smoker by looking at his or her skin. A smoker’s skin is more likely to be deeply wrinkled and even perhaps tinged with a yellow or gray color. Why? Nicotine in cigarettes is a powerful constrictor of blood flow to every organ in the body, including the skin and the brain. Deprived of vital nutrients, the smoker’s body will look and the brain will think older than they are.

Unless you actively do something to change it, blood flow throughout your body decreases over time, especially to the brain. Blood vessels become droopy and blood pressure rises, limiting blood supply. To stay young of heart and mind, it is essential to understand the factors that limit blood flow and eliminate them. Improving blood flow is the fountain of youth.

Whatever is good for your heart is good for your brain. Since I wrote Sex on the Brain, I also realized that whatever is good for your heart is good for your brain is also good for your genitals. Blood flow to your genitals is essential for both men and women to have healthy, passionate, satisfying sex lives. Did you know that 40 percent of forty-year-olds have erectile (blood flow) dysfunction? And 70 percent of seventy-year-olds have erectile dysfunction too? No wonder commercials for Cialis, Levitra, and Viagra are everywhere. The startling statistics for erectile dysfunction are an indication that heart and brain problems are also much more common than most people think.

Here is a partial list of factors that limit or disrupt blood flow.

• Stress. The overflow of the stress chemical adrenaline constricts blood flow to many areas of the body.

• Caffeine. This substance directly constricts blood flow to the brain, disrupts sleep, and is involved in dehydration.

• Nicotine. This substance constricts blood flow everywhere.

• Dehydration. The brain is 80 percent water. Anything that dehydrates you makes it harder to think. I once did a scan of a famous bodybuilder. His brain resembled that of a drug addict’s, but he vehemently denied it. Then I learned that he significantly dehydrates himself before photo shoots to look leaner for the camera, and he had one of these photo shoots the day after his first scan. When he was adequately hydrated the following week, his brain looked much better (see Images 2.2 and 2.3).

• Artery disease/heart disease. Both directly limit blood flow.

• Diabetes. A small blood vessel disease, diabetes limits blood flow, makes blood vessels brittle, and prevents the healing of damaged tissue.

• Environmental toxins. These toxins poison blood vessels.

• Lack of sleep. People who get less than six hours a sleep at night have lower overall blood flow to the brain.

• Lack of exercise. In addition to weakening the heart pump, too little exercise allows blood vessels to become droopy and less efficient.

• Drug or alcohol abuse. These substances are directly toxic to the vascular system. Drugs or alcohol cause a toxic swiss cheese appearance on scans from the overall decreased blood flow.

To increase healthy blood flow throughout your body and brain, you need to get enough sleep; drink plenty of water; avoid substances that dehydrate you, such as caffeine and alcohol; stop any medications or bad habits (like smoking) that may be constricting blood flow; and consider taking supplements such as fish oil, gingko, ginseng, and L-arginine that boost blood flow. Probably the most important thing to do is to eliminate any toxins and to exercise.

Image 2.2: Bodybuilder’s
Dehydrated Brain

Image 2.3: Bodybuilder’s
Adequately Hydrated Brain

4. INCREASE YOUR BRAIN’S RESERVE

Have you ever wondered why certain stresses or injuries affect some people and not others? I have. I have wondered why some people get depressed after losing a parent while others, although sad, keep going; why some people, after a minor head injury, seem to really be affected, while others don’t; or why some people can work many hours straight, while others are completely spent after a short period of time. Several years ago, after looking at many thousands of brain scans, I started to think about the concept of brain reserve. Brain reserve is the cushion, margin, or extra neurons that we have, to deal with unexpected events or insults. The more reserve we have, the more stresses or injuries we can handle. The less reserve, the more vulnerable we are.

When we are conceived, we all start with the same reserve. Many things can erode it; many things can boost it. For example, if your mother smoked, drank much alcohol, or was under constant stress when she was pregnant with you, she decreased your brain’s reserve. If she took fish oil, listened to classical music, and meditated every day, it is likely she increased your reserve. If you fell down a flight of stairs at age three, were exposed to chronic stress from an alcoholic mother or father during childhood, were sexually molested as a child or teenager, drank too much alcohol or used drugs, you decreased or limited your brain’s reserve. On the other hand, if you were fed a healthy diet, took fish oil, were raised by loving, consistent parents, and were exposed to many different kinds of learning, your brain’s reserve was likely increased.

Anything that harms brain function starts to erode your brain’s reserve. Here are some factors known to decrease brain reserve.

• Prenatal or birth injuries

• Brain injuries

• Excessive alcohol

• Drug abuse

• Negative thinking

• Poor diet

• Environmental toxins

• Chronic stress

• Lack of sleep / sleep apnea

• Smoking

• Excessive caffeine

• Too much television or violent video games

• Lack of exercise

Likewise, maintaining a brain healthy life will increase your reserve or hardiness to deal with pending stresses or trouble. I always want to be increasing my brain reserve, so I can deal with the crises that inevitably will come my way. Here are a number of ways to do it.

• Make positive social connections.

• Engage in new learning.

• Maintain a healthy diet.

• Take a daily multiple vitamin.

• Take a fish oil supplement.

• Learn music.

• Exercise regularly.

• Dance (of course, without drinking).

• Engage in positive thinking.

• Express gratitude.

• Meditate.

If you wish to stay healthy during stressful times, you need adequate brain reserve. Start working today to add more neurons to your life.

5. MAINTAIN THE BRAIN’S HARDWARE

Your brain not only has to grow, develop, and mature, it has to repair itself on an ongoing basis. It is not like a car that can be taken into the mechanic when it needs a tune-up or a part replaced. Your brain has mechanisms to repair the damage as a result of the normal wear and tear of life. The hardware has to be maintained in order for the brain to consistently function at its best.

It is still commonly believed that we are born with all the brain cells we will ever have. Because of this notion, scientists considered brain damage irreversible and neurological disease unstoppable. In stunning research within the last decade, investigators demonstrated that adult human brains generate new cells after all. Since then, scientists have been furiously studying the implications that has accelerated research in this area.

Neurogenesis means birth, but the birth cycle is begun by death. Let’s say you go to a New Year’s Eve party and have a little too much champagne. You come home and sleep it off. By the time you awake, several hundred thousand neurons have died from alcohol toxicity. Somehow, the number of neurons in your brain has to be brought back up to normal. Neurogenesis is the process that develops and maintains the functional capacity of brain circuits by replacing neurons that are killed or damaged. The very act of the neurons’dying triggers certain growth factors in the brain to stimulate the formation of new neurons. But neurogenesis doesn’t know when to stop; left on its own it will continue creating new neurons until the brain explodes. The brain has to regulate itself so that just the right numbers of neurons are maintained. When the number generated reaches a certain level, cell death is triggered, which miraculously brings the number back down. Yet once again, this death mechanism does not know when to stop killing, and thus new neuron formation is triggered again. This process allows the brain cell growth to stay within a certain range, so that the circuits can always function well—at least under normal conditions.

Think of this repair process as the brain’s governor, whose main job is to govern the population. It must maintain the right balance or all hell will break loose. Aging occurs when more cells die than are made. Cancer occurs when cells overproliferate. Encouraging brain health encourages neurogenesis.

6. YOUR ABILITY TO CONTROL YOUR LIFE IS DIRECTLY TIED TO THE HEALTH OF YOUR BRAIN

Most people have a black or white conception of free will. That was my thought before I started my work with brain imaging. Growing up Roman Catholic I had the idea that we could all equally decide to do good or bad. It was a simple decision that led to heaven or hell, and we all had the same ability to choose, unless of course someone was mentally retarded or had another brain illness, such as Alzheimer’s disease or schizophrenia, that took away their self-control. After looking at tens of thousands of brains in my own patients I have come to realize the free will is really a very gray concept. I think most of us have about 85 percent free will, until you drink a six-pack of Bud Lite, which drops free will to about 50 percent. But what if someone, through disease or damage, starts with 50 percent free will? That same six-pack of Bud Lite could cause a disaster in their lives.

In the first several years of scanning the brain, criminal attorneys heard about my work and sent us people to scan who had done some really awful things. Most of the time, though not always, these people had really bad brain function. It became clear that the health of the brain was related to decision making.

In one very sad case from Healdsburg, a city about an hour north of San Francisco, a sixteen-year-old boy, Jose, senselessly attacked another teenager, Dillon, because of the color of the sweater he wore. Referred to as the Red Sweater Case, the city was outraged. Jose had been “hotboxing” before he lost his temper. A group of teenagers, including Jose, were inside a VW Beetle with the windows rolled up, smoking joints. Being in a closed space with multiple people smoking increases the concentration of marijuana in the body, thus the term hotboxing. Shortly afterward, Jose saw Dillon walking his dog across the street. Dillon was wearing a red sweater. Jose, a wannabe gang member whose color was red, confronted Dillon and asked him what color he claimed. Dillon said he didn’t claim any color and started to walk off. Jose said, “Wrong answer,” and senselessly beat him nearly to death. Dillon was in a coma for three weeks and ended up with serious brain damage.

As part of developing a defense, Jose’s attorney sent him for neuropsychological testing, which revealed probable damage to his prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in judgment, empathy, planning, and impulse control. The neuropsychologist suggested the attorney contact me to scan Jose’s brain. The SPECT study was very abnormal. Jose had severe decreased activity in his prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes (implicated in learning disabilities and violence) and increased activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus, which is the brain’s “gear shifter,” causing him to be rigid and inflexible and to fixate on negative thoughts (see Image 2.4).

Clearly, Jose had an abnormal brain. He had suffered several brain injuries in the past, including being beaten unconscious by a heavy chain, and he had experienced severe emotional trauma. His mother was murdered when he was eight years old and he had witnessed much violence. Even when he was not smoking marijuana, Jose suffered with a vulnerable brain. Put him in the wrong situation, under the influences of something that diminishes brain function further, even marijuana, and he is likely to explode.

Image 2.4: Jose’s Brain
Arrows are pointing to the prefrontal cortex (top) and temporal lobe.

I received a lot of criticism for testifying at Jose’s trial, even threatening phone calls to my office. People said I was providing a high-tech excuse for bad behavior. But the truth was that Jose did not have full access to his own brain, the organ that controls behavior. It didn’t mean that he didn’t do the crime. He did. It didn’t mean he was not responsible for it. He was. What it does mean is that the jury should take into consideration that he was literally not dealing with a complete set of brain cells and they should send him to a place where he could get appropriate treatment. Odds are, whatever the sentence, he will go home at some point. He will be less likely to reoffend, if his brain was helped. In fact, the jury did use imaging information for mitigation. Rather than receiving twenty-five years, which the prosecution wanted, the jury sentenced him to eleven years, recommending he go to a place that would provide Jose with treatment.

Why is it that some people explode in certain situations and others do not? I think we must consider the vulnerability of the brain. The better our brains work, the less likely we are to do bad or stupid things.