The best thing to do for your brain | David Eagleman on The TED Interview

[0:00]What advice would you give to someone who's, I don't know, in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s?

[0:07]Like, how, what, what should we do to, to, to, to be the best stewards of our brands? Oh, I'll tell you, it's so easy. It's to seek novelty. It's to seek challenge. So the key is for most people as they get older, they, you know, whatever, they, their lives shrink, they watch Jerry Springer, they do whatever they're doing. But the, but the, the key is challenge yourself. So there's this study that's been going on for decades. You may know about this called the religious order study where a whole bunch of nuns in convents volunteered to give their brains upon their death. So, what happened is, um, the researchers started examining these, you know, these histological samples, and realized that some fraction of these nuns had Alzheimer's disease. And their brains were physically getting chewed up with the Alzheimer's, and yet, nobody knew it when they were alive. They just weren't showing the cognitive deficits. Okay, so it led to a big understanding that what was going on was they lived in the convent till the day they died. They had social interaction, they had chores and responsibilities, they played games, they had conversations, they were doing all kinds of stuff. And as a result, even though their brain was physically degenerating, with the ravages of the disease, they were building new bridges, new roadways, all the time. And, and as a result, they were able to essentially fight back against the, the degeneration of the tissue. This is the important thing is to always seek challenges. And by, go ahead. No, I was just going to say, is it challenges that, that, um, themselves vary? So if someone, if someone finds doing a crossword challenging, but they do it every day and keep doing it, is that good or is that actually, or playing bridge every week or something like that? Or is it actually much better to mix that up and actually know I'm going to travel to a new place and whatever. As soon as you get good at the crossword puzzles, you got to drop them and do something that's hard. The key is to be between the levels of frustrating but achievable. And, uh, and that's where you always want to keep yourself in life. And as long as you're there, as long as you're there, you're doing the best thing you can do for your brain. I mean, this is, I, I, um, I'm not... You feel between frustrating and achievable. You're always frustrated and never achieving, just to say. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's funny because there's so much that we know, you know, so much stuff pouring out of neuroscience labs, but this is still the key, the single piece of advice really that we have for, for putting off dementia.