Keep Your Brain From Declining After Age 30
Every time you move your body, your brain gets what one neuroscientist calls a “bubble bath” of dopamine, serotonin, and growth factors. Here’s how to activate it. Neuroscientists Wendy Suzuki, PhD, Samuel Wang, PhD, and Gary Small, MD explain how movement increases blood flow, boosts growth factors like BDNF, and floods the brain with mood-lifting neurochemicals. The brain and body are in constant conversation, and plasticity means your wiring is never fixed. According to Suzuki, even ten minutes of walking can shift your brain’s chemistry immediately, flooding it in a ‘bubble bath’ of positive neurochemicals. In other words, the way you use your body today shapes how your brain works tomorrow.
6:33 Series: Brain BriefsRelated Videos [03]
)
3 Experts Explain Everything You Need To Know About Loneliness
What does it really mean when you feel lonely? The answer depends on your perception. In this video, Robert Waldinger, MD, Kasley Killam, MPH, and Ethan Kross, PhD explore why loneliness has become so common and how it affects both the mind and the body. They explain why friendships are disappearing, how loneliness changes our health, and why being alone doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. Instead of treating loneliness as a personal failure, they suggest seeing it as a signal that helps us understand what we need and how to reconnect.
7:34 Series: Brain Briefs)
Why Humans Need Fiction, According to Neuroscience
What if the voice in your head is less of a witness and more of an interpreter? Two neuroscientists discuss the brain’s drive to explain, narrate, and make everything add up. Stories do not just entertain us; they may be one of the main ways our brains rehearse experience, assign meaning, and turn scattered moments into something that feels like a self. We are constantly sorting actions, memories and emotion into a version of events that feels coherent enough to live inside. Neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga, PhD and Dean Buonomano, PhD draw on split-brain research to explain the left hemisphere’s “Interpreter”: the brain’s tendency to create explanations for behavior, even when it does not have the full picture. The instinct to create narratives likely shapes far more than self-understanding. It may underpin identity, belief, and the desire to belong in the world.
4:55 Series: Brain Briefs)