Save the brain with all synapses

Yesterday I had a chance to talk with Monir Mazaheri, a research assistant at the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. She spoke about recent discoveries in studies of brain degradation and Alzheimer's disease. It turned out that there are very simple ways to develop your intellect, if you are young, and save it, if you are closer to 60. The bottom line is that you don’t have to do a lot of purely intellectual work, it’s more important to use all brain areas.

First, a little theory:

• the brain is a system of nerve cells (neurons). Nerve cells are interconnected by synapses. Synapses are distinguished by great plasticity, that is, synaptic connections can form, strengthen or weaken and collapse. Training is associated with the formation of long-term synaptic connections between neurons.
  
• The brain is different specialization. That is, different zones are responsible for different actions. When we speak, one zone (speech) is activated, when we present images - the other, when we learn to dance - the third, etc.
  
• In those areas that we do not use, synaptic connections weaken. As a result, we forget what we once knew and knew how. Worse, if we do the same thing every day, solving monotonous tasks, entire brain regions are not involved in us and their functionality decreases. In his youth, this leads to the fact that tasks that are too narrow for a specialist from other areas suddenly turn out to be too complicated. For example, it is difficult to solve a simple riddle or to draw a cat from a picture. And in old age, this leads to dementia (senile dementia), because it is almost impossible to recover lost synaptic connections — to learn new things.
  

Good news: maintaining intelligence at altitude is not at all difficult. You just need to use as many different areas of the brain as possible so that the connections in them do not weaken. What specifically to do:

1. Communicate more. Social contacts involve many different zones: after all, you need to remember what a person’s name is, to imagine what he looks like, what he does, what interests him, what you said last time. And it does not matter whether you communicate personally or on the Internet. By the way, old people who have many social contacts rarely suffer from dementia.
2. If you do everything with your right hand, start doing something with your left. This activates the opposite hemisphere of the brain.
3. Crossword puzzles, sudoku and other intellectual things make you strain your brain, delve into memory and restore almost lost synaptic connections.
4. Well, if your hobby is radically different from work. Yes, “at work I program under Windows, and at home — under Linux” is not a radical difference. This is a direct path to losing the functionality of a large part of your brain, and even weakening your ability to specialize. Truly challenging tasks require a non-trivial approach, imagination, visualization, the use of methods from other areas, heuristics, etc.
5. Try new, learn new. I learned from my own experience that learning new skills can give unexpected bonuses in very different areas. Having learned blind typing, I suddenly became “a girl-pick-up-all-not-looking” from “hands-full-hands”. Now, if something falls somewhere on the periphery of my field of view, and I can reach, in 9 out of 10 cases I will catch it.
6. It is not necessary that all this was difficult, but it would be better interesting and entertaining.