havemehavana

Thirty seconds after decapitation, still conscious, a brain experiences a ‘wave of death’ and transmits a signal, apparently a final attempt to restart an absent heart. As it is in rats, so it is in humans. Some researchers think the wave is a warning that neurons have ceased to function, rather than one of irreversible, balloon-bursting damage. “The brain is screaming that something is terribly wrong,” says Lance Becker. Pigs have been successfully revived fifteen minutes after cardiac arrest with no lasting brain damage. The time limit to resuscitation is unknown.

We are born with more brain branches than we will ever need and get rid of them along the way. This is neuro-plasticity in the baby brain, the manner in which it retains the branches depending on the environment we’re in; it’s set up to be adaptable. In childhood our brains solidify around early survival-based learning and the things we’ve figured out to live, the brain branches growing along those lines, ‘setting’ our skills more firmly via milenation. Our connections are quicker but more solid.

Another huge restructuring of the brain happens around adolescence, the growth of the frontal cortex - focussing, consequences, abstract thinking, not solid or set in stone. And it was thought that after this ‘remodelling’, by the time we hit twenty-five or so, that brains are done and solid. But actually between the ages of forty and sixty-five - middle-age, a new thing for humanity - we are at the top of our brain game. We lose a bit of processing speed but when it comes to reasoning, problem-solving, joining-the-dots etc., we’re the best we’ll be, the process of milenation actually continuing and peaking during these years, sometimes even later than our sixties.

Here’s Barbara Straunch on brain growth, brain health, the concept of ‘cognitive reserve’, why some people who have brains with Alzheimer’s exhibit no symptoms in comparison to other sufferers.

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