4 Ways to Increase Brain Power that May Prevent Alzheimer's Disease

If you were taught that you’re born with all the brain cells you’ll ever get and it’s all downhill from there, it’s time for a rethink. Mounting research suggests you can improve your brain no matter what your age, making it stronger now and protecting it for the long term.

In fact, while surveys have found that 60 percent of Americans consider Alzheimer’s disease a natural part of getting older, scientists say the opposite. “We’re finally able to use the terms ‘Alzheimer’s disease’ and ‘prevention’ in the same sentence,” says Richard Isaacson, MD, director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medicine. And the same may be true for other forms of cognitive decline.

Having This Much Sex Might Make You Smarter

Okay, so there are tons of reasons why you should have sex right now. But here’s one you might not have thought of: Having frequent sex might boost your brain, researchers from Coventry University in the U.K. suggest.

In the study, researchers asked 73 older adults how often they had sex, and then had them perform tasks that tested their brain function—including things like attention, memory, fluency, language, and visuospatial abilities.

How Eating Olive Oil Can Boost Your Memory

You now have one more excellent reason to shelve the store-bought dressing in favor of the homemade stuff: Eating a diet rich in extra-virgin olive oil may protect your brain as you age, researchers from Temple University suggest.

In the study, researchers genetically modified mice to express three key characteristics of Alzheimer’s disease: memory impairment, the buildup of sticky proteins called amyloid plaques, and tangles of tau proteins. Then, when the mice reached six months of age, they had some mice eat chow supplemented with extra-virgin olive for six months, while the others ate their regular food. This food change occurred before the mice began to exhibit signs of Alzheimer’s.

5 Amazing Things Your Brain Does While You Sleep

We spend a third of our lives sleeping, an activity as crucial to our health and well-being as eating. But exactly why we need sleep hasn't always been clear. We know that sleep makes us feel more energized and improves our mood, but what's really happening in the brain and body when we're at rest?

Research has identified a number of reasons that sleep is critical to our health. When we're sleeping, the brain is anything but inactive. In fact, during sleep, neurons in the brain fire nearly as much as they do during waking hours -- so it should come as no surprise that what happens during our resting hours is extremely important to a number brain and cognitive functions.

Here are five incredible things your brain does while you're asleep -- and good reason to get some shuteye tonight:

What Marijuana Might Do to Your Brain

The stoner character may be more than stereotype: Smoking pot may actually make you lazy. Occasional marijuana use can affect your motivation, according to a recent study from Harvard Medical School.

Out of 40 college students, the half who smoked pot once or twice a week for a few months showed more changes in the brain areas regulating emotion, mental illness, and motivation than the drug-free undergrads. “Your motivation levels determine whether or not you get out of bed in the morning,” says study coauthor Anne Blood, Ph.D. "And we're seeing some pretty convincing changes in these regions.”

Your Brain on Junk Food

BY JESSICA GIRDWAIN,

Skip the Taco Bell run: Five days of eating a junk-food diet can deteriorate your memory, finds new Australian research.
After that amount of time, rats that ate high-fat, high-sugar foods performed worse on special memory tests, and couldn't locate things as well as rodents fed a normal diet. These rats had problems noticing if an object had moved; for you, that’s like when you can’t find your keys.