Weekly Roundup: Brain Compensation, The Butt-Brain Axis, Eating and Cognitive Function

First published on my Substack.

Having written on cognitive performance on aging this week, this is how I’ll start this roundup, but have some other fascinating research such as the newly discovered Butt-Brain network — no I’m not kidding you….I am tempted to say I am not sh**ing you…but fascinating also. Read on:

Your Brain Can Compensate Against Cognitive Decline

I just reported on Friday about how cognitive reserve protects agains neurodegeneration — and how stress can eat away at this cognitive reserve.

More good news for the aging brain as Ethan Knights et al. of the University of Cambridge reported recently. They managed to give solid evidence of how the brain compensates against declining function.

This is in the aging brain, not in cases such as Alzheimer’s, but this might be relevant to those cases also. As we age all sorts of things happen: connectivity weakens between regions, brains cells become senescent, clumps of proteins that are not cleared out accumulate, and certain regions start to shrink.