Sunday, December 31, 2006

What's good for the body is good for the brain

Christen Brownlee's article at Science News provides evidence that voluntary cardiovascular exercise improves the health of the nervous system, including within the brain. Read part one.

Part two of this article discusses how eating cucumin (found in tumeric) and omega-fatty acids (found in fish and a few plants) also improves the health of the brain, providing similar benefits as exercise. By contrast a high fat, high sugar diet, and high calorie diet enables damage to the brain.

Additionally, calorie restriction was also claimed to lengthen the healthy life of the brain as well as the body. I've heard that calorie restriction lengthens the life of experimental rats plenty of times before, but what was especially interesting in this article was an explanation of why the brain is healthier for longer when fed less than desired. Light stress of slight hunger stimulates the brain into greater activity. Perhaps the brain is considering alternate strategies (or architectural methods) to find sufficient food. Read part two.

In some yoga and magick regimens, ejaculation-restriction is advocated to improve the spiritual health and creativity, which I believe ought to correlate to neural health and intelligence. Perhaps, like the light stress of mild hunger stimulating healthy brain activity, the light stress of mild carnal desire stimulates neural activation, learning, growth, and eploration.

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