Weekly Roundup: Brain Compensation, The Butt-Brain Axis, Eating and Cognitive Function
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.
All of this leads to lowered cognitive function - the aforementioned cognitive reserve protects against this, but Knights and colleagues wanted to find out how and if the brain truly does compensate for this. For this they analysed brain imaging data of 223 adults between 19 and 87 years old while doing cognitive activities.
They specifically analysed something called the “Multiple Demand Network” which is a distributed front to back network involved in solving complex cognitive problems.
As expected activity in this decreases with age which was related to lower performance. So far so good, all to be expected, but in those older people who performed better they saw that various other areas were also recruited. The region that was most correlated with higher performance was an area called the cuneus at the rear of the brain.
This shows that performance can be moderated by recruiting other areas of the brain -and those who can do this can reduce or minimise the impacts of cognitive decline.
Unfortunately I can’t tell you how to recruit the cuneus - but I presume the tips for building cognitive reserve apply here.
But from cognitive ability though brain compensation to cognitive ability through pooping.
Your Butt-Brain Connection
Bear with me - this is a new fascinating brain-body connection. But of interest this particular research had a focus on sports performance but cognitive performance was a part of this. I read about it from Amby Burfoot a legendary figure in the running community who reports most weeks on science related to running.
He also gave it the slightly more approachable term of Butt-Brain Network in place of the researchers terminology of “brain-rectum connection”. If you’re on Medium read here.
I and many others have reported on various other brain-body connections. The most common one being the Gut-Brain connection.
This study by Chen-Chan et al. follows research into pre race pooping and athletic performance - if you’ve ever been to a fun run, or especially a marathon, you will know that the toilets at the start line are frequented heavily. And I can tell you it is not very pleasant experience! Let’s not dwell on this - what Chen-Chan showed was that pre-race (in this case cycling time trial) improved performance. That in itself is good to know, for some!
However, the researchers wanted to know whether this was down to physiological or psychological impacts (or a mix of both of course). And therefore they also used a group of sports people, triathletes, to investigate this.
Groups of athletes were put into three conditions, no poop, natural poop, and magnesium oxide supplement to assist in pooping. They then conducted cognitive tests (using the stroop test if you’re interested). What’s more they also conducted a full body PET scan to analyse activation of bodily regions during the cognitive tasks.
And the results are fascinating:
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