Weekly Roundup: New Discoveries for Brain Health, Memory, and Learning

Dear leading brainers, if I may call you that, this week I have put together a short summary of research on a variety of topics.

As you know I tend to take a deeper dive into various themes for subscribers but sometimes I also find that the sheer amount of research continuously published make it a hard choice of what to focus on. So this week some updates on further benefits of coffee, learning mechanisms, and whether suppressing negative thoughts is actually good for your mental health…

New Compound in Coffee Improves Cognitive Function

I’ve reported on coffee multiple times - decades ago coffee was considered unhealthy, for reasons that in retrospect might seem absurd. But the volume of data that now supports your daily cuppa is now vast.

In this study just published from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, they investigated whether a molecule found in coffee could be beneficial to aging mice. Yup, not just normal mice, but mice that have aged and are experienced cognitive decline.

The molecule is called Trigonelline and the mice that received this over 30 days improved spatial learning and memory performance. That in itself sounds good but the researchers dug a little deeper conducting genomic wide transcription analysis i.e. looking at genetic activation patterns, to find the mechanisms. And this showed something more impressive.

They found that multiple signalling pathways were impacted. Ones that relate to:

• Nervous system development (brain and related systems)

• Mitochondrial function (core of cell function)

• ATP synthesis (cellular energy)

• Inflammation (managing infection)

• Autophagy (re-using and re-synthesising old cells and cell parts)

• Neurotransmitter release (brain chemicals)

That’s a pretty impressive list - this is why this translates into improved memory and spatial learning. A bunch of other processes, just about everything, actually, will be affected also by those processes.

So your daily coffee is more beneficial than you may imagine and has nothing to do with caffeine. If you don’t like or drink coffee, don’t worry, you can also get your trigonelline shot from fenugreek seeds and radishes.

On the topic of mice learning, another recent piece shows that mice take a slightly different strategy approach to learning and relearning. It might not be the best approach but is likely more effective in changing contexts.

A Surprising Learning Approach