Weekly Roundup: Can Travel Slow Down the Brain's Aging, Nature as a Prescription is Surprisingly Effective, Your Country Impacts your Brain Health, and Autonomy Boost Children and Teachers at School

This week a few topics related to aging as they sounded good to me - and my brain is aging so it is at least relevant to me - and surely to all of you subscribers and readers!

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Can Travel Slow Down Aging?

This sounds almost too good to be true but is a serious, albeit only theoretical paper.

So what is it with travel and ageing?

This was a group of interdisciplinary researchers who looked at travel from the viewpoint of entropy. Entropy is the law of nature that states that everything moves to disorder - and from a biological perspective towards disintegration and eventually death.

Fangli Hu et al. of Edith Cowen University in Australia argue that travel has an ability to influence major biological systems in positive ways through multiple mechanisms. This includes exposure to new environments, new experiences, stress but also relaxing activities, and also pathogens.

This can all elevate stress responses which in turn elevates metabolic rates, and stimulating adaptive immune system response. All this the researchers say can boost metabolic rates, the body’s self-organising capabilities, and improves the body’s ability to perceive and defend against external threats.

This in combination with change that induces plasticity in the brain and positive experiences which can have positive psychoglcial and also calming effects and positive moments that influence lasting life satisfaction.

The caveat is that this under the assumption that the travel is generally positive - overly stressful and negative travel experiences can be just that - overly stressful and hence promote aging.

A related topic is that of nature - holidays often provide access to nature in its different forms. But a project team in the UK conducted various tests and pilots to see whether prescribing nature is an effective medical intervention for mental health disorders.

Prescribing Nature May be Best

There have been similar initiatives of prescribing nature but this was a large scale and across a broader range of people including age, socioeconomic background, and ethnic status.