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The Brain Continues Developing into Middle Age

New research at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) using MRI brain scans, which was published in Archives of General Psychiatry (May 2001; 58:461-465), show that after the rest of the body has stopped growing, the brain seems to keep on developing into middle age.

New Understanding of the Brain’s Growth

While brain volume is thought to stop expanding after age 20, MRI brain scans of 70 volunteers, all healthy men aged 19 through 76, have revealed that the brain’s white matter (used for transmitting data) continues to increase until the late-40s. In particular, growth was discovered the frontal lobe and temporal lobe – areas that can be linked with higher emotional development (temporal lobe) and wisdom (frontal lobe).

Interpreting these results has far-reaching implications. For example, if the brain keeps maturing in adulthood, that means drug use, poor nutrition or other assaults on the brain could arrest a person's full development. And conversely, stimulating and developing one’s mental abilities throughout adulthood should promote its growth, in a similar way that exercise builds stronger muscle tissue.

New Discoveries of Electrical Activity Show Internal Brain Dialogue

New reports in the Dec. 18 issue of Nature Neuroscience by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology detail recordings of electrical activity in the brain that shed light on some of its major functions. While these new insights have come from recordings of rat brains, it is likely to occur in the same way in the human brain, which has corresponding structures.

The recordings that contain dialogue between the hippocampus, where new memories of each day's events are formed, and the neocortex, the neurons on the outer surface of the brain that mediates conscious thought and contains long-term memories shed new light on how the brain consolidates daily memories.

Action of Neurons of the Hippocampus and Neocortex

In more specific terms, recordings showed that during non-dreaming sleep, the neurons of both the hippocampus and the neocortex replayed memories — in repeated simultaneous bursts of electrical activity — of a task the rat learned the previous day.

Earlier this year, the same researchers at MIT observed that after rats ran a maze, they would replay their route (in just a fraction of the real time) during their idle moments, as if to cement the memory. In the current research, as the rats slept, the scientists discovered the memory replays occurring in the neocortex as well as in the hippocampus.

And as the cycles in the hippocampus and neocortex were synchronized, they appeared to be a dialogue between the two regions of the brain. Since the replays in the neocortex occurred just a fraction sooner than in the hippocampus, the scientists deduced the internal dialogue was most likely started by the neocortex, and mirrors a stimulus of the hippocampus’s raw memory electrical impulses.

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Sources: Age-Related Changes in Frontal and Temporal Lobe Volumes in Men A Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study Archives of General Psychiatry Vol. 58 No. 5, May 20012001;58:461-465 Preservation of Hippocampal Volume Throughout Adulthood in Healthy Men and Women Neurobiology of Aging 2005 Jul;26(7):1093-8. Epub 2004 Dec 8

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