My new book Magnificent Mind At Any Age is coming out 12/2/09. You can pre-order it on the website here. Here is Part One of Six of what you can expect in the book.
Protect Your Amazing, But Fragile Brain
The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. It is estimated that the brain has 100 billion nerve cells and more connections in it than there are stars in the universe. Even though the brain is only about 2% of your body’s weight, it uses about 25% of the calories you consume. If you take a piece of brain tissue the size of a grain of sand, it contains 100,000 neurons and a billion connections all talking to one another. If you are not thoughtful, the brain loses an average of 85,000 brain cells a day, or one per second. Information in the brain travels at the speed of 268 miles per hour, unless of course you are drunk, which really slows things down. The brain is the organ of loving, learning, behaving, intelligence, personality, character, belief and knowing.
The brain is also very soft and it is housed in a really hard skull. Most people think of the brain as firm, fixed, and rubbery. Yet, that is not how it is inside your skull. That is how it is once it is fixed in formaldehyde on the pathologist’s table. Inside your skull the brain is 80% water and the consistency of soft butter, custard, somewhere between egg whites and jello. Neurosurgeon, Katrina Firlik, in her book Another Day In The Frontal Lobe, describes the brain “like tofu, the soft kind, which when caught in suction during surgery slurps into the tube.”
Your soft “tofu-like” brain is housed in a really heard skull that has many ridges. These ridges damage the brain during trauma. If this is true, which it is, then why would you ever let a child hit a soccer ball with their heads, play tackle football (even with helmets), skateboard, snowboard or ski without helmets? Why would you ever buy your teenager his first motorcycle or take her four wheeling in the desert unless you didn’t like them? From a neuroscientists point of view, these are dangerous activities that could grievously injure the brain. Sports like boxing, football, motocross and cage fighting are simply not worth the risk. The brain loves physical activity and it is better to think about safer brain sports such as tennis, table tennis, track and field (although not pole vaulting) and basketball.
A 2007 study by John Adams and colleagues at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine found that playing soccer, where the ball is often hit with the head, may be linked to long-term brain injury and memory problems later in life. Researchers found evidence of reduced gray matter in the brains of male college soccer players, compared with young men who had never played.
The single most important thing I have learned from looking at tens of thousands of scans is that mild traumatic brain injuries change people’s whole lives (by damaging their brain) and no one knows it. The brain injured person often subsequent to the injury suffers from emotional, behavioral or cognitive problems that may lead them to a psychiatrist or psychologist, who typically never looks at the brain. Problems which are physically based are often considered psychological. If you never look at the brain, you miss what many researchers have called the “silent epidemic.” There are two million reported new brain injury cases every year, and millions of others that go unnoticed.
When I first started the imaging work, I saw a lot of brain injury patterns on scans. When I asked patients about a history of head injuries they denied them. When I pressed, a whole new world opened up. I found out that people often forgot significant injuries. I had to ask them three, four, even ten times. Many people forget or they did not realize that they have had a serious brain injury. You would be amazed at how many people, after repeatedly saying no to this question, suddenly get an ‘ah ha’ look on their face and say, “Why yes, I fell out of a second story window at age seven.” Or, they tell us they went through the windshield of a car head first, had concussions playing football or soccer or fell down a flight of stairs. Not all brain injuries, even serious ones, will cause damage. There is an interaction between genetic vulnerability and trauma. Plus, the brain is buffered by the cerebral spinal fluid that bathes it. Still, damage can occur more than most know.
So many of the troubled people we see at the Amen Clinics have had a brain injury or two or three. Damaging your brain may limit or impair your ability to be successful in any area of your life. People who have experienced head injuries have a higher incidence of drug abuse, alcoholism, mood problems, divorce, domestic violence, arrests, financial problems and every other type of trouble that leads to failure. Be smart. If you want to be your best, protect your soft brain.