What is Cognitive Reserve and Why should we work on it?
Cognitive Reserve is a concept that originated in the late 1980s as a result of a very revealing study. Scientists analyzed the brains of a group of people and found changes typical of having suffered from advanced Alzheimer’s. However, in life, these individuals did not show symptoms of the disease.
The reason? “They had a large enough cognitive reserve to compensate for the damage and continue to function as usual,” notes Harvard Health Publishing, the publication of Harvard Medical School in the article What is cognitive reserve? Other research has shown that people with higher cognitive reserve can better avoid symptoms of degenerative brain changes associated with dementia or other brain diseases, such as Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis or stroke. According to Dr. Manuel Vázquez Marrufo, professor at the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Seville, cognitive reserve is what is called a “construct” in psychology and neuroscience, that is, a concept that is used to address a theory, although “it is not yet known for sure what physiological correlates are really behind it”.
The expert defines it as “a kind of property” that we have – a product of experience – and that “effectively protects us against injuries that occur in the brain”.
For the American university publication, it is “our brain’s ability to improvise and find alternative ways of doing a job.” This is called brain reserve and is more related to the brain’s ability to generate new neurons, with the strength of the synapse, with “the hardware of the brain”, with its structure. For its part, cognitive reserve is what accumulates through our daily activities and has more to do with the cognitive activity that has been developed since birth.
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That way, a combination of what you have in your brain reserve and what you have in your cognitive reserve will determine “how the brain will deal with injury or neurodegenerative disease,” the doctor says.
Or as he puts it in the study “Cognitive reserve questionnaire: psychometric properties in the Argentine population”, published in the Neurology Journal:
“For the same brain damage in two patients with the same brain reserve, the patient with greater cognitive reserve will be able to better tolerate the damage and slow down the clinical manifestations.
In other words, cognitive reserve designates the set of cognitive resources that a person manages to acquire over the course of his life, and that confer protection against aging and brain injury”. Brain Reserve is an example of what might be called a “passive reserve model,” in which the same ” is derived from brain size or neural count.”
“In contrast, the cognitive reserve model suggests that the brain actively tries to cope with brain damage by using pre-existing cognitive processing approaches or recruiting compensatory approaches.” The neuroscientist, who has studied cognitive reserve for decades, seeks to understand “why some individuals show more cognitive deficit than others having the same degree of brain pathology” indicated on the university website.
Favorable Factors for developing Cognitive Reserve.
Reading
Reading, since it stimulates not only attention and concentration, but also memory and language.
Learn something new, because by doing so there is not only a cognitive stimulus and an acquisition of new resources and tools, “but at the same time it generates new synaptic connections that will favor brain plasticity in the face of changes that may occur in the future.”
Lead an active social life.
Do not stop playing, be it board games, completing crossword puzzles or the different alternatives found on the internet. The key is that “they allow us to work on skills such as organization, planning, decision-making or initiative, for example.”
Change routines.
Although routines give stability to our lives, “automating activities decreases brain activation since when we repeat tasks, learning decreases and brain activation is less and less.” So sometimes it pays to break a habit.
Although – it is warned by researchers -that cognitive reserve is a complex concept and more research is necessary to broaden our understanding of it, it is essential to help the brain stay healthy to face any mishap.
Several of the recommendations are already well known: don’t smoke, exercise regularly, maintain a healthy weight, treat high blood pressure and diabetes, get enough sleep.
An active life without excesses is appreciated not only by the body, but also by the brain.
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