Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon Quotes

“Being able to switch between two languages, the researchers concluded, improves a person’s ability to maintain focus and attention.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Most of what happened yesterday, let alone last week or last year, is literally deleted from your brain at night.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“people who spoke more than one language developed symptoms of dementia about four years later than people who spoke only one.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“One thing we know that humans and other mammals do during sleep is to transform short-term memories stacked up during the day into memories that can last a lifetime.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Sleep is not a suppression of brain activity. Quite the opposite. Sleep calls on deep powers of the brain never used during wakefulness.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Rest, you call that? The brain never rests. So essential to life are the myriad activities the brain engages in during sleep that without it, we die.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Sleep is a firestorm of brain activity. Instead of taking in new information, our brain’s subconscious is occupied defragging, deleting, and storing the prior day’s doings for long-term retrieval; cleaning out bits and pieces of discarded brain schmutz; and presenting us with immersive 3-D virtual stories in which we are the star.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“your brain cells use more blood when they’re hard at work, just like your muscle cells do when you’re running.)”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“The reason why education pays off is because of something called cognitive reserve: people with extra brain power (thanks in part to extra education) can afford to lose more before showing obvious signs of decline. That’s why two people who have brains that look exactly alike—with the same amount of shrinkage—can nevertheless show dramatic differences in how long they remain cognitively healthy. Those who put their brains to better use can withstand greater loss of brain matter.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Although his brain had lost its youthful sheen, his mind remained razor sharp, teaching us that brain atrophy does not equal mind atrophy.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“You might be surprised to learn that fruit juice is almost as bad as soda. In fact, a 12-ounce glass of orange juice contains nearly as much sugar as a can of Coke.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Nearly every millimeter of your body is penetrated by nerves that have been sent out from the brain.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“But you don’t have to spend a week hiking in the forest to have your creativity nourished by the outdoors. Even a half-hour walk near your home, office, or school will do. Einstein made a habit of walking the mile and a half to and from his office at Princeton University every day. A little exercise, some fresh air, the passing of the seasons: it’s all fuel for your creative brain.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“The brain, you see, is not a computer, despite oft repeated claims to the contrary. The brain is a living thing; much like an overgrown garden than an orderly filing cabinet. And mind wandering through your own garden of thoughts, memories, feelings and desires is a sure way to discover your inner creative self.”
― Rahul Jandial, Neurofitness: A Brain Surgeon’s Secrets to Boost Performance and Unleash Creativity

“I hope I have conveyed to you the single most important discovery that neuroscientists have made since I became a brain surgeon: your brain’s health is within your own control. Your willingness to engage in lifelong learning, social engagement, and a childlike openness to new experiences will define your brain’s fate.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Surprisingly, though, cardiovascular exercise has demonstrated the least benefit in older adults. By contrast, Teresa Liu-Ambrose, PhD, of the University of British Columbia, has found that resistance training with weights improves cognition.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Physical activity turns out to be one of the absolute best ways to maintain and even improve cognitive health.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“social isolation is not the same as loneliness. Some studies have found that it’s loneliness—the feeling of being isolated—that puts people at higher risk of cognitive loss. For those who feel perfectly happy with a book and a cup of tea, more power to them.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Since the 1970s, in fact, the risk of dementia due to any cause has fallen by 20 percent every decade, proving that lifestyle plays a major role in how our brains age, and that dementia is not an immutable force.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“another medical condition known to seriously increase the risk of heart disease is now also known to wreak havoc with the aging brain. Diabetes—in particular the persistently high blood sugar levels of poorly treated diabetes—substantially raises the risk of dementia”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“high blood pressure in midlife is strongly linked to the risk of developing Alzheimer’s later in life.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“One of the key reasons that rates of dementia have fallen sharply since the 1970s is the advent of improved treatments for heart ailments. What’s good for the heart is actually very good for the brain. The steps you take to keep your heart arteries unclogged also keep brain arteries open. Cholesterol-lowering drugs have dramatically reduced coronary artery disease and are effective even in people who live sedentary lifestyles and eat foods that aren’t “heart healthy.” Statins, prescribed to lower cholesterol, have lately been shown to lower the risk of Alzheimer’s disease in most people.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“the greater danger, by far, is when an older person becomes isolated and disconnected. So by all means, older adults can and should be encouraged to connect online. I’m confident studies will show that social media serves old folks well.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“super-agers tend to have stronger social networks on average than people whose cognitive performance declines normally.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Beginning in early adulthood, dopamine levels, which affect both physical movement and reward-motivated behavior (in addition to a bunch of other things), decline by about 10 percent every decade.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Loss of sensory functions, in particular due to difficulties seeing and hearing. Studies have shown that age-related hearing loss is directly associated with cognitive decline, in part because the area of the brain that is supposed to be dedicated to higher-level cognition is instead forced to struggle to interpret diminished sounds.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Working Memory is the brain’s workspace, where you can hold and manipulate a handful of facts and figures in your head. The reason multiplying 36 by 42 in your head is so difficult is that your working memory has limits—and the older you get, the tighter your limits. That’s why mathematicians, musicians, and physicists tend to do their most important work when they’re young . . . and why once-simple tasks get progressively more difficult with age. This the type of memory, which facilitates multitasking and juggling life’s responsibilities, is the type of memory most healthy people want to optimize. Working memory plus creativity is the key to productivity.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Episodic Memory is your recollection of events. Where did you go to kindergarten? When did you first meet your spouse? What did you eat for breakfast yesterday? And where did you leave the keys? This is the one that tends to naturally weaken with age. In fact, episodic memory peaks in your midtwenties and then slowly declines throughout life. That’s why you still remember the words to songs from when you were a teenager but barely remember the plot of a movie you saw last year.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Procedural Memory is knowledge of how to do things. How do you get dressed in the morning? How do you ride a bike? Once learned, procedural memories tend to remain solid as a rock. Performance does tend to fall off with age due to the natural slowing of reflexes, although as of this writing, seventy-six-year-old Morgan Shepherd is still competing as a NASCAR driver.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance

“Semantic Memory is general knowledge about the world, everything from who Isaac Newton was, to what a bagel tastes like, and where your office is—all the kinds of basic facts and meanings that computers and robots don’t understand. Thankfully, in normal brain aging, this huge knowledge base not only remains generally stable in an older adult but can continue to grow as a person learns more.”
― Rahul Jandial, Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance