"An old idea of \u200b\u200bcognitive science conceives the mind as a sophisticated program information processing that "run" on a machine, the brain, rather insensitive to the quality of mental activities. That there would be no influence of mental activity on the brain. According to this approach if I spend most of my time to tighten bolts on the assembly line or driving a taxi, oppurea composing music, writing books, doing scientific research, the difference would be only in the activities and not in the brain structure of people involved in those activities.
A work of a group of researchers from the Fondazione S. Lucia di Roma, the petitioner, Fabrizio Piras, published in Human Brain Mapping , however, shows that there is a relationship between years spent on books and ultrastructural features of the hippocampus. This brain area is key because it is a focal point of the circuit of the memory is crucial because it maintains relations with the so-called axis of stress, the hypothalamic-ipofisisurrene, which is a master of the whole organism. With aging, the hippocampus volume tends to decline physiologically, but soprattuttoa change the internal structure and that is why the elderly tend to have more difficulty storing new data. But the hippocampus is crucial because it is one of the most affected in the course of dementia. The study shows that researchers Romans higher the number of years of schooling and lower the negative change of hippocampal structure. We studied the brains of 150 healthy subjects using magnetic resonance imaging is both a more sophisticated tool called Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). With MRI volumes were measured in various areas, including hippocampus, and the DTI has been assessed the state of the nervous tissue, the plot of the connections between neurons. Conclusion: those with a higher level of formal education also has a more compact texture hippocampal neurons. This means that it has maintained a good number of neurons, but also (and especially) the links between them, ie the streets on which information circulates mind. This work, using very modern brain imaging tools, reaches the same conclusion reached in a 1996 study that caused a sensation: the so-called Nun Study, published in Jama . A search made on 93 nuns of the Congregation of the School Sister of Notre Dame, aged between 75 and 95 years, designed both to their old age is when I was 20 years. How? By analyzing the autobiographies the nuns had written to their input in the Congregation (preserved in the archives), assessing the ideational richness and complexity of grammar, was recovered at the intellectual level and language of the younger sisters: The post mortem examination of brain death of the nuns could establish a direct relationship between disease and poor language skills as a youth. In this study, none of the nuns with a high level language had died with Alzheimer's. David Snowdon, an epidemiologist and neurologist at the University of Kentucky, author of the Nun Study, it is continuing with 1000 elderly people. "(By Francis Bottaccioli, culture save the hippocampus , "La Repubblica", 08/03 / '11)
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