Crossfit for your brain

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Background Did you know people with low educational attainment have a higher risk of developing dementia? What can help? Crossfit for your brain.  Team  The Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre has a new MOOC, Preventing Dementia, which will help exercise your mind while teaching you about the importance of doing so. The Centre’s first MOOC, Understand Dementia, was massively successful, and Preventing Dementia already has strong interest. Professor James Vickers (Professor of Pathology), is a Co-Director of the Wicking Centre. He has been working in the field of neuroscience for more than 20 years. “In the Wicking Centre we focus on three core areas of research; care, cause and prevention. “Our NHMRC-supported Healthy Brain Project has been running since 2011 and will continue until 2020. It’s about getting older adults into University to see if it has a positive effect on their cognitive health, as that might help prevent or delay the onset of dementia."  Preventing Dementia MOOC  “Part of the reasons we came up with our new MOOC on Preventing Dementia is because there are seven key factors that science has settled on as being the major risk factors. One of those is low educational attainment." People who don’t get many years of education seem to be at a higher risk of developing dementia. Conversely, if you’ve got more years of education in the early part of your life, then you’ve got a lower risk. “When I started in neuroscience research people didn’t think there was much plasticity in the brain once you became an adult. But we know now there’s quite a lot of plasticity that’s retained in adults and older people. The Healthy Brain Project taps into that." If you give your brain exercise to do, it has to be fairly intensive. We think it’s a little bit like crossfit, it’s probably not just one kind of brain exercise that is effective, you have to do multiple exercises.