Profs and Pints DC presents: “Maintain Your Brain,” a research-based guide to nurturing your brain and staying sharp as you age, with Dr. Majid Fotuhi, adjunct professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University’s Mind/Brain Institute and author of The Invincible Brain.
Most people assume memory loss is inevitable with age, but that’s not the case. Dramatic leaps forward in brain research over the past decade have produced a host of both surprising and actionable findings related to brain health and resilience.
If you are concerned about your brain’s long-term health or looking after aging parents, you won’t want to miss this upcoming Profs and Pints talk. The speaker, Dr. Majid Fotuhi, is a neurologist and neuroscientist who has spent four decades studying Alzheimer’s disease, memory, and the science of brain resilience. He developed a 12-week clinical program that has helped hundreds of patients improve on objective cognitive tests and experience MRI-confirmed increases in the volume of their hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory and learning.
You’ll learn how the brain has a remarkable ability to grow new connections, increase in volume, and recover from years of neglect—a property called neuroplasticity. At the same time, even a single night of poor sleep causes a measurable buildup in the brain of amyloid, the protein linked to Alzheimer’s.
Dr. Fotuhi will describe how our understanding of neuroplasticity has greatly increased since ten years ago, when the prevailing view in medicine was that the adult brain is essentially fixed, a finished product that could only decline with age. Thanks to subsequent clinical trial data we now know that what we eat, how we sleep, whether we exercise, how we manage stress, and how much cognitive simulation we experience all directly reshape brain structure and function. Efforts to tend to these areas can improve memory scores and reverse early cognitive decline in people who were already showing Alzheimer’s symptoms.
These are not small effects seen in obscure journals. Many of these findings come from institutions like Harvard, the Mayo Clinic, and the National Institutes of Health, and they are reshaping how neurologists think about prevention and treatment.
Among the questions Dr. Fotuhi will tackle: Is Alzheimer’s disease really preventable? Can you reverse early memory loss with lifestyle changes alone? Why does chronic stress quietly damage your brain even when you feel fine? (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)