If you want to stay young, sit down and have a good think. These are the research findings of a team of Japanese doctors, who say that most of our brains are not getting enough exercise and as a result, we are aging unnecessarily soon.
Professor Taiju Matsuzawa wanted to find out why otherwise healthy farmers in northern Japan appeared to be losing their ability to think and reason at a relatively early age and how the process of aging could be slowed down. With a team of colleagues at Tokyo National University, he set about measuring brain volumes of a thousand people of different ages and varying occupations.
Computer technology enabled the researchers to obtain exact measurement of the volume of the front and side sections of the brain, which relate to thinking and emotion. Contraction(收缩)of these parts — as cells(细胞)die off — was observed in some people in their thirties, but it was still not evident in some sixty-year-olds who mainly used brains rather than physical strength in their profession.