Adrian Webster - Sort Your Brain Out

There are more connections between brain wires in your head – 150 trillion synapses – than there are stars in our galaxy (the Milky Way).

To help give you a clearer perspective on what we're looking at here, the London Underground proudly boasts a combined track length of 250 miles, with hundreds of tube trains travelling between the 270 stations at a top speed of about 70 mph. But that's a damp squib compared to the information‐transporting networks you're packing deep inside your skull.

If all your brain wires were laid out end to end, they would be approximately 100,000 miles in length, with hundreds of thousands of trillions of trains (electrical messages) travelling up and down, bang on time, at up to 250 miles per hour, shuttling information towards the 0.15 quadrillion connections (synapses) that reside in your grey matter. And, if all these wires – your brain's white matter – were laid out as an underground train network, it could cover an area of around 560,000 square miles, a surface area larger than the whole of South Africa, all tucked into a space smaller than your average pumpkin.

What really makes the human brain so very special is NEUROPLASTICITY – its ability to physically alter its pathways, as you learn new skills and, perhaps even more importantly, its ability to adapt to unexpected changes, under widely varying circumstances, in new and creative ways.

Your brain can send these one hundred, thousand, trillion messages per second using the same amount of power as your average fridge light bulb. For a human‐made supercomputer to send and receive that many messages per second it would require its own small power plant to provide the 10,000,000 watts needed to power it. Less than a litre of blood passing every minute through the brain of chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov was sufficient to keep his forehead merely warm to the touch, whilst his opponent – the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue – needed a vast fan‐driven cooling system to stop it blowing up.

It doesn't come with a guarantee or any warranties, but if you look after your brain, it should remain fully functional and in good working order throughout your entire lifetime. And if you're ever worried about running out of memory space, please don't! You'll be relieved to hear that it comes with the equivalent memory space of a one million gigabyte computer chip. That's enough memory to record over three million hours' worth of your favourite TV programmes.

When we sleep, our brain cells shrink. This makes the concentration of the substances swimming around in the fluid inside the cells higher than those in the fluid outside them. This flushes out the metabolic waste materials that accumulate each and every day within our brain cells, which are then banished from the brain via the newly discovered “glymphatic” waste removal system. More sleep, more toxin removal.

Your brain is a phenomenal, unimaginably brilliant piece of kit and, please note, the emphasis is on your brain – we all have more or less the same make and model. Provided you are of this planet, do not have an exotic neurological condition and your name isn't Albert Einstein, there will be very little, if anything, to tell your brain from that of the person next to you.

Yours may be broadly the same make and model, but when it comes to how your own personal brain connections differentiate your individual performance from that of others, there are three very big influencing factors:

1 The environments in which you spend most of your time

2 What you are exposed to in those environments

3 What your time in those environments is actually spent doing

The environments we've spent most of our lives interacting with so far will have slowly but surely shaped our brains. But we humans are very unusual in the sense that we have immense power to shape our environments. We build both the physical environments that we interact with every day and the virtual ones. So we humans are fairly unique in that we can alter the environments that then go on to shape our brains. This means that if we are clever in how we organise our local environments, we can positively influence how our brains are shaped! To encourage our brains to adapt in a positive way, the challenge for each of us is to try to spend more time in environments that are stimulating and less of it in others.

Yes, our brains are all amazing, but it is how we have made use of them over our lifetime so far that makes each of us unique. More importantly, when it comes to improving performance, it's what we choose to do with them from here on that will determine just how well they continue to serve us in dealing with the daily demands of our own lifestyle.

There are a few things that you could start doing right away to instantly improve your brain's performance and get you off to a flying start. Let's call them Brain Optimisation Principles, or BOPs for short. You can follow these simple suggestions to get your brain firing on all cylinders each and every day. Here are five for starters.

Believe it or not your brain is 80% water. If you are dehydrated, the speed with which the electrical messages are sent zipping around the 100,000 miles of brain wires is compromised. The trouble is that you wake up slightly dehydrated every single day. How do we know? Well, if you managed to survive until morning then you must have kept on breathing through the whole night. Nonstop breathing is absolutely vital to staying alive because that is the only way to get oxygen into your body to maximise release of the energy that powers all your cells, tissues and organs. It's also the main way to get rid of the primary waste material produced by this metabolic process, namely carbon dioxide. In order to get these gases moving in and out of your bloodstream, the inner surface of the lungs must be kept nice and moist at all times.

This means that every time you exhale, you lose some water vapour in your breath. (That's what fogs up a mirror when you breathe on it – as the warm vapour hits the cool glass, it condenses to become liquid water droplets). During the daytime we replace this lost water whenever we feel hungry or thirsty and decide to find something to eat or drink. At night there are fewer opportunities, if any, to replace this lost water, so by morning there is inevitably a deficit to correct. So start the day by rehydrating your brain to get rid of that woolly‐headed feeling caused by those sluggish, dehydrated neurons.

BOP1: Drink a whole glass of water as soon as you wake up in the morning to quickly replace all the water you lost over the course of the night. And remember to keep topping up throughout the day – for your brain's sake.

Exercise is well known to be good for the body, but everyone overlooks its immense impact on the health of your brain. In the short term, the moment you start to do any form of even moderately demanding exercise, your body automatically responds by releasing a torrent of hormones and brain chemicals to make you feel good. Even more importantly, an ever‐increasing body of evidence suggests that people who take regular exercise enjoy a better‐functioning brain. It even increases the rate at which new brain cells are created in the hippocampus. And it seems to be more important than any other factor in helping people hold onto their marbles well into old age.

BOP2: Do a minimum of 20–30 mins of moderately intensive exercise every day (or 40–60 mins every other day).