The Phases of Your Brain

Your brain changes as you age - Dr. Jim Applegate joins us with results from a new study. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is West Michigan's Morning News. Turns out there are
different phases of the brain as we go from childhood
until your beard looks as white as mine. This is
West Michigan's Morning newstee Kelly Brett Pakita. Doctor Jim Applegate
joins us on the liveline this morning. Doc, thanks for
doing this today.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
It's always a pleasure. Good morning.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
So talk to us a little bit about what we
know about brain phases.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
This is a this is a really cool study. The
scientist in me got all over the study. It was
a study down at Cambridge of over four thousand people
and what they did is they did mriz of the
brain in certain phases of their lives and they found
out that unlike what we currently think about. We thought
the brain was formed on your baby and it underwent

(00:50):
slow changes over time, it turns out that there's are
significant changes in the way the brain is structured and
functions as you go through life. The phases are childhood, adolescents, adulthood,
early aging, and late aging. So those are sort of
the five phases. And if you start out in childhood,
the brain is rapidly increasing in sizes. The brain is

(01:14):
not very efficient it's forming all of those synapses. The
way that you think is the way through a synapse,
one nerve touches another nerve, and that's why kids sort
of get our scatterindego from one thought to another thought
to another thought, because they're forming those synapses as they age,
and every new experience this forms new synapses. So that's

(01:36):
the way to think about the childhood phase, and that
lasts lasts up until about.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
The age of nine and then.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
And then adolescences, right, and the way to think about
adolescents for all the parents out there, it's when your
child begins to hit puberty. It seems like those hormonal
changes have significant changes in the brain, and adolescence will
last beyond what we think about, beyond your you know,
your teens will actually go to the age of thirty

(02:06):
and the network becomes incredibly efficient. The neurons are very
good at talking to each other. That's why these teenagers
can think so quickly. That's why they're such good athletes,
because those neurons are just all forming. But it also
answers the question of why mental health really begins. If

(02:27):
you trace it back to people they had great childhoods,
but then when purity hit. They they really had some
mental status changes, some mental health changes, and that's because
the way the brain is forming that network of neurons,
if it doesn't form exactly right, you can get those
mental health changes, the schizophrenic of the depression, the anxiety

(02:48):
that we get and that normally happens. You know, somewhere
in your teams will begin to notice it. But if
adolescents last into the thirties. It also also explains why
certain drug rugs and things like marijuana thc affect the
development of the brain, because your brain is continuing to
form into your mid twenties and to thirty and that

(03:10):
network is just continuing to become more and more efficient
and this but the structure can be changed. If you
inhale too many substances, it will definitely fix definitely not
fix it. It will definitely cause problems.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
No pointant fingers here, But what do we learn from
the adult brain as we get.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
Older That the next phase is obviously adult wild and
that's you know, basically thirty to sixty six, and that's
when there are there's very little actual change in the brain,
but that's when you plateau your intelligence, your personality, your
brain then becomes the most efficient it's ever going to be,

(03:52):
going from A to B to C. It's just very efficient.
It's just a great machine that will help you think
in process. And that's what we do throughout our whole adulthood.
It's just let those synapses just fire away. The structure
doesn't change much all in all through those years, and
it just sits there and does its thing. It thinks

(04:13):
for you. Then we hit early aging, which is sixty
six to eighty three, which is sort of the phase
that I'm in, and it's an interesting change that happens
in the brain. What happens then is the connectivity changes
a little bit, and each part of your brain starts
to act differently and starts to act more independently, and

(04:36):
it doesn't talk to each other, so it doesn't act
like a full circuit, which sort of explains why dementia
happens at this age because you know, certain things can't
flow through your brain like they used to. You're sort
of older and wiser because certain centers, especially the frontal cortex,
tends to dominate the other structures in your brain, but

(04:59):
you can develop dementia as it becomes more separate. They
act like their own little computers as opposed to acting.
It's one big computer.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
And then you hit the late aging phase, which is
when the connections actually begin to fail and the brain
starts to shrink down. And not only doesn't it connect
throughout your whole brain, but the cells themselves don't talk
to each other. They sort of shrink at the synapses
become wider. You can't send those signals across, which is
why we get older and slower as we age, and

(05:31):
why it takes us longer to think because we have
to use those synapses that don't talk to each other
like they did. So absolutely a fascinating study about the
phases of your brain, but it explains a lot in
science of why we see dementia develop, why we see
mental health develop. And once we hit about thirty, our
brain just just goes along until we hit sixty, and

(05:52):
that's when it all goes starts to go bad.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
Anyway, Yeah, I might add more angry too, if you're
putting in that way, doctor Jim Mapplegate. Always great stuff.
Thanks for your time today.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
My pleasure