aerobic exercise increased the size of participants’
hippocampi by 2 percent over what it was at the beginning
of the study. Now before you scoff at what may seem like a
very modest increase, you should know that the
hippocampus typically loses volume at a rate of about 1 to 2
percent each year after the fifth decade of life. And in fact,
this happened in the control group—their scans showed that
the same degree of brain volume was actually lost. As noted
by the researchers, aerobic exercise essentially turned back
the clock on the hippocampus, the brain’s memory-
formation center, by one to two years. As I write this, there’s
no drug in the known universe that wields this degree of
power. If that weren’t exciting enough, the leap in size seen
in the brains of the exercising group coincided with a
performance boost in the type of memory used to navigate
familiar places.
CLOTHE YOUR BRAIN IN KLOTHO
Klotho is a longevity protein named after Clotho, the Fate
from Greek mythology who is known for spinning the
thread of life. Were Clotho real, she might be pleased to
know of her affiliation with this “aging suppressor” tasked
with, among other things, making tighter, better connections
at the synapse, the microscopic junctions where all neural
processes occur.
Independent of its effect on healthy brain aging, Klotho
has a marked effect on cognition.^5 About one in five lucky