Here are the 11 proven ways to grow new brain cells (skip to the right section for you!): However, there are some things that you can do to speed up your brain’s ability to produce new brain cells. The 700 neurons our brain creates in a day might not seem like much, and relatively speaking, it’s not. 11 Neuroscience-Proven Ways to Grow More Brain Cells Some report success with correcting emotional problems, others report cognitive deficits disappearing. Now, research is showing that recovering addicts and others are having success fixing damage done to their brains with neurogenesis. One of the most common schools of thought regarding drug users and ex-addicts was that the damage they have done to their brains is irreversible. Sometimes, these problems can be remedied by restoring function to the damaged areas of the brain by promoting neurogenesis.
Mood stabilityĭamaged neurons can negatively impact our mental health and lead to emotional problems like apathy or personality disorders. The more gigabytes, the better - just like with humans, the more neurons, the better (to an extent). Neurogenesis allows us to better store memories. Think of it as adding extra space to a computer's hard drive. If you imagine each memory as a node in our mind, and the number of neurons relational to the number of possible connections or paths we could take to get to that memory, it's easy to see how having more neurons could lead to enhanced memory recall. Memory is one of the basic functions of intelligence.Īs humans, if we want to remember more, we need to be capable of building better connections between neurons. Here are a few critical benefits of increasing neurogenesis. We can also improve our mental health and cognitive processing by enhancing the rate at which we create neurons.
The fact that our brains can grow new cells suggests that we can repair cognitive damage that has been done through months or years of abuse.
What Can Neurogenesis Do?Īs you can imagine, neurogenesis has remarkable potential. We now know this isn’t true - the human brain has been shown to regenerate at least 700 neurons a day in the hippocampus alone. Under that view, people who had damaged their brains with things like drugs and alcohol were unable to repair them to their prior state. Neurogenesis is a relatively new term, but it’s pretty self-explanatory: it describes the creation (genesis) of new neurons, or the brain’s ability to generate new cells. Neurogenesis is a vital function for our mental health and it helps us retain our cognitive ability as we grow older.įor most of scientific history, we believed that brain cells could not be regenerated or created.