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Do what you don't want to
The storm region
Joe Parvizi, a neurosurgeon at Stanford, was stimulating the cingulate cortex in a patient to find the focus of their seizures. When he reached the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, every patient reported the same thing: a feeling that a storm is coming and a wish to lean into it, with the sense that they could get through it. Neuroscientists who teach neuroanatomy didn't know what the region did until a few years ago.
What makes it grow
The region grows in volume when people successfully diet, or when they take an existing exercise routine and add three 30-minute cardio sessions, with one condition: they have to hate cardio. People who love the activity don't get the effect. What matters is whether the added thing is something you don't want to do at the moment you do it.
Super agers
The region's size also predicts successful dieting and completion of other hard things. Its growth is the defining feature of super agers, people who keep their cognitive ability and many of their physical abilities into their 80s and 90s relative to their peers. It may even be connected to the will to live.
How can effort make a brain region grow?
The brain changes its structure in response to demands, a property called neuroplasticity. A well-known example is a 2000 study by Eleanor Maguire at University College London, which found that London taxi drivers had a larger posterior hippocampus than other people. The more years a driver had spent navigating the city, the larger that region tended to be. Brain imaging has since shown structural changes in many regions after sustained training.
What do super agers have in common?
Researchers at Northwestern University, led by Emily Rogalski, define super agers as people over 80 whose memory performance matches that of people in their 50s and 60s. In a 2012 study published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, the team found that super agers had a thicker anterior cingulate cortex than typical people of the same age. Their brains also showed less age-related shrinkage in some other regions. The Northwestern program has continued to study these brains after donation.
How do surgeons map the brain while awake?
Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield pioneered the method in the 1930s and 1940s in Montreal, stimulating the exposed cortex of awake patients with a small electrical current. The patients described what they felt, which let him chart which areas controlled movement, sensation, and speech. Brain tissue itself contains no pain receptors, which is why this can be done with only the scalp numbed. Electrical stimulation mapping is still used to locate seizure origins and protect critical areas during surgery.
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