“It is impossible to escape the drumbeat of grim news about Alzheimer’s Disease: this it is incurable and largely untreatable, that there is no reliable way to prevent it, and that the disease has for decades beaten the world’s best neuroscientists.”

This is an excerpt from Dr. Dale Bredesen’s book, The End of Alzheimer’s: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline.
If American Psychiatrist and brain disorder specialist, Dr. Daniel Amen says that “Alzheimer’s is a lifestyle disease”[i] and innovator in medicine, Dr. Dale Bredesen, with over 30 patents in his name, comes up with a protocol to prevent and reverse cognitive decline, you’d better believe I’m going to feature these important findings in the field of neuroscience on this podcast.  If I see anything that could possibly change the course of our lives, improving it in any way, I’ll share what I’m learning with you here on The Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast. It’s here where we bridge the gap between theory and practice, with strategies, tools and ideas we can all use immediately, applied to the most current brain research with the goal of heightening productivity in our schools, sports environments and modern workplaces. For returning guests, welcome back, and for those who are new listeners, I’m Andrea Samadi and launched this podcast almost 4 years ago, to share how important an understanding of our brain is for our everyday life and results. 
This season (Season 9) we will be focused on Neuroscience: Going Back to the Basics as we revisit our past Brain Fact Fridays, narrowing in on how anything new from the field of neuroscience (that I’ve seen since releasing those earlier episodes) can be tied to improving our productivity, our results, or our mental and physical health. My hopes are that this review will help us to become better prepared to move forward, with a healthier, stronger version of ourselves, as we move towards our goals, or whatever it is that we are working on this year, with this strong foundation and understanding of our brain in place.
This week, we will look back to our third Brain Fact Friday and episode #114 [ii] on “Building a Faster, Stronger, More Resilient Brain by Understanding Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor or BDNF.” My goal with this episode is that if anyone asks you “what do you know about Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor” that you would have a clear answer with what we covered on this past episode, (what it is, why it’s important for us to know about) and anything new that we will uncover today that will act as a check for us to see if we really are building a faster, stronger and more resilient brain.
On our last episode we covered:
✔What BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) is and what are its benefits to the brain.
✔What we should all understand about BDNF with Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease and how our brain learns.
✔The Connection Between Exercise, Nutrition and BDNF
✔ Why Putting the Body Under Stress is a Good Thing.
✔Sleep, Stress and the BDNF Factor.
If you want to revisit this past episode, you can click on the link in the show notes, and review the basics of BDNF, a protein that’s found in the brain and other parts of the body “involved in plastic changes related to learning and memory[iii] and higher-level cognitive abilities. This signaling protein is the reason why we can sit at our desk with a heightened sense of focus and concentration, after we exercise. It’s what Dr. Ratey from EPISODE #116[iv]  on The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain taught us when he said that “movement places demands on the brain, just as it does on muscle, and so the brain releases BDNF which triggers the growth of cells to meet the increased mental demands of movement”[v] and the whole brain benefits from this movement.
ON THIS PAST EPISODE, WE LEARNED THE BENEFITS OF BDNF
BDNF helps with learning, memory, or other higher-level thinking.
It grows new neurons and synap