Are Your Daily Habits Remodeling Your Brain? Find Out! 

United States: As experts note, if one skips a workout or stays up late, his/her brain might still be paying for it even two weeks from now. 

The team of researchers from Aalto University and the University of Oulu in Finland have presented how our lifelong daily behaviors influence brain connectivity and how they remain remodeled throughout our lifespan, thus providing valuable grounds for understanding neural plasticity. 

More about the finding 

Researchers are now very specific that the ways our brains communicate also change, rather than staying the same over a long time, in response to recent experiences over a long extended time period. 

Moreover, they also rejected several principles of brain function stability and opened the consciousness of the influence of human daily habits on the neural network, studyfinds.org reported. 

The particular experimental design of this study was examined in one subject over the span of five months and reported in PLOS Biology. 

Are Your Daily Habits Remodeling Your Brain? Find Out! Credit | Adobe Stock

By acquiring a brain image every few days and integrating it with data donated by wearables and smartphones, the researchers were able to assess how such pre-mentioned variables as sleep quality, physical activity, mood, and even heart rate variability affect the connectivity of the brain. 

Further details of the analysis 

The participant, Ana Triana, was also the main researcher in the study and received thirty scans over fifteen weeks. 

Each scan involved four different tasks: simple attention task, working memory task, resting state, and then execution of watching the movie.  

This variation helped the researchers to trace how various types of brain activities changed along with everyday perceptions. 

At the same time, monitoring devices of her sleep/wake cycle, physical movements, and data about her heart and breathing rates were collected. 

The mobile application is used to capture the moods and events of each day. This integration of brain scans and actigraphy gave us an extremely high-resolution picture of how daily experience and brain activity were related, studyfinds.org reported. 

The study revealed two distinct patterns of brain response: A brief wave, which lasts for a period of up to seven days, and a long-term wave, which can go up to fifteen days. 

Results of the study

One of the interesting outcomes was a strong connection between heart rate variability – which is a measure of the heart’s adaptability – and brain connectivity while resting. 

It shows that activities that affect our body’s relaxation response, like stress management ways, can shape our brain wiring even when we’re not actively concentrating on a task.