"fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

" stay emotionally unbalanced

Understanding normal brain ageing Scientists are making significant progress in understanding what constitutes normal brain ageing. While brain scans appear to indicate that brain size is reduced with advancing years, it has been shown, to our pleasant surprise, that the actual number of nerve cells does not seem to decline with age. A study done at the Harvard Medical School on 27 normal people, aged between 56 and 103 years, found that reduced brain size was due to loss of nerve cell architecture, rather than fewer numbers of neurons. Another long-held dogma is that the mature brain is incapable of growing new cells. In fact, recent experiments showed that the adult brain is capable of generating new nerve cells in the hippocampus (a region of the temporal lobe), indicating that the brain has the ability, albeit limited, to repair itself. Brain regeneration While brain repair is theoretically possible, it is obviously insufficient to heal the massive damage seen in diseases of neuro-ageing such as stroke, Alzheimers disease and Parkinsons disease. Whats needed are large numbers of brain cells to replace those lost in such conditions.