Is it possible to influence the aging process of the brain? Some scientists believe it is possible

It's long been known that our lifestyle choices can help us stay healthy longer. Now scientists are wondering whether new technology could also help slow down the aging process of our brains by tracking what happens to them as we get older.

One sunny morning, 76-year-old Dutch-born Marijke and her husband, Tom, invited me to breakfast at their home in Loma Linda, an hour east of Los Angeles.

Oatmeal, seed teas, berries, but no processed cereals with sugar or coffee—breakfast was as clean as the Loma Linda mission.

Loma Linda is one of the so-called “blue zones” – places where people live longer than average. In this case, it's a Seventh-day Adventist church community whose members live longer.

They generally do not drink alcohol or caffeine, follow a vegetarian or even vegan diet, and consider it their religious duty to take the best care of their bodies.

It's their “health message,” as they call it, and it's gotten them noticed – the city has become the subject of decades of research into why its residents live better and longer.

Dr. Gary Fraser of Loma Linda University told me that Seventh-day Adventist members can expect not only to live longer, but also to increase their “health life expectancy,” or time spent in good health, by four to five years for women and seven years for men.

Marijke and Tom moved to the city later in life, but both have already become firmly established in the city.

There is no great secret about Loma Linda. Its residents simply live a truly healthy lifestyle, engage in intellectual work, and value the community that religion often provides.

Lectures on healthy lifestyles, musical meetings and physical education classes are regularly held here.

I spoke to Judy, who lives with 112 other people in a nursing home where there was always “opportunity to have heartfelt and intellectual conversations,” she told me.

“What I didn't realize was how important socialization is for your brain… Without it, it's like it shrinks and disappears,” Judy says.

Science has long recognized the benefits of communication and preventing loneliness.

But now it's possible to identify whose brains are aging faster than expected, so that we can monitor their condition and perhaps provide more effective preventative treatment in the future.

As we move towards more personalized, predictive and preventative healthcare models, early diagnosis will be critical in all areas of healthcare – thanks to the incredible capabilities of artificial intelligence and big data.

Computer models that assess brain aging and predict its deterioration were shown to me by Andrei Irimia, an associate professor of gerontology and computational biology at the University of Southern California.

He created them using MRI scans, data from 15,000 brains and the power of artificial intelligence to understand the aging trajectory of both healthy brains and brains undergoing disease processes such as dementia.

“It's a very sophisticated way of identifying patterns that we as humans aren't always aware of, but an AI algorithm can pick up on,” he said.

Professor Irimiya, of course, looked into my head too.

Before my visit, I had an fMRI scan, and after analyzing the results, Professor Irimiya said that my brain age was eight months older than my chronological age (though apparently the part of the brain that controls speech doesn’t age that much. I could have told him that). However, Professor Irimiya said that the results were within a two-year margin of error.

Private companies are also starting to commercialize the technology. One, Brainkey, offers its services in clinics around the world. Its founder, Owen Phillips, told me that MRIs will become even easier to get in the future.

“MRI is becoming more and more accessible, and the images it produces are getting better and better,” he said.

“I don't want to sound like a nerd. But technology has only just reached the point where we can see things much earlier than we could in the past. And that means we can understand what's going on in the brain of a particular patient. With artificial intelligence, we can support that.”

Contrary to what Professor Irimiya's MRI analysis told me, Brainkey's assessment knocked a year off my brain's biological age. I was also presented with a 3D printed model of it, which looked impressive and was assured to be life-size.

The goal is not only to have a more precise approach to treatment, but also to be able to quantify how effective any interventions are.

The dramatic increase in life expectancy over the past 200 years has led to the emergence of a host of age-related diseases. I wondered: if we all live long enough, might dementia come knocking at our doors?

Professor Irimiya said the theory had been widely explored, although it had not been proven, adding that the goal was to find a way to push dementia back to a later age, hopefully beyond our lifespan.

And all of this brings us back to the same question. All of the scientists and doctors, as well as those who live in the Blue Zone, say that lifestyle plays a key role. Eating right, being active, being mentally active, and being happy are all critical to the aging of our brains.

But there's another important factor, says Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of the bestselling book Why We Sleep.

“Sleep is the single most effective thing you can do every day to restore your brain and body health,” he says. “There's not a single operation of your mind that isn't wonderfully improved when you get enough sleep, or dramatically worsened when you don't.”

He talked about our brain's cleansing system, which operates during sleep, washing away the proteins beta-amyloid and tau – “the two main culprits in Alzheimer's disease.”

Changes in sleep patterns are also linked to dementia. Professor Walker said this doesn't just happen in our 60s and 70s – it can start as early as our 30s. So identifying these changes through sleep tracking could provide a “model for preventing midlife disease”.

Fauna Bio, a biotech company based in suburban San Francisco, collects data on squirrels during and after hibernation. During torpor, squirrels' body temperatures drop and their metabolic rate slows to just 1 percent of normal.

During this time, they appear to be able to re-grow neurons and restore lost connections in their brains. The company's goal is to try to create drugs to replicate this process in humans, without having to spend six months underground. Although some may dream of it.

Untreated depression has also been shown to increase the risk of dementia. Professor Leanne Williams of Stanford University has developed a method of “visualising” some forms of depression in the brain using magnetic resonance imaging, which allows us to see whether treatment has helped.

This could help scientists better understand the underlying causes of mental illnesses such as depression, as well as provide a way to quantify how well a patient's treatment is progressing.

Few have trusted science to achieve longevity more than Brian Johnson, the tech entrepreneur who has spent millions trying to reverse his biological age.

Dozens of supplements, 19-hour fasts, burst-of-body workouts and a slew of (sometimes contradictory) treatments are what he hopes will turn back the clock.

But as 103-year-old Mildred, whom I visited in Loma Linda, put it emphatically: “You have to be very careful about your diet, that's true, but I'm not a fan of saying, 'You have to do this and this and this and this and this, and don't touch this!'” She believes in living slowly, and frankly, she knows better.