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CNN’s Dr Sanjay Gupta on brain health and how to avoid dementia: eat and sleep well, be social and exercise

  • TV medical correspondent and brain surgeon Sanjay Gupta has some advice on how to avoid dementia in his new self-help manual and guide to brain science
  • The biggest takeaway: we don’t stop making new brain cells as we age

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There are ways to stave off dementia, says Dr Sanjay Gupta in his new book Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age. Photo: CNN
Richard James Havis
The brain is a complex organ of which much is still unknown. Sanjay Gupta, best known as CNN’s chief medical correspondent – he is also a practising brain surgeon – wants to change that.

Gupta explores the brain in his latest book, Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age, with a focus on how to avoid dementia. And for a personal touch, it’s peppered with stories relating to his own family.

The book is partly a compendium of neuroscientific research and partly a self-help manual. Gupta looks at the effect of exercise and diet on the onset of dementia, and uncovers lesser known factors such as lack of social intercourse and too little sleep.

Carefully upbeat, the upshot of his research is that, although no outcomes are certain, we can proactively take steps to avoid, delay, and mitigate dementia. 

The crux of Gupta’s approach is based on the 21st-century discovery that the process of neurogenesis – creating brain cells – does not stop when we get older. The brain can make new brain cells, and forge new neural connections, at any age.

Sanjay Gupta’s book, Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age.
Sanjay Gupta’s book, Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age.

“That is the reason I wrote the book. What we were seeing in the neuroscience community was evidence not just of neuroplasticity – the idea that you can use existing brain cells to do new things – but also neurogenesis,” says Gupta.

Imaging techniques like fMRI, which allow neuroscientists to map what is occurring in the brain in greater detail, are at the heart of the new research.

“Previous research was conducted on brains and spinal cords that had been injured. We were always looking at pathological states,” says Gupta. “It was only after we were able to examine the brain with imaging that we could look at healthy brains. 

“The discovery was that healthy brains have an ongoing process of neurogenesis. We knew that it happened in young brains, and brains that were recovering from injury, but the fact that it happened in healthy brains was a revelation,” says Gupta.

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