Neuroscience Says Doing This for Just 1 Hour a Week Can Make Your Brain 5 Years Younger

You know your actual age, but do you know your “brain age”?

Everyone loses some mental sharpness as the years go by, but not everyone’s brain ages at the same pace. Just as some 60-year-olds are running marathons while others are huffing and puffing up the stairs, neuroscientists say there can be a big gap between the age on your driver’s license and how old your brain appears according to an MRI scan and other tests.

And happily for entrepreneurs and anyone else looking to keep their brain going strong, while you can’t turn back the years, you can reverse the effects of those years on your brain. All you need is a pair of sneakers and about an hour a week.

Keeping your brain young is easier than you might imagine

To figure this out, a team of Canadian doctors recruited more than 200 healthy older adults and set them a simple task — do an hour or two of reasonably demanding aerobic exercise a week. Researchers tested their subjects’ mental performance before, during, and after six months of this new health routine.

The results, published in the journal Neurology, show that this totally achievable amount of exercise had significant effects on their brains as…