D\u2019Esposito, a professor of psychology and member of Berkeley\u2019s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, wants to change that focus and bring brain health front and center.<\/p>\n
After 35 years of research using MRI scans to understand brain function in healthy people as well as those with brain disorders like Alzheimer\u2019s disease and Parkinson\u2019s disease, he is now trying to establish MRI benchmarks for brain health that everyone can use. This new focus has taken him out of the lab to proselytize, through podcasts and public talks, about the importance of brain health and what science tells us about how to improve it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just think the focus needs to be on optimizing health as opposed to warding off disease,\u201d he said. \u201cNeurology never was in the business of trying to prevent disease. It was only in the business of treating disease. But there\u2019s this kind of shift; they (neurologists) have bought into brain health now. Even the American Academy of Neurology is talking about preventive neurology. There can be a brain health revolution like a fitness revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n
Governments are already focusing on \u201cbrain capital\u201d and the \u201cbrain economy\u201d as an asset to be optimized by improving skills such as resilience and creativity and addressing neurological and neurodevelopmental disorders. Even the World Health Organization is promoting<\/a> \u201coptimal brain development, cognitive health and well-being across the life course.\u201d<\/p>\n D\u2019Esposito\u2019s turnaround to focus on preventive neurology came gradually during his 25-year, long-distance association with the Center for BrainHealth<\/a> at the University of Texas-Dallas, which is establishing itself as a worldwide center of translational research to measure and boost brain function.<\/p>\n Courtesy of the Center for BrainHealth<\/p>\n The center recently lured away one of D\u2019Esposito\u2019s Berkeley colleagues, neuroscientist and psychologist Matthew Walker, to create the new Sleep Innovation Laboratories<\/a>, with a major goal of translating \u201cthe latest neuroscience research into evidence-based strategies that can optimize your sleep.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Eti Ben Simon<\/a>, a Berkeley postdoctoral fellow who is now associate director of the new lab, \u201cWe want to use technology to understand sleep better, but also to try and offer the latest innovations that can help people achieve better sleep. If we think about brain health, we cannot ignore sleep. And we\u2019re talking about not just keeping the brain away from disease, but actually really helping it thrive.\u201d<\/p>\n Earlier this year, D\u2019Esposito and five other neuroscientists and neurologists founded the Society for Brain Health, hoping to channel an emerging trend as doctors think less defensively \u2014 How do we stave off dementia? \u2014 and go on offense: How do we bolster brain health to avoid neurodegenerative disease?<\/p>\n Courtesy of UT-Dallas<\/p>\n Meetings of the Society for Brain Health \u2014 the first is planned for next February \u2014 would be a place where researchers, clinicians, neurotech developers, public policy experts, educators and others present their results about which of the thousands of brain fitness games or other interventions are actually effective and what sorts of biomarkers, whether brain scans or blood analysis, correlate with brain health.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have to figure out how to measure brain health,\u201d he said. \u201cIf your primary care doctor doesn\u2019t know if your brain\u2019s healthy, then how are you going to know? And which interventions are actually helpful, have been vetted scientifically? That\u2019s where the Society for Brain Health comes in.\u201d<\/p>\n A longitudinal study of brain health<\/p>\n Five years ago, D\u2019Esposito joined three other neuroscientists and neurologists to launch The BrainHealth Project within the Center for Brain Health. Through the project, they recruited like-minded neuropsychologists and cognitive neuroscientists to systematically vet new tests of brain function \u2014 from online performance-based measures to questionnaires \u2014 and correlate them with objective markers of brain health, some of which involve MRI scans. The resulting BrainHealth Index<\/a> incorporates lifestyle questionnaires and online tasks \u2014 22 separate measures in all \u2014 to assess not only cognitive but also social and emotional well-being, which have been linked to a longer healthspan. The team pairs these measures with online cognitive training, lifestyle modules and coaching to see if people can raise their BHI.<\/p>\n Trevor Paul, courtesy of the Center for BrainHealth<\/p>\n Participants take the test every six months to chart their progress and engage in training to learn strategies like \u201chow to stop using toxic brain habits, stop multitasking; how to rest your brain, think deeply and continuously innovate,\u201d said cognitive neuroscientist Sandra Chapman<\/a>, the founder and chief director of the Center for BrainHealth and a distinguished professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at UT-Dallas.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve developed the first ever behavioral measure that, if you were to take it often, can show whether you\u2019ve been able to maintain your holistic ability to think clearly, to synthesize, but also to connect warmly with people and to find emotional balance in the midst of struggles and chaos,\u201d she said. \u201cWe start during middle school and take a lifespan approach to optimize the human brain potential. We are finding there\u2019s no upper limit \u2014 it\u2019s you against yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n D\u2019Esposito and Chapman compared the project to the monumental Framingham Heart Study, which over eight decades established the risk factors for cardiovascular disease that are now common knowledge: smoking, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, physical inactivity and obesity.<\/p>\n \u201cYou go to your doctor every year for your annual physical and they examine every organ in your body, right? Except your brain,\u201d D\u2019Esposito said. \u201cThe BrainHealth Project has the lofty goal of enrolling 100,000 people, following them, and not only trying to develop biomarkers for brain health but also developing intervention.\u201d<\/p>\n Their most recent report<\/a>, published in May in the journal Scientific Reports, was an analysis of three years of data on nearly 4,000 people enrolled in the project between the ages of 19 and 94. Participants of all ages reported sustained improvements in brain health as measured by the Brain Health Index, showing that cognitive decline is not an inevitable result of aging.<\/p>\n Nearly 40,000 people are now enrolled in the study, which is one reason Walker and Ben Simon have joined the project team. While the BHI already includes an assessment of sleep quality, they hope to add more measures to assess other aspects of sleep that have been linked to a healthy brain.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to try and think about the four core domains of sleep: duration, quality, regularity and timing,\u201d she said. While questionnaires can gather good subjective data on some of these, the researchers are introducing wearables to measure other markers, such as the sleeping heart rate and the duration of specific sleep stages. Ben Simon herself wears an Oura ring to record when she falls asleep and when she awakens.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an opportunity to integrate sleep into the notion of 24-hour brain health,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The brain\u2019s connectedness<\/p>\n D\u2019Esposito has helped establish that one MRI measure, of the brain\u2019s modularity or connectedness, is associated with better functioning, such as improved attention, working memory and multitasking. It can be measured during a 10-minute resting fMRI scan performed repeatedly over time to track brain health.<\/p>\n Kevin Weiner\/UC Berkeley<\/p>\n \u201cThe brain network is a lot like an airline network,\u201d he said. \u201cSome hubs are critically important \u2014 like Chicago \u2014 while others, like Milwaukee, play a much smaller role. If there are delays in Chicago, the disruption spreads across the entire country. Even a direct flight from New York to San Francisco can be affected because so many routes depend on that major hub. But delays in a smaller hub like Milwaukee usually don\u2019t have the same nationwide impact.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSimilarly, major network hubs in the brain are gathering information from many other areas,\u2019\u201d he added. \u201cAnd it turns out that these major hubs are the most vulnerable areas of the brain for disease. If you look at neurological disorders and psychiatric disorders, it\u2019s actually the major hubs that have the most pathology. Think about diseases as network failures, as opposed to just one brain area failing.\u201d<\/p>\n D\u2019Esposito and his colleagues found that brain modularity predicts whether someone is going to respond well to cognitive therapies, transcranial brain stimulation, aerobic exercise and other interventions. A highly modular brain predicts likely benefits across age groups and types of therapies, he said, leading neurologists to home in on this as a biomarker for intervention success.<\/p>\n D\u2019Esposito\u2019s colleague in Berkeley\u2019s psychology and neuroscience departments, associate professor Kevin Weiner, is focused on another possible measure of brain health: the prominence of grooves in the brain called tertiary sulci. He has shown<\/a> with Berkeley professor Silvia Bunge<\/a> that the depths of some small grooves in children and adolescents are correlated with increased connectivity between regions of the brain involved in reasoning and other high-level cognitive functions.<\/p>\n Brandon Sanchez Mejia for UC Berkeley<\/p>\n For Weiner, who specializes in brain anatomy, the BrainHealth Project\u2019s database is a unique opportunity to analyze people\u2019s MRI brain scans over time and identify the anatomical markers, specifically brain folds, associated with brain health and how they change with age. During human evolution, these folds were the last to appear as the brain grew and got compressed inside the skull \u2014 they\u2019re literally shaped by the human trend toward higher-level thinking. That developmental timeline is recapitulated during development in the fetus, with the tertiary sulci the last folds to form.<\/p>\n Because the depth and shape of these sulci vary from individual to individual, mapping them could provide a measure of brain health. Other structures, such as the brain\u2019s ridges, or gyri, and the depth of larger grooves may also be correlated with cognition and resilience, Weiner said.<\/p>\n He and Berkeley neuroscientist William Jagust have already shown that variability in one specific tertiary sulcus is related to cognitive resilience in superagers. These brain folds are painstaking to identify, but Weiner eventually hopes to train a computer algorithm to automatically identify these tertiary folds in MRI images so he can more thoroughly study their correlation with brain function.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a retrogenesis hypothesis on the table, the idea that regions of the brain that are the last in \u2014 tertiary sulci emerge last in gestation \u2014 are proposed to be the first out as you age. So they\u2019re most vulnerable in aging,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we could identify certain features of these tertiary sulci in the parts of the brain that are most vulnerable in aging that are correlated with the brain health index, that would be awesome.\u201d<\/p>\n D\u2019Esposito and Weiner both are focusing on what can be learned from MRI scans, but the BrainHealth Project\u2019s real goal is to find a way to assess brain health without expensive and time-consuming tests.<\/p>\n Brandon Sanchez Mejia for UC Berkeley<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not proposing that everyone get an MRI scan during their annual physical,\u201d D\u2019Esposito said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to develop a marker for brain health by first using the MRI data and then hopefully it\u2019ll be a biomarker that can be measured at home, either through physiological monitoring or through an ear EEG \u2014 something simple and easy. It\u2019s not going to be any single marker in the brain that tracks brain health. It\u2019s going to be some combination.\u201d<\/p>\n He and his colleagues are collaborating with a company called NeuroScouting, founded by one of his doctoral students at Berkeley, to employ technology developed for athletes to pick up physiological biomarkers like these.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s remarkable that brain modularity, as measured by fMRI, may be inferred from physiological signals such as heart rate and respiration \u2014 metrics that could potentially be monitored by a smartwatch or an in-ear device.\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Right now, his colleagues at the Center for BrainHealth are focused on extending the reach of their BrainHealth Index and training strategies beyond the study at UT-Dallas. The U.S. military has already shown interest as a way to bolster fitness and reslience for active and retired service members. Two former Navy SEALS, including retired Admiral William McRaven, former commander of the United States Special Operations Command, are big boosters of the program. The hope is that major hospitals and healthcare providers incorporate this into their wellness programs.<\/p>\n The center is also investigating how the brain health program can help treat those with addiction, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, frontotemporal dementia and other brain disorders.<\/p>\n \u201cMy goal from the very beginning, more than three decades ago, was to turn discoveries made in my lab into knowledge that could meaningfully improve people\u2019s lives,\u201d D\u2019Esposito said. \u201cThrough my work at the Northern California VA Health Care System and UCSF, we have done a number of cognitive interventions with traumatic brain injury patients and healthy elderly, but The BrainHealth Project is an opportunity really to go all in and hopefully make a worldwide impact. I\u2019ve completely refocused on translational work.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cHealth optimization\u201d and \u201cbody hacking\u201d is all the rage as people strap on wearable technology, undergo blood tests…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422999,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[12455,1570,87009,143,145,144,45139],"class_list":["post-422998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-biology","tag-health","tag-neuroscience","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Eti_Headshot-crop-1024x585.jpg\")
Eti Ben Simon is a Berkeley postdoctoral fellow and associate director of the Sleep Innovation Laboratories at the Center for BrainHealth.<\/p>\n![\"blond](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Matt_Walker_denim_blue-crop.jpg\")
Matthew Walker, a former UC Berkeley sleep scientist, is now a professor of neuroscience and biomedical engineering at UT-Dallas and director of the Sleep Innovation Laboratories at the Center for BrainHealth.<\/p>\n![\"blond](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Chapman-creditTrevorPaul-crop.jpg\")
Cognitive neuroscientist Sandra Bond Chapman is the founder and chief director of the Center for BrainHealth and the Dee Wyly Distinguished Professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University of Texas-Dallas.<\/p>\n![\"an](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/tertiarysulci-1024x535.jpg\")
Tertiary sulci outlined on an MRI scan of a human brain and the same sulci identified on a photo of a real human brain. Tertiary sulci are the last folds to form as the brain develops and may be the first to deteriorate with aging. <\/p>\n![\"man](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Weiner-Finals-14-crop-1024x585.jpg\")
Kevin Weiner, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience.<\/p>\n![\"man](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/DEsposito-Finals-11-crop-1024x585.jpg\")
Mark D\u2019Esposito, MD, professor of psychology and neuroscience.<\/p>\n