The recipe looks delicious—roasted butternut squash soup with roasted pumpkin seeds—but what makes it more attractive than a zillion others available online is that it’s food for thought. Literally.

It’s from Mindfull, an e-book collection of 100 brain-healthy recipes developed by researchers at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences and the University of Toronto. Filled with recipes by Canadian celebrity chefs, it provides a menu of information about nutrition that supports brain health, and how to use that information in everyday life. More information is available at womenofbaycrest.com/mindfull/.

The book is part of a national trend, backed by big research dollars, that will soon have us all more mindful of brain health. At some point in their lives, one in three Canadians face a psychiatric illness, neurological disorder or brain injury. It’s a challenge to individuals, to their families and to the health-care and social services systems.

Although the brain is the most complex system known to man, brain research has been approached in a somewhat piecemeal fashion, largely investigations into individual conditions or discrete parts or functions of the brain. But a human brain is more than the sum of its parts—it’s an intricate system, and now Canada is beginning to look at brain research in a more encompassing way.

The Canada Brain Research Fund will bring together researchers from different disciplines to identify common brain mechanisms and functions that can apply to a broad variety of nervous system and brain diseases and disorders. The fundraising charity Brain Canada (braincanada.ca/), Neurological Health Charities Canada (www.mybrainmatters.ca/en ), the Canadian Association for Neuroscience (can-acn.org/) and the federal government together will provide $300 million in funding over five years.

The new fund can’t help but add to Canada’s growing list of accomplishments in brain research.

A Step Closer To An Alzheimer’s Vaccine

A discovery of a way to stimulate the brain’s natural defence mechanisms in people with Alzheimer’s by researchers from Université Laval, Centre Hospitalier Université de Québec and the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline could lead to better treatment and prevention. A key feature of the disease is formation of senile plaque in the brain. In mice trials, researchers identified a molecule that stimulated the brain’s immune cells to eliminate 80 per cent of senile plaques over 12 weeks. The learning ability of the mice also showed significant improvement over that period. No word yet on when human trials might start.

Training Brain Waves

University of Western Ontario and Lawson Health Institute researchers have shown that using neurofeedback to train certain brainwaves enhances the brain network responsible for cognitive control. Dysfunction of this network is implicated in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Limiting Damage From Stroke

Hundreds of attempts have been made to develop a drug to protect the brain against damaging effects of stroke, but have been unsuccessful in human trials. A pair of Canadian research teams may have cracked that nut. During a stroke, the brain is deprived of blood and oxygen, sparking chemical reactions in the brain that kill brain cells. Since brain cells can’t regenerate, prevention is key. A team of researchers at the Krembil Neuroscience Centre at the Toronto Western Research Institute, led by Dr. Michael Tymianski, developed a drug that greatly reduced stroke damage in animal studies by preventing those damaging chemical reactions.

A few months after that research was announced, a team of researchers at the Calgary Stroke Program at Foothills Medical Centre and the University of Calgary’s Hotchkiss Brain Institute, announced the drug also protects the human brain. In randomized, double-blinded, multi-centre trails conducted in Canada and the United States, patients treated with the drug following small strokes related to aneurysm and repair had less brain damage than those not given the drug.

Odd Body Fact

Your brain weighs about 1,300 grams and contains about 100 billion neurons (grey matter), each of which has up to 10,000 synapses, tiny communication hubs that pass information from neuron to neuron. But some people have beefier brains. Adults who are bilingual have much denser grey matter than people who speak just one language. London taxi drivers, who spend their lives memorizing the complex maze of streets, have a larger hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory and learning; and the older they are, the larger the difference. It can’t hurt to exercise your brain by learning a new language, mastering algebra or taking up a musical instrument—and you just might end up with more “mental muscle.”

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