Baycrest

EXPLORING THE DETERMINANTS OF COGNITION Dr. Carol Greenwood Dr. Claude Alain Senior Scientist senior scientist and academic director Food for thought SIGNALS TO NOISE For more than a decade, Dr. Carol Greenwood has explored the relationship between diet, nutrition and brain health. She and her colleagues are working to understand what factors in our diet can increase our risk of cognitive loss as we age, and what we can do proactively through our diet to help retain our brain function. Dr. Greenwood was the first researcher to show that the average North American diet, if consumed in middle age, can contribute to cognitive decline. Now, Dr. Greenwood and her colleagues are using brain imaging technology to map and understand the biological factors that connect diet to dementia, and ultimately to identify food strategies that can help to set our brains up for healthy aging. You're at a cocktail party. There are people conversing all around you. How do you follow one specific conversation and sort it from the rest of the background noise? It seems that as we get older, this ability becomes increasingly difficult. Dr. Claude Alain's research is focused on investigating how our perception of sound changes as we age. Why, for example, do older people have more difficulty listening in multi-conversation environments like the aforementioned cocktail party? Scan this QR code with your smartphone Using a variety of brain imaging techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Dr. Alain and his colleagues are able to look at how the brain processes auditory information. The researchers can gauge, for example, whether specific frequencies are causing the problem, or if it's related to processes in a certain part of the brain – knowledge that can lead to improvements and refinements to the way we design hearing aids or other clinical tools.

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