sunday legends lot. an eclipse behind the curtain at the british royalfamily, scottish british royal family, scottish holiday british royalfamily, scottish holiday homes since the 19th century opens a guided tour to the public. now on bbc news — it is click. last year, i travelled to california to see the latest innovation aiming to help us live healthier lives for longer. this time, i'm back to look at our brain health. social interaction is basically exercising your brain. i meet the scientists and experts investigating what we can do to reduce our cognitive ageing. what you see here is six different major circuits of the brain. could we bend the arrow. of alzheimer's disease risk down on itself? hey, you must be lara! hello! i visit the residents of one of the world's blue zones... i don't smoke, i don't drink alcohol, and i'm a vegetarian. ..and catch up with the tech entrepreneur trying to turn back time on his body and mind. it's going to feel like the womb. i can't remember what that felt like! they laugh i'm visiting one of the world's so—called blue zones to find out why its residents live longer, healthier lives than average. many of those in loma linda, california, are seventh—day adventists — a religious group that really values health and community. hey, you must be lara! hello! yes. awesome! lovely to meet you. so good to meet you, lara. would you like for me to prepare you a breakfast? oh, yes, please. 0h! that would be lovely. that would be awesome. what i can see already here looks very healthy and very tasty. yes, we enjoy fruits and nuts and grains and all of this stuff. you've actually become really involved in the community here, even though you weren't born here? no, i'm originally from the netherlands. actually, when i came, it was a culture shock. of course, being a catholic and coming into seventh—day adventists, they were very, very much reserved. and at that time, i consumed alcohol, which i do not any more. i don't smoke, i don't drink alcohol, and i'm a vegetarian — you might say 99% vegan. we want to eat healthy. we want to exercise, because my body is the temple of god. so if i stay strong, and clear—minded... ..i�*ll be of service. living this life is centred around what the adventists refer to as the "health message". healthy lifestyle is to refrain from... refrain from... ..unhealthy activities. more family—oriented lifestyle, fruits and organic vegetables and everything organic — no chemical sprays — and then exercise. you know, fresh air, community and spiritual. is loma linda a happy place? it's a happy place to be, absolutely. yeah, it's a happy place. and happiness is good for your longevity. exactly. mm—hm. exactly. they may credit the religion, they may credit the lifestyle, but there's no great secret — they're simply living a really healthy life. at these assisted living apartments, esther has already been to her daily exercise class. what is your age, if you don't mind me asking? you don't know yet? i don't know yet. i'm glad you're sitting — i'll be 100 in august. you're going to be 100? that is amazing! how old do you feel? she chuckles i feel older than when i was 80. lara laughs do you think being here in loma linda, within this kind of community, is what is responsible for you being so good for your age? of course, our religion, i think, has a lot to do with it. it's very interesting to me that i have lasted this long and at night—time, i pray to... for god to help me get up again tomorrow because i have no assurance. aside from that duty to protect physical health that exists here, community spirit is strong. what i didn't realise was how important socialisation is to your brain, and without it, it seems to shrink and go away. and so the ability to just have heart—opening, brain—opening conversations is very, very, very important. and that mental stimulation matters. as we get older, our brains shrink. we lose brain cells and brain connections. this can impact our memory and our attention spans. it doesn't happen to everyone equally, though. our bodies age, our brain ages at different speeds, based on different things. there are 87 year olds that are sharp as a whip, and part of it's genetics and part of it's lifestyle. the life you lead informs your genetics and your genetics then expresses itself based on the interactions you have with your environment, which is why social interaction is so important. social interaction is basically exercising your brain. as we start to understand more about how it works and ages, experts are taking advantage of the power of ai and big data. it helps them see patterns of how cognitive decline can play out and indeed, the disease process when it comes to something like dementia. but also other sources... andrei irimia researches brain ageing. based on data from 15,000 brains, he's aiming to provide a better way of predicting decline. it's looking at a lot of different patterns related not only to shrinking of the brain, but also change in the properties of the signal and intensity on these mri scans. so it's a very sophisticated way to look at patterns that we don't necessarily know about as humans, but the ai algorithm is able to pick up on them. would you be able to identify early signs? what sort of uses are there in this technology for helping with dementia? normal adults and patients with alzheimer's disease. everywhere you see either red or blue, those are areas where ageing is occurring in a different way in patients with alzheimer's. the reason this is red is because this is in an area of the brain called the medial temporal lobe, heavily involved in memory, which is important in memory formation. and what we see in alzheimer's is that you have degradation of the ability to recall memories and also to encode new memories. so the work you're doing here, what sort of impact can that have on both diagnosing and potentially even treating alzheimer's? so if we can identify individuals whose brains are ageing a lot faster and estimate their risk for disease a lot better, so that either clinicians can provide custom tailored treatment, or individuals themselves can implement lifestyle changes. brainkey is one company commercialising this type of research. the platform quantifies how each section of your brain is ageing. to see what it made of how i'm doing, i needed an mri. what this shows is an image of your whole brain, but also 25 different areas in the brain and the volumes associated. the summary of the brainkey analysis is the brainage, which is an assessment of your general brain health. so your brainage is a3. so that's good news. it's good news. so we would ideally want brainage to be either at or lower than your chronological age. it's always preferable to have it slightly below. mri scanners, just like all technology, are getting faster and better and cheaper, so it's becoming much more accessible for people to get an mri scan, and the images coming off of them are getting even better and better. the technology's just getting to a point where we are able to see things much earlier than we could in the past, and that means we can understand exactly what's happening in an individual patient's brain. and now, with al, we can support that. and that could change the game. wow! what is this? it could also give you a nice new ornament. oh, my goodness! a gold version of my brain with my name under it. is that life size? i am a professional rejuvenation athlete. i love it. tech entrepreneur bryanjohnson is spending millions trying to turn back time on his body. i visited him last year to unearth his extreme and sometimes controversial regime of fitness, fasting, a load of tablets, tracking and treatments, and i'm back to see how it's going. it's three steps, no rail. and i have to do this now. he laughs oh, yeah. nice work. it really hits the... a little bit imbalanced, but generally... yay, i did it! yeah, good job. well done. how old am i?! a lot younger than a lot of people who pass through the house. we're back in the clinic. yeah, we're back. so if you step over here... ..on top of this. 0k. and then hold it here. right. and then i'll turn it on. but first, let me give you eye protection. lovely. thank you very much. what is this actually going to do to me? it's going to make you feel — it's going to give you energy. you love energy. is this going to feel like lying in the sun? it's going to feel like the womb. i can't remember what that felt like! they laugh are you ready? wow, it's bright — even with these on my eyes. i do it for accelerated healing, blood flow, even for mood improvement. it does feel a bit like that warmth from the sunshine, which does make you feel quite happy. and this is going to give me energy? it will. can you talk me through what you're looking at in your brain, and then any kind of interventions you're doing to try and reverse that biological age? we look at the brain several ways. one, we look at the anatomical structure with mri. so the brain shrinks and changes over time. so you're looking at the actual brain. and then functionally, you're looking at how it actually works. but then what can you do next? so we've done several things. like, last year, when we spoke, i mentioned that i had internal jugular vein stenosis. so i had problems where my posture was poor like this, and it actually... certainly not now. yeah, i fixed it. yeah. and it lessened my blood flow, and so with bad posture, i had white matter hyperintensities. this is like a scarring for the brain. when i fixed my posture and i did the physical therapy exercises, i reduced my white matter hyperintensities by nine years. so i dramatically reduced my brain age by fixing my posture. all of this is, of course, just one person's experiments and he's testing all sorts. well, i would ask if we're going cycling, but it's attached to something, so i don't think we are. what is this? the theory is that this therapy can improve concentration, peacefulness, improve sleep and may also improve the white matter hyperintensities. so it may improve damage that's caused in the brain. there's no evidence on this, so we're experimenting — as we do with a lot of things. so i do this every day for ten minutes — if you want to try it out? i'd love to try it out. i doubt i'm actually going to feel anything in the time that i put it on, am i? but maybe i'm going to be incredibly sharp and clever later. 0k. what's it actually doing? how does it work? so just like you're familiar with red light therapy for the body... yeah. ..for improved healing, it's the same thing for the brain. just a wavelength that's optimised to go through the skull and the skin and get to the brain. what we have to remember is that if you do an experiment on an individual, that is very different than an experiment on a population that can be peer reviewed and replicated. we know the importance of social interactions when it comes to feeling young. and that sense of community and talking to people really helps us feel our best, often. but you don't like talking to people, especially after 8:30, when you go to bed. so don't you think you need to do a bit more socialising if you're doing everything to try and reduce your biological age? yeah. um, uh, yeah... i would say i am more an introvert than an extrovert. i do socialise quite a bit. so i'll gather people together at my house, we'll have a dinner and we'll talk about the future of being human. maybe, though, we can learn something from the animal world, and one company has been researching ground squirrels, like this one behind me, to see what they're gaining from hibernation. they may have come out to play today, but this lot spend half the year going in and out of a state of intense hibernation. their body temperature drops and their metabolic rate is turned down to just i% of normal. as they're leaving hibernation, they have this amazing adaptation where they're able to regrow these neurones and they're able to have these neuronal connections again. biotech company fauna has been tracking the animals, aiming to develop drugs to replicate these benefits in humans. as they re—emerge, a swab is taken forfurther investigation. back here in the lab, there's a biobank of squirrel tissue cells here in the corner. but after that, it becomes all about experimenting on human cells and seeing what can be replicated in them. one side of the coin is looking at alzheimer's disease patients and saying, "what's different about their proteins?" "which genes are active or not active?" and then we compare that to the opposing biology of the squirrel, that we know can modify the protein in a good way and regrow the neurones. but does that translate into humans? yes. essentially, we only look at genes that are highly similar to humans. so we're talking about 90% of the protein or more looks exactly like the human protein. spending six months a year underground isn't generally an option for us, but getting good sleep is crucial. sleep is the single most effective thing that you can do each and every day to reset your brain and body health. there is no operation of your mind that isn't wonderfully enhanced when you get sleep, or demonstrably impaired when you don't get enough. professor matthew walker spends most of his waking hours talking sleep and analysing that of patients in his sleep clinic. this is where the staff will be monitoring the patient. these are nets that we place on your head, and it allows us to precisely measure exactly where we need to place the electrodes consistently on every head. and we've got your data. these sorts of experiments teach matthew and other sleep experts a lot. your brain has a cleansing system. we knew that your body had one — it's called the lymphatic system. you've heard of that. we didn't think the brain had one, but it does, and it's called the glymphatic system, named after the glial cells that make it up. it was specifically during sleep and during deep sleep that this sort of, you know, power cleanse for the brain began to unfold. why is this relevant for alzheimer's? because two of the pieces of metabolic build—up, of this detritus that was washed away by the glymphatic system during sleep were things called beta—amyloid and tau protein, which are two of the culprits underlying alzheimer's. there is a silver lining in all of this story of dementia and sleep, because maybe we can do something about it. you don't start to see the decline in your deep sleep that is associated with alzheimer's risk in your 60s or 70s, it's already under way. it begins in your late 30s, we can start to detect that decline. so what if i could shift from a model of late—stage treatment to a model of midlife prevention, and could we start to help the brain at that midlife stage? and in doing so, could we bend the arrow of alzheimer's disease risk down on itself? it's notjust sleep that's coming under the spotlight. there's increasing research into the long—term impact of depression. what we've developed is a way to directly measure how your brain functions. and in doing that, we can understand the root causes of mental health disorders such as depression. and the breakthrough here is the fact that you can actually see this on a scan. you can see depression. exactly. what we've been able to do is take that complexity and measure what we call the kind of superhighways, the primary connections involved in how we think, how we feel, and what gets disrupted. the presence of having depression does increase the risk for later—life conditions — some dementias, other chronic diseases, as well. data from 6,600 people's brains has been analysed to understand what looks healthy and how signs of depression can show up. what you see here is six different major circuits of the brain, and they're engaged in functions like, how we think, the one in red, how we feel positive emotion, the one in purple. depression, sadly, it affects people when they're very young. very often the onset is late teens, early 20s. and so if you don't find a way to understand that and treat — ultimately prevent — you're going to have the chronic effect of that dysfunction, disruption in the brain across your life. piano music: amazing grace # amazing grace, how sweet the sound... # music is a big part of life here at loma linda, and there could be some brain gains. recent studies suggest that learning a musical instrument, or even singing throughout your life, could benefit your brain health in later years. playing the piano was seen to be particularly beneficial to memory and problem solving. # than when we've first begun. # very nice! it's not only about staying sharp, though. healthy, happy ageing is about the whole package. mildred was a doctor. she even set up a hospital in uganda and was working in health care in loma linda. you're 103, aren't you? yes. that's an incredible age. how old do you feel? i'm getting like a worn—out model t that's falling apart. lara chuckles how would you describe your quality of life at this point? pretty useless. i would never recommend and say, "ok, you pick being old "as the way you're going to end your life." forget it. you've lived quite some life and you've had to go through a lot to reach this age. do you recommend living into your hundreds or not? i don't think i'd recommend anything about life and its length... ..to anybody. take it as it comes. i have tried to... ..be happy. and i've managed pretty well. going from talking to bryanjohnson to someone who's 103 made this all seem very real. we need to look after not just our bodies, but our minds. it's just a matter of how important being able to quantify that is. it's certainly going to make a difference when it comes to research in the future, and the power of ai and big data is making a lot of that possible. it'sjust, right now, there is no silver bullet. the power of this computational biology and ai will be to help you understand yourself over time and what the things you do benefit you. technology is helping us understand and predict like never before. we know better than ever what we should be doing to look after ourselves. but perhaps mildred should have the last word. you absolutely need to be very careful with your diet. it's true. but i'm not down for any, "you've got to do this and this "and this and absolutely not touch this." do you think it's more important to live? i think it's more important to live. hello, thanks forjoining me. let's see what the weather's got in store for the rest of the weekend. and here's the headline — for most of us, it's not looking too bad. some sunshine, but at times it will be cloudy. could be a few showers as well. now, recently there was a weather front across northern wales and northern england. it brought some damp weather on saturday. that should be mostly out of the way come sunday, as this ridge of high pressure tries to build across the uk. remnants of that weather front still visible in the morning across east anglia and the south—east, all the way to south—western parts of england. so quite cloudy, with some spits and spots of rain for a time. 16 in london. north of that, i think sunshine to greet us in the morning. through the morning into the afternoon those cumulus clouds will be developing and then eventually spreading, so i think it is going to be quite a cloudy afternoon for many of us during sunday. some showers as well, possible almost anywhere. your best bet for sunny skies is actually around coastal areas, almost anywhere, especially looking out to sea — blue skies. temperatures 20 in london, high teens further north. nothing spectacular, and actually similar temperatures and weather for the football in germany. ok, onto the forecasts now for monday. another weather front approaches from the west. this is going to bring thick cloud and some outbreaks of rain initially to northern ireland, to scotland, the irish sea, and then eventually that weather front will move eastwards across the country. so i think most of us are in at least for a little bit of rain. a short spell of rain on monday, but come the afternoon, skies all brighten across western areas of the uk, so there will be some clearer skies towards the end of monday. it may take time for that weather front to clear the east coast. and then the azores high still here on tuesday and indeed wednesday, but we're just on the edge of that high pressure and often on the edge of high pressures there's a lot of cloud. good chance of catching a shower, and that's pretty much what we've got on tuesday. i think your best bet for the dry, sunny weather will be further southwest on tuesday, for example in plymouth and in cardiff, whereas in the north west of england, the chance of a few showers. so here's the week at a glance. if you want really warm weather, it's not so great because temperatures are below the average. if you like cloudy, changeable, cool weather, well, it's perfect for you. bye— bye. this program is live captioned by red bee media. hello, good morning and welcome to breakfast _ hello, good morning and welcome to breakfast with nina warhurst and then ross. gur breakfast with nina warhurst and then ross. . , ., then ross. our headlines today: the fans are warming _ then ross. our headlines today: the fans are warming up, _ then ross. our headlines today: the fans are warming up, but _ then ross. our headlines today: the fans are warming up, but will - fans are warming up, but will england's players joined the fans are warming up, but will england's playersjoined the party at the euros, when they take on slovakia in the last 16?- at the euros, when they take on slovakia in the last 16? yes, and the will slovakia in the last 16? yes, and they will soon — slovakia in the last 16? yes, and they will soon be _ slovakia in the last 16? yes, and they will soon be waking - slovakia in the last 16? yes, and they will soon be waking up, - slovakia in the last 16? yes, and| they will soon be waking up, with some england fans camping here in essen ahead of that last 16 tie to come stop they do so knowing it will be switzerland to lie in wait in the quarter—finals. be switzerland to lie in wait in the quarter-finals-_ be switzerland to lie in wait in the quarter-finals. with five days to go until the general— quarter-finals. with five days to go until the general election, - quarter-finals. with five days to go until the general election, rishi - until the general election, rishi sunak and sir keir starmer attack each other�*s