Neuroscience has recently shown that brain size is related to certain habits and abilities such as the following:
Aerobic exercise According to an American study published last year in the journal PNAS , moderate physical exercise in older adults increases the size of the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped brain region that is responsible for the formation of new memories. According to the authors, this increase mainly affects an improvement in spatial memory.
Meditation. Meditation increases the size of the brain, as demonstrated by a study by the neuroimaging laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles (USA). Specifically, people who meditate have more neurons in the hippocampus and in areas such as the thalamus and the orbitofrontal cortex, linked to the regulation of emotions.
Friendship. Human beings need to use a series of cognitive skills to keep a certain number of friends, for example being able to guess what another person is thinking, having developed empathy or being a good conversationalist. This would explain why people with a greater number of friends have a region of the brain called the prefrontal orbital cortex that is larger than the average for the population, as published by researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Liverpool and Manchester in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
