What Oscar Winner Julianne Moore Wants You To Know About Brain Health

Academy Award winner Julianne Moore has been advocating for more awareness about and attention to brain health. (Photo: Art + Commerce)

Art + Commerce

Here’s something Academy Award-winning actress Julianne Moore wants you to keep in mind. Your mind. What’s happening with your brain. You know, that thing that sits on top of your body and oversees, oh, everything that you do like read Forbes articles. Moore wants everyone to prioritize brain health, well, more. And she’s partnered with Eli Lilly for the just-launched “Brain Health Matters” campaign to get folks to take more steps to reduce the risk of brain health issues like dementia from Alzheimer’s Disease and other causes like atherosclerosis, strokes and traumatic brain injuries.

Moore’s Emphasizes How Your Brain Is ‘The Engine Of The Entire Body’

I recently talked to Moore about her brain health advocacy. Being aware of what’s happening with your brain and taking care of your noggin may seem kind of like a no-brainer. But that hasn’t necessarily been the case. “I think that we always have kind of thought like, oh, my brain, it does its own thing,” Moore explained. “It’s like we don’t consider it as something that’s sort of the engine of the entire body.” Moore also mentioned about how any decline in brain functioning may be viewed as “oh, just part of aging” and that there’s not much you can do about it.

But all of these things, of course, are not true. You can do a lot to help your brain health. And your brain is attached to the rest of your body—at least, it should be. (If your brain is somehow detached from your body and going separately to places like Costco, you should grab your brain and see your doctor immediately.) Therefore, it’s important to know that what you do to the rest of your body can affect your brain health and vice-versa.

Moore’s Interest In Brain Health Stems From Her Role In The Movie ‘Still Alice’

Moore’s interest in brain health dates back to what she did for her starring role in the 2014 movie Still Alice. In that movie she played Alice Howland, a linguistics professor at Columbia University who is diagnosed with early onset familial Alzheimer’s disease and then goes through the major trials and tribulations of cognitive decline. That role earned Moore an Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role and led her to better understand brain health.

“Before I made that movie, I really hadn’t met anybody with Alzheimer’s and I knew nothing about it, I knew nothing about the disease, I knew nothing about the behaviors,” Moore told me. “I really wanted to make sure that I was going to portray it accurately.” She then described the research that she did for the movie. “People were so incredibly generous with with their time and with their information,” she recalled. “I spoke to doctors and patients, people who have been really newly diagnosed, and also people who are observed to be further along in their diagnosis and caregivers.”

Moore described how she had visited a long-term care facility, “watched all all the films that were available” and talked to Lisa Genova, who had written the 2007 Still Alice novel that served as the basis for the movie. “[Genova]

wanted to differentiate [Alzheimer’s] from age, because so many people believe that Alzheimer’s is a condition of aging,” Moore explained. “There was this idea,, particularly years ago, that it was about senility.”

Moore Urges Everyone To Get Cognitive Assessments

One of the first steps to taking care of your brain health is getting a cognitive assessment. The term “cognitive” means anything related to thinking, learning and understanding, you know all stuff that your brain handles. So examples of cognitive skills or processes include your ability remember stuff, learn new skills and information, pay attention to other people and your surroundings, speak and listen and process everything that bombards you each and every day. When any of these abilities worsen, it’s considered cognitive impairment or decline. Dementia is when your cognitive or mental functioning has declined to a point that it significantly affects your daily activities.

Such impairments can be very subtle and hard to detect yourself, especially early on their course. You can write them off as having a bad day, bad week, bad year or even a bad decade. As mentioned earlier, you may think they’re simply a part of getting older. You may not even be able to recognize them because it can take cognitive abilities to assess cognitive abilities. There can also be some stigma or perceived stigma about suffering cognitive impairment. Plus, as Moore has emphasized, “the progression is often very slow.”

Therefore, it’s important to get a more objective measure of your cognitive state. A health professional can administer one or more different cognitive tests. One of the quickest and easiest to do is the Mini-Cog. It clocks in at just around three minutes to do and checks whether you can draw a clock with hands to show a specific time and recall a three-word list of different objects. This is clearly a quick screen and may not pick up more subtle issues.

A somewhat longer—taking about 10 minutes—and more involved test is the Mini-mental state exam or MMSE. The MMSE entails asking you to recall the current date, count backwards and name everyday objects when they are shown to you, such as a pencil, watch or that Justin Bieber figurine that’s sitting in the corner of the doctor’s office for some reason. The MMSE can help identify more serious cognitive issues but still can miss milder impairment.

The Montreal cognitive assessment or MoCA is a bit longer, lasting around 15 minutes. It also entails memorizing a short list of words. You also will be asked to copy a drawing of a shape or object and identify the animals in pictures. This can pick up some milder forms of cognitive impairment but again is not a fully, extensive assessment.

Of course, each of these tests have their limitations. None are 100% at picking up cognitive issues. Just because you pass one of these tests with flying colors, doesn’t necessarily mean that all is kosher cognitively.

Nonetheless, getting assessed in some way is good start, and can pave the way for additional, mroe comprehensive follow-up assessments. The trouble is many people don’t even get to the initial step of any testing. “Putting in a cognitive assessment is a really important but it’s not part of normal, it’s not ordinarily part of a normal checkup,” Moore lamented. “We’ve normalized so many things, certainly getting a mammogram that was something that people didn’t do years ago. Now we get mammograms. Getting colonoscopy, that was something that we’ve normalized, too.”

In other words, if you can talk openly about getting a scope up your butt, why might be there ifs, ands or buts about doing so with your brain health? Why can’t getting cognitive assessments be more of regular talk among people? Why can’t such assessments be considered more of a routine thing to do? It should be routine to check whether the brains are all right—adapting the name of one of Moore’s movies.

Moore Emphasizes What Can Be Done About Brain Health

After all, as Moore emphasized, there are things that you can do to help your brain health. Things with your brain aren’t inevitable in a Thanos-esque way. Even if the tests do review cognitive issues, don’t consider it a lost world—to borrow from another of Moore’s movies.

One thing that you can do regardless of whether you’ve experienced cognitive issues is to keep “exercising” your brain. That doesn’t necessarily mean putting your head on a treadmill. Instead, exercising can consist of completing puzzles, filling out class reunion surveys and playing games like bridge, other card games and other games in general. For example, recently, I covered in Forbes my conversation with Deepak Chopra, MD, where he talked about how gaming can help exercise your brain.

Anything that you can do to learn new things and skills like vocabulary, languages, musical instruments, science and other hobbies can exercise your brain. Not only can such things keep your brain active, they can help you get to know more people as well, which also can help your brain. Plus, they can come in handy as you never know when you might need to use the word “acersecomicke,” which means “one whose hair was never cut.”

Speaking of hair never being cut, another thing that can exercise your brain is helping other people by offering whatever they may need. It actually can help you to, you know, think about and be kind to other people.

“Social engagement actually boosts brain health,” Moore related. “And somebody told me this anecdotally, I don’t know if this is true or not. When you are struggling, like suddenly you kind of can’t remember a word, you should not look up the word. Probably if you wait like five to ten minutes, the word will come back and they would say that’s your brain forming another connection.”

Keep in mind your brain doesn’t have to such a heady subject alone, so to speak. As Moore emphasized, other parts of your body do affect your brain health. For example, in 2018, I described in Forbes a study that found sitting too much to be associated with thinning of the brain. And since nutrition matters, you might want to think twice about eating over 70 hot dogs in 10 minutes. “Lifestyle makes a significant difference, eating correctly, blood pressure, getting enough sleep and social engagement,” she mentioned. “I think you can kind of feel it, you can almost feel it in your brain when your brain feels alive, when you feel sharp, and you realize it’s because you’ve been eating well, you’ve been sleeping, and maybe you’re learning something new. ”

The Brain Health Matters website does list some factors affecting your brain health that are not changeable like age, family history and certain genetic markers. Your age is your age even if you lie about it on a dating profile. And you can disown your family but they still might pass on some genetic factors to you.

The website also lists factors that you can change like your blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, smoking status, physical activity, body weight and alcohol consumption. You can also try to avoid traumatic brain injury or at least get TBI properly assessed when it happens. Then there’s hearing loss, which can make it harder to learn and engage with others. The website lists depression as well as a modifiable factor.

What Moore Has Been Doing For Her Own Brain Health

Moore also related the things that she’s been doing for her own brain health. “I’ve been doing yoga for about 25 years, and that for me, has been something that’s been tremendously effective, just in terms of my physical health, my well being,” she said. “And in the way that I feel emotionally, because it’s a mind-body exercise. So I really kind of need it. I always I always function better when I have it.”

She doesn’t sleep on getting enough sleep either. “Sleep is a really important to me and non-interrupted sleep,” Moore explained. “Now that my kids are grown up, I’m not waking up in the middle of the night all the time. That makes a big difference.” She mentioned being mindful of things that she eats too. You could say that there are no short cuts to physical and mental health to borrow yet another Moore film title.

All of these have long been part of her life due to her profession, which dates back to her graduating from the Boston University College of Fine Arts in 1983 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater and her turns acting on soap operas like The Edge of Night and As the World Turns through the 1980s. “I also have a job that’s a very physical job,” she related. “These are things that I’ve always been aware of, because it affects my stamina, If I’m going to be on a set for 12 hours a day, I really need to have the physical and the mental energy to complete my task because you don’t sit down. You just kind of keep going.”

You could say that Julianne Moore has been mindful of brain health and wants everyone to be so as well. Her professional and personal lives are certainly busy. “The last movie I made was with Jesse Eisenberg, a really kind of wonderful comedy that’s also a musical,” she added. “I just spent a lot of time with both of my adult kids who now live in New York City, which is great. I think we spent a lot of time together as a family. We have a couple of trips planned for the fall.” And over a decade after her role in Still Alice, Moore is still interested in using what she learned from that movie to help others.