7 Forgotten Habits That Lower the Risk of Dementia

Ancient civilizations discovered them centuries before science could explain them.

Photo by Valeriia Miller on Unsplash

People were dealing with dementia long before anyone had a word for it. Long before neuroscience existed, people in very different civilizations had already developed habits that seem to have protected the brain.

The Romans trained memory like a martial art. Indigenous communities made heat rituals part of everyday life. Ayurvedic physicians prescribed daily practices aimed at protecting the brain.

None of them called it dementia prevention. These habits were simply part of how serious, disciplined people lived — and they worked.

Here’s the strange part: they had no neuroscience. No clinical trials. No understanding of BDNF, synaptic pruning, or the glymphatic system. Yet cultures separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years, with no contact with one another, kept arriving at many of the same practices.

Modern science is only now catching up to some of them. That doesn’t look like a coincidence. When people in completely different places keep noticing the same things, you have to take that seriously. Somewhere along the way, we stopped doing that.

I stumbled into this question while looking for something else. I was researching the history of memory training for a client piece and kept noticing the same thing: a practice from one civilization, later confirmed by science, that turned out to have been used somewhere else for centuries without much recognition.

It happened often enough that I stopped working on the client piece and started following the trail.

What I found wasn’t just a collection of interesting habits. It was the same pattern appearing again and again: people had noticed important things, and somewhere along the way we stopped paying attention.

The real tragedy isn’t that we didn’t know. It’s that we did know, in the form of thousands of years of human experience, and slowly convinced ourselves that it didn’t count.

Here are seven practices we slowly stopped taking seriously.

1. The Persian and Arabic tradition of walking while thinking

In classical Persian and Arabic culture, serious thinking wasn’t something you did sitting down. Scholars like Al-Kindi and Avicenna did their thinking on the move, often walking through gardens built for exactly that purpose, with scribes following behind to write things down.

Most of what we know about how Avicenna worked comes from an account left by his student Al-Juzjani, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes as our fullest source on his life.

According to that account, Avicenna didn’t treat walking as a break from thinking. For him, the walk was part of the thinking itself.

We now have a pretty good idea why this works. A landmark 2011 study by Kirk Erickson and colleagues, published in PNAS, showed that aerobic exercise increased hippocampal volume by 2% in older adults over the course of a year — enough to offset about one to two years of normal age-related brain shrinkage.

Of course, Avicenna knew nothing about hippocampal volume. He got to this way of working by paying attention. He noticed that his thinking changed when he was on his feet, and he built much of his life around that insight. Science eventually explained what he’d already noticed. I’ve come to appreciate that more over the years.

When I’m stuck on a difficult idea, my instinct is to sit at my desk and force it. It almost never works. The times I’ve walked away and kept moving, things usually come together within twenty minutes.

Walk with a problem you’re trying to solve for thirty minutes, three to five times a week. Avicenna had scribes. You have a voice memo app.

2. The Indigenous sweat lodge as cognitive reset

Across many North American Indigenous traditions, the sweat lodge — inipi in Lakota — was a regular part of community life. People sat together in intense heat, steam, and darkness, guided by ceremony, and came out the other side after a period of physical stress and quiet.

We now know why this might work. Regular heat exposure causes the body to produce heat shock proteins, which help repair damaged proteins in the brain. It also boosts BDNF, a protein that helps neurons grow and stay healthy.

The results are hard to ignore. A long-running study led by Dr. Jari Laukkanen at the University of Eastern Finland, published in Age and Ageing, showed that men who used a sauna four to seven times a week had a 65% lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease than men who used it once a week. The study followed 2,315 men for more than twenty years.

That finding didn’t come from studying sweat lodges. It came from Finnish researchers studying Finnish men.

Indigenous communities weren’t thinking about BDNF. They knew the practice seemed to keep elders sharp, and they passed that knowledge down across generations.

Aim for four sessions a week at around 80 degrees Celsius, with each session lasting at least twenty minutes. A gym sauna works. A home infrared sauna works. No sauna? A hot bath isn’t the same thing, but regular heat exposure of almost any kind is better than none.

What matters most is doing it regularly.

3. The Roman practice of memorizing and reciting aloud

Roman education revolved around one thing: you memorized what you learned, and you said it out loud. Word for word, with rhythm, breath, and gesture. Orators spent years doing this, but educated Romans did it too. They memorized poetry, law, philosophy, and history, not just as students but as a way of life.

Much of what we know about this comes from Cicero’s *De Oratore*, our fullest account of Roman memory training. Cicero himself was still giving speeches well into his sixties.

Memory was simply part of being educated.

That kind of repeated recall, practiced year after year, may have built what neuroscientists now call cognitive reserve — the brain’s ability to keep working even as it ages and accumulates damage.

Dr. Yaakov Stern at Columbia University has shown that people with greater cognitive reserve often experience dementia symptoms much later, even when the disease itself is already present.

The sentences that have stayed with me long enough to become part of how I think work differently. They become part of the thinking itself. That used to be the whole point of reading seriously.

Try one paragraph, a short poem, or passage per month — committed to memory and said out loud each morning. The goal isn’t quantity. It’s repetition. Saying it out loud matters.

4. The ancient Greek practice of learned friendship

The Greeks had a word for a particular kind of friendship: philia — friendship built not just on warmth but on a shared love of learning.

Aristotle thought it was the highest form of friendship, and he meant that practically, not just poetically.

You found people whose minds you respected, met regularly, argued, and accepted that sometimes you would have to change your mind.

Plato’s *Symposium and [Protagoras](https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0177:text%3DProt.)* show us what these gatherings looked like. People defended their ideas, challenged one another, and made disagreement part of the evening.

Most people remember the symposium as a drinking party. In reality, it was a gathering where ideas were tested, challenged, and pushed until people could see which ones held up.

Without realizing it, the Greeks may have been protecting something modern neuroscience now considers essential: the ability to hold an idea, test it, and change your mind when the evidence points somewhere else.

The Greek symposium may have acted like lifelong exercise for the mind, forcing people to update their beliefs and engage seriously with disagreement.

Working alone makes this harder than it sounds. There’s no colleague down the hall, no seminar room, no built-in structure creating the kind of friction that sharpens ideas.

I’ve had to build that kind of friction on purpose, and even then it’s easy to skip. For the Greeks, it was simply part of social life.

When your culture expects something from you, you do it every day for life. When your wellness app recommends it, you do it until something easier comes along.

Find two or three people willing to meet monthly around a question or text. The warmth matters, but the friction is the point.

5. Medieval monastic chanting

Benedictine monks built their days around the Divine Office, chanting together eight times a day, from before dawn until after dark. They followed that rhythm for centuries across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson’s long-running work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, done with Tibetan Buddhist monks whose traditions make similar demands on the mind, found something remarkable.

Monks with tens of thousands of hours of practice showed unusually high levels of gamma-wave activity — patterns linked to attention and memory.

Davidson’s research suggested that decades of practice had changed the brain’s resting state itself. In other words, the monks had spent decades asking their minds to do work modern life rarely demands.

The result is a practice built around memory, breath control, focused attention, and years of demanding mental work.

Spend ten minutes a day humming or reciting something you’ve memorized with slow breathing. Do it regularly, and loud enough that you can feel it in your chest.

6. The Taoist practice of deliberate forgetting

Taoist philosophy, especially the Zhuangzi, most authoritatively translated by Brook Ziporyn, describes a practice called wang: deliberate forgetting. Not the kind of forgetting that happens to you. The kind you do on purpose.

A mind packed with old conclusions gradually loses its ability to deal with what’s right in front of it. The goal was xu — emptiness, or openness. A clearer mind could meet the present with full attention instead of forcing everything through what it had already decided.

A 2017 paper by Blake Richards and Paul Frankland argues that forgetting is an active process the brain depends on for clear thinking. A brain that holds on to everything eventually loses some of its ability to adapt.

My working life revolves around accumulation — tabs open, notes saved, half-finished ideas tucked away. Deliberately clearing any of it feels wasteful, almost like I’m not doing my job.

But the weeks I’ve written most freely are rarely the weeks I had the most material. They’re the weeks I had room. Creating that room on purpose is what this practice asks for.

Spend twenty to thirty minutes each day with no distractions and no agenda. The hardest part is tolerating the feeling that you’re being unproductive.

7. The Ayurvedic practice of oil pulling and nasal oiling

Ancient Indian medicine included two daily practices that modern neuroscience is beginning to take seriously, even if the evidence is still more suggestive than conclusive.

The first is kavala — swishing sesame or coconut oil around your mouth each morning. The second is nasya — placing a few drops of warm oil inside the nostrils.

Both practices appear in the Charaka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita, two of the central texts of Ayurveda, written more than two thousand years ago.

The mouth carries bacteria, including Porphyromonas gingivalis. A 2019 study published in *Science Advances* found evidence of this bacterium in the brain tissue of Alzheimer’s patients, with toxic enzymes present in 96% of the 53 brain samples examined.

These practices may have influenced forms of chronic inflammation that researchers are increasingly investigating for their role in dementia.

Whether that’s ultimately true remains an open question, but the possibility is intriguing enough to take seriously.

Swish sesame or coconut oil each morning and place two drops of warm sesame oil in each nostril after waking.

The evidence is still early, but the biological connections are intriguing enough to deserve serious attention. And the fact that Ayurvedic physicians were recommending these practices two thousand years ago for brain health — before anyone knew what a neuron was — seems like the kind of clue we’d take very seriously if it had come from a modern laboratory.

If you do nothing else from this article, start with three things: walk every day with a problem you’re working through, find someone you can have genuinely challenging conversations with regularly, and memorize something difficult.

Seven civilizations, separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles, arriving at many of the same practices for staying mentally sharp well into old age.

That convergence deserves attention, because what connects these practices isn’t culture or geography. It’s movement, heat, memory training, challenging conversations, sustained attention, and the ability to adapt.

The habits that helped people stay mentally sharp into old age were never really secrets. We slowly stopped treating them like ordinary parts of life.

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