This article notes that BDNF is the trigger for better memory and long term potentiation.
The investigators confirmed increased BDNF with transcranial direct current stimulation.
My cursory reading shows that actions, supplements and treatments that increases BDNF also increases HRV heart rate variation index.
Conjecture: a fast brain like a race car has more horsepower or bandwidth through parallel processing of fuel AND must have an antagonist or braking system that is similarly stronger.
Therefore autonomic nervous system strength measured by increased HRV indicates strong central sympathetic drivers and increased central parasympathetic vagal tone that varies with respiration and baroceptor response would show similar strength. The later would be analogous to pumping the brakes to maintain control on the racetrack. Increased vagal tone is associated with decreased central TNF alpha, cortisol and increased BDNF.
Additionally, prayer, meditation, yoga, tai chi, Amy Cuddy's power posing for two minutes and two minutes of slow paced breathing as in biofeedback increase vagal tone, BDNF and HRV. I suspect that vagal nerve stimulators might also brake the redlining brain.
As people age they lose parasympathetic tone (or recovery braking) and may develop network damage from glutaminergic toxicity and the exhaust of TNFalpha and other inflammatory cytokines.
Brief stress strengthens a system that adapts, hormesis.
Chronic stress weakens and kills a system, all spending and no investment.
There is likely a limit to growth (acceleration and sympathetic tone) and a limit to decline (braking, recovery and parasympathetic tone.)
The body then is like a business that grows within the safe range, fast but not too fast, with stored or accessible reserves of capital to weather a downturn or financial cycle.
Jim Collins books Good to Great and Great By Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos and Luck- Why Some Thrive Despite Them All are excellent books that examine business like a system such as ourselves.
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