Brain Rules for Aging Well: 10 Principles for Staying Vital, Happy, and Sharp

by John Medina

After the visits ended, the researchers continued to measure how the seniors were doing. The seniors who had received regular visits started faring worse over time—much worse—than those who had never received visits. And much worse than their own baselines, taken before the experiment had begun. The visits, if kept up, made them smarter, healthier, and happier. But once the visits stopped, their brain functions regressed below pre-experimental levels.

SUMMARY Mindfulness not only soothes but improves • Stress is biologically intended to keep you out of danger. It is supposed to be a temporary state. Stay stressed too long, and it becomes damaging to your brain’s systems. • Strive to be positive about aging. If you feel young, your cognitive abilities improve. • Practicing mindfulness consisting of contemplative exercises that ask you to focus your brain on the present, rather than the past or future, can both reduce stress and boost cognition. • Improving your lifestyle choices needs to be a consistent and active part of your routine if you want to enjoy both physical and cognitive benefits as you age.

Comedian George Burns riffed on them famously. “First you forget names. Then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your zipper up, and finally, you forget to pull it down!”

One of the distinguishing differences between procedural memory and declarative memory is conscious awareness.

Semantic memory, a memory for facts, doesn’t erode with age. Access to its supporting memorized database—your vocabulary—actually increases with the passing years.

Procedural memory (nonconscious retrieval, remember, falling under the umbrella of motor memory) remains steady as the years go by, although some studies also demonstrate a slight improvement.

you really do get wiser with age, depending on how you define wiser (and age). These findings come from the obvious insight that we seniors have brains chock-full of experience, which provides two measurable benefits: First, older people have access to a larger fund of knowledge.

Second, our decision making is less impulsive, more thoughtful. It takes longer, simply because we have more options to weigh (it’s the load of all those extra memory traces). Senior brains are still flexible and plastic, but decision making becomes more metabolically costly to the brain the more stuffed it is with information.

One research paper showed that in our twenties, we score on a normalized scale for working memory at about 0.6 (for the particulars of the test, see the references on brainrules.net). That’s pretty high. As we get older, unfortunately, the numbers go south. At age forty the score is about 0.2 (not so high) and by age eighty, it has plummeted to a –0.6 (really low). Forgetfulness settles on our brain like a net floating down from above.

episodic memory, like working memory, gets worse with age. Research shows there’s a 33 percent drop in the ability from your twenties to your seventies. (The peak is around age twenty.)

Older people and younger people could identify the content just fine (semantic memory), but older people had much greater difficulty in identifying who said it (source memory). They failed even to remember the gender of the speaker, a much less cognitively taxing task called partial-source memory.

In any one particular year as we age, a few memory gadgets get worse, a few get better, and a few don’t change at all. 2. Most everything declines after age thirty. Working memory, for example, peaks at age twenty-five for most people, stays steady until thirty-five, then begins its long slow journey into the night. Episodic memory peaks five years earlier than working memory, then takes the same slow slog as its working cousin.

overall vocabulary scores don’t peak until you reach your sixty-eighth birthday. That may sound positive, but on closer inspection may also sound contradictory. How can that possibly be—especially when your Tip of the Tongue exasperations become annoyingly noticeable soon after you turn twenty-five? You appear to have a Cadillac database for vocabulary, but your ability to access it seems to corrode to a Model T.

your brain take up the habit of lifelong learning.

An aging brain is fully capable of learning new things.

Researchers even know the type of learning that’s most nutritious. It’s based on the psychological concept of “engagement,” which has two types. The first is receptive engagement, where you learn things passively, leisurely, stimulating areas of knowledge with which you are already familiar. This has been shown to improve memory in aging populations.

Yet there’s a better way. If you want the Energizer Bunny of memory improvement, go for “productive engagement.” Here you experience a novel idea and actively, even aggressively, engage it. The best exercise is to find people with whom you do not agree and regularly argue with them. Productive engagement involves experiencing environments where you find your assumptions challenged, your perspective stretched, your prejudices confronted, your curiosity inspired. Productive engagement is one of the clearest ways to keep your memory batteries from draining.

“The findings suggest that sustained engagement in cognitively demanding, novel activities enhances memory function in older adulthood . . .” She’s being modest. Episodic memory improved 600 percent above those in the receptive group.

bilingual people perform significantly better on cognitive tests than monolingual controls. This includes memory, especially working memory, regardless of the age at which the language is learned.

Fluid intelligence, a measure of creativity and problem solving, is better in bilinguals, too.

Language turns out to be a friend with many long-term benefits. Normal cognitive decline is less steep for bilinguals. Same with their risk for general dementia.

One experiment took musically naive seniors and exposed them to a four-month music-training program. They not only learned to play the piano but also were taught music theory and sight-reading. Tests of executive function (which includes working memory) improved dramatically. Participants were happier, as shown by quality-of-life assessments, including measures of depression and acute psychological stress. The control group for this study experienced “other leisurely activities,” ranging from computer classes to painting lessons. The results were clear: it was music that did most of the heavy cognitive lifting.

Voracious reading, another papal habit, also turns out to be good for aging brains and, surprisingly, even better for longevity. One twelve-year study showed that if seniors read at least 3.5 hours a day, they were 17 percent less likely to die by a certain age than controls who didn’t read. Read more than that and you increase the number to 23 percent. The reading has to be of books, long form.

Exercise (mountain climbing with the Daredevil, anyone?) is great for both short- and long-term forms of memory. So is meditating.

SUMMARY Remember, it’s never too late to learn—or to teach • The brain’s memory is like a laptop with thirty separate hard drives, each in charge of a specific type of memory. • Some memory systems age better than others. Working memory (formerly short-term memory) can decline dramatically, causing forgetfulness. Episodic memory—stories of life events—also tends to decline. • Procedural memory—for motor skills—remains stable during aging. Vocabulary increases with age. • Learning a demanding skill is the most scientifically proven way to reduce age-related memory decline.

I’ve reached an age where my train of thought often leaves the station without me. —Anonymous

Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different? —Anonymous

The brain isn’t fully myelinated until age twenty-five, which means the brain takes last place in the body’s race to finish its post-birth developmental schedule.

Without white matter, neurons act like wires without insulation

Motor regulation is not the only function of this multitalented vegetable. The cerebellum also appears to be involved in language, attention, mood, and processing speed—especially in measurements involving motor tasks (like pressing a button). With age, two changes occur that directly alter that speed. First, gray matter volume within the cerebellum shrinks. Second, connections from the cerebellum to far-flung places like the parietal lobe (roughly the region underneath a wide headband) erode. That’s a big deal: the parietal lobe helps integrate information from a variety of senses. These negative changes result in slower processing. When combined with the frontal findings, a remarkably crisp picture emerges about why things decelerate.

Our ability to ignore distractions declines from a high of 82 percent when younger (average age twenty-six) to a low of 56 percent when older (average age sixty-seven). That’s what happened in the pantry. Rather than ignoring the pizza-littered war zone to get the juice, I became distracted by it. Interestingly, it’s not the inability to focus that produces the problem. Older folks concentrate on tasks just as well as younger ones, maybe even better. It’s the increasing inability to ignore distractions.

Such simultaneity is often (incorrectly) called multitasking. Scientists have a better term—divided attention—because what we’re really doing is switching between tasks.

Scientists have known for years that true multitasking is a myth. It’s impossible for any brain to monitor two attention-rich targets simultaneously. The only way your brain can track multiple targets is to use a task-switching strategy. That switching is what researchers measure. Here’s the bottom line: older people just don’t do this very well.

Fluid intelligence, roughly defined, is your ability to persuade your problem-solving talents to come out and play. Specifically, it’s the facility to apprehend, process, and solve unique problems independent of your personal experience with them.

The researchers gathered a cohort of cognitively healthy seniors, average age seventy-four years. This was christened the ACTIVE (Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly) study. The cohort was randomly assigned into four groups. One group did nothing (the control), one got training to improve memory, and one got training to improve reasoning. The fourth group was exposed to the processing-speed game for ten sessions, each about an hour long, over five or six weeks. (A random sampling also got “booster” exposures around one year and three years later.) The researchers then sat back for ten years, waited for the cohort to reach their mideighties, and looked for signs of dementia. The results were a bombshell. At the end of ten years, people in the processing-speed group were 48 percent less likely to get dementia than any other group. That’s astonishing. For one thing, the subjects were exposed for less than a day’s worth of total training, yet the effects echoed with a cognitive sonic boom ten years later. That’s what I call far transfer. For another, subjects in the group who’d received training to boost memory showed no improvement in those skills, essentially a waste of time.

The improvements were still observable six months later. When seniors who hadn’t touched the game in half a year were measured against twenty-year-olds, they beat them! Here’s a quote from the Nature paper: “[These findings] provide the first evidence, to our knowledge, of how a custom-designed video game can be used to assess cognitive abilities across the life span, evaluate underlying neural mechanisms, and serve as a powerful tool for cognitive enhancement.

SUMMARY Train your brain with video games • Processing speed, the speed at which your brain takes in, processes, and reacts to outside stimuli, drops in the aging process. It is the greatest predictor of cognitive decline. • Switching tasks becomes more difficult as you age. Consequently, it is easier to become distracted as you grow older. • Specially designed video games like NeuroRacer have been shown to improve seniors’ working-memory-with-distractions, working-memory-without-distractions, and Tests of Variables of Attention, beating twenty-year-olds who hadn’t played the game.

We’ll be friends until we’re old and senile. Then we’ll be new friends. —Anonymous

Alzheimer’s disease, responsible for up to 80 percent of age-related dementias.

Lewy body dementia is the second-leading cause of dementia in the United States, accounting for between 15 percent and 35 percent of all dementias, depending on the study. It’s named after the German scientist Frederic (Fritz) Lewy, who first noticed tiny dark dots around the neurons of people who had died from “senility.”

The second dementia is one not famous for being a dementia at all. Parkinson’s disease is most notorious for causing people to lose motor control—arms flailing, legs refusing to follow gaiting instructions.

Although Parkinson’s is a movement disorder, later stages almost always include dementia, cognitive disorders like changes in ability to focus, or affective disorders like depression and anxiety. Parkinson’s disease occurs when brain cells in specific regions start dying off, like those in the substantia nigra

The third disease comes early. Frontotemporal dementia typically strikes younger people (around age sixty, though it can even hit twenty-year-olds). Language deficits are a symptom, but the biggie is a striking change in personality. You see wildly inappropriate behavior, such as shouting at strangers, hitting people, gorging on food, and exhibiting a marked indifference to loved ones. Frontotemporal dementia also can include repetitive behaviors, such as talking about the same subject over and over again, continually mowing the lawn, or walking the same path repetitively. It is neurodegenerative, with progressive damage to the frontal lobes (the regions behind your forehead) and temporal lobes (the ones next to your ears). No one knows why it occurs.

On both financial and humanitarian grounds, Alzheimer’s may be one of the costliest diseases ever to strike the modern world.

Dementias of any kind rank No. 5 on the list of the biggest causes of death in the developed world, but it ranks No. 1 in expense. That’s because a patient can live for many costly years after diagnosis (a decade between diagnosis and death is not uncommon). In the United States alone, where 5.4 million people were afflicted with the disease in 2016, the cost of their care was $236 billion.

They don’t really know if you have Alzheimer’s. Nobody does. Even an autopsy is not necessarily definitive,

Researchers now know that 30 percent of all people with no signs of dementia have brains choking with the molecular detritus of Alzheimer’s. About 25 percent of people who have Alzheimer’s disease show no significant accumulations of plaque.

Could you predict who got Alzheimer’s in their eighties simply by analyzing writing samples authored in their twenties? It’s all correlational work for sure, which is why I used the word “potentially.” But real research fruit was obtained. The writing samples were analyzed for linguistic density, a complexity measure, and the number of ideas per sentence. Eighty percent of the nuns whose writings didn’t meet specific neurolinguistic benchmarks—who scored low on linguistic ability—developed Alzheimer’s. Only 10 percent of those who scored high on those same benchmarks did. Idea density was especially predictive.

SUMMARY Look for 10 signs before asking, “Do I have Alzheimer’s?” • Neuroscientists have a tough job teasing out typical, everyday aging from abnormal brain pathology. Just because you might show symptoms doesn’t mean a pathology exists. • Mild cognitive impairment is the term clinicians use to designate the beginning of brain pathologies. MCI doesn’t mean seniors are necessarily on the path to dementia, Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s disease. Many seniors live long, happy lives with MCI. • Dementia is a catchall term for a cluster of symptoms related to a loss of mental function. There are many age-related types. • One in ten Americans over sixty-five lives with Alzheimer’s. It is the most expensive disease to treat in the world. The average amount of time people live with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis before they die is four to eight years.

Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness. —Edward Stanley (Earl of Derby), 1873