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May 8 - July 15, 2020
The key to remembering things is to get involved in them actively. Passively learning something, such as listening in a lecture, is a sure way to forget it. Actively using information, generating and regenerating it, engages more areas of the brain than merely listening, and this is a sure way to remember it.
This can be done by slowing down and practicing mindfulness; trying to mono-task instead of multitasking; and trying to follow the Zen master’s advice of be here now.
We tend to remember best those things that we pay the most attention to. And the deeper we pay attention, the more likely those things are to form robust memories in our brains.
ago.” Lots of people have different
The brain learns to become fully functional through its interactions with its environment.
All learning results in synaptic connections. Things that have been learned and practiced many times produce greater synaptic strength, and so it is easier to return to them.
The Healthy practices of the COACH principle are partly responsible for people with increased health spans: Curiosity, Openness, Associations, Conscientiousness, and Healthy practices.
COACH allows us to maintain the intelligence we had when we were younger and to grow it at any age. Growing intellectually is one of the secrets of successful aging; it is different from intelligence, but we can’t easily say how. Still, we might suspect they have something to do with each other.
Wisdom enables you to handle some problems more quickly and effectively than the raw firepower of youth.
Making associations underpins learning. To assimilate new information we need to associate it with what we’ve seen before. Life experience gives us more associations to make, more patterns to recognize.
Learning doesn’t happen the same way for everyone because the influence of culture, genes, and opportunity impacts everything we do from the womb to the tomb.
Quincy Jones got caught up with a bad crowd, occupying his mental energy with petty thefts and other criminal activities in Seattle.
A special commission of the US National Academy of Sciences concluded in 2018 that “school failure may be partly explained by the mismatch between what students have learned in their home cultures and what is required of them in school.”
This is in contrast to individuals of average intelligence who tend to have low variability across the various skills subtests that are used to establish IQ. That’s just a fancy way of saying that if they are moderately good in one area, like verbal ability, they tend also to be moderately good in others, like spatial and mathematical ability.
But this is not true for exceptionally high-performing individuals. They tend to excel in a single domain, or perhaps two. It’s not that they couldn’t excel in many; it’s that as these high performers start to get really good at something, they become increasingly absorbed in it and continue to develop that single area of expertise by redirecting brain resources toward it, letting other areas that are less relevant to them fall by the wayside.
This led the great cognitive psychologist Buz Hunt to quip that g is not really a general intelligence factor, but a general mediocrity factor: Those who do not truly excel in any one domain are more likely to have similar scores on various subtests of intelligence. High intelligence breaks you free of the constraints of the hypothetical g.
No, the best strategy for cognitive health is to keep doing new things—things that require new ways of thinking.
significantly correlated. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for a number of aspects of cognition that often decline as we age:
Unfortunately the prefrontal cortex is susceptible to age-related decreases in blood flow, changes in the structure of cells, and reduction of volume (shrinkage).
Practical intelligence seems to grow alongside crystallized intelligence as we get older.
Analytical intelligence is preserved in old age if you can practice using it.
His philosophy appears to be in accord with what I’ve encountered with other people in their nineties: Try not to slow down.
Aging is not accompanied by unavoidable cognitive decline. The aging brain changes, thanks to neuroplasticity. It changes itself, heals itself, and finds other ways to do things, some of them (such as abstract reasoning) actually better than the earlier ways of doing things; it harnesses neuroprotective and neurorestorative capabilities.
Fluid intelligence, the ability to use what we already know, is lower before the age of forty and picks up in each decade thereafter. Although our raw neural processing speed and reaction times may slow down (precipitously in our eighties), older adults have experienced so much more than twenty-year-olds that they have a competitive edge.
According to her model, the internal resources that predict the development of wisdom include: mastery (managing uncertainty and uncontrollability), openness, reflectivity, and emotion regulation, including empathy (the model is called MORE).
Older adults show higher levels of emotional regulation, experience-based decision making and conflict resolution, prosocial behaviors such as empathy and compassion, subjective emotional well-being, and self-reflection or insight, compared to younger adults.
Emotions are an acute state of affect and arousal lasting from seconds to minutes, whereas mood refers to a longer-term emotional tone. Emotions occur against a background of mood.
Emotion, motivation, reinforcement, and arousal are closely related topics and often appear together in neuroscientific research.
It is no accident that the word motion is contained in the word emotion.
All of this underscores the counterintuitive point that emotions are cognitive constructions that depend on circumstances and interpretation.
Long dismissed by physicians who were more focused on pharmaceutical, electroshock, or other “medical” interventions, talk therapy has proven its effectiveness, and even its superiority. For depression, it is at least as effective as antidepressant drugs in the short term, and over the long term, we see less relapse—two years after intervention, people who received prior cognitive therapy are doing better than people who simply stayed on medication.
Rumination also feeds the destructive aspects of mood-dependent memory retrieval because the hippocampus is exquisitely sensitive to emotion. When you’re unhappy, the hippocampus has a far easier time accessing negative memories to the point that it can become very difficult to recall times when you didn’t feel unhappy.
The more effective strategy, according to Nolen-Hoeksema, is positive distraction—that is, immersing yourself in positive, forward-looking activities you enjoy: sports, baking, travel, music making . . . whatever it is that is engaging enough, absorbing enough, to distract you from your unhappiness, and is enjoyable and positive.
One of the surest ways to get over depression is to help others—this allows you to step outside of yourself and your preoccupations. Helping others is powerful medicine.
Immersing yourself fully in whatever activities you engage in—work, leisure, family, community—is protective against cognitive decline and physical illness. The rewards from doing things that please you lift your mood, and strengthen the immune system, increasing the production of cytokines, T-cells, and immunoglobulin A.
The biggest tip of all to promote healthy emotions as we age is to find a way to help others. It is much more difficult to be depressed or feel dreary if you are working to make someone else’s life better.
One of the keys to a long health span and a long life is social connectedness.
People can feel lonely even when surrounded by others, such as in the middle of a party or inside a large family. Loneliness is a feeling of being detached from meaningful relationships, and that may arise from feeling unacknowledged, from feeling misunderstood, or from a lack of intimacy.
Klinenberg goes on to implicate the rise of communications technology, perhaps paradoxically, as a cause of loneliness.
gratitude. Gratitude is an important and often overlooked emotion and state of mind. Gratitude causes us to focus on what’s good about our lives rather than what’s bad, shifting our outlook toward the positive. Positive psychology grew out of a belief that psychology’s focus on disorders and problems of adjustment was ignoring much of what makes life most worth living. Positive psychology has found that people who practice gratitude simply feel happier.
The research suggests that religious people feel happier because religion promotes gratitude through prayers and gives them a social network, along with a sense of purpose and meaning—three things that benefit most of us, regardless of where they come from.
belief that we can exert some control over our environment is essential for our well-being and is believed to be a psychological and biological necessity.
The very fact that we have options that we can decide to act on seems to reduce stress responses in the brain and can lead to healthier brains as we age.
Social engagement helps to maintain brain functions and protects against cognitive decline. Epidemiological studies find that having a large social network and more daily social contacts is significantly protective against dementia.
The fact is, outcomes don’t differ all that much among the leading diets. The Journal of the American Medical Association published a research article that compared the Ornish, Atkins, Zone, and Weight Watchers diets and found no difference among them in weight loss or reduction of risk for cardiovascular disease.
At present, what does seem to be clear is that large amounts of refined sugar, deep-fried foods, and heavily processed foods are unhealthy.
Physical activity may be just as effective as pharmaceutical agents in improving and maintaining memory, as well as global cognition, and delaying the onset of dementia and other neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
A large part of the story of people who manage to stay young, in spite of their chronological age, relates to synaptic plasticity—the ability of the brain to make and form new connections. As we’ve seen, plasticity is influenced by your genetic makeup, your lifetime of experiences, and the culture in which you live. It is also influenced by your daily routines, especially as you get older. The act of transmitting information across synapses, and the forming of new synaptic connections, requires a dramatic increase in the amount of energy used in the brain.
In addition to synaptic plasticity, cognition is maintained and enhanced by neurogenesis—the growing of new neurons. As
The idea that older adults need less sleep is a myth. They tend to get less sleep, but they still need the eight hours that the rest of us need.
