Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives

by Daniel J. Levitin

Coping

It turns out that the primary cause of confusion, disorientation, and delirium among older adults is not Alzheimer’s disease—it’s adverse effects from medications or from drug interactions.

this could be important in evaluating cause-effect"effects". Useful in evaluating and etiology and misdiognosis

In mammals, circadian rhythms rely on three separate processes: an input system that takes in information from the environment, consisting of cues such as light-dark cycles and food consumption that are received via peripheral oscillators; a central, master oscillator, or clock, that keeps track of the time of the input events and can generate a consistent rhythmic signal; and output pathways that allow the master clock to influence and synchronize the various peripheral oscillators that govern physiological operations, such as digestion, sleep-wake cycles, core body temperature, hunger, and alertness.

how different aspect of enviorment affect circadian rhythms

Eating at different times each day, or at times that are out of sync with your circadian rhythms, can lead to obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and other problems.

important to know time of eating patterns are important. I would wonder if this correlates with grehlin levels.

And teenagers experience a particular shift in their sleep schedules for reasons we don’t fully understand but are related to the sudden influx of pubertal hormones. A nascent movement in the United States to delay the starting times of high schools is gaining traction.

importance of sleeping is important enough to try to move schooling patterns.

Adults after the age of sixty or so begin to show performance differences on a range of neuropsychological tests—memory, problem solving, spatial intelligence, reasoning, fine motor coordination, and athletic performance. Test them in the morning and they are normal; test them in the mid- to late afternoon and they show reduced performance, compared to forty- or fifty-year-olds (as we saw in Chapter 4, on the problem-solving brain). The differences become even more pronounced after age seventy.

real time effects of older individuals are important in academic studies. Should be included in method section when studying the elderly

Melatonin’s sleep-promoting action works as a step function, meaning that if you get enough of it, more won’t help (and could be harmful). Although over-the-counter products commonly available often contain 5–10 mg (and at least one manufacturer sells 60 mg tablets), overdosing can cause extreme drowsiness the next day and disrupt your sleep cycle for a week or more.

over the counter melatonin can be detrimental as it can overdose you causing you to feel groggy.

Fasting stimulates the production of ketones, an energy source for neurons. Fasting can increase the number of mitochondria in neurons, which helps them produce more energy.

importance of fasting and basic biological factors.

A Cochrane systematic review (the gold standard for meta-analyses) in 2018 examined the results of seventy-nine separate trials involving more than twelve thousand people and found that taking omega-3 supplements makes little or no difference to the risk of cardiovascular events, coronary heart deaths, coronary heart disease events, stroke, or heart irregularities. And it may even increase the incidence of some cancers.

omega 3 supplements shown to have minimal and sometimes negetive effects.

recent report by the National Institutes of Health concludes that omega-3 supplements don’t reduce the risk of heart disease but that people who eat seafood one to four times a week are less likely to die of heart disease. It may be that the optimal amount of omega-3s (and other antioxidants) follows what engineers call a step function: Once a certain minimum is reached, additional amounts have no effect and may actually introduce harm. The

naturally occuring foods of omega threes good. Step function with over staturation of vitamin/protein bad.

Vegetable proteins are a part of that balanced diet. You may have read reports that soy products interfere with sex hormones, lowering testosterone in men and leading to estrogen problems in menopausal women. These reports were based on flawed data, and the current thinking is that soy is beneficial for all except those who are allergic to soy.

soy found to not have negetive effects on males.

It turns out that 90 percent of the serotonin in the body resides in the gut, and it is manufactured there by bacteria such as Candida, Streptococcus, Escherichia, and Enterococcus.

interesting distribution

Children who are delivered via Caesarean section show a reduced diversity of their gut microbiome. In animals, stress caused by the separation of rhesus monkeys from their mothers changed the microbiota and decreased their Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus levels. Rats separated from their mothers showed decreased fecal Lactobacillus levels.

gut biome lack of diversification c-section. additionally, high levels of stress at a young age can negetivly affect microbiome.

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.

excersise just as effective as pharmacology agents.

It includes swimming, cycling, running, dancing, and walking. It’s called aerobic because aerobic means “living in the presence of oxygen,” and these activities leverage the body’s ability to use oxygen to extract energy from carbohydrates, amino acids, and fat.

aerobic def.

The ACSM defines anaerobic activity as “physical activity of very short duration, fueled by the energy sources within the contracting muscles and independent of the use of inhaled oxygen as an energy source.” It includes things like strength (weight) training and short-distance running.

anaerobic def

But Suwabe and Yassa measured cortisol in their participants and found no differences—the improvements in both hippocampal activity and connectivity occurred even without a stress response. Further good news is that you don’t have to be physically active over a long period to see benefits. Cognitive benefits show up immediately, and by twelve weeks improvements in cerebral blood flow are evident.

cog. benifits pronouned with min. excersise

Although this is technically true, the proportion of people who can get along on fewer than five hours of sleep a night without showing major impairment is tiny—less than half of 1 percent.

very few can operate with less than 5 hours of sleep.

Sleep-deprived people show a 60 percent greater activation in their amygdala during waking hours than those who are not sleep-deprived. Because the amygdala is part of the brain’s fear circuit and is known to trigger aggression, anger, and rage, this finding highlights the relation between sleep deprivation and emotional regulation.

people who are sleepy should greater amygdala activation more prone to outburst.

distribution has been uncovered, showing that people who sleep less than seven hours a night or more than ten are at an increased risk for hypertension. Similarly, sleep duration of less than six hours or more than nine is associated with increased prevalence of diabetes and impaired glucose tolerance. Poor sleep duration or quality, as well as too much sleep, also increases stress and allostatic load—the cumulative effects of stress over time.

too miuch or too little sleep can lead to hypertension/negetive effects.

Naps can compensate for poor nighttime sleep, but it’s best to limit them to twenty minutes or you can suffer from sleep inertia—your body may want to stay asleep and a long nap may make you groggier than a short one.

20 min. naps are the ideal to not have sleep inertia.

Given the time-dependent nature of hormonal release schedules that are governed by the circadian clock, what is the most important thing about sleep? To go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every morning.

most important go to sleep and wake up at the same time.

Life expect. Graph at a certain point subsequent years are a 50/50 chance of living.

Graham Ruby, a bioinformatics scientist, took a hard look at the longevity data from 400 million people. It turns out that the true heritability—the influence of genes on longevity—is only around 7 percent, much less than had been previously assumed. It’s true that longevity runs in families, but in Ruby’s study, longevity was almost as likely to show up in nonblood relatives, like in-laws, as in blood relatives.

longevity apparently not tied to heritible genes. This is interesting and likely needs addtional reserach.

Conscientiousness—the propensity to be planful, reliable, and industrious and to adhere to social norms and tolerate delayed gratification? It turns out that childhood Conscientiousness predicts telomere length forty years later, as shown by Sarah Hampson and her colleagues.

higher conscientousness tied to longer telomeres years later.

Surprisingly, it turns out that excessively long telomeres are also bad for you. In one large study of more than twenty-six thousand people, overall cancer risk increased by 37 percent with doubled telomere length. And some cancers were more impacted than others. For people with the longest telomeres, lung cancer risk increased by 90 percent, breast cancer by 48 percent, prostate cancer by 32 percent, and colorectal cancer by 35 percent. The most troubling effect was a more than doubling of the risk for pancreatic cancer.

excessively long telomeres are tied to higher risks of various desises. This is similar tot he step function mentioned previously.

“low fat!” That was a boon for the food industry; less fat, less calories, you can eat more. The current obesity epidemic is a direct result of that faulty translation.

dont know the validity of the claim made. If so, this would mean that our health crisis could be attributed to the low fat craze we saw decades ago.

Several systematic reviews and meta-analyses have concluded that there is no convincing evidence that brain-training games enhance cognition beyond the realm of the game, nor do they fend off dementia.

brain training games have not been found to help with things outside of their domain.

The Association for Psychological Science (APS) published a paper in 2016 by a team of experts led by Daniel Simons, an experimental psychologist at the University of Illinois. The team analyzed 132 papers cited by these for-profit brain-training companies. The paper is very carefully prepared and documented. It reads something like an indictment from a federal prosecutor. Of the 132 papers, 21 were review papers that did not report any new data and therefore were redundant; 15 reported on data from only a single study; 36 lacked an adequate control group; 6 papers with a control group lacked random assignment; 5 other papers had similar reasons not to include them. Of the remaining 49 papers, 25 were reporting on the same six experiments. Many of those 49 were authored or co-authored by employees of the company whose products they were testing, and so they are not independent assessments of the products. If you are not an expert, it is easy to be bowled over by the sheer number of papers cited by these companies. But you know better now. Simons’ team found, as many others had, that brain-training games develop a particular, narrow set of skills and lead to improvement in those skills but not others, even others that would seem to be related. Simons and his colleagues concluded, We found little compelling evidence that practicing cognitive tasks in brain-training products produces lasting cognitive benefits for real-world cognition. . . . If your hope is to stave off the c...

Brain training game time spent could be used for other things that one may find important.

What Daniel Kahneman found about pleasure and pain—that people were willing to endure pain longer if the ending was relatively pleasant—was found in the narrow context of painful medical procedures, such as colonoscopies. Does this same principle apply to life itself? Psychological scientist Ed Diener found that it does. Diener started with the following straightforward question: Do additional years of lower quality among elderly people enhance or detract from their perceived overall quality of life? In other words, he investigated whether people judge it better to have a shorter life that ends on a high note versus a longer life with an end that is marked by misery and discomfort.

pleasure and pain end preference found to be present when doing a life evaluation. Perceived a better life when dying before they get really bad.

The AARP Foundation has a program called Experience Corps, which matches older adults as tutors in public schools for economically disadvantaged children. The program has had a positive impact on the children in the ways you might imagine—improved literacy, increased test scores, and improved classroom and social behavior. It also has a positive impact on the volunteers. In one study, volunteers felt a greater sense of accomplishment than a group of control participants and had increases in brain volume for the hippocampus and cortex, compared to the controls, who had brain volume reductions. This was particularly true of male volunteers, who showed a reversal of three years of aging over two years of volunteering.

interesting program and could be the basis for some alt. education programs. Mutually beneficial for the parties involved.