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every decade after our fortieth birthday, our brains spend more time contemplating our own thoughts versus taking in information from the external environment.
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.
Studies have disproven the old folk wisdom that a multilingual child is only a fraction as good at each of the languages it speaks—the different languages coexist in the brain and don’t take away from one another. In other words, it’s not like you’ve got a maximum capacity for a vocabulary of thirty thousand words that needs to be shared among the three or four languages you speak; each language gets its own vocabulary storage space in the brain, and no one has yet found a limit.
Although no one has done these experiments with humans, human children who are born without sight in one eye and have it restored after the critical period (by removing a cataract, for example) never develop depth perception either.
Now, with declining efficacy of the prefrontal cortex and the medial temporal lobe, along with overall shrinking brain volume and white-matter reduction, you can see why older adults can find it more difficult to integrate and act on the information coming in from multiple sources, and why they find multitasking especially difficult.
Some early evidence suggests that chronic inflammatory processes feed existing Alzheimer’s disease, or perhaps even cause it. Some researchers have suggested that taking NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) as much as ten years before the expected onset of Alzheimer’s symptoms might be advisable, but a great deal of further work needs to be done—we don’t know what other negative effects may accrue from such chronic use of NSAIDs.
Neuroplasticity does not seem to slow down nearly as much for older adults who have been making demands on their brains to think differently and rewire for many years. If you’re involved in the creative arts—painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, writing, music, and other forms of creativity—you’ve been exercising your brain, pushing your brain, in interesting ways all along because every project you undertake requires new adaptations, some way of looking at the world differently, and then acting on it. And it’s not limited to the creative arts—any job or hobby that requires you to interact
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One of the most protective things you can do against aging is to learn a manual skill when you’re young and keep it up. The next best thing you can do is to start learning something new when you’re old.
It’s not just that older adults are slower at doing many things; it’s that they are slower at adjusting to new things. If you are thinking that there might be a correlation between this and the tendency for older adults to become more politically conservative—to want things to stay the way they are—you might be on to something.
Half of adults over the age of seventy-five report hearing loss and one in six report vision loss. A whopping 90 percent of people over the age of fifty-five wear glasses; only one in six Americans with hearing loss wears hearing aids, and not wearing hearing aids is associated with an increased risk of hospitalization in older adults.
health span is about the health not just of your body but of your mind as well. I believe we can all stretch the health span to enjoy many more years of mental fitness and agility so that we can still do the things in life we care most about with intact intelligence.
COACH principle are partly responsible for people with increased health spans: Curiosity, Openness, Associations, Conscientiousness, and Healthy practices.
integrate these challenges. 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).
When a situation is perceived as being stressful (because it is novel, unpredictable, uncontrollable, or painful), two major classes of stress hormones are secreted, catecholamines and glucocorticoids.
‘What is this I that you speak of? This is not in our teaching!’ And she became quiet. And I asked, ‘Tell me about this I that is so unhappy—where is it?’ She pointed to her chest. I said, ‘What shape is it? A triangle? A square? A circle?’ She said, ‘It’s a circle.’ I said, ‘Okay. Imagine the circle in your chest. Meditate on it. Don’t let it move one centimeter to the left or to the right.’ She closed her eyes and focused on it. After a few moments she whispered, ‘It disappeared!’ And we both laughed.” The disciple awakened to the realization that she did not exist and since she did not
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Ambien, Ativan, and Halcion, can actually cause depression
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. Even relatively neutral activities furnish almost the same magnitude of benefits—things like looking at art, reading a book, taking a leisurely walk in natural surroundings, or spending time with pets.
Higher estrogen is also related to increased competitiveness and possibly to reduced fearfulness.
Elevated progesterone is also associated with quicker reading of facial cues and body language and quicker categorization of friends versus potential enemies.
There is a tendency as we age to resist change, owing to a variety of factors. Depletion of dopamine and deterioration of dopamine receptors in the brain lead to a lack of novelty seeking—we’re chemically less motivated to look for new experiences or to learn new things. Bodily and cognitive limitations make learning and doing new things more difficult. And memory! Our memories and perceptions are based on millions of observations of things being a certain way; our prediction circuits are basing their calculations on what happened over and over again in the past. The intact memory system
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Often, all it takes is someone pointing out to you that you can change your brain and that you can overcome limitations you’ve encountered previously, not just with effort, but with focused, directed learning (this is why education works).
Beyond effort, learners need to try new strategies and to seek help from others when they’re stuck. Having a repertoire of approaches and perspectives to draw on enriches your mental life and can spur that much-needed motivation. Without these things, knowledge tends to stagnate.
Happiness may also be subject to an observer distortion effect in that trying to assess it all the time may actually interfere with it. Probing happiness stops the flow of activity and pulls you out of time to inspect it. And the one constant of happy people seems to be that they don’t think about happiness—they’re too busy doing things and being happy to stop and think about it. Happiness therefore is a judgment made in retrospect.
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.
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, decries the “corrosive individualism” that has infected modern society. He documents what he sees as an unhealthy and mounting trend toward political apathy, retreat from church attendance, eroding union membership, and the decline of bridge clubs and dinner parties, volunteering and blood donation.
psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin have been shown to decrease feelings of both loneliness and depression, with lasting effects, and ketamine has been shown to provide relief, although the relief seems to be only short-term.
lower dopamine uptake leads to increased impulsiveness and hatred of monotony.
Parents living in poverty, suffering from mental illness, or facing great stress are much more likely to be exhausted, irritable, and anxious. These conditions are transferred in the interactions between such parents and their children.
rates of autism among children raised in Mexico, as well as Hispanic and Latino children raised in the United States, are significantly lower than they are for “white” US children.
ingredients of happiness. 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.
When time is perceived as open-ended—as it is for most young people—goals are most likely to be preparatory, and we spend time on things that will optimize the future—for example, gathering information, pushing ourselves to find our limits, and seeking new skills. Young adults often place great emphasis on activities that will help them later; after all, what is school if not the prime example of things that don’t really help you in the moment? In contrast, when constraints on time are perceived, goals focus more on meaningful activities that can take place in the present. As a consequence,
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Freud said that the two most important things in life are healthy relationships and meaningful work.
Try to find social situations that respect older adults and a role that allows you to contribute your accumulated knowledge and wisdom to a community organization whose goals you admire. And when you can, go outside. Go outside. Go outside.
Pain also has an emotional, affective component; that is, we don’t consider it pain unless we experience it as unwanted and undesirable.
There are even placebo effects in acupuncture, where sham needling at nonacupuncture insertion points is as effective as actual acupuncture, with effects lasting up to one year.
Fifty percent of modern NSAID prescriptions are for osteoarthritis, the most common form of arthritis, and the most prevalent pain condition in the United States, affecting around 30 million people. The most used NSAID worldwide is diclofenac and it is available as a pill, a gel, a cream, and a patch; it is currently the most effective treatment for osteoarthritis, with nearly 100 percent of patients reporting at least moderate relief from arthritic pain. The availability of a diclofenac patch has signaled a new promise for patients. The gels and creams are meant only to be absorbed by the
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Glucosamine is commonly taken by older adults for arthritis, but the scientific results are actually inconclusive. In the United States it is considered a “dietary supplement,” not a drug, and so its manufacture and use are not regulated, and it is illegal to advertise it for medical conditions. As with many supplements, its popularity is based on unsubstantiated claims infused with a lot of technical jibber-jabber that only superficially resembles scientific language and is carefully designed to persuade naive consumers. Glucosamine is a natural compound found in cartilage—the tissue that
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There is some early evidence that yoga can bring real and lasting pain relief. Yoga practice enlarges the insula, giving patients greater ability to tolerate pain. Mild exercise can reduce pain too—as Jeffrey Mogil says, “Exercise is the best analgesic we know of by a wide margin. The problem is that when you’re in pain it hurts to exercise. But if you can get past that, it really helps.”
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. There are a number of cases of older adults being shunted off to an old age home not because they have become mentally incapacitated, as well-intentioned family and friends might think, but because of polypharmaceutical complications.
removal of foreign compounds from the body and blood (xenobiotic detoxification).
Why do individuals have different chronotypes? To quote Shakespeare, “Some must watch while some must sleep.” From an evolutionary standpoint, consider what life was like for our ancestors ten or twenty thousand years ago. Sleep was necessary for survival, and yet it was a time when we were especially vulnerable to attack by animal predators and violent humans, as well as the occasional hurricane or erupting volcano. The sentinel hypothesis is that when living in groups, animals share the task of nighttime vigilance, some watching over those who sleep.
brains show stark degeneration of the hypothalamus’s
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. Remember: it is not a sleeping pill—it just resets your biological clock, which is not the same thing.
Maybe what’s really going on is that following a diet, any diet, causes you to pay more attention to the foods you’re eating—to engage in mindfulness—and that’s where their effectiveness is, not in the particulars. In this respect, all diets involve some kind of lifestyle change. People on a diet typically increase their physical activity at the same time, and that is likely to be a much more important lifestyle change than the actual composition of the foods one eats.
As with fish oil, a supplementation industry grew out of the nascent findings of red wine’s potential health effects. Researchers identified a chemical in red wine that you may have read about called resveratrol. Resveratrol has antioxidant properties and in animals reduces hypertension, heart failure, and ischemic heart disease, and it improves insulin sensitivity and reduces blood glucose levels and high-fat-diet-induced obesity. However, systematic reviews conclude that there is insufficient evidence that resveratrol supplements could prevent disease or extend life in humans. That said,
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We already know that serotonin is an important neuroregulator of mood, memory, and anxiety. 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.
Our gut microorganisms produce other essential neurotransmitters too. Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium create gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), an important inhibitory chemical, as we saw in Chapter 2. Escherichia coli, Bacillus, and Saccharomyces produce norepinephrine, which is important for alertness; Bacillus and Serratia produce dopamine. Bifidobacterium infantis increases levels of tryptophan, an important precursor to serotonin, melatonin, and vitamin B3. Lactobacillus acidophilus increases the expression of the natural cannabinoid and opioid receptors in the brain, affecting appetite,
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If memory evolved to help us with spatial navigation, the reason that very young children have no memories is because they are not moving around and interacting with the environment very much. Although children, even before they can walk, are eager to explore the space around them, it appears that the onset of walking triggers neurochemical activity in the hippocampus, prompting the hippocampal place cells and grid cells to begin their internal mapping of the environment.
Alzheimer’s disease occurs when a certain kind of protein, amyloid, builds up in the brain, where it forms clumps that collect between neurons, which in turn disrupt cell function. During proper, restorative sleep, these amyloid deposits get cleaned out of the brain through the action of the cerebrospinal fluid. When you’re sleep-deprived—either from short duration or poor-quality sleep—these amyloid deposits don’t get cleaned out, and they tend to selectively attack regions in the brain responsible for sleep, which then makes it even more difficult to sleep and, consequently, more difficult
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Melatonin levels in the blood are highest in young people (55–75 pg/ml) and start to decline after the age of forty, with the fastest decrease found from sixty years of age onward, reaching very low levels in the elderly (18–40 pg/ml). New research suggests that melatonin may have protective effects against many cancers, which may be part of the reason that as people age—and melatonin levels go down—they are more susceptible to cancers.
