Thursday, 09 March 2006

Just a couple of months after reports of discoveries about previously unknown flexibility and agility of aging brains, new research tools appear to be helping researchers dispel even more old myths about elder brain power.

“For one thing, neurons don’t abandon ship. ‘It used to be thought that normal cognitive decline occurred because of loss of neuron throughout the brain,’ says Marilyn Albert of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. But new techniques show that most regions hold on to their neurons (and even 70-year-olds produce new neurons), with little to no loss in the hippocampus, where memories form, or the front cortex, site of such executive functions as planning and judgement.”

- The Wall Street Journal, 3 March 2006

That’s not to say that there is not decline as years pass (although at recent rates of new findings if this might not be refuted too one day). Elders process information more slowly and have more trouble multitasking than younger people.

But in one test of short-term memory comparing people in one group age 19 to 30 and another age 60 to 77, one-third of the older group did just as well as the younger ones and showed the same pattern of focused brain activity.

“Apparently,” writes WSJ reporter, Sharon Begley, “trouble inhibiting irrelevant information and blocking distractions, which impairs short-term memory and reasoning, is not as inevitable as had been thought."

Researchers are now thinking that perhaps brain decline attributed in the past to aging has more to do with the different kind of life that elders live:

“The elderly tend to have fewer new experiences, be less physically active and socially engaged, and live in less complex environments. All of these impair the production of new neurons and the maintenance of neural circuitry.

“’The trouble with retirement is, there are not a lot of social and intellectual demands,’ says research psychologist Denise Park of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ‘Life becomes routinized,’ a recipe for cognitive decline.”

And that is something over which elders have control. The same advice we’ve heard many times applies: use it or lose it. Another recently-published study found that old brains can be trained to behave like young ones, showing improvement in only five hours of training. Perhaps, soon, we’ll have computer programs to help with that.

Blogging is an excellent brain activity. As reported here before, studies from Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide show:

1. Blogs can promote critical and analytical thinking.

2. Blogging can be a powerful promoter of creative, intuitive, and associational thinking.

3. Blogs promote analogical thinking.

4. Blogging is a powerful medium for increasing access and exposure to quality information.

5. Blogging combines the best of solitary reflection and social interaction.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if researchers would investigate the difference between elderbloggers’ brains and the brains of elders who don’t blog.

[Thank you to John Franklin for forward The Wall Street Journal piece.]

More Good News

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Wow…is that welcome news. I just started a blog a couple of weeks ago. There’s hope I can retain the neurons! Makes sense to me if the brain is a muscle...'exercise it to keep it in shape!' :)

why I sometimes put the mugs in the refrigerator:-)