{"id":4035,"date":"2007-12-14T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-12-14T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/?p=4035"},"modified":"2025-09-25T18:40:28","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T18:40:28","slug":"how-to-postpone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/?p=4035","title":{"rendered":"How to postpone mental aging"},"content":{"rendered":"

The<\/strong> NY Times<\/strong> science section over the last two weeks had a two part series on memory and mental agility s you age. The first part wasn’t very useful – clever stuff like write yourself messages on post-it notes (duh!) but part 2 was interesting.<\/p>\n

Mental Reserves Keep Brains Agile<\/strong> Memory – Aging – Medicine & Health – New York Times<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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The brain, like every other part of the body, changes with age, and those changes can impede clear thinking and memory. Yet many older people seem to remain sharp as a tack well into their 80s and beyond. Although their pace may have slowed, they continue to work, travel, attend plays and concerts, play cards and board games, study foreign languages, design buildings, work with computers, write books, do puzzles, knit or perform other mentally challenging tasks that can befuddle people much younger.<\/p>\n

But when these sharp old folks die, autopsy studies often reveal extensive brain abnormalities like those in patients with Alzheimer\u2019s<\/span><\/a>. Dr. Nikolaos Scarmeas and Yaakov Stern at Columbia University Medical Center recall that in 1988, a study of \u201ccognitively normal elderly women\u201d showed that they had \u201cadvanced Alzheimer\u2019s disease pathology in their brains at death.\u201d Later studies indicated that up to two-thirds of people with autopsy findings of Alzheimer\u2019s disease were cognitively intact when they died. <\/p>\n

\u201cSomething must account for the disjunction between the degree of brain damage and its outcome,\u201d the Columbia scientists deduced. And that something, they and others suggest, is \u201ccognitive reserve.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cognitive reserve, in this theory, refers to the brain\u2019s ability to develop and maintain extra neurons and connections between them via axons and dendrites. Later in life, these connections may help compensate for the rise in dementia<\/span><\/a>-related brain pathology that accompanies normal aging. <\/p>\n

>>>>>><\/p>\n

Long-term studies in other countries, including Sweden and China, have also found that continued social interactions helped protect against dementia. The more extensive an older person\u2019s social network, the better the brain is likely to work, the research suggests. Especially helpful are productive or mentally stimulating activities pursued with other people, like community gardening, taking classes, volunteering or participating in a play-reading group.<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps the most direct route to a fit mind is through a fit body. As Sandra Aamodt, editor of Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton University<\/span><\/a>, recently stated on The New York Times\u2019s Op-Ed page, physical exercise \u201cimproves what scientists call \u2018executive function,\u2019 the set of abilities that allows you to select behavior that\u2019s appropriate to the situation, inhibit inappropriate behavior and focus on the job at hand in spite of distractions. Executive function includes basic functions like processing speed, response speed and working memory, the type used to remember a house number while walking from the car to a party.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although executive function typically declines with advancing years, \u201celderly people who have been athletic all their lives have much better executive function than sedentary people of the same age,\u201d Dr. Aamodt and Dr. Wang reported.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The NY Times science section over the last two weeks had a two part series on memory and mental agility s you age. The first part wasn’t very useful – clever stuff like write yourself messages on post-it notes (duh!) but part 2 was interesting. Mental Reserves Keep Brains Agile Memory – Aging – Medicine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-lymphoma-and-related-medical-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4035"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9365,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4035\/revisions\/9365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}