Not Older … Smarter!
As if I need to be reminded of how old I am and am getting, I make daily visits to Ronni Bennett’s Time Goes By. Ronni continually captures and portrays the essence, the hope, the inevitability, and occasionally, the despair of aging. She always does so with just the right mix of professional clarity, seasoned introspection, and personal grace.
In this post Ronni explores brain power and aging. As always with her work, the entire piece is interesting, but this comment jumped off the screen at me:
The more you believe memory loss and thinking ability will decline as you get older, the more likely they will.
Now, if I’m reading that correctly, we’re talking about a “mind over matter” concept. Think it, believe it, and it will be so. Further, if we can will a decline in memory loss and thinking ability, then is the converse true? Do thinking and believing we will become smarter as we age actually make that come true? Or is the flip-side of loss, in this case, not gain but staying even … no loss?
Check back here in 10 years. I’ll let you know.
Either way, triggering gain or avoiding loss, this is the reasoning behind the recommendations to keep our minds busy, active, and engaged. Reading, writing, solving puzzles, and yes, even blogging will probably help us avoid or at least delay a loss of brain power as we age, and if we believe it strongly enough, maybe even make us smarter. Experts say we are using only a fraction of our mental capacity. I like the speculation that in the future we will learn how to harness and use more of it, perhaps including telepathic abilities, mind-over-matter powers, and compartmentalization of thought and problem solving processes. I can’t wait to try my first Vulcan Mind Meld! Any volunteers? Ronni?
2 Comments so far
Did you ever read about the infamous ‘Nun Study’?
http://www.neurologyreviews.com/may01/nr_may01_ad.html
Winston, the quotation above is a summation of ongoing memory research projects with old people, most particularly by Becca Levy at Yale with colleagues from other universities who have been studying older people’s brains and minds (some longitudinally over long periods of time) for many years now. It’s not just opinion.
In normal aging (that is, barring dementia) the only difference Levy and others have found in older brains is that after 50 we learn new skills a bit more slowing than younger people, but having learned them, we retain them just as long.
It’s not so much a matter of will as belief: if you accept the belief and expectation of our ageist culture that aging causes memory loss and decline in intellectual ability, you are more likely to have that happen. To me, that’s the top reason to fight back against ageism.
Regarding the Nun Study, which focuses primarily on the possible causes of Alzheimer’s Disease, findings so far show that positive emotions early in life and an active intellectual life seem to protect against Alzheimer’s. But Snowden - the director of the ongoing study - cautions that cause and effect are hard to winkle out.
And, it’s a much more complex study that I’ve summarized in one paragraph, but I’d not label it “infamous.” It’s an important study that is giving researchers some clues to preventing this terrible disease.