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On Aging Well (Part II)
By Alfred Norwood
Part I of this article was pointed toward helping you formulate a personal strategy to live until your 4th age (post 75). Now let’s see what that gets you. Think of this Part II as your first recon patrol into the 4th age. You want to take a look at where you are going before you get there. To do this, we have to look at our brain. Our body is just something we will wear in our 4th age, but our brain is what will determine what we do when we arrive there.
First the good news. To a large degree you and your brain control how well you age.
In a now famous study, 70-year-old men were invited to stay over a weekend with various of their peers. The only caveat was that they had to take IQ and dexterity tests and have photographs taken just after they arrived and just before they left three days later. Also they had to bring stuff from 20 years earlier, and, once they arrived, pretend it was 20 years earlier. The researchers supplied magazines, TV, and radio shows from 20 years ago, but the men had to talk to each other as if it really was 20 years ago.
The next week college students were shown the two photos of each man. The students were only told the photos had been taken at two points in time, and were asked to estimate in which photo the person was younger and by how many years. In every case the visage photographed after the weekend was deemed to be the younger by five years. Performance on IQ and dexterity tests were also higher for all the men after the weekend than they were before the weekend.
In a sampling of Ohio seniors, researchers found that those who had a positive self-image lived 7.5 years longer than those who did not. Another study found seniors with a positive self-image also had lower rates of dementia.
The moral of all this: In the 4th age you will probably be as old as your brain tells you you are.
And what does survey after survey find 4th-agers are most worried about? Dementia. Let us explore what dementia is and what you can do to avoid it.
To understand dementia you again have to know a little about your brain. Want to see what your brain looks like without making any incisions? Take both your hands and make like you’re praying. Now form both hands into fists so your thumbs are parallel to each other. Voila, there’s your left brain, your right brain, and over all a pretty darn accurate representation of your whole brain. (I know, you thought your brain would be larger, but, thankfully, quality is more important than quantity.)
If you now push your wrists together they represent your brain stem, or the part of the brain protruding up from your backbone. The meat of your hands, less fingers and thumbs, represents that majority of your brain which is devoted to unconscious or automatic behavior and the storage of random information.
For orientation you can draw little eyes and eyelashes on the knuckles of your thumbs. Your thumbs are the front of your brain and the visible top section of your fingers represents your frontal cortex. This is where consciousness is housed. It is the last evolving and last maturing part of the brain.
Your thumbs represent the part of the brain right behind your forehead (called the prefrontal cortex). Its main job is to inhibit stuff. For example it stops you from blurting out things you think about your mother–in–law. But it also inhibits passing unimportant sensory information to consciousness. Your prefrontal cortex has seen it all. In fact it has seen, heard, tasted, and touched it all. Since you were a baby It has learned, through repetition, which sounds, sights, etc. are important enough to send on for conscious processing and which can be ignored. For example it allows you to keep focused on what someone is telling you despite a siren wailing outside and other people talking nearby. This focus allows only important information to be sent to short-term memory; that part of consciousness in which you can actually interpret what to do with such information.
Short-term memory is assisted by another part of the brain called the hippocampus – a sort of file clerk for memory. As new stuff comes into consciousness, this file clerk instantly collects related information from other parts of the brain and brings it into consciousness.
The kicker is, that, with the possible exception of Timothy Leary, nobody has figured out how to expand the reach of consciousness. As a result we are all pretty much working with the same limited capacity for conscious thinking. Well, everybody except most 4th-agers. What I forgot to mention earlier is that as we age, most of us lose brain cells -- some in the prefrontal cortex, some in the frontal cortex, and some in the hippocampus. Depending on the size and rate of this loss we are either normal 4th-agers, or have mild cognitive impairment, or have dementia. Unfortunately, the majority of 4th-agers are in the latter two categories.I am assuming that you, like me, would prefer to be in the normal category. So the question becomes:
What can we do to retain as much of our conscious processing (cognitive) ability as possible?. The answer is: Do everything your mother told you to do when you were little.
Be nice to people and have lots of friends.
Humans who have a large social network suffer less dementia and gain more happiness than those who keep themselves alone. Research shows that people with lots of friends don’t have less brain loss than those who live alone, but that they are much less impacted by that brain loss, and score higher on tests which measure cognitive functioning.
Watching too much TV will rot your brain.
Research has shown that people who watched more television, especially soap operas -- not news or educational TV -- had higher rates of dementia than those who watched less. I was skeptical of this one, since my mom also said I would go blind from sitting too close to the TV.. I moved further back from the TV, but I still had to wear glasses.
Pay attention, you might learn something.
Well, always learning something new seems to be prophylactic to dementia and to cognitive decline in general. While all the areas of the brain used by consciousness are the first to decline as we age, they are the same areas of the brain that are capable of growing new brain cells even when we are old (a process called neurogenesis) including cells that can be induced to take over the role of cells that die (a process called plasticity). For more protection. go big: Learn a new language, learn to play a musical instrument, learn to dance. Research shows that people who do ballroom dancing or speak two languages have the very lowest incidence of dementia.
Get up off your big fat posterior and exercise.
Seniors (this also holds true for smaller posteriors) who elevate their heart rate for 30 minutes a day have a lower incidence of dementia than those who do not exercise. The same can be said of people who lift weights.
Jack LaLanne, who is a former Mr. America and 95 years old at this writing, recently told a reporter that he started every day with an hour of weight lifting and an hour and a half of aerobic exercise. I liked what his payoff was. He said he could still put a smile on his wife’s face, and I got the impression he wasn’t talking comedy.
Don’t eat that — eat what is good for you.
This sort of gets us back to my first article, in which I reported that being underweight and underfed increases experimental rats’ life spans. But as the rats said, “You call that living?”. If your lifespan goal is more modest, say just becoming a 4th-ager, you just have to eat well enough to avoid being overweight and/or getting diabetes. Generally speaking, the same things that are good for your brain are the same things that are good for your heart; lots of vegetables and fruits, more fish and less red meat, less refined sugars and less artificial trans fats.
Oh wait, I forgot. If you live in New York City it’s against the law to eat trans fats, so concentrate on the fish, fruit, and veggies. The next article of this series will discuss what you can do if my first two articles appeared too late for your cognitive salvation (or that of someone you love).
Alfred Norwood is the president of Behavior Science, Inc. His company works with nursing homes, hospitals, and home-care givers to improve their quality of care for dementia patients. He is the progenitor of Caregiver Rounds, a self-managed team approach to drug-free dementia care, and Sound and Loving Care, a similar program for family caregivers. For more information on either please call (800) 734-6186 or visit www.behaviorscience.com.
