by Rick Téllez BRAIN DECLINE BEGINS AT AGE 27! Or says a study from the University of Virginia. The seven years study, headed by Timothy Salthouse, indicates adults achieve their peak mental performance around 22 and mental decline starts as soon as age 27. Most of us believe it is inevitable — one day or another our mental abilities are going to shift into reverse. The University of Virginia study seems to confirm that we become slower, less attentive, and more rigid. Unfortunately, this process starts before age 30! But here’s the good news: in the 21st century we have the tools to avoid brain decline. Not only can we stop brain decline, we can even reverse if we know how and if we are willing to make the effort! THE PROBLEM OF AGING Brain performance decreases with age in several cognitive skills: Attention decreases. The result is that we have difficulties concentrating on a single thing. It may happen that we are reading a book and after a while, we have to move back and re-read it because we did not pay attention to what we were reading along the last minute. Our ability to analyze at the same time different pieces of information decreases, this means, our working memory performance is lower, and it is more difficult for us to hold in the mind different information at the same time. Decline in the short-term memory makes us more forgetful. We forget things that we did not forget before, things like where did we put the keys, what is the name of a known person or where did we park the car. Processing speed decreases. It takes us longer to understand things and to make decisions. As a consequence, many people feel reticent to learn new things because they find it more difficult. They would rather rely on what they already know. But avoiding to learn new things accelerates brain decline. An interesting paradox: brain decline promotes brain decline! WHY DECLINE HAPPENS There are many reasons why brain performance decreases with age, including nutrition and genes, but the most basic reason is simply we do not challenge ourselves. Around peak performance age many of us have already constructed most of our mental automatic systems, those are, structures of thinking that allow us to easily move in the world. You can call them habits. From that age on, we rely on habits for doing almost everything. We feel comfortable using them because we know how they work and what the expected results will be. Hence, we repeat them once and again to solve the same things. Once we have built our set of habits, we have created our personal comfort zone. The comfort zone is that psychological place were we feel safe and that we control the situation. We know what to do if something happens. We know how to solve the problems that lie within the zone. It is our zone of (mental) relax. Everything we do in life is related to the creation of our comfort zone. Above everything, we want to be comfortable. Until we achieve this, we work hard and challenge ourselves. Once achieved, we decide to stay within it, making challenge and effort disappear from our lives. Moving only within our comfort zone has two side effects in the brain: One, it strengthens the brain connections of the habits we repeat. This means that the more we do the same thing, the more we are condemned to do it again. So we stay within our comfort zone. We avoid using and training of our other abilities that lie outside that zone. Two, the capacity of the brain to create new neurons and connections (called neurogenesis) decreases because we don’t use it to learn new things. Again, the effect is that it will be even more difficult for us to create new connections, that is, learn new things. At this point, moving away from that comfort zone is very difficult because we have a limited...
10 Longevity Secrets of a 103-Year-Old Bon Vivant...
posted by Dave Bunnell
HARRY ROSEN IS 103. He lives alone in a studio apartment on West 57th Street in Manhattan. His hearing has declined and he a bit far-sighted but his mind is as sharp as most men half his age. Still, he doesn’t remember the last evening he didn’t go out for dinner at one of the city’s top-rated restaurants. It’s been too many years. People say Harry doesn’t look a day over 90, and indeed when people ask him his age, he tells them he is 90. He’s never had a major operation and as far as he knows there is nothing wrong with him. And yes, every single afternoon Harry dresses up in one of his fine business suits, grabs his satchel, and heads out to hail a cab to one of his favorite dining establishments. He eats alone but the waiters always know who he is and patrons at nearby tables almost always strike up a conversation with him. Twice a week Harry goes to David Burke’s Townhouse on East 61st Street where a server greets him, escorts him to his usual corner table, brings him a glass of chardonnay and his usual appetizer of raw salmon and tuna. Harry was recently profiled in The New York Times. The article makes for fascinating reading, the writer refers to Harry as the city’s “oldest foodie,” but there are no direct refers to any of his longevity secrets. Yet, reading through the lines, I’ve come up with a list of Harry Rosen’s 10 longevity secrets, which follows: Harry always orders fish. For a non-Eskimo he has unusually high levels of omega-3 fats in his diet. His omega-3/omega-6 ratio must be highly favorable to reducing any risk of heart disease or dementia. Harry’s daily routine never varies–this keeps his life stress free....
This Baby Will Live to be 120: National Geographic Jumps on Longevity Bandwagon...
posted by Dave Bunnell
“Our genes harbor many secrets to a long and healthy life. And now scientists are beginning to uncover them. IN A FIELD historically marred by exaggerated claims and dubious entrepreneurs hawking unproven elixirs, scientists studying longevity have begun using powerful genomic technologies, basic molecular research, and, most important, data on small, genetically isolated communities of people to gain increased insight into the maladies of old age and how they might be avoided. In Calabria, Ecuador, Hawaii, and even in the Bronx, studies are turning up molecules and chemical pathways that may ultimately help everyone reach an advanced age in good, even vibrant, health.” National Geographic’s May 2013 issue contains one of the most thoroughly researched and interesting articles on longevity ever published. We highly recommend you read this article Also, because National Geographic’s editors couldn’t decide what race of baby to put on the cover and ended up publishing several versions, they also created a FACEBOOK app that lets you put your own face on a National Geographic cover. We tried it out and it works great! (see below) If you’d like to try this, click...
Improve Your Memory by Listening to White Noise While You Sleep...
posted by Dave Bunnell
If you’re not willing to send electrical shocks through your brain – “mild” as they might be – to become smarter, here’s a much gentler option: play sounds while you sleep. Researchers have found that “carefully timed” sounds, like the rise and fall of waves washing against the shore, can help people remember things that they learned the previous day. I predict sales of white noise machines to increase in the near future. In the human brain a network of neurons are often activated together. The collective rise and fall of activity of the network produces oscillations, the lines we see in an EEG. At different times the brain oscillates at different frequencies. During sleep the brain produces slow, <1 Hz oscillations – hence the term “slow-wave sleep” – and these oscillations are thought to be important for consolidating memories. The idea that the scientists at the University of Tübingen in Germany wanted to test was whether or not auditory stimulation that boosted the slow-wave oscillations also boosted memory. The study included 11 people who learned word associations right before they went to bed. Their word association memory was tested before they went to sleep and then again the following day. While they slept, they were played short durations of pink noise, a hissing sound similar to white noise. Importantly, the pink noise sounds were timed to the sleeping person’s “slow-wave” brain oscillations. When the individuals received the pink noise stimulation they were able to remember twice as many word associations than without the stimulation. When they repeated the experiment with pink noise that was not synchronized to the slow-waves, they saw no improvement in memory. Monitoring the brain waves with EEG, the researchers also saw that the sound stimuli actually boosted the ongoing slow-wave oscillations. This led the researchers...
Lack of Biotechnology Only Limit on Human Longevity...
posted by Dave Bunnell
Are there limits on human longevity? Sure. Few people will make it past a hundred years of age in the environment of today’s medical technology – but today is today, and the technology of tomorrow will be a different story. If you want to talk about longevity and mortality rates, you have to qualify your position by stating what sort of applied biotechnologies are available. Longevity is a function of the quality and type of medicine that is available across a life span. It so happens that most of the advances in medicine achieved over the course of human history, the vast majority of which have occurred in the past fifty years, have solved problems that killed people early in life. Infectious disease, for example, is controlled to a degree that would have been thought utopian in the squalor of Victorian England. The things that kill older people are a harder set of challenges: great progress has been made in reducing mortality from heart disease in the past few decades, for example, but that is just one late stage consequence of the complex array of biochemical processes that we call aging. The point of this discussion? It is that tremendous progress in medicine, including the defeat or taming of many varied causes of death and disability, has not greatly lengthened the maximum human life span as experienced in practice. Read the rest of this article...