My occupation for 38 years was a mainframe programmer in Assembler and COBOL; damned difficult problems were solved. My social connections are extensive. My aging brain at 70 is working great!
New study suggests the aging brain is adapting, not declining
Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten why you’re there? Or struggled to recall where you left your keys? These memory lapses aren’t unusual, especially as we age, but a new paper published this month in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science suggests there may be an overlooked biological reason for it.
“I think it’s provocative,” said Patricia Reuter-Lorenz, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan who conducted some of the studies cited in the new paper. “It’s taking a new step that’s building on ideas that have been in the literature on aging for several decades, including the idea that aging involves adaptive processes,” she said. Reuter-Lorenz’s work has pointed to older adults using their frontal cortex to compensate for the weakening of the hippocampus. But she said she is interested in the silver linings of old age and is currently studying emotion later in life. She said her work is “trying to understand the tendency for older adults to have a more positive outlook and better emotion regulation.” It is advancing existing research showing that older adults tend to focus more on the positive aspects of a situation, and remember them more than negative ones. Both Reuter-Lorenz and Fernandez say the idea of brain aging as an adaptive phase more than a declining one needs more study. A call for more research
How to help your brain age well
Regardless of whether scientists believe that the older brain is adapting to a new phase of life or compensating for decline, they suggest that there are ways we can all age better. In Fernandez’s paper, he and his colleagues write that older people who “engage in lifelong learning,
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