Posted on 12/17/2007 9:29:40 PM PST by neverdem
My husband, at 74, is the baby of his bridge group, which includes a woman of 85 and a man of 89. This challenging game demands an excellent memory (for bids, cards played, rules and so on) and an ability to think strategically and read subtle psychological cues. Never having had a head for cards, I continue to be amazed by the mental agility of these septua- and octogenarians.
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.
But when these sharp old folks die, autopsy studies often reveal extensive brain abnormalities like those in patients with Alzheimer’s. Dr. Nikolaos Scarmeas and Yaakov Stern at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center recall that in 1988, a study of “cognitively normal elderly women” showed that they had “advanced Alzheimer’s disease pathology in their brains at death.” Later studies indicated that up to two-thirds of people with autopsy findings of Alzheimer’s disease were cognitively intact when they died.
“Something must account for the disjunction between the degree of brain damage and its outcome,” the Columbia scientists deduced. And that something, they and others suggest, is “cognitive reserve.”
Cognitive reserve, in this theory, refers to the brain’s 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-related brain pathology that accompanies normal aging.
Exercise:...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
This is the first of two columns on memory.
I can’t remember what I had for dinner.
Dominoes and ROOK was my POPS favorite.
But do you really want to remember what you had for dinner?
My dad and mom who are in their upper 80s kick butt on Boggle (and I scored in the top 1% in the verbal section of the GRE).
Sirloin from Omaha Steak, I'll have to think about it.
bookmark
But do you really want to remember what you had for dinner?
I didn't say that.
The brain needs exercise.
We have a saying that it’s ok if you forget where the keys are all the time. When you don’t know what the key is for though there is a problem.
The brain synapses of a child are new and very impressionable.
when one gets much, much older, our brains are ‘full’ , and ‘used’.
The synapses don’t hold a new or temporary memory as well, and require repeated imprinting to hold the memory.
It was a dictionary for Scrabble and it was for my daughter and my granddaughter to share when they get together...
They need to establish a mental reserve in Seattle!
Try taking the supplement Pycnogenol. It's been the object of several medical studies. Good for your vascular system and oxygenation of the brain. I've been taking it for years as it helps keep blood sugars from spiking and dropping radically. I'm hypoglycemic and haven't had a situation where I've started shaking when my blood sugar drops since I started taking it. My memory is great now and it seems to help me with that feeling that my brain is in a fog.
I’m working with my daughter’s Nintendo DS and “Brain Age”. I am dead serious when I tell you that I have stopped having the mom moments since working on it.
In my family, you either get cancer and die by 60 or have horrible “Old timers disease” as my aunt calls it. I’m hoping to avoid both.
I think I may be drawing from this reserve "thing", pushing other memories to the back of the shelf. These "lost memories" seem to be recoverable...but it's almost like I have refiled them elsewhere and have to "research" their whereabouts.
I picked out a great book on snowboarding for my daughter - in fact, it was so great that I bought it last year, too. By the time I remembered, I had already wrapped and sent it !
and now the rest of my story. When I got all done my wife told me I had bought the electronic version last year!...
No big deal. That's just being an absent minded professor.
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