Archive for March, 2007
Elkhonon Goldberg has written an interesting book (The Wisdom Paradox) about how our minds change as we get older. Most of us think that things get worse, but Goldberg argues that some things may get better. Interesting?
Goldberg spends some time in the book reviewing what we know about how mental abilities change as we get older. This is usually called cognitive aging. People often think that our mental abilities get worse as we get older, but many people don’t know that some things may actually get better. Things that ask us to work quickly (psychomotor speed) or keep several things in mind at once (working memory) are performed more poorly as we get older, it’s true. But things like knowing words, general knowledge, and judgment may actually get better.
That’s where Dr. Goldberg’s book comes in. He argues that life experience can help us to recognize patterns around us, and that these patterns are what make up wisdom. For those of us over 50, it means that we can often figure out things faster than our younger counterparts. They may be able to do some things faster, true, but it may take them longer to figure things out. Older people can take longer if they have to figure out something new, but can work more efficiently when it’s something they’ve seen before.
Now that might sound good and bad. You can cope with old situations pretty well, but new ones can be challenging. What does it mean overall?
First, think about how many really new situations you have to cope with. Buying a car? Did that one a couple of times. Buying a house, investing money, coping with difficult family members? Been doing that one for decades. And research shows that older adults often do just as well or better than younger people in areas such as this.
Second, you need to know that even though some mental abilities are worse as you get older, it doesn’t mean that you lost them completely. You may not learn how to surf the Web on a computer as quickly as a 10 year old, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t. In fact, there’s more and more research that shows that older people can perform new tasks just as well if their unique needs are taken into account. My colleagues and I did a symposium on this topic last year (2005) at the meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, and it was pretty well attended.
So if you think about, it’s a good thing that younger people are quicker — they have a lot more to learn! It’s only fair to them. Otherwise, older persons’ abilities might put them at an unfair advantage.
The book is called The Wisdom Paradox. You can find it in our Amazon bookstore here.
If you’re interested in our symposium, contact me or leave a comment.
Latest
- Brain Fitness and The Mind of a Monk
- Brain Fitness Tip: Training Without a Computer
I saw an interesting blog post yesterday evening on the site of the Huffington Post about the potential benefits of meditation – or at least about what one woman thinks might be the benefits. (more…)
Although many people are excited about the potential for using computers to train their brains, we shouldn’t forget that other techniques have been used to the train the brain for many centuries. I’m thinking about the large number of techniques for meditation. While free computer software still requires an investment in a computer, meditation only asks you to sit or lie quietly and focus your mind.
A recently-published study shows parts of the brain in long-term meditators are larger than the same parts of the brain in people who don’t meditate. The article by Eileen Luders and her colleagues appeared in a recent issue of the journal Neuroimage (Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 672-678, April 15, 2009). The study showed that portions of the orbitofrontal cortex and the hippocampus were larger in persons who had been regular meditators for 5 or more years. The study is interesting because the parts of the brain that were larger are often thought to be important in helping people keep themselves emotionally balanced.
A number of strategies are likely to be helpful for meditators. There has been a great deal of interest over the last several years in mindfulness meditation. Researchers have studied how it can be used in reducing anxiety and depression. Mindfulness is based on Buddhist meditation (for a brief article, click here) but you don’t have to be a Buddhist to practice meditation. In fact, one of the most important persons who has promoted mindfulness is Jon Kabat-Zinn, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts. You can see a video presentation by him on YouTube by clicking here.