Sleep and Brain Fitness

Several weeks ago, I had the opportunity to talk about brain fitness at a meeting of the Miami Rotary. After my talk, there were lots of questions. Several of the questions had to do with sleep and brain fitness. All of the questions seemed pretty good, so I thought I would answer them here in case other folks are interested. The first question is about sleep and brain fitness.

How we sleep changes as we get older. Many people over 50 feel as though that they don’t sleep as well as they used to. Their perception is supported by research evidence. Studies of sleep and aging show that how people sleep change as people get older. The normal cycles of light sleep, deep sleep, and rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep don’t occur in the same way. Deep sleep is often associated with feeling rested when you get up in the morning, and studies show that older people may not get as much deep sleep. It may take you longer to get asleep, and you may wake up more often during the night.

Older adults may get sleepy earlier and take more naps during the day. It’s not unusual for me to see people who complain about waking up too early in the morning. When I ask about their sleep, though, I find out that they go to bed at 9:00 PM and wake up at 3:00 AM. It’s true that’s a little early – but often these folks take a two-hour nap in the afternoon. They get eight hours of sleep, but it’s distributed in a different way. Although it’s sometimes hard to stop taking naps entirely, it’s often helpful to try to keep them to a minimum. If you sleep a lot during the day, you may not sleep very well at night.

So what about brain fitness and sleep? Study after study has shown that sleep deprivation affects your mental abilities and mood. So if you feel as though you can’t concentrate or work as well as you’d like after you don’t get enough sleep, it’s probably true. This may be especially true for tasks that require attention for a long time. Some of those kinds of tasks are harder for older adults to begin with, and may be even harder if you don’t sleep. Don’t think that you can’t function at all if you don’t sleep well – you’ll usually be able to function. But odds are you won’t function as well as you would like.

Psychomotor Speed

“Life goes by pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” – Ferris Bueller in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

One ability that is usually measured in studies of cognitive aging is “psychomotor speed.” It’s often considered as a separate ability and has been shown to decline with increasing age. What is it, and why is it important?

Psychomotor speed means being able to coordinate thinking fast with doing something fast. Driving a car is an obvious example. You have to move your eyes and your head to know what’s going on around you. You have to think about what your car is doing, and what other drivers, pedestrians, and animals are going to do. And you have to respond to what you see by doing something such as pressing the brake or accelerator pedals, turning the steering wheel, or using the turn signal. The “psycho” in psychomotor refers to the thinking part of this skill, while the “motor” part refers to doing something with your muscles, like hitting the break when you see a ball bouncing into the street. When you’re younger, you’re generally able to do this sort of thing much more quickly than you can as you get older. Some studies show that psychomotor speed starts declining in someone’s 20s, and continues to decline with age.

Like Ferris Bueller says, “life goes by pretty fast.” A lot of things go by pretty fast, and declines in psychomotor speed affect more than just driving ability. Another example that isn’t quite as obvious is your ability to understand conversations. You may not think about it this way, but understanding what people are saying requires that you take in all sorts of sounds, sort out what’s meaningful from what’s noise, and then figure out what a speaker is saying based on this complex of sound and meaning. And you have to do all of this pretty quickly, before the next volley of sound comes at you. Some people believe that this is one of the issues that causes older people to say they have trouble understanding conversation. It’s not just having problems in hearing (that can often be helped with a hearing aid) but also with speed of processing or psychomotor speed.

Since psychomotor speed is something that can be improved with training, it may be possible for older people to improve it in ways that might help in everyday life. Both auditory (hearing) and visual speed training are included in many computer brain training programs.