What are the basics? I think they start with essential health care that will make sure your brain is in a health body. Maybe the single most important basic is to take care of your blood pressure. Besides being a risk factor for heart attack, high blood pressure is a risk for stroke. Studies have suggested that high blood pressure is a risk factor memory problems. You should know your blood pressure, and if it’s high, you should discuss it with your doctor. A number of effective treatments are available for high blood pressure. You can find out more about high blood pressure on the web site of the American Heart Association by clicking here.

One risk for memory problems that seems to be more and more common is the metabolic syndrome. The metabolic syndrome is a group of characteristics that includes abdominal obesity (fat around the waist), problems with blood lipids (the special substances in the blood that carry fats around the blood stream), insulin resistance (your body doesn’t take care of sugar very well), and increases in the substances in your blood that cause blood clots. People with the metabolic syndrome may be at higher risk for diabetes and heart attacks. The American Heart Association also has a good page on metabolic syndrome here. It may be possible to reduce the effects of the metabolic syndrome by maintaining a health weight, getting regular exercise, and following a healthy diet.

We know that the basics include a lot of things we’ve been hearing for years. What has become more clear over the past few years is that there are clear reasons for the links among obesity, low physical activity, and several diseases. One of the most intriguing links is the fact that all these conditions are associated with markers of inflammation in the blood. Inflammatory markers have complicated names like cytokines and interleukins. You don’t have to know all the specific names to know that high levels of these markers go along with memory problems. More and more, then, there’s a clear link between your basic health and your brain’s fitness.

Cognitive Aging refers to how our mental capacities change over time. It may seem as though all of our abilities go downhill after age 30 or 40, but research shows that isn’t completely true. The truth is that some abilities decline over time, some stay about the same, and some actually improve as we get older. For example, psychomotor speed is an ability in which most people perform more poorly over time. The precise definition of psychomotor speed varies from study to study, but it’s often assessed by tests that ask you to do some kind of task that requires that you think and to something with your hands as quickly as you can. One task is called a pegboard. A piece of metal attached to a block of wood has rows of holes in it, a little like the kind of pegboard you might put up in your workshop to hold tools. The person being evaluated is asked to put small metal pegs in the board as quickly as he or she can. This is the sort of thing that younger persons in general do much better than older persons do.

Another ability that may decline over time is called working memory. This ability is usually assessed by asking someone to keep a couple of things in their minds and then do something with them. The person being evaluated might be given a series of numbers and then asked to repeat them backwards –  he or she has to remember the numbers and then somehow mentally read them backwards. Being asked to do mental arithmetic problems also taps working memory. Here, the person being assessed might have to remember some elements of the problem that are given, might have to access some existing knowledge (like how many quarts are in a gallon), and then do a calculation.

What abilities may actually get better over time? Things that don’t require speed or working memory, but may benefit from life experience. The most common example is vocabulary. Many older adults score better than their younger counterparts on tests of how many words they know. Older adults probably have had more opportunities to learn words, and once a word is in long-term memory, older adults can recall it pretty well. Some people have also suggested that because of the benefits of experience, older adults are better able to discern patterns in events around them. Finally, some research has shown that older adults are better than younger persons at certain kinds of problem solving, especially when it involves social skills or awareness of social issues.

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.