Posts Tagged ‘cognitive aging’
Why would you want to rewire your brain? Because the evidence suggests that doing things that cause basic changes in what you know or can do may be the most effective things you can do to increase your brain fitness.
Jean Piaget was a researcher who lived early in the 20th century and had a big impact on developmental psychology. He studied his own children and developed a theory of how mental abilities develop that has been extremely influential.
One of Piaget’s key ideas is that we organize information in mental structures called schemas. You might have a scheme for how a car works. You know about how gasoline is used and how the air intake and electrical systems work. Then maybe one day you learn about a problem with how the air filter works on your car. It would be new information, but you would easily be able to incorporate it into your overall schema of how a car works. When it’s easy to put information into an existing schema, Piaget called the process assimilation.
But something else could happen. What if in the next few years we all have electric cars? All your information about air filters and gas pumps would no longer be relevant. You would have to develop a new schema, or modify the existing car schema to have a new major category for electrical cars. When the new information means that you have modify an existing schema, Piaget called the process accommodation.
What does this have to do with brain fitness? If you look at the kind of activities that seem to be the best for increasing brain fitness, it looks as though they are activities that require accommodation rather than assimilation. It may be helpful to spend your time learning new vocabulary words (assimilating new information to the language you already know), but it may be better to spend time learning a new language (accommodating your existing schemas to include new ways of expressing meaning).
So my suggestion is that what’s best for brain training will be activities that are really new to you and make you change your habitual ways of thinking about or seeing world.
As part of my class on brain fitness at the Lifelong Learning Institute the past several weeks, I asked interested participants in the class to fill out the fourteen item Perceived Stress Scale. It’s a well known questionnaire used to evaluate someone’s level of stress. Items on the scale ask questions about how often a person encounters things that he or she can’t cope with, and also about how able the person feels to cope with stressors.
I’m interested in stress because lots of research shows that stress has a negative effect on memory. Ever since the pioneering studies of Robert Sapolsky, we’ve know that stress can harm the brain. Other research has shown a negative relation between level of stress and how well people do on memory tests.
Individuals in my class last year at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Miami did the same questionnaire. When we looked at how stress was related to how well those people did on a memory test, we saw what others have found. There was an inverse relation between stress and memory. As stress went up, memory went down.
An important part of any brain fitness program is developing a stress management program. By that I mean you should spend some time in identifying what kind of stressors you have and figure out what to do about them.
Good ways of coping with stress include avoiding the things that you can avoid (that third cup of coffee, or that family member who always upsets you) and then having a systematic way of dealing with the ones you can’t avoid.
Schedule challenging tasks for the time of day when you’ll have the most energy for them. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the things you have to do, make a list and work through them one by one. If a new task just seems overwhelming, break it down into a series of smaller tasks and work through them one by one.
Exercise and meditation help your body cope with stress as well. Regular aerobic exercise helps people manage stress. Remember to talk to your doctor about what kind and how much exercise is safe for you to do.
Meditation is deceptively simple: just stop for a few minutes a couple of times a day and spend some time breathing. For many people, I think meditation is a simple and effective way of coping with stress. It’s effects are cumulative: do it a couple of times a day for a week, and you’ll gradually develop a more relaxed and focused mindset.
New research published this week gives new clues to the genes related to developing Alzheimer’s disease. Two groups independently reported this week that the gene CLU was related to research participants’ chances of developing Alzheimer’s disease. CLU has the genetic material that allows the body to create a substance called clusterin. Clusterin has multiple functions, but importantly is involved in lipid transport (moving fatty substances in the body) and apoptosis (programmed cell death).
Clusterin is also called apolipoprotein J, and may be involved in removing amyloid plaques from the body. These plaques are key parts of the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease. People who have certain forms of the gene are at higher risk for Alzheimer’s. The finding is reported this week in the journal Nature Genetics. Click here for the online report. Another group in France also report on the CLU gene.
The two groups reported on two other genes that may also be involved in Alzheimer’s pathology. Until recently, we have only been fairly sure that the gene for apolipoprotein E was a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. These new studies significantly advance our understanding of the role genes may have in developing Alzheimer’s disease.
An interesting study is reported in the online version of Discover magazine suggesting that mind wandering is an important part of mental functioning. You can find the article here. Researchers asked people to pay attention to a task while their brain activity was recorded in a special scanner called a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI). At intervals they asked the people of they were paying attention to the task. Many people weren’t paying attention and were letting their mind wander. Its’ interesting to know that until they were asked, many of these people didn’t know that their minds were no longer focused on the task.
The researchers went back to the results of the fMRI scans and looked at what the mind wanderers’ brains were doing when they weren’t paying attention. They found that the parts of the brain that were active at those times were related to thinking about yourself and planning for the future. The suggest that the mind has a way of switching back and forth between paying attention in the present and thinking about and planning for the future. So letting your mind wander may have some benefits.
In contrast, an article that appeared earlier this year in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (available here; scroll down to the article titled “Conducting the Train of Thought . . .”) showed that mind wandering was related to poorer working memory functioning. Since working memory function, in general, becomes worse as we get older, this finding presents the possibility that older persons may have the tendency to let their minds wander more than do younger persons.
This would be an explanation for the most common complaint I hear from people about their memory. People tell me “I went in another room to get something and I couldn’t remember what it was.” If your mind wanders in the middle of a task such as finding something, it may give you the impression that your memory isn’t working. It may not be so much your memory itself, but your ability to control whether your mind wanders.
Computer brain training in a brain gym is one way to help improve this ability. Most brain training programs require people to pay attention for extended periods. Both the programs from Posit Science and available on line at Lumosity may train your ability to pay attention. I’m also intrigued by the possibility that coping with stress and improving your mood may help with attention, since both depression and stress have a negative impact on a person’s ability to pay attention. Some types of meditation, too, can help train attention. More studies of all of these interventions are needed to help us figure out whether attention training can help older people improve their everyday memory.
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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.