Do you worry about what will happen to your body as you get older? Do you envision your brain slowing down and your grandkids speaking realllyy slllowwlyyy so you can understand them?
Cognitive functioning—which includes attention (allotting mental resources to notice something), memory (the process of encoding, storing, and retrieving information), and executive functioning (a broad term for the system that regulates many cognitive processes)—tends to decrease with age. However, one of the many benefits of exercise is that it has been shown to improve cognitive functioning. And for many older adults, general fitness as it relates to health is a primary concern. But some forms of exercise can be harmful or painful for older adults who have joint pain. So what kind of exercise and how much exercise should older adults get in order to stay physically and mentally healthy?
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How good are your survival instincts?
It has been seven scores and sixteen years (or 156 years for people uninterested in the Lincoln reference) since Darwin first outlined “survival of the fittest” in his theory of natural selection and evolution. Even then, the term was taken to apply mostly to animals – and our evolutionary ancestors perhaps, but much less to human beings. Do we care about survival? Definitely; but certainly in a different way than a snake or a hawk might care about survival. Are we selected for? Perhaps, but certainly not in the way peppered moths are selected for in the industrial parts of England. The thing that makes us stand apart from the rest of nature is that other species, for the most part, must adapt to their environments, whereas human beings have made an atrocious name for ourselves for adapting our environments to us.
Thus, nowadays, survival of the fittest, when applied to humans, often takes on a much more socially constructed meaning than the theory it originated from. When an employer chooses a more versatile worker in hopes of getting more work done with fewer employees, we shrug our shoulders at the poor rejectees and say “survival of the fittest”. When someone who is drunk and decides to try and climb a vending machine falls and injures his leg, we laugh and say “survival of the fittest”. The term has come to embody the ideal of being social apt, versatile, and smart enough not to make self-endangering decisions. In any case, for the inhabitants of first world countries who get to sit in class and learn about Darwin, actually having to survive in the wild (as the term was originally about) is no more than a bizarre gag evoked by the flight attendant before a flight across Australia. After all, where is the relevance of “wilderness survival” instincts in a world of supermarkets and movie theaters?
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Have you ever wondered why when you plan to do something beforehand, you usually end up getting it done? For example, for something as minuscule as taking out the trash – the act of reminding yourself to do so or envisioning yourself taking out the trash (maybe don’t envision it…) is proven to help you complete tasks. This is called an implementation intention (II), i.e. the act of specifying when, where, and how you will perform a specific task or action. To carry out an II, you use an if-then structure, such as “If it rains, I will put on my raincoat.” The formation of II’s is confirmed to improve prospective memory, which is the ability to remember to perform a specific action at an intended time. As Peter Gollwitzer and Gabriele Oettingen write in their article (2013), “Successful goal pursuit requires solving both of two subsequent tasks: first, strongly committing to goals, and then, effectively implementing them.” However, what cognitive processes do you need to act on an II, and can people of all ages and conditions exhibit excellent prospective memory?
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When one thinks of heavy drinking, one usually jumps straight to college students, due to popular culture references and stereotypes that paint college as a breeding ground for excessive alcohol consumption. Despite their stereotypical nature, these assumptions do hold some weight. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) reports that approximately 80% of college students engage in alcohol consumption. This statistic can be seen playing out on the weekends here at Colby College, as well as at many other colleges around the country, when students put down their textbooks and start to drink. Many of them drink a lot, with approximately 50% of students who drink alcohol also engaging in binge drinking (NIAAA). Binge drinking is defined as four alcoholic drinks in two hours for women, and five alcoholic drinks in two hours for men (NIAAA). Heavy drinking, then, is when a person engages in binge drinking more than five times in a month. At Colby, it is not uncommon to hear of girls drinking over ten drinks in a night; boys, up to twenty. The effects of such risky behavior are often cited as being responsible for bad grades, poor social relationships and general unhappiness (NIAAA). Despite the repercussions of excessive drinking, many students laugh it off as “just a college thing,” and expect that they will go back to a normal, generally sober, life after graduation. But what if they don’t stop? Will the alcohol have a similar effect later in life?
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Everyone has moments in their life that they wish they could forget. It could be that time that you the bridge gave out during your pictures on the water or the inevitable newspaper article written about it. But what if you could forget the whole thing happened and block out that embarrassing moment out of your memory forever?
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In the classic film The Sound of Music, Maria teaches the Von Trapp children primarily through song. If you don’t recall the words from the song that starts “Doe a deer a female deer…” you might be sorely missing an important part of your movie education. The song is pretty catchy after all. Once someone starts singing it, I can’t seem to get it out of my head. It turns out music can be helpful beyond just having something to dance to. It can really help us remember things. In fact, some studies may suggest that learning through song can actually enhance one’s memory. The most basic example I can think of is learning the alphabet. The alphabet song is pretty catchy and helps kids to better remember it. An interesting question then is: how far this musical benefit extend? Can music potentially help older adults or even adults with Alzheimer’s remember more? In Simmons-Stern et al.’s “Music-based memory enhancement in Alzheimer’s Disease: Promise and Limitation” one of the central questions is: To what extent can music enhance memory function in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (AD)?
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Most people know that there are extreme cognitive deficits associated with DAT, otherwise known as Alzheimer ’s disease, but what is the nature of these struggles? What do those with DAT have the most trouble on, and what is the biggest cause of the troubles? It turns out that those with DAT have the biggest deficits in attentional tasks, and a lot of their memory issues stem from an inability to focus and maintain attention. In 1998 “Sentence Comprehension Deficits in Alzheimer’s Disease: A Comparison of Off-Line VS. On-Line Sentence Processing” looked at and tried to analyze the reasons behind memory deficits in DAT individuals.
The experimenters wanted to test whether the problems were stemming from a lack of syntactic knowledge, or the knowledge of how words form into sentences correctly, or from a working memory deficit. Working memory is the system that holds information in short term memory, deciding whether to attend to it, rehearse it, and transfer it into long term memory or to just throw it out. The better a person’s working memory, the better they can learn and pay attention to what they are looking at. Read more…
With the holidays quickly approaching, many of us will be reuniting with family members at our grandparents’ houses. Someone will inadvertently spike the punch and then you’ll have grandparents, aunts, and uncles a little on the tipsy side. We’ve all heard that a glass of red wine each day is beneficial for your health but how true is this for the older folk in our family? Is it only red wine that has these effects? Several studies have suggested that it can actually be good for the elderly to have a few drinks per week. Alcohol is protective to the cardiovascular system due to its anti-inflammatory effects. This can in turn have positive effects on the health of the brain, which improves cognition (how quickly we think, how well we remember, etc.). Can alcohol be used as a sort of protective substance?
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(Treadwell, 2012)
As the older population grows in numbers, there is an increasing social urgency to find ways to maintain or even improve one’s cognitive health. As we age, declines in memory, attentional control, speed of processing, and problem-solving abilities are expected and are considered to be typical of normal, healthy aging. Past studies have shown the links between participation in cognitive, leisure and social activities with improved cognitive ability, as well as a decreased risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. However little evidence has been found on whether sustained lifestyle engagement can help to maintain or improve cognitive function. This study by Park et al. (2013) sought to examine the impact of sustained engagement on the cognitive abilities of older adults. This study is called the “Synapse Project” because unlike normal cognitive training, in which participants come in for an experiment that typically last a few hours or a few days, the participants in this study agree to make a lifestyle change in that they are learning new, demanding real-world skills in a social environment. This allows us to see the true effects of the acquisition of the new skill over time on the participants’ cognitive abilities.
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Ready to get engaged….socially? Social engagement, which is defined as the maintenance of many social connections and a high level of participation in social activities, could in fact reduce declining cognition. Why not go out with some friends a couple of times a week, enroll in a group exercise class, or get out and volunteer with your community? Results from a number of studies have shown that participating in cognitively stimulating activities and having satisfying relationships, as well as a large number of social contacts can reduce the risk of cognitive decline into the early onset of dementia. On the other side of the spectrum, a low level of social engagement may be a reliable indicator of the progression into dementia. Thus, social engagement may not only reduce the risk of cognitive decline, but may more importantly be a predictor of dementia onset.
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