KEEPING INTELLIGENCE
People who have gone to college stay sharp longer than people who haven’t. Likewise, a job that requires navigating complex relationships, setting up elaborate systems, or dealing with difficult people and problems can push back brain decay by a decade. The reason for this is the very simple secret of cognitive involvement: the more you use your brain, the longer you’ll be able to use it.
What if you didn’t go to college or spent your college years trying to kill brain cells rather than grow them? Luckily, the choices you make in your twenties aren’t the only way to protect your brain into your sixties, seventies, and beyond. It turns out that going back to school in midlife has the same brain-protective effect as attending college at the traditional age. Even better: researchers Margie Lachman and Patricia Tun of Brandeis University found that you can self-train your brain just as effectively as you would through college or a demanding job. In their studies of senior citizens who hadn’t gone to college, they saw one common factor among the most overachieving brains: the people with “cognitively protected” brains were those who challenged themselves through a lifestyle that included reading, writing, attending lectures, and doing word puzzles—in other words, they followed a self-imposed regimen of cognitive involvement.
If you’re sold already, flip to the end of this chapter for exercises to keep you cognitively involved—although, in fact, most of the exercises in this book should make your neurons crackle in a protective way. But cognitive involvement is only one tine of a three-pronged approach to brain health in later life. The second tine is a healthy body. “What is good for our hearts is also good for our heads,” says Archana Singh-Manoux, lead author of the Whitehall II study, which followed the aging of 10,308 British Civil Service workers. Whitehall II showed that obesity and hypertension in middle age leads to cognitive decline later in life. In fact, your cardiovascular health in middle age is even more important for your later brain health than the same risk factors in old age itself. Likewise, cardiovascular exercise, moderate alcohol consumption, and even living in a good neighborhood can affect your body and so your mind.
Finally, in addition to cognitive involvement and a healthy body, the third tine of cognitive protection is personality. The massive study known as MIDUS (Midlife in the United States) shows that remaining calm in the face of stress, feeling more in control of your life, optimism, and openness to new experiences are markers of cognitively above-average seniors. But the most powerful part of personality is social interaction. Nothing forces the brain to work like interacting with other brains. And all these personality factors are interconnected—more social interaction leads to more brainpower, which leads in turn to more interaction, and so a rising tide floats all boats. The other fair analogy is to a house of cards: allow one aspect of your personality to slip and all domains of brain health can come tumbling down along with it.
So safeguarding your cognitive resources requires a long-term lifestyle commitment, not just to using your brain but to using your body and staying social as well. The last two are up to you. Meanwhile, let’s get your cognitive involvement jump-started with the following exercises.
ACTIVE
A study known as ACTIVE, which stands for Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly, shows the effects of brain training in later life. The study split 2,832 people into three groups and offered ten one-hour training sessions in either memory, processing speed, or reasoning. Five years later, some exciting results were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association: while training in memory and processing speed didn’t seem to have much effect, reasoning training not only improved the participants’ cognitive skills but helped them continue to live independently. This is a big deal: this cognitive training improved not only subjects’ brains but their lives.
There were two major pieces of the ACTIVE reasoning training: learning to reason about everyday information and training pattern recognition skills. You can approximate the training in everyday reasoning simply by making sure you understand the information you happen to run across in your everyday life—for example, nutrition panels on cereal boxes, recipe directions, dosage instructions on over-the-counter medicines, medical insurance information, taxi rates, and so on. When you’re hit with information, you have a choice: you can struggle to understand it, or you can let it slide past while groking just enough to get by. ACTIVE shows that working to fully understand the information that comes your way helps you keep the ability to understand it.
The second major section of the ACTIVE reasoning training was learning to work with patterns—the old recognize-and-predict-the-next thing. It seems like a trivial skill, but according to Thelma and Louis Thurstone, who pioneered pattern-recognition research in the 1940s (and apparently provided the names for a popular movie), seeing patterns tests our ability to “solve problems, foresee consequences, analyze a situation on the basis of past experience, and make and carry out plans according to recognized facts.” The skill is anything but trivial.
The ACTIVE trial tested participants’ pattern recognition, trained them, and then tested them again to check for improvement. We’ll do the same. Start by testing your pattern-recognition skills by writing the next letter in each pattern of the pretest below. Then flip to the back of this book for answers and training before returning here to take the test. Afterward, more training is only an Internet search away—just Google the phrase “pattern-recognition test” and you’ll find plenty of options including picture and number patterns. For brain health in late life, the more pattern practice the merrier.
1. bcbcbcbcb …
2. fffggghhhiiijj …
3. gfefededcdcb …
4. tubcuvcdvwd …
5. cexdfxegxfhx …
6. hipijqjkrklslm …
7. efbghbijbklb …
8. hijkijkljklmklm …
9. tpqtqrtrststttutu …
10. pmopnopooppo …
11. xbqxcrxdsxe …
13. tontattonta …
14. emoeroenoeqoeoo …
15. eftufguvghvwh …
1. bikbabbikba …
2. jihihghgfgfe …
3. rsastbtucuvdvw …
4. iufiuwiugiuviuhiu …
5. pqcrsctucvwc …
6. ththththth …
7. histijtujkuv …
8. pqrsqrstrstustuvtu …
9. nopnpqnqrnrsns …
10. bcdccddcdecd …
11. gikhjkikkjlkk …
12. lllmmmnnnooopp …
13. semsfnsgoshps …
14. lmcdmndenoefopf …
15. cdtcdscdrcdqcdpcd …
Click here for answers.
A COGNITIVELY INVOLVED LIFESTYLE
Does a crossword a day keep brain decay away? Well, yes and no. A crossword forces you to mine your memory for a wide range of information, and by recalling things like another name for a sewing case (etui), tool handle (haft), or Spartan serf (helot), you reinforce both specific memories and the process of remembering itself. This helps you hold your baseline crystalized intelligence—that is, your store of knowledge. In that way, crosswords are a whole lot better than Sudoku, which, once you’ve learned the techniques, is effectively a rote exercise in filling boxes with numbers.
But if you want to slow the decline of fluid intelligence—your ability to reason with these pieces of crystalized intelligence—you’ll have to go further than the crossword. In fact, once you understand a puzzle’s directions and how you should go about solving it, you’ve harvested the majority of its ability to boost or maintain fluid intelligence. At that point, actually solving the puzzle becomes practice without much purpose. So instead of playing your favorite smartphone game into the ground, try to download a new one every week. And instead of getting stuck in the rut of one type of favorite brain-training puzzle, look for a new kind every session. Skipping around this book is a good start. And once you’ve exhausted the puzzle types here, continue to search out not only new repetitions of puzzle types you know but new types entirely. Make it a practice to periodically hop online in search of games or puzzles with novel directions. Maybe make it a once-a-week ritual. And then once you’ve got the instructions nailed, pivot away in search of a fresh mental challenge.
Click here for answers.
A COGNITIVELY KIND LIFESTYLE
In addition to puzzles and challenges that directly kick-start your neurons, certain lifestyle choices lead to healthy aging in the brain. Consider incorporating the following brain-protective tips into your daily routine:
• Exercise: In his presidential address to the 2010 meeting of the American Heart Association, Dr. Ralph Sacco said that nearly any measure of brain health is related to heart health. From multitasking to attention to psychomotor speed to brain volume to measures of general intelligence, people who have good vascular risk scores and better cardiac indexes have better brain scores, too. The reason for this is simple: your brain likes oxygen and nutrients. Your heart and vascular system give it oxygen and nutrients. And so what’s good for your heart is good for your brain. Light exercise is best. For example, a study of older adults found that thirty to fifty minutes of brisk walking four times a week increased blood flow to the brain by 15 percent compared to sedentary subjects.
• Diet: Oregon State University researchers asked which goodies in the blood predict a sharp brain. Even controlling for age, education, and all the socioeconomic factors you can imagine, older adults whose blood contained fish-oil fatty acids and vitamins B, C, D, and E had 17 percent better scores on cognitive tests and 37 percent larger brains than subjects whose blood was a coagulated mess of trans-fats. Other likely brain foods include antioxidants (found in berries), choline (found in eggs), uridine monophosphate (found in beets), and docosahexaenoic acid (another component of fish oil). Experts aren’t sure whether this brain-boosting diet acts directly on the brain or if benefits come by way of the heart—in other words, these foods may simply be good for heart health, which in turn is good for brain health. Either way, there’s mounting evidence that what you eat affects how you think.
• Drink: You’ve heard this before, but it bears repeating: moderate alcohol consumption, and especially drinking red wine, has been definitively shown by the Mayo Clinic and elsewhere to be good for your heart—and again, what’s good for your heart is good for your brain.
• Sleep: A 5,431-person study found that six, seven, or eight hours of sleep are all fine for the brain—as long as sleep habits never change! People who changed their sleep habits in middle age, either getting more or fewer hours per night, hurt their brains in the form of lower inductive reasoning, vocabulary, phonemic and semantic fluency, and overall cognitive ability. As long as you’re not getting more than nine hours or fewer than six hours of sleep per night, stick with your current schedule. Oh, and your brain likes a good nap.
Click here for answers.