Old brains/ young brains

“I’m just getting older.  That’s why I…(fill in the blank)
…am not as flexible as I used to be”
…have put on weight”
…have less energy than I used to have”
…don’t sleep as well”
…am just not as mentally sharp as I used to be”

No. No. No. No.  And a BIG no.

Here’s what I want to shout from the rooftops:  We should not use chronological age as an excuse/ explanation for unwanted physical and mental changes, for the waning of our abilities.  When we experience those changes, the reaction should be:  Okay, so what am I doing or not doing right now that’s causing this to happen?  And, what can I do (or stop doing) to improve this?  Settling for the “I’m just getting older” explanation is the quickest path to…getting older.

I was reminded of this in a big way last week when Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals on the planet, published a study it titled “Game Changer.”  And it is.  This study forces us to re-examine our assumptions about the aging brain, about the waning of cognitive ability, about the “it’s just a part of getting older” mantra.

University of California, San Francisco researchers had older people play a video game that involved swerving around cars while simultaneously picking out road signs.  (Not my idea of a good time, but read on…) Playing the game improved the short-term memory and long-term focus of older adults – and not just while they played the game… and not just specific to the skills of the game.  They had sharper skills (with no additional training) six months after they played the game, and these vastly improved memory and attention skills were evident in other, unrelated tests.

Some people as old as 80 began to show neurological patterns of people in their 20s.

Yes, you read that right.

An MIT neuroscientist not affiliated with the research called the study “a very big deal,” an exclamation that, in the staid and cautious world of science is akin to standing on your head and spitting wooden nickels.  This is ground-breaking.  This really is a Game Changer.  If you can take older people who are not functioning well and make them cognitively younger through training that means their older brains are perfectly capable of functioning younger.  It means “I’m just getting older that’s why I’m not so sharp any more” is invalid.  Maybe you’re not so sharp any more because you don’t challenge yourself, because you don’t provide your brain with stimulating and demanding tasks, because you no longer work up a mental sweat.

One of the main early findings of the study reinforced what we should ALL know by now (but continue to act as if we didn’t):  Multi-tasking harms performance. People in their 20s experienced a 26 percent drop in performance when they were asked to try to drive and identify signs at the same time (rather than just identify the signs without driving). For people in their 60s to 80s, the performance drop was 64 percent.

But after the older adults trained at the game, they became more proficient than untrained people in their 20s.  “We made the activity in older adults’ prefrontal cortex look like the activity in younger adults’ prefrontal cortex,” one of the UCSF researchers told the New York Times.

FYI, on the hope/hype front:  Most commercial so-called brain games do not work as advertised.  Research like this study shows that scientists can – and should — develop the games and objectively test their effectiveness. And we should stop making excuses and start taking action.