The New Old

"A movement known as the new old age is sweeping society.  The social norm for the elderly used to be passive and grim; consigned to rocking chairs, they were expected to enter physical and mental decline.  Now the reverse is true.  Older people have higher expectations that they will remain active and vital.  As a result, the definition of old age has shifted.  A survey asked a sample of baby boomers 'When does old age begin?' The average answer was 85.  As expectations rise, clearly the brain must keep pace and accommodate the new old age.  The old theory of the fixed and stagnant brain held that an aging brain was inevitable.  Supposedly brain cells died continuously over time as a person aged, and their loss was irreversible. 
"Now we understand how flexible and dynamic the brain is, the inevitability of cell loss is not longer valid.  In the aging process--which progresses at about 1 percent a year after the age of thirty--no two people age alike.  Even identical twins, born with the same genes, will have very different patterns of gene activity at age seventy, and their bodies can be dramatically different as a result of lifestyle choices.  Such choices didn't add or subtract from the genes they were born with; rather, almost every aspect of life--diet, activity, stress, relationships, work, and the physical environment--changed the activity of those genes.  Indeed, no single aspect of aging is inevitable.  For any function, mental or physical, you can find people who improve over time.  There are ninety-year-old stockbrokers who conduct complex transactions with memories that have improved over time.
"The problem is that too many of us adhere to the norm.  As we get older, we tend to get lazy and apathetic about learning.  It takes smaller stresses to upset us, and these stresses linger for a longer time.  What used to be dismissed as an elderly person's 'being set in his ways' can now be traced to the mind-brain connection.  Sometimes the brain is dominant in this partnership.  Suppose a restaurant is behind in seating its patrons who have reservations.  A younger person who must stand in line feels mild annoyance, but it dissipates once he is seated.  An older person may react with a flash of anger--and remain resentful even after he has been seated.  This is the difference in the physical stress response that the brain is responsible for. Likewise, when older people get overwhelmed by too much sensory input (a noisy traffic jam, a crowded department store), their brains are probably exhibiting diminished function to take in tidal waves of data from the busy world.
"Much of the time, however, the mind dominates the mind-brain connection.  As we get older, we tend to simplify our mental activities, often as a defense mechanism or security blanket.  We feel secure with what we know, and we go out of our way to avoid learning anything new.  The behavior strikes younger people as irritability and stubbornness, but the real cause can be traced to the dance between mind and brain.  For many but not all older people, the music slows down.  What's most important is they not walk off the dance floor--which would pave the way for decline of both mind and brain.  Instead of your brain making new synapses, it keeps hardwiring the ones you already have.  In this downward spiral of mental activity, the aged person will eventually have fewer dendrites and synapses per neuron in the cerebral cortex." - Deepak Chopra, M.D. and Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. in Super Brain.

To keep a young brain, one that is growing, we must keep learning and doing new things.  We need to calm down when we get stressed.  This way we can have the new old brain and life.

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