Train your brain to stay sharp as you age
March 26, 2010
Judy Gerstel
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
It happens all the time.
I tell a friend about something I read online but stop to say, “I don’t remember if it’s from the London Times or the Washington Post ... or maybe Slate.”
I’ve always blamed my forgetting the source on too much browsing, too many sites: information overload.
But Nicole Anderson, a researcher at Baycrest’s Kunin-Lunenfeld Applied Research Unit, set me straight. It’s not too much information that’s my problem; it’s too little action in my hippocampus.
Even if you’re an aging adult who is healthy, explains Anderson, “you remember the information but forget where you learned it. The source is more vulnerable (to memory loss) than the facts themselves.”
In other words, you might retain content as you get older but you have more trouble remembering context.
Or maybe not — if you train your brain.
It seems to have worked for Wayne Cook, a 69-year old Torontonian who retired as president of a small manufacturing company.
He recently took part in Anderson’s ongoing research study into whether cognitive rehab can improve an older adult’s ability to remember the source of information.
After an initial assessment, Cook attended 36 training sessions over eight days. Each session lasted 10 to 15 minutes.
“I sat in front of a computer screen with a speaker in front of me,” recalls Cook. “A word would be presented, either spoken or appearing on screen.”
When that same word was presented again, either spoken or on screen, Cook had to say “yes” if it was repeated in the same way it was originally presented. Or “no” if it was switched.
At first, the repeated words were separated by only a few seconds and one or two other words. But gradually, there were up to 50 different words between the repeated words.
“The difficulty was remembering whether it had been on screen or spoken,” says Cook.
“It is incredibly difficult for older adults to do, even after a couple of seconds delay,” explains Anderson. “People’s ability to remember not just information, but whether they saw it or heard it before, declines even with healthy aging. And it declines even more among people with mild cognitive impairment.”
It’s why, as we get older, we’ll tell someone an anecdote without realizing that they’re the one who told it to us in the first place.
Could it also be, I asked Anderson, why journalists sometimes claim they didn’t realize they were plagiarizing? Because they didn’t remember there was a source other than themselves?
Anderson just laughed at that suggestion. But she was pleased to be able to say that her subjects, most between the ages of 65 and 80, show improvement after the training sessions. “They are really, really improving on this task.”
She’s still collecting data from brain scans done after the training concluded, hoping they’ll show actual changes in the brain — “richer neural networks” — and that study participants are using more areas of the brain after training than they used before.
Cook says he achieved higher and higher levels of remembering the source of the word as the training progressed.
“My memory got better,” he says. “I would say it’s better now.”
Among those in the study are some people with mild cognitive impairment — “memory deficits that are greater than what you expect for their age,” Anderson explains. “But attention, language, problem solving and visual/spatial skills remain intact. There can be mild cognitive impairment with no impact on everyday functioning.”
Taken into account in assessing mild cognitive impairment is educational level.
That’s because education, explains Anderson, “develops richer brain networks. You have more connections and synapses between cells, so even if you lose some because of disease and dementia pathology, you have more left over. You don’t feel the impact of dementia in the same way as people who don’t have these protective factors.”
Education and exercising the brain as you get older are just two ways of delaying, and even reversing to some extent, the effects of aging on the brain.
Other important factors are diet and physical exercise. Baycrest scientist Carol Greenwood is researching how diet affects cognition in people with diabetes.
“Individuals with diabetes experience more impairment in terms of memory function,” she says.
The thinking used to be that high blood pressure and high levels of bad cholesterol affect the brain negatively, she explains. “But now the thinking is that metabolic abnormalities of diabetes in and of themselves are also harmful for the brain.”
“It’s argued that individuals with diabetes may be at a three- to four-fold increased risk of developing dementia.”
However, the better the adherence to a healthy diet — the Mediterranean diet, for example, or Canadian nutrition recommendations — “the better the cognitive retention,” advises Greenwood.
And that’s true for all aging adults, not just those with diabetes.
Researchers “are now looking at more global aspects of diet rather individual nutrients such as fish oil and antioxidants,” she says.
And she warns, “Canadians are way behind on fruit and vegetable intakes.”
Exercise can improve cognitive function, she adds. “That’s been observed for both people who are high functioning and those already experiencing decline. Even a walking program, which is easy for older adults, has shown effectiveness.”