“The brain is a plastic organ— it’s malleable—and with training or exercise, it gets stronger, just like the body does with physical exercise.”


Meanwhile, the concentration of certain


neurotransmitters—brain chemicals that move impulses across synapses between nerves and affect everything from mood to memory—tends to decrease as people get older, which can alter brain function, notes Cathy McEvoy, PhD, professor and director of the School of Aging Studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Plus, “as you go through life, you have more and more assaults on the nerve cells— damage caused by stress, smoking, alcohol, poor diet, illnesses, as well as the simple process of oxidation within cells,” McEvoy explains. These physiological changes can cause the brain


to retrieve and transmit information more slowly as you get older, says McEvoy. This is why you might experience the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, in which you try to come up with the right word or name but struggle to locate it in your memory bank, which happens more often as the decades pass. It’s also why it might take you longer to learn new information, especially complex material. Or why you might walk into a room, only to draw a complete blank on what you’re looking for. When it comes to age-related thinking changes,


“probably the area that changes the most is immediate recall,” says George T. Grossberg, MD, director of the division of geriatric psychiatry at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine in Missouri. “The ability to recall instantly a previously learned piece of information, whether it’s a name or a date, on demand may not be quite as sharp as it was before. It isn’t gone; given a little time, it will come back.” Prospective memory—remembering to do something in the future (to pick up milk or broccoli on the way home from work, for example)—can also become less reliable, McEvoy says.


SPRING / SUMMER 2012 pause


27


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43