Some topics on healthy brain aging
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Struggling to find an interesting topic that relates to Trumbull County Senior Levy and searching the internet for ideas usually triggers this brain to write a senior-related topic for our local community.
The Google search results of "aging news" resulted in a finding worth mentioning. The website is ScienceDaily.com of strange, offbeat and bizarre things, which is perfect timing for the late October Halloween event. Intrigued by the articles found and to confirm the website sources, Wikipedia reports that "ScienceDaily is an American website owned most recently by Chris Hogan, launched in 1995 that aggregates press releases and publishes lightly edited press releases (a practice called churnalism) about science." That's an interesting word -- churnalism.
Various categories of topics are health, technology, environmental, society, and quirky, but all related to science. Naturally, quirky sounds most interesting, but first the news. Several science articles included that extra weight may be aging your brain faster than you think, that a simple blood test could reveal Alzheimer's risk 10 years before symptoms and that less than 42 minutes of bright daylight is linked to higher dementia risk. This website is reminiscent to Reader's Digest of the 60s, bringing back fond memories of actually holding a small book while turning the pages, but now replaced with holding a mouse, scrolling and clicking, meanwhile getting lost in the deep dive of the internet.
Still, I want to read the quirky news, but wait, there are more articles with one resonating from a recent conversation I had with a work associate. This person said that he does not mentally hold onto details that can easily be retrieved from Google or completed by technology because he needs more brain room for his difficult tasks of problem-solving as our hard drives (brains) can only hold so much detail. We joked that elementary school math can be done with a calculator, so why retain that information.
An article on this website caught my attention: "A Healthy Aging Brain May Be Trading Out To Make Room For Something More Valuable." Scientific theory is that your healthy aging brain may be making a revolutionary adaptation to the new stage in life, beginning in the sixth or sevent decade of life, in which accumulated knowledge, wisdom and understanding become more important than recalling every detail. The brain is adjusting its priorities to make better use of a lifetime of accumulated experience. You get the "gist" and don't need every detail.
Two brain regions are the hippocampus, which preserves specific details of events, and the frontal cortex, which understands the central message or the "gist." In a healthy brain, researchers say that the balance changes as we age, relying more on the frontal cortex for interpreting information from existing knowledge rather than needing to remember every detail. For the Alzheimer patient, this transition to the frontal cortex gets interfered with by abnormal processes involving proteins, which stop the details from being able to be summarized in that frontal cortex area of the brain.
Decades of life experiences are valuable for guiding others and sharing important information to younger generations as a central message. This is how humans evolve as we learn from our experiences with past existing knowledge. If only the younger generation, otherwise known as my adult offspring, realized the existence of my wisdom. Instead of "eye-rolling" at any guidance, maybe a little respect of that wisdom should be appreciated more.
Now for the quirky news? I get the "gist" just from reading the headlines and don't exactly need the details, but we all need fun reading such as "Blood Tests Reveal Why Astronauts Get Constipated In Space." This was not any detail stored in my hippocampus, but I got the gist.