The Aging Effect
Cognitive aging is the decline in working memory, processing speed, and long term memory. A research article titled Human Neuroscience and Aging Mind: A New Look at Old Problems discusses the study of healthy aging through cognitive methods that help show favorable adaptation to brain changes (Rueter-Lorenz and Park). As we get older the activation for cognition is significantly higher, just as the early phases of learning cognitive skills.
The aging process takes its toll in many ways; grey hair, muscle pain, back pain. But the worst pain is the one of declining cognition. Many older individuals are mistakenly assumed to have some sort of degenerative brain disease, because they start to forget things. In other words, they are mistaken for starting to “losing their minds”. This is simply incorrect. In spite of this disrespectful assumption, an elderly person in the early stages of dementia can still retain many of their abilities to understand and reason important life choices. Since the ability to make choices is still there, it is still possible to re-train certain sections of their brain to work with other regions that have yet to be affected by the disease.
When looking into a neurological disease, we must to be aware of the parts comprised in our cognitive control and how they are inhibited. As previously stated by Devlin, the brain is divided into many regions in order to produce language (Devlin 123-134) and these diseases tend to attack three parts that affect one’s cognition: memory, capacity to learn, and language. So, if these diseases attack cognition, what can we do to try to prolong it? I stated before that we can try to retrain our brain, but what does that mean? I have always heard people say that you can train your brain by being involved in certain ‘brainy’ activities; learning another language, reading, doing a puzzle, playing an instrument and anything that involves many parts of your brain. Let’s say you choose to learn a second language. Learning a second language and speaking it regularly is said to improve your cognitive skills and delay the onset of a neurological disease. But can age also factor into how neurological diseases affect the brain? The older we become the more sites of the brain we require, in the same way learning a new language requires the activation of new sites of our brain. This can help to stop the aging process by using regions of one’s brain that are not typically used. But it is not certain that doing these activities can indefinitely stop an individual from developing these diseases. Further research is necessary to determine the effectiveness of theses brain training ‘workouts’.
For more information: Rueter-Lorenz, Patricia A. and Denise C Park. "Human Neuroscience and the Aging Mind: A New Look at Old Problems." Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences (2010): 405-415.
The aging process takes its toll in many ways; grey hair, muscle pain, back pain. But the worst pain is the one of declining cognition. Many older individuals are mistakenly assumed to have some sort of degenerative brain disease, because they start to forget things. In other words, they are mistaken for starting to “losing their minds”. This is simply incorrect. In spite of this disrespectful assumption, an elderly person in the early stages of dementia can still retain many of their abilities to understand and reason important life choices. Since the ability to make choices is still there, it is still possible to re-train certain sections of their brain to work with other regions that have yet to be affected by the disease.
When looking into a neurological disease, we must to be aware of the parts comprised in our cognitive control and how they are inhibited. As previously stated by Devlin, the brain is divided into many regions in order to produce language (Devlin 123-134) and these diseases tend to attack three parts that affect one’s cognition: memory, capacity to learn, and language. So, if these diseases attack cognition, what can we do to try to prolong it? I stated before that we can try to retrain our brain, but what does that mean? I have always heard people say that you can train your brain by being involved in certain ‘brainy’ activities; learning another language, reading, doing a puzzle, playing an instrument and anything that involves many parts of your brain. Let’s say you choose to learn a second language. Learning a second language and speaking it regularly is said to improve your cognitive skills and delay the onset of a neurological disease. But can age also factor into how neurological diseases affect the brain? The older we become the more sites of the brain we require, in the same way learning a new language requires the activation of new sites of our brain. This can help to stop the aging process by using regions of one’s brain that are not typically used. But it is not certain that doing these activities can indefinitely stop an individual from developing these diseases. Further research is necessary to determine the effectiveness of theses brain training ‘workouts’.
For more information: Rueter-Lorenz, Patricia A. and Denise C Park. "Human Neuroscience and the Aging Mind: A New Look at Old Problems." Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences (2010): 405-415.
The Possible Cure to Losing Your Mind by Wendy J. Rodriguez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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