Ellen Hansen's List: Family

• The normally aging brain has lower blood flow and gets less efficient at recruiting different areas into operations.
• blood flow drops the most in the frontal cortex, people most commonly experience declines in verbal fluency, or the ability to find the words they want. They also have to work harder at "executive function," planning and organizing their activities. The areas most affected after that include the parietal cortex, which affects construction and visuomotor performance (practice that golf swing!), and the medial temporal area, which affects the ability to make new long-term memories and think flexibly.
• Episodic (what did I have for breakfast?), source (where did I learn about that new car?), and flashbulb (where where you on Sept. 11, 2001?) memory decline the most. Semantic (words, facts and concepts) and procedural ("it's like riding a bicycle - you never forget") memory decline the least.
• Challenging oneself by learning a new language or playing a new musical instrument may be a solution to preventing memory problems or the development of dementia or Alzheimer's.
• to one of three training conditions (trained participants received instruction in one of three different kinds of thinking skills: memorizing lists, reasoning [looking for patterns in strings of numbers or letters] and visual concentration.)
• showed a significant performance advantage on learned thinking skills.
• booster training showed even more significant benefit in the areas of reasoning and visual concentration.
• reasoning-trained group showed the most improvement
• people think they can do it, a concept known as self-efficacy, they perform better
• greatest gains come from combining memory skill training with cognitive restructuring - in other words, accepting normal age-related changes and actively compensating for them.
• a healthy lifestyle supports brain health. Regular aerobic exercise has been shown to aid cognition, probably because it boosts blood flow and brings more oxygen to the brain

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