ENSURING A BETTER SELF

Like some of your neighbors, I am quite a few years down the road. I am increasingly being joined by others of my ilk. Statisticians tell us that by 2030, ten years hence, some 21% of Americans will be 65 or older. Things are even worse in Canada, the figure being 23%. By 2060, almost one in four Americans will be of that age or older, and over one-half a million will be aged 100 and older. Wow!

Obviously, scientists must be re-directing their efforts to finding those secrets for long-lived healthy living and to finding answers to the scourge of Alzheimer’s and related conditions.

Aside from the health implications, a whole range of economic consequences come with having a smaller and smaller share of the population participating productively in the economy. The plunging birth rate in the developed economies that is elevating the percentages quoted above is one of the powerful prompts for an energetic immigration policy. In spite of the increasing clamor for reining in arriving numbers for fear of lost jobs, the cold economic facts argue the opposite. Japan is the poster child for the results of a restricted immigration policy, over ten years of economic stagnancy, the price of ethnic purity. A Nobel laureate in Economics (Dufo) has disproved the theory that immigrants take jobs from domestic workers by examining real world data.

One of the greatest challenges associated with aging, even with health care advances, is precisely our concern about failing mental aptitudes as we age. One of the findings that have come to light has been evidence of hidden capabilities in our brains we have found out about. For many years the collective wisdom has been that the brains we are born with have fixed capacity. The theory was that our brains cannot be altered after the normal age of completed brain development in our twenties. We were told that we learn as we mature but when we have attained our limits, all we can face is a downward slide toward dotage. The news has been “IT AIN”T NECESSARILY SO!”

There have been studies made of the brains of deceased individuals who have had a stroke. What has been found is that there is a marked difference between the brains of those who have been seriously damaged and have accepted that, and those who have overcome their disabilities to the point of leading a normal life. This is proof that our brains can be retrained. Even if critical areas of our brains have been damaged by a stroke, and cannot be repaired, if we strive vigorously, and act with persistence to rebuild function, eventually other areas of our brains can learn to take over the capability of parts of the organ that have been destroyed. The term for this quality in our brains is “neuroplasticity”.

But the message is much broader than just recovery from a stroke. What this reality is telling us is that our brains never lose their ability to learn. What this is telling us is that we do not have to accept the slow decline into dotage that the old theories proclaimed. Surely we will lose some parts of our brain function with aging. That seems an inevitability until we can find a way to arrest this process.* Some of us are more susceptible, but all of us face this threat as we age. But there are alternatives!

During a broadcast on US public television, marketing a Brain Fitness Program, Dr. Michael Merzenich, Phd.  broadcast rules to take advantage of our brain’s capacity to continually learn new things at any age. The rules were simple:

1.                      We only learn when the brain is in the mood. If we are not alert and paying attention, nothing happens in our brain. When we are alert, neurotransmitters are active. Without our active will to accomplish a task, nothing happens in our brains.

Change strengthens connections between the neurons in our brains.    Purposeful action is required to move one from what is, to what could be, into                               what you need to do to relearn.

2.                      Initial changes are only temporary.                                              without repeated actions. Permanent learning in the brain takes place only when we are really engaged.

Neurons that fire together, wire together. Repeated actions form connections that are strengthened by continued learnings repetition.

 

3.                      Brain plasticity is a two-way street, driving brain change either positively or negatively.                                                          We can learn bad things like pain sensitivity or addictions, acceptance of declining function, as well as creating new pathways of learning to regain functions we are losing or have lost.

4.                      Memory is crucial to learning.                                                 Repetition is a mechanism for the permanent memory to be formed in the brain. When the permanent neuron connections are forged in new areas of the brain, the memory is retained allowing us to regain the functions we may have lost or are losing.

5.                      Motivation is a key factor in brain plasticity. Without strong motivation, (we really have to want it,) to overcome the discomfort that may be involved in planting the re-learned process in the brain, we may not realize the goals we wish to achieve.

The good news is that we can teach other parts of our brains to learn how to take over lost functions by persisting in resisting the losses we inevitably face.

Do we fight for our lives? Do we resist? Or do we give up the ghost? Wherever we find skills slipping we have to redouble efforts to regain them. Tough work, but one can do it! Those who will it can do it! The kind of lives we hope to live depend on it!

*An Israeli research breakthrough is giving us new hope in this area.