'Superager' brains resist the march of time to have memories like 25-year-olds
sciencealert.com
sciencealert.com
I have some friends who I've known since high school, now some have health issues and its how they respond seems to make a difference. Some just take the pills the doctor gives them and accept the ageing process and complain about things. Others, like myself, fight tooth and nail to do whatever they can. Of course you can only fight so much - the genetic hand you're dealt, but, I believe your attitude to ageing is really a factor - if you accept it, or fight it. Which sort of aligns with the personality traits they observed. You're only as old as you feel as the saying goes.
I know one lady for example who has had two cancers and was forced to use a walker for a while but is going again, whereas her husband was showing me all the pills he takes - due to being overweight and eating poorly. He has accepted his fate, she has fought against it.
Often, people expect to do whatever they want and then go to doctors to ‘fix’ them. It’s good for doctors, but not so great for you.
I just started getting into some of the self-care routines she lists in her book after breaking my foot and having multiple doctors recommend surgery to ‘fix’ things. Instead of going down that route, I asked an Ortho-bionomist I know personally to help me. In a single session, most of the swelling and limp in my foot ‘disappeared’. After sticking to the very simple routines he suggested and that I read in the book(none involving pills or icing it), my foot healed more in a week than it did in the 2 months I sat around taking Tylenol and just ‘waiting’ for someone to fix me.
Hackernews doesn't realize they are the 0.000001% of patients we see. I'd love for all my patients to make the lifestyle, diet and habit changes I recommend in addition to the medications I prescribe. The reality is that users here do not recognize the privilege they have in terms of money, agency and knowledge. The vast majority of people I see are barely scraping by and have very little time/effort/privilege to make the changes I would like them to undergo.
That's excellent perspective. To add more: I'd love my doctors to respond to my interest in my health. They usually barely hear what I say, ignore my priorities, and rush me out the door. I can't even get a simple response from my general practitioner any more unless I am standing in front of them at an appointment. (And no, I'm not a nut asking bizarre or pedantic questions. I generally avoid seeing the doctor until it's clear I need professional treatment.)
If you want to make lifestyle changes then it might be more useful to consult with a dietician, personal trainer, or therapist instead of a physician.
Like anything, it’s a complex of the doctor’s personality, personal motivations and their own contentment or lack thereof and how it manifests in their work.
One of the finest bedside manners and wholistic approaches was a doctor I’d had growing up who moved up here from Kingston, Jamaica. The life he had led up until his career as a GP forced him to maintain a “big picture” approach.
One of the worst bedside manners and considerations is a doctor who I can’t name or point to because he’s one of rather high standing in Toronto. A truly brilliant physician and technologist. Awful manner, poor communication. That’s compounded in emotional effect as it’s your life on the line and not theirs.
People are complex and some doctors prioritize their work with patients, others prioritize their research, others their personal finances and so on.
If possible, it’s best just to seek out help and insight elsewhere. Sometimes that second opinion doesn’t change anything, other times it’s fundamental.
My father, who is a physician, used to have a diet clinic as one of his ventures. Out of the thousands of people he saw, none, not one, person stayed with the program. Some did for a while. But then bam, fatso again.
It's really super sad. Back in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, everyone was thin. Everyone, except for a very, very few people who were horrifically fat to our eyes, although now they would be on the light side of overweight.
As the population started to get fatter and fatter, starting in the 1990's, I 100% knew, KNEW, back in the 1990s, that at some point in the future, things were going to change and fat women would insist that they are beautiful, and revile slender women. Which we see every day now. I mean, it's not guys, guys don't give a sh-t if you call them fat. You never read anything about men wanting to be called BBM or "curvy" or body acceptance or whatever the phrase of the day is. But women have it in their DNA that they want to be perceived as beautiful, in order to attract a mate, I guess.
https://pos.org/whos-watching-a-look-at-the-demographics-of-...
People should never be ashamed or accused of arrogance for pointing out objective truths.
I don't necessarily only think this about the underprivileged. More like the uneducated and the credulous. This included all manner of Republicans. They put out confusing information, say that there's fake news. And the underprivileged don't know what to do. Despite almost every single person in the USA knowing for sure that all infectious disease and epidemiologist say to take the vaccine. Everyone knows this. Every single person, every single underprivileged person knows this after 1 1/2 years.
I understand that not everyone is as cynical as I am, so feel free to have your own view of how the world runs.
At least that's the feeling I got from my GP when he diagnosed me with high BP about a decade ago. He prescribed some pills, I asked about lifestyle changes and what happens when your body adjusts to the pills, can you just stop taking them or is there a tolerance, etc.
He said something like "some people exercise, and maybe it helps, but just take the pills."
I was willing to do whatever I had to do, because I saw high BP as a dysfunction, and wanted to fix whatever the root cause was. I don't want to be an unhealthy person taking pills to help me live a longer unhealthy life, I wanted to be healthy.
For one condition, I came in with clear lab tests showing I had brought all the relevant markers WELL within normal range by dietary and lifestyle changes, and my doctor insisted I should instead have increased the medication I had been able to wean off during the process.
She asked me, "Don't you think if diet and lifestyle change worked, we would recommend that to everybody?"
I replied, "Absolutely not. Not a single person in your industry benefits if everyone with this condition becomes healthy. No medications are needed. No surgeons are needed. Your whole career disappears. I think the entire industry that trains and forms you depends on people like me staying sick. If you can't at least question the incentives in your industry with a critical eye, I have no interest in any further advice from you."
Suffice it to say she doesn't work for me anymore.
This is the crux, "worked" means a different thing to a health care professional: to them it means when you tell 100 people to do it, most of them get better. It has nothing to do with root cause or mechanism of disease or any of that.
They know if they tell 100 people to make the diet and lifestyle changes necessary, only a few will get better because most people didn't go through with it. Therefore in the doctor's experience it "doesn't work".
Congrats by the way.
Treating this as anything other than a public health issue, rather than a personal failing is ridiculous.
> other people are eating less and losing weight. No, they're not, and that's my point.
Look at smoking that you mention. Smoking was unbelievably common a few decades ago. It's now pretty uncommon (in North America). Why? Were people just failing in the past, and now aren't failing? No, we made public health decisions that have dramatically dropped the proportion of the population that smokes cigarettes.
IOW: Treating it as an individual failing may feel good, and may even be "true", but it's not a useful framing of the problem. Treating it like a public health issue is massively more likely to work than just wagging your finger at people and telling them to just eat less.
To my initial point, Americans are overall uninterested in becoming thin. Public policy may be able to change that. I don't believe that people generally wanted to quit smoking in the 50s but couldn't, but instead that they generally didn't care about quitting. The same is true now for being fat. Only once the public consciousness shifted toward smoking being bad did smoking rates fall. That was a consequence of desires shifting due to (benevolent) propaganda. I'd love if we had similar ads on TV and such for fatness like we did for smoker's lungs.
I say "US medical treatment often doesn't explore valid alternative remedies and focuses of treating preventable conditions after they've developed into serious problems."
They say "Yes, rub some sage oil to kill the nanobots"
scream
My favourite example as a trans woman is that the orchiectomy could be apparently replaced by a 2 cent ethanol injection.
Saudi Arabians are the only ones willing to try it and publish the results.
Get into pubmed commons, see for yourself.
In my case, a few of the most helpful things I do now are:
- Focused box breathing for ~5-10 minutes several times throughout the day to relieve tension in my body. I find it helpful to do this to figure out what I should try and address next.
- Walking indoors in different ‘patterns’ to break my body out of the limping pattern it found itself in after my injury.
- Walking indoors as normally as possible with an increasing cadence. Ie. I’ll walk in a straight line extremely slowly as normal as possible. If there’s no pain, I’ll turn and walk faster.
- Contrast baths for my foot to properly circulate blood flow in my foot and reduce inflammation.
There are plenty of other things, but I think I’d do very little justice trying to write things out. I’m still essentially just a patient and learning more about this as well.
What does that feel like? How could you tell?
He got Alzheimer’s. It dragged out for over a decade killing him slowly and hurting everyone who knew him.
My father decided he’d rather have a shorter but more quality driven life after that experience. He’s overweight, has a great outlook on his life, and is a joy to be around.
Not everyone wants longevity.
The problem with the “shorter higher quality life” position is that diet, exercise and health affect EVERYTHING. Exercise and diet are majorly implicated in both physical health decline and onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s. In fact, maintaining a healthy and active lifestyle is often found to be the number one protective factor against cognitive decline.
Unfortunately there’s no health strategy that reliably produces a shorter higher quality life. There’s only increasing health span through lifestyle.
Note: there are medical choices that increase lifespan but not health - medication and surgery that prolong unhealth. But that’s a whole different game than healthy lifestyle.
I would also include sleep in this list.
With advancing age the amount and quality of sleep seems to diminish. Maybe it's individual-specific and dependent on the life-style, in any case undersleeping effects eventualy catch on and affect the body and mind state.
The set of healthy and active elderly people consists only of those who can be healthy and active, while the set of sedentary / overweight elderly contains both those who choose not to be, and those who are kind of stuck with it due to chronic illness. Which aren't sharp categorical distinctions, mind you, but it virtually guarantees that the latter set will have shorter lifespans and worse end of life outcomes, even though plenty of nonagenarians are overweight (though very few indeed are obese).
I stay in the game for what it brings me now. I can think of little so grim as going to the gym with the goal of living longer— but that's my personlity, someone else might find it motivating.
That said, I'm taking as good care of myself as I can without going to the extreme. I don't want to deny my one short, brief life the pleasures that are here to be experienced but I also don't want to artificially shorten my (already stacked against) life.
I have decided however that I won't be dying in pain in some hospital if I can at all help it. I've watched it happen. I'll either live somewhere that assisted is allowed, or I'll FEED MYSELF TO SHARKS...something, anything, other than the slow waste of a hospital.
I’m now at home, where I’m slowly healing just as well. As long as I can eat and drink (and failure to be able to do that is what sent me to hosp to begin with), I stay here.
I’m going to come out of this more healthy, I’m determined.
If you’re younger (or older!), I strongly endorse avoiding the pharma industry to the extent possible. The side effects will almost aways catch up to you at some point, usually during a crisis or other sickness. Work on your weak spots “naturally” (eg, if you’re anxious, master meditation and physical workouts). If you’re on a chronic drug, always carefully re-evalulate risks/benefits at least once a year, and find out if there are any new non-pharma approaches.
With a very few exceptions, pharma is about temporarily soothing symptoms while doing nothing for the underlying disease.
For many conditions, such as arthritis, taking daily medicine is required and skipping that would decrease quality of life dramatically.
However, if you've a sore head then potentially skipping some medicine is fine.
>> With a very few exceptions, pharma is about temporarily soothing symptoms while doing nothing for the underlying disease.
I think you're quite mistaken. Pharma is about improving the quality of life and health outcomes for the patient. Some diseases cannot be magically fixed with drugs, e.g., Parkinson's, etc.
Which arthritis med, exactly? So many have been pulled off the shelf by the FDA.
But Levadopa for Parkinson’s (which I’m highly likely to get if I live long enough), and its newer analogues, may be one of the few worth the trade. Grandparents on both sides w/Parkinson’s.
99% of the other drugs are not worth the tradeoffs, for most people.
>> But Levadopa for Parkinson’s (which I’m highly likely to get if I live long enough), and its newer analogues, may be one of the few worth the trade. Grandparents on both sides w/Parkinson’s.
I'm very sorry to hear that. Are you taking any "precautions" to (potentially) delay or mitigate the onset of Parkinson's, e.g., healthy eating, exercise, etc? Do you think knowing what you know has had an impact on how you lead your life currently (#Yolo)?
Note: I'm a researcher in an adjacent field (digital health) and so please don't take anything above as medical fact.
You can master the art of balancing medication intake to fit your needs.
Sadly, the biggest roadblock in that case is having to deal with doctors and pharmacists who just won't give you what you need.
Best option of all is to stay fit. Some of mine were out of my control (genetics), but some were probably not. And the extent to which the genetic ones expressed was probably somewhat in my control.
I've seen people give in to stuff like wrist magnets and rejecting vaccines because they didn't like "chemicals in their body".
Why have this whole industry if people reject it?
I personally have the opposite problem - I can't get what I need.
I managed to a few times and can tell my life is noticeably worse without medication. So I guess this is the result of my experience so far.
Seeing people with access to prescriptions or suppliers who simply refuse to try "chemicals" because they can't be arsed to experiment or even learn how they work makes me sad.
I've asked my family doctor to help plan ahead. So that it's my decision. Like getting a home euthanasia kit. Or whatever.
Highly likely that you won't. Standing there, ready to go, your survival instinct will go into overdrive and suddenly living a bit longer regardless of the pain won't seem so bad.
I thought that was a completely obvious stand-in for some gentler not-medically-assisted suicide but nothing is obvious here on Hacker News...
No part of my hindbrain is upset by switching breathing gasses, and by all reports there is no more pleasant way to check out.
You can't detect the lack of oxygen, only the buildup of carbon dioxide. You just get tired and pass out, it takes about two minutes. There's no panic.
If I'm ready to log off because my life has become weakness and pain, I'm not going to chicken out. But I'm not afraid of death, it's the dying I'm not so stoked about.
I can't pull all nighters anymore. My body literally starts shutting down around 2:00 a.m.
My poop is less firm. I have to wipe a lot more.
Muscles take more time to stop being sore.
Other than that that's about it so far.
I can practice piano for hours. Working on my bike I’ll have a hydraulic brake caliper fall apart in my hands in a puddle of mineral oil, then just muddle my way through until my mistake is fixed. I used to get so frustrated by things.
Diet is mainly Mediterranean now - beans, lentils, veggies, fish etc. occasional meat, but not much.
I was active. Bike commute, some weights, jogging, hiking, stretching.
I had to do some physical therapy (before and after surgery). Part of their assessment is balance & stability.
I was shocked to learn I had none. Eg I couldn't hold onto one foot and balance on the other leg.
Now I recommend everyone starts PT no later than 40 yo. If only for assessment and tuning.
That’s not how natural selection works. Men over the age of 50 father less than %1 of babies, and it’s lower than that for women. So if a tendency to embrace chronic pathological behaviors is genetic, the offspring will be born long before the behavior catches up with them. Things get a little more complicated because of the inter generational support networks. The older generation does support their offspring, but at eventually will need support, and take resources from the breeding cohort. Which is the only cohort natural selection cares about.
Generally, the rate at which memory synapses weakens is similar across the general population (stability of a memory synapse), so for super-agers it is probably genetic.
I may not have a super-ager brain, but as a lifelong learner and brain-health lover I've placed all my significant memories into a spaced-repetition program I use for everything, and thus am able to recall at will all sorts of important memories in life. I'm keeping my important synapses strong.
There's another category besides super-agers: people with hyperthymesia: "a condition that leads people to be able to remember an abnormally large number of their life experiences in vivid detail. It is extraordinarily rare, with only about 60 people in the world having been diagnosed with the condition as of 2021." There's a documentary about these people. You ask them: what important event happened in your life on January 7th, 1980, and they can answer it accurately.
I haven't seen anything that indicates that is also true for episodic memory though.
For the "negative", I've mostly resorted to journaling in ways that help me self-discover and resolve the past, such as SelfAuthoring.com exercises that I continually write and re-write from time to time (I bought and copied the exercises to my local drive).
My wife tells me things we did, and there aren't photos of those occasions, so I know I'm not remembering everything.
The photo albums our parents and grandparents had were spaced repetition.
Not advertising it, but I've found it's the best for my needs despite the effort it takes to stick to it.
I would liken it to an average computer user making the effort to learn and stick to Emacs because they really believe it will pay off in the long term. And SuperMemo sure has paid off for me.
- optimism
- resilience
- perseverance
- active lifestyles
- engaged lifestyles
- having pursuits (like travel, reading, positive social relationships)
[1] https://www.sciencealert.com/less-than-5-superagers-what-the...
No, you can't use the phrase "leads to this". It misinforms the reader because that's not exactly what the researchers wrote. We need to be super pedantic about this because they found correlations of personality traits but did not make the leap to say optimism, etc were the causes. For your linked article:
>"The findings suggest that superagers have unique personality profiles," Rogalski said, noting that they stood out for their optimism, resilience, and perseverance – as well as active and engaged lifestyles, marked by pursuits like travel, reading, and positive social relationships.
There may be another hidden confounding variable that leads to both the optimism and the superager memory performance. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding)
E.g. the same researcher also wrote about rare Von Economo neurons (VENs)[1] that exist in higher quantities in the elderly that don't have early dementia and Alzheimers. They don't know if those rare VENs are present at birth. This means it could be an candidate confounding variable that causes both the optimism/resilience and protection from dementia.
Sounds quite plausible to me that having a good memory at old age leads to a more active and engaged lifestyle leading to happy people that appear less neurotic and more extrovert.
Joking aside, having grown up relatively poor and feeling compelled to put work success above everything else to ensure economic stability for my kids these things really do negatively shape my expectations for the second half my life. Not sure what to do about that.
Biggest things you can do are the basics:
* Sleep as close to eight hours a night as you can
* Cook healthy food
* Maintain a low waist circumference and maintain muscle mass
* Have some combo of low intensity cardio (walking etc) and higher intensity stuff. A 7 min strength training circuit is good here
The basics are surprisingly hard, the majority of north american adults flunk all of these. From your description you may be missing at least the majority.
That’s ok, you have a clear priority in your life. The point is, examine that list and your own life/work schedule, and see if one of those can be improved within your existing framework.
Usually this is possible for one of them and they actually work together. Improving any of these gives your body its best shot at maintaining itself over the long haul despite work stress.
Is there a reliable, proven (i.e. actual science, not broscience) way to do both of these at the same time without drugs in middle-age or elderly people? I was under the impression that this was an unsoved problem because many (if not most) people undergo age-related changes that cause them to put on fat way more easily than muscle.
My whole strength training routine recently has been:
* 5-8 chinups, 5-8 pullups
* 15-20 pushups
* 30-50 air squats
* 7-9 dips
* 12-15 rows up on the dip bar
* A plank about a minute long
Takes about seven minutes. Very low risk. Most could learn to do it. I am not as strong as when I did barbells but I’m quite strong and have high muscle mass. The equipment cost about $200, once.
An 18 year old will have an easier time starting that than a 60 year old. But if you start that sometime between ages 20-40, and build the muscle mass and motor skills while young, it is extremely possible to maintain that muscle while older.
The process you’re describing is sarcopenia. Here are the main causes listed in Wikipedia:
> Immobility dramatically increases the rate of muscle loss, even in younger people. Other factors that can increase rate of progression of sarcopenia include decreased nutrient intake, low physical activity, or chronic disease.
Most of these are lifestyle factors. Including chronic disease in many cases, where the disease was a lifestyle disease eg type 2 diabetes, atherosclerosis, etc
There’s nothing there that says it is impossible to build muscle from a strength training program when older.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcopenia
—————-
As for diet, the biggest one is cooking your own meals with healthy ingredients. Older people didn’t previously get obese in large numbers. It is a more modern phenomenon.
This is probably harder to do than the strength training process I laid out above. Cooking well both takes more time and more money than strength training.
(Cooking well can save money of course but this depends on circumstance)
As this topic is more complex I won’t go into too many specifics, but my own method for making it more efficient has been roughly:
* Batch cooking and seasoning meat, then freezing it
* Cooking enough rice as a side to eat over three meals. So I only cook rice afresh every third meal
* Steaming vegetables in the morning, then eating again in evening
I would not recommend this to everyone, but it has worked very well for me. I’m satiated, can prepare food even when exhausted, and the weight has melted off. And I was already at “last ten pounds” weight.
My parents switched to a similar style of eating in their 50s and weight also melted off for them. So it works for older people.
Aging does make things worse, but people overestimate how many of the changes they observe are due to aging vs lifestyle.
Whenever I’ve done the above, I’ve both lost fat and gained muscle at the same time. And once you are at the desired waist level, you do not need to be in a calorie deficit.
I’m not 60, but I don’t know of any biological reason that leads to more fat and less muscle with age for the same calorie intake.
Leangains is the best method for combating the issue you speak of, but I’m not doing that presently other since the workout I describe everyday. Leangains is a method of cycling macronutrients: more carbs on workout days, more fat on rest days.
Not just more fat and less muscle, but also a higher ratio of visceral fat to subcutaneous fat (waist circumference generally being a proxy measurement for visceral fat, which is the actual thing we're worried about). [1].
Perhaps I am misinterpreting your decision, but it seems like you are saying that in older people there is some inevitable tradeoff between waist circumference and lean mass, and that if one tries to lose fat they must grow weak or if one tries to grow strong they must gain fat. If older that is.
This doesn’t seem to be true in practice for people in our society, and hunger gather societies didn’t have obese elders.
I could believe it is harder to gain muscle when older, but I’m not convinced it becomes impossible to meet both goals with fairly modest effort.
It's a review summarizing multiple kinds of evidence.
> Does it day somewhere specifically that the same diet and exercise regime produces worse outcomes for older people?
No; that was in response to your statement that you weren't aware of any biological factors affecting fat vs. muscle with age. I had also tried to search for studies that specifically tested diet and exercise against age while distinguishing between lean and fat body mass (as opposed to just weight gain/loss), but didn't find any. This might just be that I don't know the jargon well enough to do an effective search; I'm not an expert, I just go to the literature on these topics because it's hard to find people summarizing it who aren't cherry-picking in order to sell something.
> Perhaps I am misinterpreting your decision, but it seems like you are saying that in older people there is some inevitable tradeoff between waist circumference and lean mass, and that if one tries to lose fat they must grow weak or if one tries to grow strong they must gain fat. If older that is.
Apart from a modicum of "noob gains", it's conventional wisdom that typical adults cannot readily gain muscle without also gaining fat or lose fat without also losing muscle, due to a shared baseline of anabolic vs. catabolic signaling. The key thing that makes diet and exercise programs worthwhile for changing body composition is that that while this might be true with respect to absolute amounts, the ratios aren't set in stone. But with age, those ratios tend to shift such that fat tends to be favored more, and the ratio of visceral fat to subcutaneous fat also tends to increase (so one typically needs to be leaner overall to maintain the same amount of visceral fat). So it tends to become harder to design an effective program, and I gather that it's already fairly difficult by 35 or so.
I'm not making a claim that this is somehow written into the laws of physics (you're the one who brought words like "inevitable" and "must" into it), I'm just saying that based on my understanding of the consensus it's not at all clear that anyone really knows how to "maintain a low waist circumference and maintain muscle mass" in a way that works for most older people.
Indeed this study found that resistance training can halt the accumulation of visceral fat. So unless somehow the resistance training led to no muscle, this seems to contradict what you’re arguing?
And for most people sleep quality improves as you sleep longer. “Sleep only high quality” is not really actionable advice unless someone is taking sleeping pills or drinking before bed or actively doing something to impair sleep quality.
Like reading hacker news in the evening.
Maybe it’s the same with the brain.
Antidepressants to keep your brain young.
Laxatives to more easily get rid of your fast food dung.
β-Blockers for making sure your blood pressure isn't wrong.
And of course deodorant: fresh as a daisy, even without a shower because you were too lazy!
Pharmaceuticals, for when you just can't.
Even if I inherited this trait and lived that long, I doubt I would be able to repeat this - he's been very active throughout his whole life and neither drinks nor smokes.
> Superagers are more likely to be extroverts and less likely to be neurotic than others, and it looks like their active lifestyles aren't necessarily healthy in other ways. In at least one study, 71 percent of superagers smoked, while 83 percent drank alcohol regularly.
https://www.sciencealert.com/less-than-5-superagers-what-the...
Plus, the results are on a very small group. It's difficult for me to imagine that fMRI can reliably show differences. And it's also noticeable that they couch the effect in very vague terms: "similar pattern", "more youthful". That's a lot of freedom to interpret a few so much data.
That they've found a bio-marker sounds implausible to me: all they've found is a correlation with a memory task that can't be measured without applying that task.
Music seems to be another form of memory that resists memory loss even amongst Alzheimer patients.*
On the other hand i am quite good at relating bits of information, which is useful for problem solving, e.g. where was something similar seen before.
This relation ability also works for words, such as your use of "adept". That relates to Battle Chess and then another old game called "Archon II: Adept", which is a bit like chess.
Granted, it's not always useful things that come up this way.
Me and my partner just had a discussion this morning where she claimed I had met one of her friends, and her friends long term partner, in a bar. We apparently spent he whole evening together chatting. I remember nothing of this evening (and I wasn't drinking).
I think it's a combination of a lack of stimuli, anxiety with work (I'm far from alone in our local employment where folks are underutilized and 'waiting to proceed', and a rut between the bed, the couch and the home office. I was (and am) getting exercise, but there needs to be more than that to continue to be mentally happy.
I think some of it was a psychological over-attribution to normal forgetfulness...people forget things...older people can proportionally forget more things...it's not [necessarily] early onset dementia, not during a pandemic.
But a small environment, with no long-term goals + the sheer terror of a pandemic and unstable government fed by the media machine...isn't healthy.
But half the time my short term memory is nearly useless so I have to write everything down. So much static from my internal monologs, constantly talking over each other. It's exhausting sometimes. So I just write down everything..what I'm about to do, what I was just doing, what I just thought to do next week...all goes in the notebook.
At 42 I have the memory of me at 25. My memory was terrible back then too.
Same here, I've always had bad memory, I've learnt to live with it better as I've got older.
I always (or mostly) think of my future self for current actions, ie I try and predict what I would be thinking in the future - eg If I put things down, I choose places where my future self would guess to look. same for my documentation or actions lists etc..
over time this makes things extremely efficient
My fact memory is working relatively well (passive recall/recognition much better than active recall/production) but my autobiographical memory is almost non-existent. It's really bothering me.
I stopped consumption of disjointed media on social media-like feeds (only exception: HN) because that was worsening it to no one's surprise. Maybe a full digital detox to the extent work allows is in order?
What else could I try?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overgeneral_autobiographical_m...
Disclaimer: I am not a mental health professional, and this is not medical advice.
I still suck at it though. I haven’t written anything since the spring.
Most of it is unread, and when it is, I don’t know about it. But it helps me to write it as I can revise the code that the docs are supposed to reflect. I try, whenever possible to embed docs directly in source or at least the repo.
I generate static sites from them and a few years ago added our web analytics to find that the docs are actually read. So they are used, but it’s jot like the readers send me notes saying “great docs, they helped me X.”
Anybody else have that experience that once you're 20+, your brain is full and only x-amount of stuff is retained per day. I sometimes don't remember what I had for dinner the day before, but I remember some esoteric option to a one-time used application on the commandline from 2 weeks ago. Scary, because it makes me look ultra-dumb for everyday stuff which I have to do in a normal house-hold.
Mind has a habit of either ruminating about the past or imagining the future. Once you quiet it down the NOW appears with all its shininess and vivid colors. Meditation helps a lot. I had a realization 10 years back and after it I can switch my brain to NOW anytime.
Meditation is a good way to achieve it. I got this ability after reading “Power of Now” by Echary Tolle.
I have vivid memories from preschool, but, ask me what happened last week, and I will need to check my bash history. j/k
Smarter elders -> more successful tribe (more food, more territory, better group-fitness!)
You may find actionable protocols that greatly improve your quality of life and prepare you for aging.
Dr. Andrew Huberman is a tenured Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine. His laboratory studies neural regeneration, neuroplasticity, and brain states such as stress, focus, fear, and optimal performance. For more than 20 years, Dr. Huberman has consistently published original research findings and review articles in top-level peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, Cell, Neuron, and Current Biology. He is a regular member of several National Institutes of Health review panels and a Fellow of the McKnight Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts. Dr. Huberman regularly consults for technology development companies, professional athletic organizations, and various units of the United States and Canadian Special Operations. His bulldog’s name is Costello.
Relative #1 started having "senior moments" a while back but then he got an engineering contract job. Once he was engaged with his life's work again, the "senior moments" went away and he was sharp as ever.
Relative #2 retired from work and just started puttering around the house, then went into a deep depression and is now in the early stages of dementia. Without a "life's work" or even a hobby she's passionate about to keep her mind engaged, her memory is in gradual but noticeable decline.
One particularly frustrating consequence of this pattern is that we are most certainly overlooking and underfunding basic life science research that could uncover precise biological mechanisms producing positive outcomes, and instead chase after mere correlates of their presence.
In this vein, it is sometimes claimed that human longevity is only weakly heritable, which leads to excessive hope pinned on trivial lifestyle changes. The folly of this is best illustrated by the fact that even in this study superagers often neglect basic rules of healthy lifestyle: 71% of them even smoke. In fact, if we look at longevity in the sample consisting of people who already have reached advanced age (thus excluding the noise produced by infant mortality etc.), heritability estimate increases significantly, the older the sample the greater[3].
>In contrast to the modest heritability estimate for continuous age at death (16%), heritability of surviving past 65 years and surviving past 85 years was substantial at 36% (p = 4.2 × 10 −10 ) and 40% (p = 9.0 × 10 −10 ), respectively. Thus, genetic effects appear to be greater for survival to more advanced ages. In the Framingham Heart Study cohorts, heritability appears to increase with each 10-year increment in survived age (65 years, 75 years, and 85 years) for men, but not women, again suggesting that genetic effects on aging may be more substantial for men than women (20).
It is highly likely and in fact supported by growing evidence[4] that the pattern observed for longevity holds for cognitive aging as well.
In my humble opinion, it is incumbent upon us to focus on dissecting relevant heritable differences in biological pathways[5][6][7] between the small minority of supercentenarians (and, indeed, "superagers") and people with average lifespans/healthspans, in order to design sound medical treatments which could provide those benefits to the rest of us, less genetically endowed.
1. https://psyarxiv.com/j5x7g/
2. https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2017-42708-001.pdf
3. https://doi.org/10.1093/gerona/gls089
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23586942/
5. https://www.pnas.org/content/106/8/2700
6. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2012.0027...
7. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11357-006-9020-x
Possibly something with how nicotine/tobacco interacts with the brain?
I ctrl+f'ed a bunch of the links and I didn't see the word smoke.
https://www.sciencealert.com/less-than-5-superagers-what-the...
Nicotine currently has a very negative reputation globally because of humanity's recent past emphatuation with igniting and inhaling tobacco smoke, (which certainly can cause lung-trouble!) but I think the general stigma is currently too strong around nicotine itself.. it's just not that potent (psychoactiveness-wise), nor has much if any overdose-potential, nor toxicity (compared to other common things even!) "So what" if ppl want to ingest it, I say!
And surely no surprise at all to see that people with the best-functioning brains in old age were still seeking out these nootropic levers! I'd bet they probably also had ethanol, tea, coffee, chocolate, etc (etc!) too.. (whichever ones worked for them) to keep things interesting!
Maybe consciousness has some kind of self-existence validity-check built into it, the output of which fundamentally affects the physical outcome, beyond lifestyle, or genes?
Emphatic infatuation?
However, it's reasonable to believe it can help. Dosing of LSD/psilocybin (in rats) in moderation has shown to increase synaptogenesis, prospective and retrospective learning, BDNF expression (in some regions), and other related effects.
The currently most scientifically supported benefits revolve around anxiety and depression. Psychedelics have a robust effect against stress, anxiety, depression, and related neuroses. We know these neuroses have detrimental effects on cognition and life quality. Lowering stress levels in aging folks is likely neurobeneficial in general.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsyn.2020.0003...
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2020/11/10/searching-for-th...
Ethical, eh. Legal, sure in most countries you can grab blood, compensate blood and do whatever.
If ethics is the biggest barrier, makes you wonder.