Games, eating with chopsticks, reading the newspaper upside down and traveling without a navigation system: do it, because it is good for your memory.
The latest insights about our brains are surprising. A healthy person hardly loses vital brain cells until old age.
Vital brain cells
Brains shrink. From the age of 25 they slowly shrivel, like old apples on a fruit bowl. The folds in the brain become flatter, the grooves between them widen. By the time we turn 90, we have lost about 5 to 10 percent of our brain weight.
It’s not surprising that your IQ slowly declines after you’re 25, you might say. And indeed: groundbreaking scientific breakthroughs become rarer after the age of 30. It is not surprising that you lose it after your 40th birthday with Memory. And that after your 55th you can no longer park if someone talks to you at the same time. The less brains, the greater the mental decline – that seems logical.
But the latest insights shed a completely different light on the matter. A healthy person hardly loses vital brain cells until old age. The brain shrinkage appears to be mainly a result of water loss and the shedding of superfluous cells.
Changing brain
Recent brain research shows that our brains are never ‘finished’. The brain molds itself for a lifetime. A teenager’s brain works very differently than a child’s. Those of a twenty-something are different from those of a forties. And those of a forties are different from those of a sixties or eighties. From the age of 20, your brain’s sensitivity to important neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin decreases. A neurotransmitter is a substance that transmits certain stimuli. Serotonin influences our mood and outlook on life. The more the brain has and the more sensitive it is to it, the more relaxed and cheerful we are in life. Dopamine plays an important role in feelings of desire. The substance also provides the feeling of bliss in love and sexual satisfaction.
Because we become less sensitive to these substances, the intensity of our experiences inevitably decreases in the long run. For that reason, the impact of the first crush cannot be matched.
That doesn’t mean I can’t be entranced at 45. It just takes a little more. I am now less sensitive to dopamine and that forces me to experience life more intensively, by loving people more deeply, for example. At the beginning of high school I could already feel a sense of bliss at the sight of the girl two rows in front of me. It immediately stopped there. That was enough.
Fortunately, my social contacts are a lot less fleeting these days. Thanks to the lower sensitivity to dopamine, there is often more room in my head to enjoy quietly.
Until you are 50, the brain works hard to provide the brain cells with insulating myelin layers. The thicker that layer, the better the stimuli can move between the brain centers and the faster the connections. Thanks in part to that thicker myelin layer, people in their fifties are better able than people in their thirties to combine information. People in their fifties are also better able to make well-considered decisions in complex situations. Not only do they have more life experience, but they can also make better use of it.less rush
After the age of 60, the brain slowly loses momentum. Light wear begins to appear. Aggressive molecules (free radicals) gradually break down the myelin insulating layer again. As a result, electrical stimuli take longer to travel from nerve center to nerve center.
Here and there a connection is also broken. The brain quickly creates a diversion, but that does mean some extra travel time.
Don’t worry: the brain cells simply adjust their pace. The time it takes for them to process signals gradually decreases. Hence, the score in video games decreases over time. That is why someone of 60 is less adamant than someone of 40. And that we start to like music with a fast rhythm less.
But who cares about that at 60? At 60 you are no longer a stock trader or news editor. Your brain can’t handle stress very well anymore. You would rather leave night shifts and transatlantic flights to younger colleagues, because the biological clock in the brain adapts less smoothly.
Feelings are not so easy to hide anymore. You are more impulsive and more distracted than you used to be. But all this has a positive side as well. The fact that people in their sixties show their feelings more honestly means that they are often an open book for colleagues. Add to this the fact that people in their sixties benefit from years of experience and that they often have an eye for others because they no longer have to prove themselves if necessary, and voilà: the ideal coach is born. This also fits in perfectly with the stage of life.Active Brain
People change because their brains change. But it’s also the other way around: brains change because people’s lives change. Psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, discovered this when they had 135,000 people fill out questionnaires about their character over the internet.
The researchers determined the average character per age group. They found that this slowly changes as you get older. People in their twenties become more careful and systematic, people in their thirties become friendlier and more helpful, and people in their fifties become less open. Not coincidentally, these are character changes that neatly coincide with the course of life.
People in their twenties are mainly occupied with their work and that forces them to be accurate. People in their thirties are given more and more social responsibility. They raise their children and sometimes take care of their parents too, which requires social skills. People in their fifties start to prioritize and learn to choose for themselves again.
Our environment makes different demands at each stage of life and the brain develops the corresponding skills.
That goes without saying. Brain centers that you use a lot get ‘better’. Cells and connections that you rarely use disappear. Our brains cut out the dry wood, as it were. The more we let our brains work throughout our lives, the more crisp and compact they become. Apparently the brain is organizing itself more efficiently as we go along.
Finding memories
“What’s his name again?” As you get older, you are increasingly looking for a word, a name, a birthday or a pin code. That is certainly not just an aging problem; people in their twenties and thirties often notice with shock that the memory is no longer what it used to be. But in fact, people in their thirties do little better than those in their sixties, researchers at the University of Michigan discovered in 2001. When I try to remember a name — something I’m pretty bad at — my brain works associatively. I often help them by recalling as many of their qualities as possible: voice, smile, glance. Via a sort of hopscotch, the brain often finds the name you are looking for again.
According to researcher Li-Huei Tsai of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, forgetful brains rarely really lose information. Memories that seem to have been lost are, as it were, on an island or peninsula in your brain.
In May, the researcher described in the British scientific journal Nature how forgetful mice regained memories after an injection with the protein ‘histone deacetylase inhibitor’. The substance ensures that the mouse brain quickly establishes new cross connections. The islands grow back together.
Memory drugs
Interesting memory medicines are also on the way for people. Modafinil, for example, is promising in the Netherlands, which is already prescribed in the Netherlands for narcolepsy, a condition in which someone can suddenly fall asleep at any time of the day and from which an estimated 7,000 people in the Netherlands suffer.
Also promising are the ampakines, a group of new drugs (not yet available) that strengthen memories. It turned out that test subjects between the ages of 65 and 75 were able to measure their memory with that of medical students with this drug, American researchers at Princeton University discovered. It remains to be seen whether there are no unpleasant side effects.
You can also train your brain yourself. PlusOnline has listed a number of simple tips for you.
This article is an adaptation of the recently published book Is that me? What brain research says about ourselves by Mark Mieras. Read more about this book.
