aging » The Thinking Meat Project

Contented realism

Sep 112008

“Every day is better than the one before it,” sang Al Stewart in a bouncy, optimistic song about Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic. Thinking that things will keep getting better can be a motivator, but life is more of an up-and-down affair than a series of constant improvements. According to a recent study, older people realize that and have fewer illusions about possible future happiness (and also more accurate recall of past mindsets).

Researchers surveyed nearly 4,000 adults in the US ranging in age from 24 to 74 in 1995-1996, and then again nine years later. They asked about current levels of satisfaction with life and projections for the future. The overall trend was that younger people (under 65) appeared to see life as a sort of a progression, with the present better than the past and the future projected to be even better yet. On the other hand, those over 65 saw the past and the present as being about equally satisfactory, and they did not anticipate as much satisfaction in the future. The younger people were not as accurate in projecting their future state of mind (they thought they’d be more satisfied than they were).

What’s particularly interesting is that across all the age groups, having realistic views of the past and future was linked to “the most adaptive functioning across a broad array of variables”. One of the things I enjoy about getting older is the perspective that you get from having a wider range of experiences to draw on as you face new situations (this is especially valuable for difficult new situations). I’m 47 now, so maybe I can look forward to greater self-awareness and a more realistic grasp of life’s possibilities and limitations by the time I hit 65. (Sounds like I just need to keep my expectations reasonable.) This press release from EurekAlert provides more details, and the paper itself, which will appear in the September 2008 issue of Psychological Science, is available online in PDF format: Realism and Illusion in Americans’ Temporal Views of Their Life Satisfaction: Age Differences in Reconstructing the Past and Anticipating the Future. Margie E. Lachman, Christina Röcke, Christopher Rosnick, and Carol D. Ryff.

Aging and decision-making

Psychology Comments Off

Jan 172008

Everyone makes bad decisions sometimes. (I have a friend who says that good judgment comes with experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.) A recent study focused specifically on the decision-making skills of older adults, looking for explanations for why old people sometimes make spectacularly bad decisions like giving the money they’ve saved for retirement to a shyster. A researcher at the University of Iowa looked at the decision-making ability of 80 healthy older people with no obvious neurological problems, and identified a subset of the group, about 35-40% of them, who showed poor decision-making performance on a series of tests.

One especially interesting finding is that the bad decision-makers had a different physiological reaction when they had to make a decision. Good decision-makers vary in the amount their palms sweat before a decision, and this autonomic physical response might provide a cue that helps them to figure out what to do. The bad decision-makers did not show the same changes in how much their palms sweated. Doing poorly on the tests and exhibiting a different physical response is also characteristic of people whose ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC) is damaged. The hypothesis is that perhaps the people in the study who had problems making decisions also have something in that area of the brain. The next step will be to try to determine what that might be.

This is all interesting, but I wonder what the rate of poor decision-making among younger people is. (Sometimes younger people also make spectacularly bad decisions.) I also wonder if anyone has looked at whether decision-making ability changes across the lifespan. Maybe the poor deciders have always been that way.

News about the aging brain

Brain and mind Comments Off

Dec 062007

Someone told me once that as you get older, everything on your body gets hairier and closer to the ground. (Whether this applies equally to women and men, my informant did not say. Either way, it’s not an appealing prospect.) Worse than that, though, the brain undergoes various aging processes that can lead to declining mental powers.

If you watched the Brain Fitness Program on PBS last night, for example, you heard about how the brain loses tissue as it ages. This story from Scientific American Mind describes some recent research into age-related cognitive decline and a discovery about what happens to the white matter in an aging brain. Researchers examined the brain activity of young people (18-34) and older people (60-93) as they worked through various memory and cognitive tasks, and found much less communication between the front and back parts of the brain in the older people. Then the researchers used another kind of scan that targets the white matter in the brain, which is crucial for information flow. They found that in older people the white matter showed signs of degraded performance. The condition of the white matter was correlated with the performance on the memory and cognitive exercises. Not exactly a cheerful story, but understanding the processes behind the negative mental changes that can accompany aging may be the first step in figuring out how to counteract those processes.

They never told you the price that you pay…

Psychology Comments Off

Jun 282006

…for things that you might have done. So goes the line from Billy Joel’s “Only the good die young”, and evidently the price for deferring gratification can be greater than the price of giving in. According to this brief press release, as people get older they tend to regret the pleasures they passed up (self-control regret) more than they regret the pleasures they gave in to (indulgence regret). Interesting that this is cast in terms of virtue and vice; the examples of pleasures that people regret not enjoying when they had the chance include going on a cruise or eating dessert, which are hardly sinful. Certainly the line between self-control and self-denial can be tough to find.

I wonder if this means that as we grow older, self-control starts to look more like self-denial no matter what it felt like at the time, or if long-term self-denial takes its toll. (Please have exact change.) I also wonder if this is an example of the common tendency to value what we don’t have more than what we do. It looks like I can’t get hold of the full text of this online yet, so the press release leaves me with more questions than it answers.

Aging and happiness

Psychology Comments Off

Apr 062006

Here’s a pair of articles about recent research into how emotion and cognition are affected by aging. This press release from Brandeis covers a study that had people of different ages looking at pictures of faces that each showed a particular emotion and neutral faces. Older people (age 57-84) preferred the happy faces (interestingly, a much younger age group [18-21] rested their eyes longest on the faces that showed fear). One possible explanation for the older people’s preference is that people who are aware that their future does not extend indefinitely are more likely to focus on the positive and make the most of the time they have.

This press release from Georgia Tech describes some research that looked at how young and old people interpreted situations after either a negative or a positive mood was induced in them. The older people who were in a bad mood tended to give less weight to external factors in assessing someone’s behavior, perhaps indicating that they were looking inward in an attempt to deal with the negative mood and not paying as much attention to the outside world. Younger people paid more attention to external factors in the same situation. A happy mood had the opposite effect, making the young people less careful in observing the whole situation and the older people more so.

This doesn’t necessarily say much about how the older people felt; sometimes it’s most important to try to keep yourself focused on the positive when you’re starting to feel grumpy or depressed. Maybe it does say something about learning to manage your mood better as you get older. At any rate, it’s interesting stuff.

A time when aging stops

Being human, Human origins and evolution Comments Off

Dec 122005

This seems like it’s only the start of a story, but it’s intriguing. Evidently researchers have found that there’s a falling-off in the aging process after a certain point in humans, and those of us who make it that far reach a stage they call late life, where the wear and tear of aging no longer occur. This has been observed in other species, but although the data have been there for humans, it sounds like this is the first time anyone has taken them seriously. The headline says something about evolutionary explanations, about which I’m very curious, but there’s not much detail, just the statement “The authors posit that late life arises after the forces of natural selection affecting both fertility and mortality cease to have an impact.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/12/051205163133.htm

Language activity in brain shifts with age

Brain and mind 1 Response »

Oct 122005

In most right-handed people, the left side of the brain is where most language processing takes place…at least until their mid-twenties. Recent work indicates that between the ages of approximately 25 and 67, the non-dominant half of the brain picks up more of the load and language activity becomes distributed more evenly across both brain hemispheres. This might be related to declining ability on the dominant side, so that the other side needs to step in more and more as the brain ages. (Kind of depressing to think of things starting to decline at the age of 25…) Whatever the reason, there might be clues here to helping people regain some language ability after brain injury or stroke.

http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.asp?id=3183

Frontal lobes: Last in, first out?

Brain and mind 2 Responses »

Sep 122005

The frontal lobes of the brain are where a lot of higher-level decision making, planning, and behavior control take place. Among the last parts of the brain to mature, their functions start to decline as we age. Here are a couple of stories about how the inhibitory functions of the frontal lobes might deteriorate as we age. The first story, from UC Berkeley, is about how well older people do on tasks involving short-term memory and attention. According to the results of this research, it’s not so much that the capacity for mental focus lessens in older people, but rather that they have a harder time filtering out distractions. Future studies will focus on the possible role of the frontal lobes in this inability to tune out distractions. It’s noteworthy that some of the older people did not display any deterioration in short-term memory or attention. It might be useful to study these people and see how some brains are able to age without losing that particular ability.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/09/12_memory.shtml

The other story is about a study at the University of New South Wales which showed that older people seem to have a harder time figuring out what is inappropriate to say in public. They find it harder to stop themselves from, for example, inquiring after your hernia in front of your date. (This would explain a lot of talk about constipation that I had to listen to in my tender years.) Researchers chalk this up to decline in the frontal lobe activity that helps us control our thoughts and speech in social situations. I’m only 44, and so I don’t have any direct experience with this. My experience with older people has always led me to believe that it’s not that they can’t control themselves, they just don’t see the point in beating around the bush any more. But maybe that’s just what it looks like when your frontal lobes start slipping up.

http://www.psycport.com/showArticle.cfm?xmlFile=aap%5F2005%5F09%5F10%5Feng%2Daap%5Feng%2Daap%5F164040%5F1684266114803537683%2Exml&provider=AAP

Coincidentally, it was on September 13, 1848, that an iron rod passed at high velocity through the frontal lobes of Phineas Gage, drastically altering his personality (amazingly, he survived the injury) and giving scientists one of the first clues that different areas of the brain are responsible for different functions.

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