Want to Keep Your Brain Sharp As You Age? Study Finds Two Key Factors
Summary
Two studies on adults over 65 found that having a strong "cognitive reserve," which comes from education, mentally challenging jobs, and activities, helps keep the brain sharper as people age. Positive emotions also seem to improve memory and language skills in older adults.Key Facts
- Cognitive reserve means the mental strength built through learning and brain-stimulating activities over a lifetime.
- Older adults with higher cognitive reserve performed better on language tasks, sometimes as well as younger people.
- The first 10 seconds of word-retrieval tasks show early signs of decline, but those with more cognitive reserve had less decline.
- Positive emotions help older adults retrieve words more easily than negative emotions.
- Working memory, the ability to hold and use information temporarily, usually gets worse with age.
- People with higher cognitive reserve did better on working memory tasks involving faces and emotions.
- Emotional content in tasks helped older adults process information more efficiently.
- Emotional intelligence, or understanding and using emotions, affected how older adults responded to emotional tasks.
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