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How to Deal With an Aging Brain?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm sure this is something all older Slashdotters are aware of: as I get older my once-sharp brain is, well, getting worse. In particular, I'm not able to remember things as well as I once did. As a geek my capacity in this area was always what defined me as a geek. Nowadays things seem to go in OK, but then leak out. A few weeks later I've mostly forgotten. So, I ask Slashdot: how do you cope with your mind getting older? What's your trick? Fish-oil? Brain Training on the DS? Exercise? Or just trying harder to remember things?"
Simply take yourself out of situations where it matters ;p
Seriously though.. where I work a lot of the "older guy's" tend to migrate into roles where they don't need to keep mountains of info bouncing around their head all the time. Roles where people come to them for guidance and advice.. but don't expect them to know the ins and outs of the systems. Let the young guys be the walking encyclopedias while you chill-ax into retirement.
Drink more and accept the inevitable.
Stop using M$ crap, it has been shown to cause brain rot
Not knowing your age, i can't say if it is the onset of advanced age. I'm 47, I find that
and I don't pay attention, at least not as much as I used to, and therefore things are
harder to remember.
I get distracted because I think that I know where the conversation, lecture or whatever is
going and then I find out it took a different turn somewhere and I lost it.
Once I pay attention, I find that the old grey matter is still serviceable.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
I think I'll take over the spaceship and kill all the astronauts.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Better study habits? This is how most people live their whole lives.
Isn't there a firmware upgrade that fixes this yet?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
I had an elective castration, and am on testosterone replacement after I found myself not remembering as well as I did before. Really helped in that area. Check your levels to see if they warrant some replacement.
Why did I click "Read More" again? Back I go, retrace the steps...
Choose 'all of the above' and anything else that keeps your mind active. Brain health is a topic with a huge volume of data on the Internet. Recent additions to the pile of info is that cannabis (THC) may help retard onset of senility. There are many things you can do. Your wetware is chemically based, and so any particular concoction that works wonders for anyone else many not work at all for you. The goal would be to match physical traits of yourself to those that benefit most from various remedies. If you are overweight, look for brain health options that seem to work for diabetics etc.
That's what I'm doing. Find best matches and experiment. So far so good. I think.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
The closer you can get your acceleration to c, the better.
You're 47, I'm 42, and timothy might be 21.
Yeah, chilling thought, I know.
Seriously, I've got nothing. I'm 27 and I think my brain is already going ;-)
I recommend Piracetam: the first Nootropic ("smart drug").
It is extremely safe, and is widely used in Europe to help reverse the effects of aging and to help against the deterioration of memory, among other things (note: I am not a doctor).
There are numerous forums and communities on nootropics, both for anti-aging and productivity-boosting needs. However, make sure you take the advice from those places with the appropriately-sized grain of salt, and always double-check everything with a proper medical resource (i.e. peer-reviewed studies).
I won't get into the details here, because I already did that in an older post (related to stimulants, but it is nonetheless relevant here too). Yes, I guess this qualifies as karma whoring ;)
My previous post on Piracetam: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=562684&cid=23523554
Wikipedia on Piracetam: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam
Erowid on Nootropics: http://www.erowid.org/smarts/
Secondly, I wonder if this testosterone effect is the same / similar in women. (I'm pretty sharp, but I'm also suffering from excessive testosterone... well, for a chick anyway.)
10: Eat, Drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!
20: Heh, an aging brain implies you are still alive.
30: goto 10
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I've had this same issue over the last few years. I wondered if it was the ease with which I can "look things up" thus never having to commit anything to memory or recall it later, when I could just google it. I recall needing to memorize command line switches for novell certification tests years ago. Nowadays the only switch I can remember is "/?" because that's all I need.
I kept right on going, full pelt, in what I loved doing. Until, like a lightbulb filament, I went TING! and burned out. Now I'm professionally retired, and am taking a year or five out of the workforce to get what's left of my head together. Sure, I've got hobbies, but who's gonna pay me to custom-build bicycles to my own designs?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Memory training software. Supposedly backed by some research that optimizes the time spent using the software by testing facts at optimal times instead of excessive repetitions.
http://www.supermemo.com/
One of my solutions to the problem is a good set of vitamins. I tend to shy away from stuff like Centrum, and use multi-vitamin packs with a little more "kick" to them (and are a heck of a lot more soluable in the digestive system), and B12 sublingual drops.
If I have to ask myself the question "how long was it since I took my vitamins?" then the answer is probably about three days - that's how long it take for them to wear off on me.
As with a lot of processes in our bodies, good nutritian helps the brain considerably. Eat right, exersize, and take a good multi vitamin, and you'll probably see a lot of the memory issues go away. It works for me anyway - as with any random commenter on /., YMMV :-)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
It is guaranteed to help you gain a photographic memory. You'll never forget anything again! The secret to this amazing breakthrough is...Dammit, I can't remember.
...Wait, what's the question again?
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Learn new things. That's how you "exercise" your brain. Things that are tough and cause "brain pain" are generally best for you.
Use it or lose it. No magic pills will help. Same for body, as for mind.
I never found having nearly photographic memory to be particularly necessary. I never saw the point of memorizing a lot of junk in school; I know how to read, I own the book, nobody could ever give me a single sane reason why it was worth spending days memorizing things for an exam. We all know it's gone again a few days later, but the book is still there.
I find the same applies to life in general. The important part is to be able to find solutions, and understand them when you do, not being able to recite every possible thing from memory.
If you remember "everything" without any effort, great! I don't. But, luckily, there doesn't seem to be much of a need.
Can't say more than that. I've seen many young hotshots that can run rings around me as day to day sysadmins. What I've became good at, as a sysadmin, is fixing something once and then automating the fix. I forget pretty quickly how I fixed the problem before, but I can always read the comments in the script I wrote to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Just rub it into the old noggin, and I'm sharp as a whistle in spring.
You should check Dr McCleary's book. Good advice from a scientific who actually explains how he reached his conclusions.
The notion that memory == intelligence is just wrong. Just get over it, and let a computer do all the memory for you. Use your brain for what it's uniquely qualified to do.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
This recent Slashdot thread (and the accomplishing article) discussed the effectiveness of brain training games.
In that thread, I pointed to Brain Workshop, an open source version of the game used in this study by Susanne Jaeggi, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. The study deals with improving "fluid intelligence" - the part of your mind that deals directly with the raw newness of experience or, as defined by Jaeggi, "the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge."
Others pointed out there's also a Javascipt version that's much more light-weight.
I use to be very anal about remembering every detail. As I've gotten older I'm less concerned with this. I use technology (Outlook calendar/tasks, smartphone, Google Calendar for personal) to remember less and remind me when needed. I only concern myself with concepts and only sweat the details when it comes to actually doing the job.
I feel far less stressed out than I did when I'd try to remember every little ol' thing simply because I thought I needed to be a pedantic nerd. As a bonus I'm realizing there is more to living contently and I feel I have more time to spend on other things.
On top of it all I also make sure to leave the damn things at home when I'm going to do something and don't want distractions. Work can pay me 24/7 if they want me to be available 24/7. Otherwise when I'm not at the office I don't really care.
I do still take the time to know the important things: Birthdays, anniversaries, etc..
No sig for you!!
Any slashdotter worth his/her bits should be a supporter of PBS. They have a couple of 'lectures' (pledge drive shows) about aging bodies and aging brains and how to live longer with healthy brains. While all of them sound like old wives tales, some of the suggestions on there may work for some. They do a good job of convincing you to eat and drink healthy (purple veggies, red wine etc) by showing you MRI pictures of 'bad brains' and 'good brains'.
I am in my mid-fifties, so I am in the same situation. The big difference that I notice in my work is the start-up time when switching programming languages and development tools: whenever I switch between Ruby, Common Lisp, and Java it takes about 5 minutes to click in to whatever new set of tools that I am using. After a half day I get even more tuned in.
So, I used to switch around using development tools and now I try to work in much longer time blocks before switching development contexts.
I think that exercise a few times a day really helps. I find that even 15 minute walks help concentration and getting into nature really helps (I live a block from a national forest land trailhead, and this picture was taken about 8 miles from where I live: http://www.markwatson.com/pictures/Mark5.jpg -- try not to get jealous).
For Omega-3, organic cold-pressed flax oil is both tasty and offers a lot of the benefits of fish oil. Lots of organic fruits and vegetables helps, at least in a good "placebo" way :-)
Lastly, as long as I am tossing out opinions not backed by any real evidence, I would say that a happy attitude helps concentration and work. As Joseph Campbell said "follow your bliss" and do what makes you happy. I have always had a knack for really enjoying whatever I am working on, and that seems to help.
-Mark
just like riding a bike. once you learn, you never forget.
Ow, my arse!
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Lay off the alcohol and get more exercise. You'll notice a great change in about 2-3 days (of not drinking, exercise takes a little longer to kick in)
and I've started making efforts to use external memory as much as possible: calendars, phonebooks, todo lists. All the things I didn't need 10 years ago.
i've been told that a good diet and exercise can help, but it's not THAT bad yet.
i forget people's names right after they introduce themselves. i lose my car keys every morning.
my daughter (8) is taking advantage of this; "daddy, remember you told me you'd take me to a movie." shit, maybe I did.
At least that what I read somewhere (can't remember where though ;-)
In terms of dealing with a failing memory, my solution is to write a lot of stuff down. I carry a pocket PC with all my notes in it -- very helpful.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I have to remember all kinds of shit now so the wife doesn't find out. I figure my memorization capacity has quadrupled since...er....what were we talking about again?
Working on your power of concentration can help your memory and recall.
There are some helpful exercises described in the book Concentration by Ernest Wood (originally published in 1949). http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1443076&referer=brief_results
Once you try a few of these, it's easy to incorporate them in your daily life.
For example, next time you find yourself in a long, rambling conversation that jumps from topic to topic, try to trace the conversation backwards to the beginning topic with your conversation partner.
Another helpful practice is, when you're faced with something you want to remember, try to remember as many contextual details about it as you can: where you are, who you're with, what the weather is like, what you're wearing, what it smells like, what background noises there are, etc. If you notice these things, you have a better chance at building the kinds of associations that help build strong memories.
Some Books
But as far as forgetting stuff, I noticed that I was forgetting left and right when I turned 23. The difference is that instead of just focusing on college or something else, I had a lot of shit going on in my life and was constantly distracted and that hurt my memory. Now it is even worse. I think as you get older and you have more of a life, you just are more distracted and a lot of stuff you just won't pay as much attention to to remember as much. I'll bet if you throw in kids forget it....
I bet this suggestion gets ignored completely! This IS Slashdot after all!
Bah!
At the last performance evaluation, he told me that the quality of my work was borderline due to the fact that I simply could not remember things. We worked out a plan that if I "qualify" for termination in the next layoff, then I will simply pull out the gun and blow my brains out.
If I cannot survive in the competitive American market place, then I should not live. Most Americans support the concept that a nation is a free-market place. If you cannot compete, then you deserve to die. Hence, America does not have national health insurance: losers should die.
Since I choose to live in America, I (and my manager) accept the rules of the free market.
Open Source way - your brain is proprietary and thats why you are having all these problems. Trade your brain with a Gnu...
You're wasting what little time you have left on this earth by spending dwindling energy and resources on an ill-fated attempt to stay young. Keeping the right attitude is also a lie and a waste. You are traveling along a number line, each whole number has it's own set of characteristics. Your range is 8.
Get off my lawn!
I too have found my brain to be less sharp than it
used to be. I believe in the wisdom of 'use it or lose it'. I have been a computer programmer for many years and write freeware programs. I am always thinking of some new fangled modificaton that I can add to my existing programs. I just put one out a few minutes ago. Although I know a great deal about writing programs and how the Windows system works, I believe that just the repetitive programming is helping to develope new synapses. I also eat a cup of blue berries every day which is supposed to help in the development of the brain.
A major contributer to memory loss is the stress of worrying about it. Expect it to work when needed, and it's more likely to do so.
That being said, do a crossword puzzle every day. Take DHA (from an algal source NOT fish oil). Eat brewer's yeast; it has every B vitamin known, plus lots of DNA and RNA. Eat eggs (choline), and beets (they provide a chemical group that the rest of your body will use and leave the choline for making acetylcholine.)
Exercise your brain - it really does respond just like muscle tissue does; it will grow and become more vigorous.
Don't take large doses of B vitamins, just take some. Your food will provide a variable amount on top of the minimum, and that variation will enhance your brain's use of what's available.
Most of all; if you expect some function to fail, you will stop using it so much, it will atrophy from lack of use, and you'll have a self-fulfilling prophesy. Just as you expect to get better at what you do with practice, expect your body's cells to get better at what they do with practice. They will, if you let them.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
The good news is that you are not alone. This is happening to everyone over 25 to one degree or another.
My first suggestion is to not separate mind from body. Aerobic and weight exercise can help your brain as much as puzzles and memory exercises.
Second, supplements - within reason. You may not want to take as many daily pills as Ray Kurzweil but I would recommend reading his book Fantasic Voyage.
Third, so-called smart drugs. Someone already mentioned Piracetam but I would suggest pramiracetam though it is more expensive. Also look into vinpocetine. And for general alertness there is adrafinil and modafinil (not sure if the latter is legal in the US yet).
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
Mayo Clinic's website is claiming that clinical studies have shown that Ginko Biloba increases memory (by supplying more blood to the brain) esp. when taken with Ginseng.
Fish oil is good for the brain too (but watch out for heavy metals) and of course exercise is good for your general health. 45min of cycling 3 times a week goes a long way.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Get a larger Hard Drive !
I'm fairly young, but this seems like an almost obvious answer to me (yay naivety!). For almost any situation, whether it be a conversation with a coworker, an article about the latest video card, or a night class, writing it down should help a lot. Not only do you have your notes as something to refer to should you forget, you also gain the added benefit of actually writing down what you learned.
Remember high school? If I didn't take notes on a lesson, I was guaranteed to do worse on a test. The same applies even as you get older - writing stuff down, even if the notes are minimal, should help with your memory problem significantly.
Obviously, YMMV, but even if it feels too nerdy for a self-described geek, I would highly recommend carrying a small notebook around just to take notes in. Give it a shot, you might be surprised at how well you begin to remember things.
...and you aren't likely to follow it. I know I am having similar symptoms and am not following my own advice very well.
The fact is, the body changes ...blah blah blah... you know where it's going. But with those changes, you also have different nutritional needs. What you need is "Science Diet" for older dogs. Eat a LOT less meat and a lot less starches. That doesn't leave a whole lot in the way of your favorite foods, but that is life. When I eat a lot of meat (and my god I love BBQ... especially pork ribs and pulled pork!) my brain goes to nearly useless. Eating starches makes me predictably sleepy and terribly less aware. I know these things all too well, but it is TOUGH changing diet! Social matter make it difficult... even convenience makes it difficult. But when I do take lunch at Souper-Salad instead of Burger-thing, I feel and think one hell of a lot better and the brain comes right back into swing.
One thing that helps significantly, I find, are those vitamin-based energy drinks. Stay clear of those youth-targetted energy drinks -- they will kill your brain FAST.
For what it's worth... I'm in my mid 40's and have found two things of use.
/.) I do think we're inundated increasingly more each day (see goole article just a few down) and I'm tired of it. So I do, actively, ignore a lot of shit. I find that helps me stay focused on what I value and what I want from my life.
1. When I was an undergrad I had a class on African Traditional Religions, the prof. was Kenyan. He used to actively speak out against using notebooks in class. He insisted that his education was better, it was entirely an oral based schooling as was his home life. After this had come up enough times in his class as well as my anthropology classes I thought I'd give it a go. I already had a great memory and often found notebooks and their accouterments a pain in the ass. One day I just stopped using any kind of notes; instead I paid attention to everything I felt I needed to learn. At night, I'd replay my day before I went to sleep. My GPA went up, in one semester from a 3.3 - a 3.9 and stayed there until I graduated.
2. I find, the older I get the less I care about much of the inane crap that gets tossed at me. (apologies to
Between work and home I have 14 unique passwords and change them every 30-60 days. I don't use a personal phone book either. I'd rather keep this stuff in my head instead of writing it down. I still believe that maintaining an active oral/mnemonic storyline of my life will keep it active instead of seeing it wane so dramatically in my later years.
I've seen this hold true for many friends who are in the theater. I've seen many 60+ yr/olds grab a script and be off book in 24 hrs. Relying on devices, of any kind, weakens the mind.
Whoa, why did you do that?
Don't forget to take care of your physical health. Excercise! Avoid bad foods, play, try to be fit. You wouldn't expect your legs to carry you very far if you didn't take care of yourself, and so it goes with your brain.
I'm in my 40s and have recently lost 30 pounds. My mind functions better lately than it did ten years ago. Or at least, it's malfunctioning in a way that makes me think so.
I was/am in the same boat as you. I noticed a huge drop in memory and concentration ability about 5 years ago. Like you I set off on a journey to find a solution, and what I found was
What were we talking about?
Oh yeah, I never found anything that helped.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
Being in my mid-forties the best things that I found to fight off decline in mental acuity is exercising, could be running or lifting weights, seems to help a great deal, might even start up tae-kwon-doe. Also go out and learn something new, try learning a new language or whatever you've had an interest in and will get the brain working as it did in youth.
Seriously, not having to remember things while you are sitting in front of your PC because you can always google for it is very bad for your memory ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Home remedies, hot "stuff", xyz "vitamins", doctor "recommended" is little more than what was called "snake oil" when I was young. Quite a few studies showing harm from vitamins in people have popped up recently.
Hence, I wouldn't "recommend" anything that can't or hasn't been proven in the self medication arena.
On that thought, there are easily a dozen common things that are known to cause brain rot. You can name them, and most could be self-avoided.
Surveys have shown that around 50% of hospital admissions are due to self-imposed conditions as a way of putting that.
What is left to help? Good food, good company, stimulating avocation & good exercise, which may be most important of all. Elderly people who don't move much deteriorate far more quickly than those that do physical tasks and/or exercise each day.
I think that besides eating well, exercising daily moderately and training your brain, one important thing for brain health is to sleep well.
But I'm no doctor, if you feel you have a problem, go and see one.
I just read a PhysOrg article today about how certain compounds in red wine seem to retard the onset of Alzheimer's, among other things. Check it out.
Actually, there is an entire class of racetams that can be used and each of them act a little different. Piracetam is considered the weakest of them all, and Pramiracetam is considered the strongest. I use Aniracetam and find that it helps quite a bit. When you stack them (Piracetam + Aniracetam) they work synergistically and you get an even stronger effect. Because they tend to use up your brains acetylcholine faster, people usually have to take a choline supplement with them a few times a week. The best form that I've found is alpha-GPC. It is the most bioavailable of choline supplements. The best part about these is that there are no side effects, even at high doses. Wiki - Racetam Class
Like everything else, it's "use it or lose it." Keep learning new stuff, keep remembering stuff, keep using it, don't slow down and for Bob's sake don't stop! I'm 48 and so far, so good. Hell, I'm even learning Mandarin at this late date.
Oh, and for the person who blames Google? I _work_ at Google. :-)
As a 39 year old psychologist one month away from the big four oh and noticing cognitive slowdown, I would suggest trying not to force the issue but look for a way to hack it. I started using David Allen's Getting Things Done system three years ago and - yeah I know gimmicky business thing blah blah -- it is actually a great way to relieve yourself from having to remember things.
On the technical end I run Tracks to manage my work, there are a lot of GTD-related programs so shop around.
Yeah. Some methods do work. Wired published a lengthy article earlier this year about how to remember everything. Apparently, a Polish guy named Piotr Wozniak sells a program called SuperMemo that does the trick.
In my case, I simply use technology.
I'm 25, and I have a neurological condition called Dyspraxia which causes short-term memory problems, among other things. (My long term memory works fine, and you wouldn't notice anything unusual just by looking at me) On any given day, I can usually remember only one or two pieces of information at a time in my short term memory, and I used to constantly forget about assignments, appointments, things I was told to do five minutes ago, etc. Over the years, I've had to adapt to this problem by devising workarounds.
I used to write things down in a planner book and keep it with me, but I kept losing it or forgetting to bring it with me. To solve this problem once and for all, I began using a tool called Taskfreak after a former co-worker told me about it. I have Taskfreak running on my server, and since it's a web app, I can check it from pretty much any location and at any time, unlike other software planners I tried in the past. Plus, its impossible to "lose" Taskfreak since it's never really in my possession to begin with. This tool has practically replaced my short-term memory, since the only thing I have to remember is to check it often. (The browser start pages on all my computers point to my taskfreak installation, so I see it every time I start Firefox or any other browser)
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
I started on a very, very cool tech R&D project in April at the age of 50. It's one of those things that is so involved that when anyone starts working there their brain swells up for the first month as it is filled up.
I have said many times why couldn't I be like 30 or 40 when my brain worked better and come across something like this?
I make up for the slowly decreasing short term storage by making a lot of notes. Make short term notes for what you are doing now. Then after the rush is over take a few minutes to flesh them out a little in case you have to do it again in a month and have forgotten what you did. It's not unmanly to make notes if it helps you kick the young whippersnapper's butts.
Don't multi-task as many things at once. This helps even the young. I used to work on six systems at a time. Now I do like two and get them right. If you're going to do things over and over take the time to script and automate if there is a ROI. Share the scripts, etc. with others to help save everyone time.
I draw on my 29 years of professional technical experience. I use the professional maturity gained over the years to spend an appropriate amount of time carefully crafting an important email or document. It ends up saving time in the long run.
Over the years you learn what works in business and what doesn't. Tech knowledge is important but learning how people and business works is important too.
I use my 29 years of IT experience in so many different things to my advantage. Last week I reduced a problem down to system tuning. I used those old skills and made a lot of people happy. In the old days system tuning was a way of life. Younger people who haven't dealt with low horsepower and don't do know things like that.
Use your experience with people and maturity gained over the years. I've got a deck of punch cards of assembly code on my desk to remind me how good I've been over the years. Today people can hardly imagine using assembly much less reading a dump. Might just have to do some of assembly in the future to get stuff to run faster.
Hold on. The OP gave a relevant reference. Why was his comment marked down as a troll? Methinks /. moderators need to be sent to moderator school.
Its effects are dramatic and well-established, whereas the case for memory exercises, environmental enrichment etc. is murkier --
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/opinion/08aamodt.html
Remembering stuff isn't what makes you a geek - remembering stuff is what your hard drive and the Internet is for. Being a geek is all about applying your one-eyed devotion to [hardware|software|cameras|games|knitting|etc] to the fullest extent and doing nifty things with it.
It's pretty well known that young people are better at raw ability where older people are better at anything that requires experience. So don't worry about forgetting stuff too much, concentrate on kicking arse with your experience.
If you are forgetting stuff, write it down. But keep on being a geek and stay fit, because mental and physical activity are two primary factors in retaining cognitive ability in old age.
/Mike
PS: wear sunscreen
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
"Einstein"
Get up!
is that why you're always misplacing your keys and finding the phone in the fridge?
people become senile as they get older because the brain, like the rest of your body, deteriorates with age. how much it deteriorates depends on how you live. unfortunately, as many people get older they become less and less active, and it becomes a vicious cycle.
if you learn to place chess when you're young, and you never stop playing chess, you'll still be able to play quite well even in your old age. you won't be as fast as you were in your mid-20's, but you'll probably still be fast in your mid 80's as you were in your mid-to-late-30's. as long as you keep your brain active, the areas that you use regularly will not degrade very much. so yes, in theory if everyone remained active in their golden years, their brain will still function quite well in all the ways "that matter." but that's not how things are in reality.
in reality people become less active, both physically and mentally, as they age. they don't push themselves as hard mentally, and they also stop stretching their mind/creativity. senior citizens also tend to be less socially active, and a lack of regular social interaction/stimulation can also lead to mental decline.
it's got nothing to do with performing menial work for others. neurological degradation is not the same as becoming wiser. nor is becoming more and more useless the same as becoming sager.
My personal approach is to drink more tequila shots and beer. I always remember more and drive better on a ton of booze.
For some reason I refuse to use either spell check or the spacebar properly.
I'm in a similar situation with memory loss due to a sleeping disorder. In short, the worse I sleep, the less I'm able to immediately remember. I'm not talking about things like arcane switches to iptables (I mention iptables because I was recently passed over for a job because I couldn't list all of the switches and what they are used for, in the middle of an interview). I'm talking about names of people I've known for years, or forgetting what a red-light means (thank God I'm rarely that bad, and it's never caused any accidents).
Proper sleep hygiene is absolutely necessary for both short term, and long term memory access. I say memory access because I believe most everything is retained, but the difficulty comes in pulling it back up again.
The only method I've had for successfully offsetting bad sleep patterns has been nutritional supplements. Personally speaking, I use a product called Memorin from Vaxa http://www.vaxa.com/663.cfm (disclaimer, yes I have a distributorship with the company to save money, no this link DOES NOT reference me in any way, and I will NOT be getting a kick back from any sales it generates). It has never made me jittery, or agitated like caffeine, or speed type supplements. Generally the only way I know it's working is that I'm able to remember stuff easier then normal, and focus a little better.
If supplements aren't your thing, I have a friend that has gone through a major diet change to offset excessive memory fatigue. No hydrogenated fats, no preservatives, reduced (cane) sugar intake, those type of things. Personally speaking I couldn't do it. But hey, to each his own.
Well there are studies which are inconclusive but point to high dosages of vitamin in conjunstion with high doses of vitamin E reducing chances of alzheimers by 80%. Their is also evidence that THC and cannibinoids not only help to produce new brain cells but to preserve them. So I gues what I am saying little Johnny is don't forget to smoke your pot and take your vitamins.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I've always had a nearly photographic memory - I can remember things back to when I was 1 year old. However, as I've gotten older, I find that the film's getting a bit dried out and it's not as easy to remember things as it once was.
The simple solutions?
* Sleep. As a pure CS - I never got enough. Still don't. But when I do, I can remember much better.
* Repeat things that you want to remember 5 times. Whether it's out-loud or to yourself, it doesn't matter.
* Lower the stress levels. Whether it's smoking pot, petting the cat, hanging out with the wife/girlfriend, going mountain biking, just walking around, meditating, etc. it all helps. Stressed out brains don't work so well - and caffeine doesn't always counteract those effects like it did when we were 20-somethin...
* Play sudoku. Seriously - play that thing a couple times a week. Get one of those little toys, a book of the puzzles, something for the palm/treo/blackberry/N8x0/whatever... It exercises the brain.
* Finally - challenge yourself with things that have nothing to do with what you do every day. The more technical, the better. Make the brain work. Pick up a good book on Quantum Mechanics or Gravational Wave Theory or even Differential Equations. Yeah - we all struggled with that crap in school, but trying to wrap your brain around it helps to keep things sharp. ... that which isn't used withers. That which is used to excess grows tired. Find the balance - it's going to change as you grow older, but it's certainly doable.
I personally can't wait for Alzheimer's given all of the stuff (plus an ex) that I'd love to forget about.
I agree. Recently, I've started treating my computer as my swap space. Things I don't really need to keep at the top of my head, I "swap" out to a computer, and then page them back in as needed.
Hey, gramps - next time you build a bike, you might want to follow the instructions and bolt the seat on.
Richard Feynman had a good story about this. Someone once published a paper that was supposed to have serious impact on his theory. The problem was, that when Feynman read through it he didn't understand it at all. He was all out of himself thinking his years as a researcher are over and he's just too old to understand the new stuff. Finally his wife talked him down and told him to try and go through the paper the old fashioned way - step by step, taking notes, just like when he was a student. And sure enough when he chewed through all the formulas slowly he understood it all.
The moral of the story is that we get too comfortable as we get older. We have more experience and our brains are trained cracking the hard stuff. You are used to understand complex things easily and you forget just how much energy it used to take when you were learning some fundamental ideas the first time. Just remember how much time you had to devote to understand calculus even though it's ideas may seem self-evidend now to you.
Now from time to time you encounter a problem that your brain will not crack right-away. You think you are too old for it but it is much more possible that you just don't have the patience to put as much effort into understanding it as you did when you were a student. And that is not a physical brain condition - it's just good old 'getting too comfortable'.
They say that regular exercise greatly improves brain function, especially with growing old. As usual, studies on the trusty lab rats give some credit to this belief: http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20081119/exercise-the-brains-fountain-of-youth?src=RSS_PUBLIC
... but now I just can't remember what it was.
Mind training practice, by which I mean mindfulness-based meditation, is a really wonderful tool for this.
It helps engage the full brain, including that very non-geeky right hemisphere, in the learning and recall process. It trains the mind to apply the attention much more intelligently and effectively.
I find that this actually opens up more space in my head to geek out when necessary. The stuff I do not need to have filed away all perfectly can drift off into a more intuitive space where I can still access it when necessary. Meanwhile there is more room in my brain to efficiently file away all the nerdy details that I want.
See the Mind and Life Institute for research and information about this kind of thing.
When you're young, the significant stuff is all recent. When you're older it's spread out over a much wider range of time. It's also a lot more stuff.
It's a lot easier remembering everything you learned in the last 5 years than remembering everything you learned in the last 30 years.
The answer is simple:
books
Wait, where was I going with that subject line again?
How important is it to you? It's probably not that you're forgetting, you just need different or stronger triggers to that memory. Try the association tricks that memory experts recommend (ie, Google'em). Of course, the more you're passonate about something, the more you'll remember about it.
As a geek who started computering in '69, I've found I have to limit myself to practicing and learning the things that MOST interested me - my niches, my passions. The IT field has expanded, fragmented, forked, and repeated itself so many time I can't absorb the depth and breadth of it anymore. So I browse the headlines to stay generally current and then only concentrate on what is really important to me. At least, I try real hard not to follow every link...
Finally, it's very important to be healthy and well rested. Vitamins, diet, exercise, those are up to you and your body.
Let me add this: there are some medications that have helped me the last few years to concentrate, stay alert, remember, and be more productive. Just Google "brain enhancing drug", "modafinal", and "ADD or ADHD", but skip the steroids.
I forgot what it was called, but I remembered that I had one, so I looked.
Now I carry a Moleskine notebook and mechanical pencil with me at all times (given that I remember). It is much more useful than computer notes, as a lot of the time when I want to record something there isn't a computer to hand. (Exposure notes when taking pictures with film, measurements when in the garage, etc.) Also, it is easier and quicker to flip through the pages looking for the relevant information than to get to a computer.
In general, I find it sufficient to remember where the information is instead of trying to remember the information.
Best wishes,
Bob
Your brain is screwing up because you're not getting enough myelin around the axons of your neurons - think of it as stripping away the insulation around the wires inside a computer. They're going to start smacking into eachother and short circuiting.
Also, the more fat you eat, the less sugar/carbs you'll be eating, so you won't be creating as many advanced glycation end-products (AGEs), which build up in your body over decades and interfere with proper brain function. AGEs have also been associated with increased amyloidosis among Alzheimer's patients.
I don't have a lot of info crammed into my 41-year-old brain. I find it's better to know *how* and *where* to find the answers, rather than actually storing any actual data in my brain. I, too, am finding that age (as well as an over-fondness of rum) has affected my ability to remember things, but just so long as I can look them up online somewhere, I'm ok with that.
You can try neurofeedback which is a direct way to train the brain. Research this since there is a lot information out there, both for the expert and layman.
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Normally I stay out of threads like this, but I take exception to the high number of responses so far that have advocated taking supplements and vitamins. But that's what our society has come to these days, I guess. Got a problem? Take a pill!
I'm not that old but like most of us, I'm aging nonetheless. Here is what I'm doing to try to keep my brain in decent shape.
First, keep your body in shape. Recognize that the brain depends on the body. If you aren't eating right and aren't exercising, then your metal facilities are lower than they should be. Every single study that has been evaluated the link between exercise and brain function has found that there is a direct causal relationship. People who exercise regularly are smarter than those that don't, when all other factors are equal.
Second, keep the mind in shape. It needs exercise too. I usually get plenty of intellectual stimulation from daily geeky activities but when I don't, I read like a fiend. Read fiction, read non-fiction, read technical books (even ones you've already read). Keep learning. You'll never learn everything there is to know, but it's incredibly rewarding to learn as much as you can. In the past few years, I've taken interest in music, electronics, and a foreign language (German). All things that I wouldn't have dreamed I'd dabble in 10 years ago.
If it's memory in particular that you're having a problem with, see about getting more sleep. One popular theory for the necessity of sleep is that it gives the brain a chance to shut down the I/O bus while it evaluates, organizes, and stores information received during the day. Sounds plausible to me because I know I don't retain much when operating on minimal sleep.
I could not imagine not pushing myself mentally, regardless of how old I get.
Sitting around doing nothing would bore the crap out of me after a few days, and I'd have to go fix something.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I must admit at 43 my PDA is my best friend. I scribble more notes at work and keep a more detailed list of where I am at on projects and where I expect them to lead with more timelines. I don't think I have trouble with retention due to my age, I think the problem is at this point in my life technolgoy is just a slice of my life, not the entire thing it was at 18. Then I could computer all night long and sleep all day. My priorities are rearranged. Now, when at work, I am not only working, I am thinking about what to pick up at the grocery store for dinner, answering an email from my wife, wondering what holiday is coming up next, and wondering if I paid the water bill. I'm multiplexing much more than my 18 year old self which just makes me look like a slow old geezer...................
The Dual-N-Back cognative exercise wont help you with your long term memory, but it is excellent for keeping your short term memory sharp. It's the only exercise proven to really do anything.
You can read about it in wired
You can also read the
full paper if you want to pay or just read the abstract.
iPhone version
Online (requires silverlight)
This one doesn't require a plugin
http://xkcd.com/447/
Does having a witty signature really indicate normality?
I was 37 when I entered medical school. Before that, I was Java programmer. I found that I had to work much harder in order to keep up in med school than I ever did in cubicle land. But I love it! I love lecture, the books, the patient encounters, cadaver lab, everything. It is amazing to me that I get to do this. I also found that the simple skill of memorizing and learning is like any other skill - the more I practice it, the better I get. I have also found that I enjoy thinking through things a lot more, and I have found that I am thinking more deeply than I used to. Probably because I am much more passionate about medicine and healing than I ever was about computers or programming. Perhaps if you are having difficulty remembering things you feel you should remember, you should one of three things. 1) Use technology make up the lack - lots of posters are suggesting this, it's easy. 2) Get a referral from your primary care physician to go see a neurologist. He or she will have some standardized tests they can use to determine if you are within norm or not. Regardless of where you fit in terms of your memory, a neurologist may have some practical suggestions on how to approach this challenge. 3) Find a career about which you are passionate enough so that you are fired up mentally. It could be that you simply don't care enough to make the effort required to remember things you think you should remember. Maybe you need a vacation or maybe you should find a hobby that is fulfilling and fun that has nothing to do with your career. It could be that you are simply burnt out. Here is a list of questions that are a modified Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), by Paul O'Leary, MD, from the Fall 2008 issue of "Physician License & Practice Today,", page 8:
1. I feel emotionally drained from my work
2. I feel used up at the end of the workday
3. I feel fatigued when I get up in the morning and have to face another day on the job
4. I don't understand how my patients (customers/coworkers/boss/minions) feel about things
5. I feel I treat some (same list as 4) as if they were impersonal 'objects'
6. Working with people all day is really as strain for me
7. I deal very poorly with the problems of (same list of people as 4)
8. I feel burned out from my work
9. I feel I'm not influencing people's lives through my work
10. I've become more callous toward people since I took this job.
Anyway, don't accept the status quo. Work through this problem. Use your analytical skills and experience and find a solution and then apply it with discipline. The brain can do wonderful things but, really, only if we make it so. Good luck! -
There was one of those mythbuster kinda things I saw. This guy upped his lean protein intake to see if it would help his brain. He took a battery of tests to gauge his reaction time ant ability to process informatie.on before he started and then took it again after 4 weeks of increased protein intake. He scored noticeably higher on the tests. It may have been placebo, but it's worth looking into.
My grandfather was recently diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. Since there is no cure the only treatment that is worth endeavouring at this juncture is resistance. The basic idea is that you take certain measures to stimulate new growth in the brain and it helps you remember new things as well as helping you recall things you already know.
Some simple methods are really effective, for example, write down everything you want to remember. Write a mnemonic if possible but ultimately just writing the whole thing down is the most effective.
Some methods are a little more self-manpiulative. For example, write yourself reminders of important info and place them in places where you will encounter them later rather than explicitly seeking them out. The interesting thing here is that you will begin to notice you remember the thing before you encounter it due to a minor anxiety induced alertness related to predicting your encounters. The effect is similar to setting an alarm and then subconsciously thinking about that alarm every time you see a clock til the alarm goes off.
You probably don't have this problem, but, reading literature is generally helpful in stimulating your memory. Read new things though. Don't read the same old moldy space alience bug fighting sci-fi! Read some poetry or a mainstream mystery novel.
Another aspect of this problem to give some attention to is information overload. Take yourself away from it all. Get rid of your habitual slashdot refreshing, get yourself an RSS aggregator that can filter everything from zonk, and so forth. Open up your time for focusing on memorization and learning of what really matters and try to take a more curricular approach to new learning with self testing and note taking. Basically, all the same habits from school so many years ago...
And personally I find it useful to avoid too many memory crutches. I used to memorize phone numbers implicitly upon hearing them and over time I started writing them down because I feared I would forget between hearing and then needing to use it. For example, if I asked my wife for a number and then I needed to dial it, out of fear I would write it down. That kind of complacency in memory usage just leads to a poor memory. Remember the phone number, use it, and if yous crewed up the negative reinforcement will have an effect of memory improvement in the end.
That's about all I can remember for now... :-)
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
I'm 49, and been playing with computers since 1982. Back then we used punch cards and walked to work up hill both directions. I agree that my mind is not so good at remembering specific facts as it used to be; never has been. So I compensate. I'm far enough the ladder that understanding the processes and the what can happen is more useful than how to code in the latest style and language. What I am good for is my experience, all the many years I've been doing the same sort of things. In my given areas of proficiency, I can usually see what to do and how to do it. Very little is a surprise anymore. The youngsters are much faster at seeing parts of a project or applying solutions without understanding the possible exceptions that will occur. I've already seen a lot of those exceptions.
Don't get me wrong and thing that work is not fun or is a grind. It is still fun to work on solutions to problems. Today, those problems are different, usually more complex and require more sharply honed instincts to get to solutions faster and cheaper.
And 2nd, I write lists now. Never more than what I need from the grocer today or the calls and appointments I have for today. 10 items on any list are a couple too many. I keep a pack of 3" * 3" PostIts and a pen handy. One page, tear it off and stick it on my phone or inside my wallet. (stick a love note to your other half's hair spray or some such in the cabinet, too, sometime.)
Supposedly after 40 your brain function starts degenerating...along with the rest of your body. I read and take classes nearly constantly. And, yeah, mentally I'm a step slower. But I'm also able to focus better. Instead of 100's on tests I limp along with 90's.
You do get it back in other places, too. A lot of times you'll be covering material you learned a long time ago or maybe brushed on in a related topic. So that's more of a refresher than new ground and maybe you add some new information to the old, which is easier to remember than someone with less experience.
When you learn a new programming language later in life, you may not know the language but you know how to program. Loops, arrays, classes, functions, methods, IF statements...you know what you need to know, which saves a lot of the overhead processing power that you might have lost. Same with a spoken language. I may not be able to memorize as well as when I was in my 20's, but I know nouns, verbs, irregular verbs, idioms, contractions and all the elements of a language. You don't have to burn any processing building the mental scaffold for a new language.
So, yeah, you lose a little. You can make it up by being more efficient and having a broader knowledge base to build on.
Read a lot....and, oh yeah...stay off my lawn.
Punks.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The internet helps you remember things. I call it a pornographic memory.
FLR
Wow, so I'm not the only one, nice to know. I will be 50 in a few short months and it started about two or three years ago. I feel like I was in a fog and things were just having a hard time getting through my think head. Once there the memories seemed to take the first available exit. It is not a pleasant experience having been a "Golden Boy" back in the 80's then onto being the go-to guy that was always handed the most complicated tasks. Now I'm doing things too embarrassing to mention. But I do enjoy telling the youngsters stories of punch cards, RPG, SNOBOL, PL/M, teletype terminals, line editors, oh here I go again, the old guy reminiscing about the old oold ooold days. What was the question? Oh yea, I have started writing everything down this year, should have started doing that long ago. I use Outlook to remind me of everything that I need to do that is more than 5 minutes away. And now I am a big "Team" player, I take on a lot of the crappy work to leave the heavy lifting to the kiddies. You know how it is with the bad back and all I have to watch what I lift.
Interesting question. I hate to admit it but I'm getting up there too, and in the industry I'm surrounded by people younger than me. Think positive though, that is the key. Experience brings a strong work ethic, keeping this up exposes you to different program and design environments etc and you learn how to accomplish jobs better. I'd say just take care of your health and think positive; keep taking vitamins and drinking tea and keep working your brain the same way you did when you were younger.
Really most studies show that mans brain power peaks at age 39, and I can say as someone approaching that age, I have never been more mentally capable as I was in my mid to late 30s. And I am 39 next month. Mylein peaks and then degenerates after 39, in recent studies, so mid 20s is out the window. I learned spanish fluently at age 31. Granted I was in Colombia and that was all I could speak. My father went to lawchool at 46, graduated at 52, top of his class, and, three years later had a phd in philosophy, again top of his class. Your mid 20's is nothing but hormonal and easy to get over hangover age. I did not come into my own physically and mentally until I passed 30.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
I miss my Slashdot PID the most!
When I was about 22ish. Not for any ridiculous moral reason, and not on some absolutist frothing at the mouth basis - I'll still sip a drink at new years and things. - I simply don't drink alcohol much because it's bad for your brain. The "couple of beers with the team at the end of the week to wind down" is rapidly endumbening you.
Sure, I was mocked for it at the time, there's ridiculous peer pressure associated with drinking. But if your work depends on your brain, drinking at the rate of a typical american or european or (holy fuck) japanese salaryman is basically self-destructive.
I look at college geek friends who didn't quit drinking, and they're all okay, not raging alcoholics or something. But they're not quite as sharp as me or as fast as me, and I think it's down to the drink. I can hold my own against a teenager playing modern computer games, they can't. I can look at a password and remember it, they write it down "just in case", etc.
I had an elective castration....
I voted Republican; I feel pretty emasculated as well.
Exercise increases the metabolism and helps the body clean the blood. Healthy blood cells make for a healthier brain. Meditation helps focus the mind and keep it sharp. Modern science has made great break throughs with supplements. I can't speak highly enough of Jarrow Labs' Alpha GPC. It increases the amount of choline available to the brain and also gets metabolized into HGH.
I have read an excellent book about aging and how to stop forgetting things. I am sure I did. The book basically say ... Oh, shit I cannot recall what is said. I will submit here a link to the book at Amazon as soon as I recall the book title. I promise I will.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
In John Medina's "Brain Rules" book, he talks about how aerobic exercise has been proven to help improve memory and mental function as we age. Exercise isn't just to keep us physically healthy, it's also been shown to help increase certain proteins in the brain the increase cognitive ability.
"gramps"??
I'm 33.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
"Do this for 40 years and you'll be just as sharp at 50 as you were at 20."
50 - 40 = 10! Are you suggesting that 10 year-olds should be concerned about losing mental capacity? How about drinking? ;)
Try learning a new language. Force yourself to speak/listen as much as possible to only that language for certain periods. That's my tact, and it seems to work fine. I'm 48 and sharp as ever and still have amazing memory (for the important things)
Although any serious brain activity that requires thought, memory and processing will work to keep your brain healthy. Its just like muscles - want them to be big and not grow soft? Gotta use them
One highly productive developer in my office has a notoriously short term memory. One day he told me he was going to implement a feature, when he discovered the feature had written a few months ago... by him! He told me he found out because he used the same naming and the compiler told him.
I have a very good memory. I laughed at him for a year. Until I discoved I had done the exact same thing. Except I was not consistent in my naming, so I reimplement a few hundred lines of code. These days we are more organized so this is less likely.
Of course automated systems won't save you that often. But being systematic and remembering to keep notes and where to look is very useful, like having an encrypted password file for the rest of the passwords. Another example is having been forced to write meeting notes. At first I did this somewhat slapdash. But with my memory going a little I have been better about putting rationale and process of a decision not just the outcome. Now I occasional do go back, but as importantly it helps me to remember and I can actual ask someone to read the notes before going through the full explanation again.
I think the rest of what has been suggest is good and can be joined. Learn new things, find a role and learn how to be less reliant on memory, write things down, exercise - both mental and physical etc.
Replace all meat in your diet with fish & seafood.
Then wait 3 years for the changes to take effect.
Try it. You will be most pleased with the results.
Seriously, I can't remember things that happened the same day at times.
Code I wrote weeks or months ago....well give me a while to read it. (I write clean code, but anything longer than 2 months and I need to refamiliarize myself).
Forgetting people's names is really bad. I use to be a consultant so I really had to work hard to remember a name. Once I've been working with someone for a week it's not so bad. If I'm not introduced to a bunch of people all at once it's not so bad. But introduce me to 10 people and expect me to remember their names and I'll laugh at you. I may remember two or 3.
So how do I cope? Concentrate. Make sure my problem solving skills are good. Look things up and make sure they're available to look up!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Memory can be improved at any age. Reading aloud engages significantly more areas of the mind than silent reading. Try that for 15 minutes a day and see what that does for you.
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/smart_software
"is that why you're always misplacing your keys and finding the phone in the fridge?"
Thanks! I was just looking for the phone to call my parents about Thanksgiving dinner. Now, what was their phone number again? I can't seem to find the phone book. OH, gotta go. I warmed up the oven for supper but for some reason I see smoke coming from the kitchen.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Vitamin K can be dangerous with increased age if one has a thrombosis history.
Folic acid (I read some months ago) can contribute to Vit. B12 deprivation masking _and_ hence cognitive loss (see Wikipedia for a better explanation).
Every decision -- every single one -- brings consequences. Vitamins are no different.
Start going to bed at a decent hour.
You need approximately 10 hours of sleep.
Children only pretend to be knowledgeable about millions of things. But in reality they only know small bits about a broad range of topics.
Yes they know what Calculus is but 'NO' they cannot perform Limits, explain why a rotary engine works, nor can they fix a broken car engine.
So go the fuck to sleep and stop dranking caffine as it's clouding your mind.
pz
I've heard that ginkgo biloba works to improve memory and cognitive function...
However, you need to take it for 30 days before it starts working...
But if you can REMEMBER to take it every day for 30 days, then perhaps you don't NEED it?
-Myke
It is the answer.
Do what I do. Up your caffeine dose eeeevvverry yyyeeaaarrr...........
Knowing facts and specific piece of knowledge is useful, but its must more important to know how to how to work things out. If you cant remember as much then dont try and remember much, if you find yourself working things out again and again, then you are reinforcing the process of gaining knowledge rather than reinforcing the knowledge itself. I think knowing the process rather than the result is the path to wisdom.
A smart person knows what to do, a wise person knows what not to do....
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Since I crossed the GEEZER boundry a few years ago (or so), I found that a proper diet is not to fry or nuke your brain to often ( 2 beers not 37, a couple tokes not 14 bowls) works well for keeping an edge. Exercise consists of occasional arguments with my x-wifes and moving to a strange place every 4-5 years. the best move is to a place where you dont know anyone or the language.
Proudly Butchering code for 20 years
Unfortunately since we're not to that point yet, I've started using Notefrog on a flashdrive.
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I was never able to remember crap. I couldn't tell you what I had for breakfast, and this is a condition I've had since I was 5, and continues strong to this day. I've got a Nearly-Fool-Proof system in place to make sure my fly is up when I leave the restroom. Shoelaces are still a challenge.
But, here's the deal, the real important stuff I know, and more importantly, =you= know, is still strong and undiminished, and this will be the way until you die or alzheimers eats your head.
You need to operate like the absentminded geek... and you know you know one...operates. The interesting stuff you know cold, because it's interesting. The stuff that isn't interesting, =WRITE THAT SHIT DOWN=. This was the hardest lesson I learned as a geek... some stuff just settles into my head. Usually the awesome small details of obscure systems. Other stuff does not. Usually who's on-call for this week, or who has to sign off on the change-review.
Write. It. Down.
More! Write it down in a way that you can figure out and trace back to any given project what's going on. Getting geek-obsessed in a writing instrument and paper really helps (.9mm lead mech pencils on moleskine: lovely figuration in a satin-smooth writing stroke, Pilot .9mm and Rotring 1mm leads being superior to Pentel's .9mm.)
So, the issue isn't age, but geek hyperfocus geting more hyperfocus as the years wind by. Recognize, and deal with it geek-style: lots of notes. Bonus? Doodling when they bullshit on the conf call goes unquestioned.
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those were just figures i remembered off the top of my head (it might have been from a BBC or NatGeo documentary or maybe an article from NewScientist) so they may not be accurate. but my point remains, just shift the referenced ages as appropriate.
perhaps mid 20's is more to do with reflexes and response times, but those things have little to do with overall intelligence/knowledgeability. but i do know that we perform certain types of mental tasks better when we're younger. for instance, young children are better at remembering unfamiliar visual information, like a screen filled with random numbers, or made-up bugs/creatures. this is because the brain goes through 2 different stages of rapid development during which infrequently used neuronal connections are pruned, which optimizes the brain for commonly performed tasks like facial recognition--which adults are generally better at than small children.
however, i'm very glad to hear about you and your father's experiences. i'm 23 myself, and i really hope to god that i haven't reached my intellectual peak already, as i got a little sidetracked after high school and didn't really regain my focus until more recently. it's also a comforting thought that i still have a few years to reach my full physical potential--a lot of people say i look like i'm only 16, and i'm also pretty scrawny; though i'm not holding out too much hope on that.
Air traffic controller specialist is one of the few occupations in the US where maximum age limits for initial hire (30 for civilians) are legal. In my younger days as an ATCS, I could easily remember a list of 8-10 pending aircraft callsigns while working a busy traffic pattern (sometimes a mix of small puddle jumpers and KC-135s and anything in between), while talking to the ground controller about something totally unrelated, like the party I went to the night before. The interesting thing is that you learn how to do this through practice, every day, 6 hours a day. After 10 years as a controller, I was able to remember random bits of information from simultaneous auditory and visual sources. It was automatic: I did not have to consciously think about it, or use memory tricks. It just happened.
Two years after I decided to move on to other things in life and left the tower, I discovered I couldn't remember shit. There are not many jobs out there that require you to perform dual n-back exercises on a daily basis (of course, back then I knew nothing about "dual n-back" exercises), and once I was no longer exposed to this type of brain simulation, my ability to remember short-term facts was drastically reduced.
These dual n-back exercises (I tried the JS version) are very similar to the type of mental processing controllers use to process queues of radio calls and traffic sequences. I'm looking forward to trying them out to see if some of my short-term memory comes back to me.
I exercise daily, teach myself new things that I've always wanted to learn, do a lot of reading and challenge my mind in many other ways. I enjoy a few beers or glasses of wine often and do a little weed now and then. I don't take any vitamins and I don't do diets. I'm 63.
I realize that I have forgotten a lot of information I needed to know for school, work etc., but I recognize that I have forgotten that information because I no longer need it and I replaced it with new stuff I like.
There is a history of Alzheimer's in my family so I also keep myself informed on the latest research regarding prevention.
For starters, paying attention to your health is critical. If you are overweight, set a goal to get your Body Mass Index down at least to 22-23. Get your vision and hearing checked so that you don't miss key points of a presentation or conversation. Get a physical exam to check on blood pressure, cholesterol, blood glucose, and other health issues that can affect your mental acuity.
Exercise is important, so make room in your life for bicycling, running, swimming, or some other form of regular exercise. Get custom-made orthotics for your shoes so that you can walk/run without pronating or hurting your knees.
I have three effective memory aid techniques. First, focus on one thing at a time. No one really multitasks very well, though it's easier when you are younger. You can't sit in a business meeting and check your email or surf the web. You definitely can't drive and talk on your mobile phone.
Second, keep a physical todo list. For me, it's just an index card, updated or replaced each morning with a list of things I'd like to accomplish that day, grouped into A, B, and C priorities, freely mixing personal and professional items. The card idea is based on both the GTD approach and the Hipster PDA.
Third, save online text and links that you might want to see again. I use Foxmarks and de.licio.us to give myself access to those bookmarks from multiple machines. I use Google Notebook and Evernote to clip articles, links, and more. The ability to quickly retrieve useful information comes in handy if you are unable to instantly recall something.
For me, it's not that getting older has my brain struggling, it's that getting older has me doing so many more things with so many new means that I can't possibly keep it all straight. I've started two new businesses, still have the original one; I work on twelve projects at a time, and still have hobbies, friends, family, and recreation. And I also keep track of Dexter.
For me, it's come down to the simple mindset of switching hats means switching heads. When I'm in "Business A Day" mode, the other businesses don't exist, can't remember anything about them, don't need to. I'm switching more than simply my activity, I'm switching cognitive mindsets entirely.
As to how I've gone about learning such a thing, I can't explain it. Unless I did it by allocating given days, like wednesday and saturday, to Business B, from the second I awaken to the moment my day ends. That tends to have the effect of really focussing on a given hat.
Surround yourself with people of all ages. I teach at a local gym; I'm one of the oldest instructors on staff. I get to hang out with lots of younger women in tight lycra.
Seriously, if you work out, and if your peer group consists of interesting people, you won't get old. Surround yourself with a bunch of geezers sucking their gums and you're done for.
I am not a dietician (albeit I have studied a short university course in nutrition science), but I believe that the best diet in the world for health and a sharp brain is the Mediterranean diet, and specifically its traditional Greek diet variety including lots of traditional Greek products.
The problem is not your memory. It is the huge amount of crap you're trying to remember. And a less c*cksure attitude to life.
I deal with a lot of postgraduates and undergraduates. Most of them would forget their head if it wasn't screwed on. But they _think_ their memory is perfect. And that their life is _incredibly_ complicated. And that they know _all_ that there is to know.
Now, to give them their due, the 20 somethings are more lateral than I am these days. And less set in their ways.
But the problem isn't your memory*. You've just started to get a dose of humility. Work out what is important, use lists and get the important things done.
Thog :-)
* presuming you're 40; your diet is OK and you're getting enough exercise and sleep. Your hair, eyes and joints go long before your memory.
PS I'm not as fast as I used to be. But I'm a hell of a lot more devious
-- Butlerian Jihad NOW!
I had a plan to keep my brain from aging, but I forgot what it was...
When I get to forgetting I do not give up, at least not easily, pause then try to remember again, let it idle, then again. I have good results expecially with names, even if the person has walked a block away I remember their name and at least do not feel old and helpless. As far as remembering the launch code with ten seconds to spare, I have not arrived to this point, to forget this and try to remember, yet.
I eat my grapes at room temperature, cuz the cold ones hurt my teeth
I keep a text file with daily notes. If I forget something (like what's that goofy syntax for find with a wild card again), I just do a grep and find it in my notes.
I'm 54, and I've found finishing my computer science degree helps keep my brain ticking along. Learning Linear Algebra and Statistics and Stochastical Modeling is painful, but is definitely keeping my brain sharp.
A bird in the hand is worth two, if by sea.
I can't remember the last time I forgot something.
when you get old you are supposed to have a secretary.
Works for me and I'm 62 ... or ... is that 63 ... damn. Really it works. I think it's the new mitochondrion produced that makes this work. Only way for an old guy to get younger.
Don't be shy about storing important bits of information, ideas, notes, etc, externally. I use a cross platform, mobile friendly web application to store information. It has quite literally become an extension of my mind. I do not function properly without it. Also, did you know you can now view Google Calender from your GMail inbox?
you might be right. My oldest kid is 15...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
"No that was your mother. Don't you remember?"
Your brain develops neural network paths based on experiences and feelings. If you continue to repeat those same experiences over and over the receptors burn out and you start experiencing problems (Alzheimers?). Keep doing things new and differently and your brain will be 'new' all the time. Memory too.
You might want to make one of those helpful notes reminding you that you already told us about using your maturity and experience. Like six times or something.
Then maybe you won't tell us the same thing three or four or more times in the space of a single message.
Sheesh, what the young and able-brained have to put up with from you rambling oldsters ;-)
I think learning a new language REALLY well, as in applying it to a large project - that is an excellent way of refreshing the memory that you already have, as well as learning a few new things.
That said I'd ALSO try something totally new as a hobby, the more exercise the brain gets the better. I just think some exercise devoted to improved retention of what you have and are interested in is wise.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There is a proven way to prevent "smart loss". (That is, proven except for actual deterioration like alzheimers). I've known people in their fifties who were showing signs of cranial petrification, and a few in their nineties who were as sharp as ever.
First thing: Don't stop learning. Change is good for the brain. If all you ever use your brain for is programming, it will deteriorate in other areas. Keep learning new skills and areas of knowledge.
Second thing: Exercise your brain. Work on puzzles, write new software, analyze things, etc. Not just the left brain, but the right brain too. Write poetry, paint scenery, create scuptures, etc.
Most people get dumber as they age for the same reason their waistlines expand: they get lazy and stuck in a rut.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I'm 40 and have started college. I have to say that regardless of what the studies show I able to remember and process information better now than 10 years ago when I wasn't doing anything. One thing is known is that as you learn you build new neurons.
Now, that's great and I'm happy to have new neurons but I still need help. I great note taking device is great. I used to use a Hipster PDA but I graduated to an all digital life style and use Evernote. It has a web interface, desktop application, & a mobile version. I can clip web pages or fire up the desktop app and make notes. And what's really great it syncs up to all three interfaces.
For tasks I use the web app Remember The Milk. It also has a mobile version that stays synced with the web version.
Biggest thing to help me remember things watching less TV and getting more exercise. Passively watching TV doesn't help your brain.
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
Three steps:
1. Exercise the brain - programming, chess, etc.
2. Exercise the body - running, biking, etc.
3. There was something else, but I forgot it.
Uridine, found only in human breast milk and sugar beets
Uridine is a ribonucleoside, one of the building blocks of RNA. Those sources might be especially rich, for all I know, but they aren't the only ones.
learning a foreign language will cause brain functions to keep in better order in the areas of cognitive powers and memory retention.
I'm 39, and every time I can't quite remember a name, word, date, whatever, I attribute it to age. But then again, it's not as if I wasn't absentminded in my early 20s as well. Heck, I was an absentminded child who didn't know how to get anywhere because all our time in the car I spent daydreaming. I'm sure there has been scientific study done on memory and I'm not saying that age has no affect, but I'd wonder if part of it isn't just that we increasingly attribute the forgetfulness we already had to advancing age, while forgetting (aha!) that we also forgot stuff in our youth. I think many people have a disproportionate memory of exactly how sharp they were in their youth. Me, I'm fully aware that I was a dumb-ass. If I'm less of one now, it's only because I've learned to shut the hell up and keep it slightly more of a secret.
On the other hand, when it does seem important, build a visual-imaginative metaphor, a symbol or icon, to associate whatever it is with. It's particularly easy with people's names. Build a picture of the person wearing stuff or holding stuff that sounds like their name. For example, Robert Fisher is obvious -- imagine the person wearing a robber's mask and holding a fishing pole. Picture that then mentally (or out loud, if you must) say the person's name. Tricks like that have been keeping my memory working fairly well despite my being somewhat older than dirt.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
About 3-4 years ago, I found that lots of "trival" details about certain things started leaking. Here is what I've found works
1) Remember the old hints about "a quiet spot to study" - yes it makes a difference. I find with my 2 kids running around, the TV blareing, the radio on, etc, I can't remember, my brain goes elsewhere (and it doesn't help that I have a chronic wound, and I'm on pain killers almost 24x7). Find a quiet place/time for the deep things
2)Personally, the thing _I_ tend to forget are appointments, and in particular, the details. "OK, I know my wife has an MD appointment one day this week, which day is it, and where and what time should I be picking up the kids that day?" A calendar - be it electronic, or written - the way my WIFE likes it (conflict here - causes extra work) is a lifesaver - write it down (and if you have an SO, have them write their stuff down). You can then "page out" that information till you need it
3)A Journal - Many years ago, a co-worker (Thanks Harry) taught me something important - keep a journal (I don't do as well as I should) - a bound numbered book you keep on your desk. Write EVERYTHING down, every day. Go to a meeting, write it in the book, get a phone call - it goes in the book. Have lunch with someone, in the book. Make an apointment to have lunch with someone? In the book.
This isn't only for memory, but if you faithfully keep the book, leave no blank pages etc, what you end up with a document that is legally acceptable as evidence. Just in case. It's like the scientists bound lab notebook. You'll find that EEs use them, etc -
4)Take a little time each day to have as "quiet" time. For me at least, the ability to sit down with a cup of coffee/tea/glass of water (or whatever) and just "clear my mind" makes a big difference - watch the birds, the clouds, or even (if you can get outdoors) look at a picture, gets my mind into a state where the rest of the day is a lot better memory and stress wise
5)A consistant routine. Remember I said about "offloading details" - I try and do as many things as I can on "autopilot", so I don't get overwhelmed in details - sort of like programming, a lot of the techniques in programming are all about "information hiding" - you can really do a lot of this in your life.
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
My father went to lawchool at 46...
Please note, spelling proficiency appears to decrease prior to age 39.
One trick is to tell them stories that don't go anywhere.
Like that time I took the ferry over to Shelbyville; I needed a new heel for my shoe. So, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them. 'Give me five bees for a quarter,' you'd say.
Now where were we?
Oh yeah, the important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.
I guess I could give a flip, slashdot-style reply but this is a serious question, deserving a serious answer.
I'm 58, I still code, usually only three months every year because that's all the 'extra' cash that I need. I enjoy that time, meet a lot of very bright younger people and learn new stuff, Ruby on Rails at present.
At the moment, I run several times a week, take fish oil, have a pretty good diet (fish, steamed veggies), swim when I can, don't smoke. But I eat ice-cream and pizza too, just not every meal. I've started to play guitar again, now I have some time, too.
I do a certain amount of voluntary work with local charities which means I'm out, talking to people and not sitting in front of TV (well I do do some of that...)
In short, I take some care of myself and live as fully as I can. I don't make too many assumptions about the horizons closing down either, although it's clear I don't run as strongly as I did twenty years ago and I'm slower with code.
It's not a race, the idea is to live fully as possible at any age.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Can cause those very symptoms. Get thee to thy doctor for a UA w/Microscopic.
As people get older their sleep often gets worse. I have sleep apnea and have not slept well for 10 years (if not longer). My memory has always been crap and while good memory does not equal smart, not having good memory can sure make you look stupid.
If you snore a lot you are probably not getting proper sleep. If you ever wake up gasping, you're asking for trouble. If you don't sleep well for other reasons that could also be a problem.
As for how to cope with it (other than getting the proper treatment) I use my mac Calendar, Mail and spotlight. I never delete an email (and luckily I get zero spam - don't even run a spam blocker anymore).
I also teach myself new technologies, read books, am re-learning chess with with my son, and have given up drums for piano. Learning a new instrument in your mid-40s gives a really clear perspective on the differences between a young person and an older one. You can still learn, but it's way harder, and you'll pretty much always suck. But it's rewarding anyway.
I agree wholeheartedly. My brother went back to school and became an RN at age 50 (he was a medic in the Air Force in the 1950's), and I started learning Japanese when I was 47. I'm having to come up to speed on Java, Hibernate, AndroMDA, Maven, Oracle, and Spring for the project I'm on (I had no experience with any of them except Java 1.0) and even though it's hard to get all of them at once, I've made enough progress in 2 months to start fixing simple bugs. I've programmed in about a half-dozen other languages, and wrote code for everything from microprocessors to mainframes for the past 30 years, so that helped. I use my iPod to help me study Japanese vocabulary whenever I have a few minutes (like a 20 minute compile), and I occasionally read and post stuff on the Internet.
If I wasn't working I wouldn't be bored, because there are a lot of projects I've put on hold that I could be doing if I had the money and time for them.
Hopefully my brother and I can stave off the possibility of Alzheimer's that we may have inherited from our father and grandfather...
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
I add a few frozen blueberries to my oatmeal every morning. Several studies have found that blueberries help the memories of older rats.
Read "How to increase your intelligence" by Win Wenger for a couple of physiologically based techniques to improve brian function. The use of elevated blood CO2 levels to influence brain tissue development looks quite promising.
Also take comfort from the fact that the site with more pages has more broken links, and the database with more data has longer quer times. :-)
Few people need to have the same level of mental agility as a geek involved with creating something useful out of a few wispy ideas, uncertain laws of computing and foggy requirements specifications. On top of that they need a set of toolkits, one for say algorithms, one for good coding practice, one for all the calls and defines in this application, one for each language being coded and one for project management. AND they have to flip between all of them all the time. AND, even within the realm of a bit of straight code there will be nests of issues, side-effects, diversions and breakpoints.
This isn't the sort of thing that goes on the hard driver or internet.
However there are two ways to mitigate the undoubted problem of brain ageing and mental fatigue: (1)Do less. (2)Restructure, or apply a structure where before you could busk-it, tasks - typically making notes or checklists to suit.
My advice to the OP is (a)work in an environment that is distraction-free as possible. (b) Recognise there are some times it is best to go for a walk and try again an hour later. (c) When you get a really good session going, ask yourself what could be the influencing factors.
ok
here is what works
and it's guaranteed
and i dont give $hit if you try it or not
i dont make a dime or benefit...except knowing that i shared the info
A company called Univera has a product called Ageless Xtra. 30 years of research, money back guarantee, good customer service, and the products work.
I noticed mental slippage about a year ago. Freaked me out since I too rely on the brainiac to make money.
One of my kids told me re the product. I hate supplements...they are almost all bs. But, being desparate, I tried it. The results were nothing short of amazing. Since then, I have told friends and family about it. It works. Doesn't make any difference if you think it will work or not, it works. Takes anywhere from a few minutes to a week to notice the increased mental clarity, increased energy (NO stimulants-it just gives your body what it needs to produce energy like when you were in your 20s), lowered stress, joint flexibility.
Liquid form, drink a few ounces a day-about the cost of a Red Bull, cheap, tastes ok, you can mix it with other stuff if you want.
I am also playing basketball, full court, again. And other parts of me are working great again. Fountain of youth.
You can get it wholesale for a one time fee of $40 with an annual renewal of only $20.
877-627-4787 or <URL:http://www.univera.com/>
And like I said, I don't care if you get some or not. But if you do get some, you'll more. Take that statement every way you want to. Men, women, teens, twenties, athletes, couch duds, everyone benefits.
And don't whine at me re posting this info. I'm doing you a favor by taking the time to give you the info.
If someone hadn't shared it with me, I would be s@#$ out of luck by now.
Just my $0.02 worth.
pron
> is that why you're always misplacing your keys and finding the phone in the fridge?
Don't joke about it.
When I was 25 I did this.
Not that I've lost my phone since, but I have one or twice, with great trepidation and foreboding, opened the fridge on the off-chance that my keys are in there.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Avoid too much beef... "Mad Cow" type disease that is often mistaken for Alzheimer's disease. Most patients die and there is no autopsy to confirm it was Alzheimer's disease, so cycle continues.
Not only Google causes it. Before the electronic calculator, students and people in general had to do (and could do) simple maths in their heads. Before the cellphone (remember the days?) I was able to memorise over 60 phone numbers by heart (i'm a journalist). Since the cell took that job from my brain, I don't have to remember anymore, so my brain doesn't memorise the numbers anymore. Google works the same way, and the computer in general works the same way. As computers and electronic memories tend to become more portable, they take over more and more tasks from our brain. Therefore the memory problem will increase for a lot of people. So my advise is, throw away your electronic notebook and use a pen and a paper notebook to help you memorise things (Post-Its don't count:-). Try to do the math in your head. Do crosswords, sudoku and the like to solve problems in your head. Memorise at least 6 things on your to-do list by heart. Memorise your appointment schedule for the next week. Try to remember the names of the people you meet. Write down as much as possible by hand. It will increase the quality of your handwriting and the memory capacity of your brain. On the other hand, be very discriminant in the things you want to remember. In times of information overflow this is the first and foremost thing to do. Memorise what you will need on a daily basis, not what you need to know when you play Trivial Pursuit:-).
memento mori
Your brain has a lot more info to account for than the whipper-snappers do. They are all still glomming everything into two or three clusters, like not-work, work and GIRLS?!.
Therefore, work to associate your content within your clusters, like a file system. Calendar entries and other triggers can prompt that data. Never forget the value of a post-it note.
kulakovich
Forget You Forget Things
Take a hallucinate drug (LSD/Psilocybin/Mescaline/...) once or twice a year. Feeds your brain with new exciting information, possibly making it a bit more alert.
I'm 41. I'm not as fast at learning new things as I used to be (though I'm still faster than half of the students I teach), but I'm much much better than I used to be at fitting new things into the big picture. That only comes with experience. I don't fixate on the details as much, but skim through to get the overview. I know I can pick up the details if I want to - I wrote about 15K lines of code this summer, though coding isn't what I do daily - but often younger people fixate on the details and miss what's important.
So often I get grad students come to me with graphs of the behaviour of some code they've written, trying to tell me how well it works. I don't know the details of their code, but often I can say "your code is buggy". Their first reaction is "no it's not!", then "how can you tell?". It's usually something really simply like the slope of the graph is different from what it should be. They fixated on the absolute values, and missed the bigger picture.
Anyway, my advice is don't stop learning, or you'll go rusty. And play to your strengths - the ability to assimilate data into the bigger picture is something that (should) improve with experience. But don't try and race the youngsters at learning the details - you will lose that race!
Some of us professional geeks never had a short term or long term memory to speak of anyway, so count yourself lucky. I can barely remember my mothers first name or where my car keys are, but somehow, people think I'm competent. Idiots. It pays the bills, and i enjoy the humility of it all, so who cares?
For failing memory, a cheap dietary add-on you could try, and that has been shown to work rather well for some, is coconut oil: http://tampabay.com/news/aging/article879333.ece. Since it is used commonly in certain Caribian cuisines, it should be quite safe.
It is a tell-tale sign of stress when people suddenly start becoming forgetful.
So I would advise you to deal with your stress, and your former good memory will come back. You know: exercise, sleep, lots of fresh air, proper, healthy nutrition, and yes that includes lost of fish. Decide for yourself that life is short and living is now.
Bad memory is a problem to you? I've always had a bad memory and I don't remember it ever posing a problem.
You just got troll'd!
is that why you're always misplacing your keys and finding the phone in the fridge?
I'm an old fart - I've programmed with punch tape and core memory. My first computer had 3520 bytes of RAM.
I'm noticing the same problems. A while ago I started a new job, and had to start making my own sandwiches for lunch. I made some the night before, and put them in the fridge. So that I couldn't leave them behind, I put the car keys in with them. The next morning I spent half an hour searching for the keys, and was late in for work. Fortunately I'm now working for an old friend in his small family scientific instrument making business, so I could get away with it.
You know, one of the first signs of senility is the failure to capitalize the first word in a sentence.
a statistical universe make.
However, my mom is 73 and still quite sharp. She does the sudoku and crossword in the paper every morning, and reads voraciously when she's not out taking courses in almost everything, and pursuing her retirement job as a storyteller (which requires memorizing reams of dead tree).
I think the habit of exercising the brain tends to keep it sharper.
As an aside, losing a bit of short term memory is beneficial in prodding smart programmers to name their variables, classes, methods and functions carefully (if verbosely) and keep their documentation up to date. Possibly even use an editor that does auto-completion from their own code.
Sometime after they mentally peak, and before they reach senility, some people pass through the phase called wisdom. Remembering small details is not as important than.
what were we talking about?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Because I can't get the darn lid off.
Not even close. What will happen to you over the next decade is that you will learn to think in more organized ways and clean out a lot of the crap. I've been programming since 1980, and while I don't have the same raw horsepower I'm better now than I was then.
I've had a bad short term memory since a fairly serious accident (I was close to losing any chance to ever become ambidextrous :-)). That doesn't make me an expert, but it does give me an idea of what it feels like to suddenly find your braincells to underperform without the help of serious quantities of alcohol.
First off, it's like a muscle, it needs exercise. Try to do without tools if you can because they'll diminish the exercise your brain needs, but obviously don't be too strict (stress because you may forget something is a self-fulfilling prophecy :-)). Two classic examples to demonstrate: how many people still remember phone numbers now we have mobile phones that do that? And how many still bother to calculate in their heads rather than on a phone or calculator?
Secondly, few people learn strategies for remembering which means you may add some knowledge to the mix and improve matters. Books like Mindgym (BBC press) or quite a few ones that Tony Buzan (of mind mapping fame) has written describe METHODS by which to remember. The idea is that you cover the lowering performance by more efficient use of what works.
And focus on mainly forgetting bad things, this would certainly be bad news :-)
Insert
Happiness? That's nothing more than good health and a poor memory. Albert Schweitzer
I have a really good memory, always have had. It's not photographic in the sense someone can ask me about the colour of a tie of a guy I passed in the street 10mins ago, but if I am motivated to remember or something has an emotional impact it locks in my memory in HD.
I'm also geeky in the sense I like tech, I don't place much value on my achievements, I can plan and contingency plan in great detail with little effort and I'm always looking for the next challenge to beat or task to excel at.
The consequence of this is that I use my memories as a test set for my future plans and assumptions. My HD memory means I can, and do frequently, review in great detail every unlucky, stupid and asinine thing I have done in the past 30 years as part of my planning process.
Depending on the context: dating rejections, test issues, social faux pas, failed projects, unexpected disasters, betrayals and being let down by others etc.
I am very good at what I do. I can see, assess and rank the 27 likely failure modes of just about any endeavour and deduce plans B, C, D & E. It's satisfying intellectually, it's not a lot of fun emotionally.
I'd like to remember the lessons without the events in such crystal detail. I'm looking forward to age taking the edge off.
Couple comments:
One, enjoy it. While it's always a rush to balance ten things at a time, after awhile I found it is just as gratifying to lead the parade, not repair it.
Two, while the physical exercise never hurts, I found that playing Go has greatly added and improved both my visual perception, and my ability to carry on background threads, solving problems throughout the day.
I enjoy Go for the game itself, but was surprised by the changes I've noticed. Now, if I can just beat that 7 year old in Korea I'll be happy !
.
Ohio State University scientists are finding that specific elements of marijuana can be good for the aging brain by reducing inflammation there and possibly even stimulating the formation of new brain cells. Their research suggests that the development of a legal drug that contains certain properties similar to those in marijuana might help prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimers disease. Though the exact cause of Alzheimers remains unknown, chronic inflammation in the brain is believed to contribute to memory impairment....
Crap. Phone in the fridge is a sign of old age? I've been doing that since I was 17.
Way back then, it was my keys or whatever I was reading at the time, but damn it, it still wound up in the fridge.
Seriously, spend more time thinking about the big picture, and maybe do POCs to check if you are right (and stay sharp). Hopefully your experience will allow you to determine the right direction without knowing all the little details that younger people can remember better.
This works for me, it works for a lot of "older" people.
Oh, and don't forget plenty of excersize, sleep, sex, and lay off the booze/etc.
There are also memory enhancing drugs if you want to participate in the long-term usage drug trials that they imply.
I'm 49. I use Galantamine, Choline (and/or GPC) and Piracetam. They all seem to help. They are either neurotransmitters, precursors, or neurotransmitter suppressor inhibitors.
Galantamine has been approved for treatment of Alzheimer's, which it has been clinically proven to slow or reverse. It doesn't help with all types of dementia. It is available as prescription and over the counter as Galantamind, by Life Sciences. (That's the brand I use. It's expensive, but what's it worth to keep - or improve - your memory?)
Someone else commented about Piracetam and covered it well. I'll just add that it is an Acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, which means that it slows metabolization of Acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter, so that levels of it increase.
Choline is a precursor to Acetylcholine. Acetylcholine cannot pass the blood-brain barrier, so can't be taken directly as a supplement. But Choline can make it through, and is then metabolized into Acetylcholine.
I learned of these serendipitously when I read the book "Advanced Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Supplements" by Thomas Yuschak. He presents details of these and other supplements, including scientific research about how they're absorbed and broken down by the body.
He points out that Piracetam can cancel the effects of Galantamine, so I take Galantamine in the morning and Piracetam later in the day. That seems to work well for me.
IMO, good sleep habits help, too. I use GABA (Gamma-aminobutyric acid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-aminobutyric_acid), 5-HTP, Melatonin and Tryptophan before bed to help me sleep. (Yes, I take a lot of supplements.:) Some of these are fairly new, and haven't been researched very much, but they help me sleep better.
Of course you can learn more about these supplements by searching Wikipedia, Google and/or your favorite online retailer (that carries supplements).
There are also memory techniques that can help you. Check out "How to Develop a Super Power Memory" by Harry Lorayne, or "The Memory Book" by him and Jerry Lucas. Some of these techniques have been around since ancient Greece, but still are not common knowledge. I read the first book in 7th grade and it's helped me ever since. (You do have to pay attention, as someone pointed out.)
Finally, just two days ago I read this article: http://dailyhealthtips.vitacost.com/dm?id=3BE9059AEE3A96118C6EC567C665EA66 It seems that exercise actually helps to create stem cells in the brain, which are then used to form new neurons!
(BTW, I am not a doctor, nor am I associated with any of the above mentioned names or companies. I won't make a penny if you spend money because of any of the above information. It's all just my opinion.)
Anything that enhances BDNF or brain derived neurotrophic factor
Seastead this.
Hmmm......BEEF.....[drool]
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Going back to school has done my wife a world of good (she's getting a degree in childhood education) so much so that I have gone back myself (I'm getting a degree in communications.)
Its keeping both of us young, agile, nimble, and makes for far more interesting conversation around the dinner table.
The worst thing is to sit there and ossify in front of the TV set. (I now use an old 20" G5 iMac with an Elgato EyeTV 500 as a digital signal receiver, but I don't get a chance to watch it much. :-)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I actually have neurotransmitter deficiencies, so I HAVE to take some of these things, but they're commonly used by people with fatigue problems.
L-Theanine - Calming and clarifying
L-Tyrosine - Converts to norepinephrine and dopamine
Pregnenalone - Memory formation (esp. hypocampal)
Acetyl L-carnitine - Mitocondrial energy (take with a strong antioxidant like alpha lipoic acid)
Rhodiola Rosea - Mitocontrial energy
Ginkgo Biloba - Various effects
Korean Ginseng - Mental energy (avoid the American or Siberian varieties)
5HTP - Converts to serotonin, helps with sleeping and mood
DMAE - Converts to choline -> acetylcholine
DHEA - Episodic memory
Echinacea - Boost immune function
Astralagus - Immune function
Fish oil - Mood, energy
Taurine - Inhibitory neurotransmission (to balance the excitatory ones)
By far not an exhaustive list of the things you can take. Research dosages. Overdoing some things can be bad. Learn about the chemicals your body needs, see if you can match up deficiencies with any symptoms you have, and then see what supplements you can take that will convert to them. Wikipedia articles are good about listing the metabolic coversions.
Besides these, one cannot stress enough the value of a varied and balanced diet. Add to that supplementation of all of your essential vitamins and minerals. Whey protein is an excellent source of essential amino acids, if you're not sensitive to casein.
Besides a regular multivitamin/multimineral, I take more of these:
- Vitamins C, D, E, B (complete complex), K
- Get a B12 shot now and then (methylcobalamin, not cyanocobalamin), and take a sublingual B12 supplement
- Iodine (12.5mg Iodoral from Optimox)
- Magnesium
- Zinc
Do an elimination diet to see if there are any foods that you are sensitive to. Most people have mild sensitivities to some foods, which act as irritants that drag them down. Ever notice that you're not feeling so hot a few days after eating at some restaurant? You might be having an IgA reaction to something you ate. You can fine-tune your energy by identifying these things and eliminating them. Start with the major food alergens (see wikipedia), including corn. Since I have leaky gut syndrome, I also have IgG reactions to foods. You can actually get an IgG food sensitivity test panel, but it's expensive and not applicable to most people.
Limit your sugar intake. Eating a lot of sugar can cause insulin spikes followed by low blood sugar followed by adrenaline spike followed by jitteriness and confusion. Or putting it another way, manage your energy levels by managing your caloric intake. Eschew artificial sweeteners, including corn syrup; they cause depletion of nutrients and cause you to crave more sugar.
Find a sport that you really enjoy, where the enjoyment of the sport distracts you from the fatigue. My favorite is racquetball. I have CIFDS, so I'm rather exercise intolerant, but I can manage to push myself to play this for hours. Also consider getting a Wii fit and maybe a dance dance revolution game.
If you're interested in enhancing longevity, there are lots of things you can take for that, and have a look at calorie-restricted diets like Walford.
1-Assume this is a problem that's going to stay with you and don't beat yourself up about it. We're all being asked to remember far more stuff that we have capacity for every day; what matters is the quality of what we do with information more than our ability to haul it out of memory instantly. Focus on the quality of how you *use* the stuff you know.
2-Take copious notes. Even if you never refer to them, the act of writing stuff down helps fix it in your mind. I started carrying a 3x5 notebook full-time when I was 40.
3-Operate a triage system. What do you really *need* to remember? Focus on that. In my own case, often that's the path to where information is stored rather than the information itself.
wg
Replace memorization with wisdom and intelligence.
Couldn't agree with you more. I lost my memory, and most of my ability to form new memories, when I was 19. (Woke up one morning and couldn't recognize my family. Learned at the end of my first post-amnesia semester that I had no memory of the begging of the semester.)
People wonder how I still managed to graduate with honors and succeed at work. I tell them that I stopped trying to memorize things and instead worked to understand them. As a friend of mine once said, "so I guess you're an interpreter. I'm a compiler."
So be an interpreter. Hone those equations you've (probably) developed subconsciously (and make them conscious.) Take lots of notes. Organize things systematically. (It's fun trying to find things from the past; it's like being a detective all the time.) When dealing with data, get it, process it, take action, and move on. Then you don't have to worry about remembering all of it -- you've gotten everything you need from it. Learn to be a better writer and to communicate ideas. (I've become a much better writer since losing my memory. Everything I write has to be for the third person: myself, when I read it again.) Oh, and on a personal note, take photos. (It's nice to learn over and over that I've been all over the world.)
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
Regularly add some Curcumin, found in turmeric, to your food. There are some indications that it might prevent Alzheimer's Disease. The development of Alzheimer's Disease usually starts many years before any serious memory problems start.
And yes, exercise is always good
There are a number of techniques that I have found that solve the problem perfectly. They are .. let me see ... ummmm .... hold on a sec.
Okay, what was the question again?
It's amazing how many authors/writers/novelists/biographers about Chaucer's age take notes and squirrel them away. Dunno if there's any sort of indexing system for handwritten stuff, though - does anyone have time to index their own notes, except of course in Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds?
Unfortunately, my experience mirrors yours. I did a couple of years of near-genius work when I was younger. Some of my own code reads like the Book of Revelations to me now. I can barely understand it, and I was never a slacker about inline comments. Apparently, I never knew what a good comment was, or what I'd done that was so noteworthy, because some of those remarks seem downright cryptic to me. I was no Steve Wozniak, ever, but I could write beautiful code once. That mind is a complete stranger to me now, at age 64.
I use FireFox and SQLite Manager to keep a searchable list of memoranda to myself, these days. It helps, it really does. I keep telling myself that.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
I highly encourage you to read John Medina's Brain Rules. He highlights all the latest confirmed (repeatable) brain science studies and what they mean for what we should do to stay sharp. Though the book is not about aging per se, it does give examples of studies that looked at those who aged well vs those who aged poorly (mentally). There are plenty of examples of geriatric geniuses. Frank Loyd Wright completed his designs for the Guggenheim Museum when he was 90.
One of the most critical aspects of the rules when it comes to aging is exercise. It was once thought that neurogenesis (the creation of new neurons in the brain) stopped at a fairly young age. That idea has been completely overturned. We can create new brain neurons throughout life. One of the best ways to foster that is through exercise.
I highly recommend the book to anyone looking for a pop-sci book on how to maximize your usage of your brain.
Ever heard of a musician or composer getting memory loss or declining mental capacities? For my whole I've been a musician (classical and jazz pianist) and I find it an excellent way to keep my mind working.
Listen to music. Learn to read music. Play music. It's a universal language that works both hemispheres of your brain. Get the NYT's best seller: http://www.yourbrainonmusic.com/
I play gigs, a lot of gigs, and most of them for retirement homes and whatnot. Many of the residents there, the seniors, don't remember a thing. Some have Alzheimer's and it's sad. However, on many occasions when I'm playing a 1940's, 50's, or 60's popular tune on the piano, they start HUMMING ALONG automatically. They say they don't know where they've heard of it, or the name of it, but they know it and it's very familiar. They always ask for my name, thank me for my time, and we part goodbye.
Two weeks later, I come back to the same place, the same gig, and they have NO CLUE who I am. I play both classical, jazz, and popular tunes, and they struggle to walk toward the piano, just to tell me "Young man, I don't know who you are, but I remember this music, and I know I've heard of it just recently."
Music is invulnerable -- no, INVINCIBLE to mental deterioration. Oscar Peterson, the world-renowned jazz pianist, had a stroke during his prime career. He lost complete control and mobility on the entire left side of his body. Awhile later he gained full control back and was on the piano again - and came back with even more articulate music and improvisation. He had ANOTHER stroke years later, and recovered AGAIN with top-notch musicality and improvisation. None of the strokes affected his musical technique, articulation, and dexterity of his brain.
Music will "crystallize" a certain part of your brain's capacity. Music bridges, networks, and reinforces the neurotransmitters that send and receive brain signals.
Listen to music. Learn to read music. Play music. Start with some classical music for a good foundation, then move on to anything you like.
http://www.palmzone.net
I am now in the 65 age bracket. I am still working, go to the pool almost every day and still taking classes. However the classes I am not taking are not job related but more for fun (learning Spanish at the moment). As a result of my activity I do not watch TV very much. In fact I am contemplating just giving it up altogether next year when I will be forced to make a change with my "over the air" rabbit ears being my only means of reception.
I don't find any change in my memory capacity - although the psychologists would probably find it. I have been active most of my life and have always enjoyed reading and going to school.
The only thing that I do notice that I just do not type as quickly as I used to without making minor mistakes. I am a touch finger typist. Recently this has started to annoy me. Mind you it has not yet reached epic proportions. Now maybe 1 typo in 50 whereas before it might have been 1 typo in 100.
My two cents.
Having your memory getting worse as an inevitable byproduct of aging is a myth. Unfortunately, it is one that has been perpetuated by a lot of bad pseudo science myths for one reason or another.
The first myth is that your brain cells die off and are not replaced. Not so. You brain follows the basic model as the rest of your physical body, "use it or lose it". Not what we are finding in modern biology. For most people, their memory gets bad because they don't use it. I am in my fifties and have found that my memory has gotten better over the last ten years as I task it more intensively.
The second myth is that the inevitable process of aging and decay is programmed into us at the genetic level and nothing can change it. Again, modern biology has shown that our DNA is actually adaptive and responds to your environment. In many cases. what are thought to be the symptoms of aging are really symptoms of lack of use.
It is true that memory mechanisms change as you get older, but then your whole cognitive system changes as well. I find that I see connections and patterns much more rapidly than my younger associates (the the point where I often wonder how they can miss something so obvious). The underlying mechanism for that is the accumulation of decades of information so that I am able to extract salient features much more quickly because of the mass of previous data I have that I can "mine".
However, the access time for specific details has also gotten a bit longer but I have noticed that my contemporaries assume they can't remember when all they are doing is not giving the recall process enough time to work. Often when I am lecturing, a name or term will elude me. I tell the students "I can't recall that person's name right now, but I'll have it for you a couple of moments." Sure enough, as I continue to lecture, a few moments later that person's name will suddenly pop into my mind.
The changes in your memory are not necessarily symptoms of deterioration, but rather adaptations your cognitive systems are making to manage large amounts of experience and make it available in different and novel ways.
As for supplements and all that stuff -- they help because they provide the raw materials for our body's constant regeneration and growth (and given the artificial nature of our food, we can't rely on getting them in our diet) BUT they are not the solution. Your memory is not going to get "fixed" by taking B12, a supplement may help rectify a deficiency but it won't help your memory. Kind of like your car won't run without gas, but putting gas in the tank is doesn't guarantee that the car will run.
Explore the work of Edward de Bono and Dr. Bruce Lipton. Interesting ideas.
I find that I can usually remember something related to the "thing" I'm trying to remember, i.e. a word, a concept, a phrase, etc... Or, I find that I remember it in context with other thoughts, words, phrases, etc... I also have a visual memory so seeing things helps.
Because of all this I found a tool - TheBrain - to be very helpful. It's mind mapping software that gives someone like me the ability to relate a thought to other thoughts in a visual, 3D way. The thoughts are also searchable.
This is one of those love it or hate it kinda deals and, it ain't free kids. Find it at http://www.thebrain.com.
Don't drink hard liquor. Eat red grapes. Don't watch TV. Read books constantly on a growing list of topics. Learn a new language and continue to speak it. Pick up new categories of interests. In short, give your brain a workout.
I find myself in this predicament now I'm in my thirties so god knows what it'll be like in a few more years!! I blame lack of sleep and too much work (try raising 3 small children and you'll understand).
Anyway, I started doing puzzle games (word games are my favourite) and my brain kicked back into gear. Also started taking some online courses and broadening my knowledge (outside of IT) and that helped a bunch also, plus it's making me a better person.
The key seems to be keeping your interests broad and not focusing on the same old stuff every day. We're fortunate in IT that it's a constantly evolving environment, I can only imagine what mush my brain would turn into if I worked in a boring job.
Oh, and eat healthy and exercise, that helps too. It's amazing what a difference changing my diet made to my whole outlook.
I propose a more drastic Resolution to the problem.
Just don't forget to reverse the polarity first (so you remember things instead of forgetting them) or you might wind up like this kid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRdCO7YEfuw
Phosphatidyl Serine.
Check it out.
I have ADHD and have a terrible time remembering names, that word I'm looking for, etc.
Phosphatidyl Serine helps a crap ton.
I usually use the brand Sharp Thought but I'm sure there are others too.
Something younger technical people forget is that managing a group of people requires more skills than knowing how to obfuscate a perl script.
If technical people are great problem solvers they could apply the skills, allegedly learned doing "fun" stuff, to the problem of implementing productive teams of techies.
This nonsense about management being a dead end for techies needs to be put to rest frankly, a good manager will enable technical people to do their job by isolating them from all the bullshit that comes from higher hierarchical levels while at the same time setting realistic objectives for all the parties involved. Having being a techie should be a great plus for somebody managing other techies, not an artificial hindrance.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Honestly, there is no satisfactory solution to the ageing problem, no snake oil in any form will change that in the long term.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I have still to meet a piano player that has developed Alzheimer early in life (I am sure they are out there, I am just saying my experience).
Playing piano (or any other instrument, but I favour piano because it is more complex) forces you to exercise your muscular memory (every sportsman does that, but you can play an instrument pretty much all of your life), your concentration and your memory.
The tour de force of piano players is to play the complete cycle of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas (32 of them), very often they do so on the mature years of their careers (50s-60s) and by memorizing all the music (20-25 hours of it).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm not old by many standards, 22yrs, so maybe I don't have quite the same perspective. I do however have what we call ADHD, and I don't mean the kind where little Billy failed his math test he must have a learning disorder. I mean the kind where I would lose my shoes while I was wearing them, I would forget the end of a sentence while I was speaking it, at times I would not be able to recall my middle name. The solution for me came in the form on a lovely little pill called Adderall XR, although it costs almost half of a morgage payment per month, it is well worth it. I do not condone the illegal acquisition of this drug but you might consider some tailored solutions for your concentration and memory problem before defaulting to Vodoo and fish oil.
Check out this link. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081119120141.htm Pot. It's not just for breakfast anymore.
Seriously, I just turned 47, and brain as sharp as ever. My secret? Simple. I eat plant-based, non-processed foods, and avoid High Fructose Corn Suyrp like the plague!
Yep, I am Vegan gastromonically. I don't subscribe to Vegan Politics at all, though I will chide some carnivore friends of mine about the inconsistencies in their morality about caring for certain species of animals over others. They would never want to see a single hair harmed on dogs and cats, but have no problem with the slaughter of pigs, cows, and fowl.
Read "The China Study" if you wish to know more.
One of the best ways to keep the brain sharp is to keep it active. Keep learning new stuff and doing new and novel things with your brain to keep those neurons firing! Use'em or loose'em!!!!!
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Check out the following link. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081119120141.htm By the way, this is the second time I've posted this link because I couldn't find the first posting. What gives?
In the original post, the use of "synergistically" is perfectly cromulent. The word has been a part of the pharmaceutical jargon for more than 50 years and is being used correctly in context.
Two drugs exhibit synergism when the effects of giving them together are greater than one would expect from the effects of giving each one separately. Aspirin and codeine are synergistic: when given together in moderate doses, the combined analgesic effect is greater than either given alone. This combination is often used in the early phase of mending a broken bone.
Contrast "synergism" with "potentiation": aspirin and caffeine are not considered synergistic since caffeine has no analgesic qualities by itself. However caffeine does potentiate the analgesia provided by aspirin. Two aspirin taken with a cup of coffee are more effective against headaches or sore muscles than just the aspirin alone. And cheaper than the many OTC pain relievers that are basically just aspirin and caffeine.
I only bothered to read the link for D, but that page clearly states that you have to be over 50 for D absorption to be impaired. It also lists side effects for taking too much vitamin D.
I think the message here should be go see your doctor. Don't go taking nutritional supplements based off what you read on teh intarwebs, otherwise you could end up increasing your risk of disease. I know there are lots of other supplements that are actually quite poisonous taken in the doses available in some supplements if you're not suffering from a nutrition disorder.
Nick
I'm forty years old and taking first semester Chinese (Mandarin) at Harvard Extension. I'm doing well. But to get character recognition down I've had to resort to flashcards. And many repetitions of writing the characters (in proper stroke order) in order to memorize. I've only got about 250 - 300 characters down, but that's real progress. I'm actually reading my textbook in Chinese now, which - I admit - is a very limited set of characters. But still, pretty damn cool.
So, folks call them "flashcards". A more formal name for it is: Spaced Repetition. Also, if you dig flashcards try ANKI, a free GPL'd flashcard program for Win, Mac, and various 'NIXen (including Linux).
How old are you really? Mental function doesn't significantly decline until after 40. The slope gets alot steeper at 60 though. If your under 40 and having problems remembering things already -don't quote me I'm no expert- that's not really a good sign at all. Two large components other than gene programming (predispositions to dementia, Alzheimer's etc) are lifestyle and diet.
I would suggest you could mitigate your claimed decline in sharpness by:
1. Brain training. This can mitigate just about any mental problem at least to some extent, the brain has tremendous ability to recover from damage, ie stroke, people re-learning to talk/walk etc. In theory you could stave off.
2. Diet. It's all been said but put into three simple rules: 1. Protein. Get all your protein from fish and plant sources, top up with free range (for good reason) poultry including egg white (cholesterol is only in the yolk, egg white is excellent food), only a small amount of red meat. Cannot stress the free range point enough - eating a animal -in quantity- that was unhealthy in life cannot be healthy. 2. No refined carbohydrates. No sugar, no high fructuse corn syrup, no milled white flour/rice flour/refined starchy products. Avoid thickeners. You might as well eat sugar - if you put white flour in your mouth you will find it tastes sweeter than wholemeal: This is because your saliva is converting it direct to glucose. Potatoes: are not much better being carb-dense try sweet potatos and more exotic root vegetables which are usually packed with fibre and antioxidants.
3. Good fats. Eat oily fish daily. Herring, Salmon (not grain and antibiotic feed farmed crap), not too much Tuna (or other mercury packed fish like shark). Plant sources are excellent. Flaxseed (linseed oil) and nuts.
A fourth rule should be eating your greens, but I didn't include that because that's a given. The majority of the carbohydrate you should eat every day should be coming from vegetables raw or cooked, and then the rest from wholegrains and fruit.
I went from being a typical geek where Mountain Dew and pizza were two significant food groups, this is fine as a teenager as I was active. But when I found my brain getting foggy at my desk job and a growing beer belly I got myself sorted out. Back on the mountain bike, and don't eat crap. Simple. Interestingly I found my mental function to not only improve, but I had a particular new found clarity and energy. The difference was compelling.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Before I got married I was a hot-shot developer, worked 60+ hours a week no problem.
After I got married the world got more complicated. I had to remember to be home on time, remember I had a wife at home when at the pub after work with my colleagues, remember to pick up some groceries on the way home, remember that she was pregnant (actually she'd remind me often), remember to burp the baby, remember to pick kids up from school, remember soccer practice, campouts, and sleep overs, remember...
I've determined that I still work 60+ hours week and still have to remember just as much if not more. It's just diversified from programming. Now I manage hot-shot developers with my eye of experience and get paid twice as much :)
Oh, and marriage does not cause memory loss; you just learn to focus on what's important.
I use acoustic brainwave entrainment..
Opensource: sbagen
Commercial: monroe institute/holosync, etc..
It's a docudrama about the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter. Victim of the Brain.
Could Marijuana Substance Help Prevent Or Delay Memory Impairment In The Aging Brain?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081119120141.htm
I am 60 years old. I have a very good, carefully groomed personal database of information that I pay attention to every day. A good database always outperforms young spongeheads. Young geeks revel in keeping everything in their head. Older geeks know that it is better to not clutter up the synapse with a collection of process list information (that is what it most often is). Who cares if I know the 25 steps to Web site security? Do I have access to those steps? What about the 25 different experts who all have 25 different steps? Do I have access to them? Do I need all of them? (probably do) What is their relative value? Do they apply to this situation? How much time do I have to try and remember them? Just bring them up off a database (right now!) Less stress, more complete, more interesting, more fun, more professional. So, get yourself a very good, portable, personal database that you groom every day in a disciplined manner. I am more and more impressed with sqlite. If you lack discipline to create and maintain such a database, no one can help you. But you can help yourself.
I'm 55 and I had some cognitive issues for a couple of years. This is what I've found:
:-) The world is a different place for them and they need to cope differently.
Get off of cholesterol meds! Death is better than being stupid. Satins are the worst. I lost one job after a year when I was on 10mg of Lipitor. It got to the point that I was beginning to wonder if I would have to give up driving because I was having trouble concentrating well enough to drive safely (i.e. stay in my own lane on the freeway). You can imagine what meetings at work were like for me. I was just about to go see my doctor for what I was sure would be a brain tumor, when I asked myself: what's changed? I skipped my meds for a day and felt better. After a couple of weeks, I took another pill and felt much worse, so I stopped for good. It took about 2 to 3 years for me to recover.
The "mental fog" is not a generally recognized side effect of statins, though it is one of the most common statin side effects reported to the UCSD Statin Effects Study https://www.statineffects.com/info/. So, your doctor may have heard of it but the reports are anecdotal, not published. The UCSD study did one test where they tried to detect mental decline with statins but that study did not detect any. There is, however, at least one study that associated low cholesterol with cognitive issues.
The statins work by suppressing the mevalonate pathway in your liver. Mevalonate is a precursor to cholesterol and a whole bunch of other important stuff. One of the key things in "other stuff" is CoQ10. I now take 100mg of CoQ10 every 3 days or so. I feel as mentally sharp as I was in my 30s.
After I stopped the Lipitor, my doctor put my on Vytorin. Vytorin works differently than a statin. Vytorin inhibits cholesterol absorption in your intestines. I found the effect of Vytorin to be much milder than Lipitor but still too much to live with without a really clear payoff to taking it. Going from 2 chances in 10 of a heart attack to 1 chance in 10 isn't worth it to me. YMMV. During that time I was taking Vytorin, I didn't do well at another job, not badly enough to get fired, just bad enough that I didn't feel like I was making a contribution. If you miss the "make a good impression" window when you start a new job, it's really hard to recover.
After reading some of the posts in the Yahoo Stopped_Our_Statins group http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/Stopped_Our_Statins, I feel lucky to have recovered at all.
At the risk of sounding totally arrogant, I'll say that the one good thing about that experience is that I understand people of average and below average intelligence better.
Other medications can cause mental problems too but I don't have any experience with them.
B vitamin supplements can help a lot too, especially if you drink or are under a lot of stress. I take two B-50s every day.
Exercise and sleep It helps keep your weight down and your energy level up. I find that exercise helps me sleep better which helps me think more clearly. Exercise is a challenge because I just don't recover as fast as I used to. If I worked out now as intensely as I did 15 years ago, I'd be a basket case for 6 months! My muscles recover from workouts well, the problem is tendons, ligaments, and joints. They take forever to heal. Check out Clarence Bass http://cbass.com/ to get an idea of what is possible. He only works out twice a week! A lot of 20-somethings would love to look as good as he does. There's a lot of good info on his site too.
I do Yoga, weightlifting, backpack (Scoutmaster for a local troop - talk about an interesting set of problems!), and some high-intensity cardio; I've had too many overuse injuries with long-slow-cardio. I've not been able to lift he
Einstein was wise, but many in the world are not. And a problem for many of the people this thread is about is that they are leaving unsatisfactory careers and trying something radically new. I quit a cubicle job at the phone company and next month will graduate from watchmaking school (thanks to a Slashdot posting from two years ago).
The problem is, it's REALLY HARD to try to learn a whole new set of skills in a new career at 45. (The flip Simpsons comments on this thread are just showing how slashdot has become polluted with idiocy when serious subjects need discussing.)
The final exam has a bunch of math, and the Swiss group that administers the test requires students to memorize the formulae. Fortunately it's only a few questions out of twenty or so on the test.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
I used to think I had a horrible memory. Then I saw doctors and found out I had fairly severe ADHD ("primarily-inattentive" variety). So as an experiment, they tried methylphenidate on me (aka Ritalin). Suddenly I could remember things, I could sit still without constantly jittering, and I could hear people talking even in crowded rooms.
It is quite possible to simply not realize anything's wrong until someone says something that makes you reevaluate things.
(BTW, the crap about Ritalin making people into "zombies" is part of the usual run of anti-psychiatry lies served up by Scientology. If you don't have ADHD, methylphenidate just makes you jittery.)
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Aside from a balanced diet and plenty of exercise, you should also supplement your aging mind with the nutrients that it needs to stay sharp. Hang on another 15 years, and there will be more permanent therapies to restore your brain to its prime.
I'm currently taking:
* 300 mg alpha lipoic acid (antioxidant, mitochondrial target)
* 500 mg L-carnitine (improves fat utilization)
- you really need antioxidants when you take this
- nobody under 40 needs to take carnitine
* 600 mg N-acetyl-Cysteine (direct precursor to the endogenous antioxidant, glutathione)
- Antioxidants are only good for protecting against loss of function, not so much for restoring function
* Broccoli sprouts for the sulfuraphane, a Nrf-2 activator and one hell of an antioxidant as well as anti-cancer drug.
* Periodic low carb diet to reduce arterial plaque as well as lose weight.
* Vitamins don't improve performance unless you are deficient.
The latest studies show that we don't lose a lot of neurons as we age normally, although the brain does shrink. Our neurons are reverting to a less developed form and our microglia (the resident immune cell in the brain) becomes chronically activated.
It looks like our memory loss is linked to increasing inflammatory signals in the aging body. Basically, all tissues increase signals for inflammation, so, it's not brain-specific. There are also issues with cellular circadian rhythm being screwed up in aged cells. Solving these latter two problems are where progress on memory is going to come from.
BTW, IAANS (I am a neuro-scientist)
... get your glasses prescription updated. And get reading glasses to compensate for presbyopia if you haven't already.
Slightly blurred vision - especially when reading - causes you to avoid looking at text and lose comprehension and memorization when you do read it. Internally you don't notice it as such and instead it feels like you're thinking in a cloudy fashion, zoning out, or having memory problems.
Eye changes creep up on you. Like "boiling the frog" you can go years and have significantly impaired vision before you feel like it's an eye problem - let alone enough of one to make the appointment and spend the bucks.
= = = =
Meanwhile there's a lot of good advice elsewhere under this article. (Example: Vitimin suplementation, in moderation, to compensate for age-related absorption reduction.) You could have more than one impairment and you have to treat or compensate for them all to get back to your maximum potential.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Eight million idiotic Simpsons references to five actual worthwhile suggestions. Thank goodness someone finally got around to solving this original poster's query.
/cetam drugs are good, but much better when you're young. I'm taking Piracetam and centrophenoxine, but it's too early to see what the results are.
The
A lot of talk on here is behavioural coping mechanisms, and not much talk of actually repairing the damage aging has caused to the brain.
One of the main problems with learning and keeping mentally agile is the accumulation of lipofuscin on the dendrites in the brain. Lipofuscin is a pigment; age spots are made of it, and it accumulates in the brain and liver. It's made of broken pieces of cell membranes and other crap. And it's plaquing up our brains! The brushy tips of the dendrites are where the mental connections are made, and there's less available surface area when lipofuscin is mucking everything up. So take centrophenoxine.
Rat studies show a significant reduction of lipofuscin (about 40% in middle-aged rats) after a month. This effect is potentiated by piracetam and similar drugs (all of which can be had online nowadays).
Piracetam (and the others that came after) cause the brain to use more glucose and choline, which get turned into acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter. These drugs were originally developed to repair damage caused by alcoholism and hypoxia. Good stuff, Maynard.
Also the previously suggested exercise, eating less/no red meat, meditation etc are all important as part of the program. AND QUIT WATCHING TELEVISION.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
Well, it being Sunday morning, I'm indulging myself in a longish slashdot comment, which is a small part of my long term effort to reshape everyone else into my image.
Diet becomes more important with age, if you want to keep sharp. Consider adding the following to your breakfast (assuming you've got normal renal and liver functions):
You could also do a lot of other dietary modifications, but the above assemblage of vitamin supplements will help assure that you get the most out of what you eat, whether you are a diet-fad-of-the-week follower, or a strict Pop Tarts consumer. Take the vitamins with a meal so that all the other substrates for cell repair are going to be present at the same time. Do this early in the day so you can take advantage of the immediate benefits.
Exercise becomes more important with age, especially wrt immediate mental functions. Before settling into work, pace or do a brisk walk for 15 minutes (about half a mile). This literally gets the blood to flow more vigorously, assuring better oxygenation of brain tissue (among a lot of other things that will also improve neural performance). This is especially valuable within an hour of taking the morning vitamins.
If you have control of the thermostat, consider setting the room temperature to 68F, which will be very comfortable after warming up with the pacing. Then take fifteen minute breaks pacing breaks from work when you start to feel a little chilly, to get you warmed again. That will probably be half of your midmorning coffee break, the last quarter of your lunch hour, and half of your mid afternoon break. So you will be pacing or walking about 2 miles a day, interleaved with your work, and you can tell anyone that asks that you are doing this for your health.
If you want to get fit as well as stay mentally sharp, carry weights while pacing or walking. Start by increasing to 110% of your weight: if you weigh 125 lb, carry 2 lb weights in each hand and 8 or 9 lbs of books in a back pack. At my weight of 205 lb, I started with 3.3 lb weights in each hand and 15 lb of cast iron pans (wrapped in towels so they wouldn't clank) in the back pack. If you want, increase your effort by gradually adding more weight, but do so in small increments, no more than about 2% of your base weight a week. I'm currently doing about 120% of my base weight and I'm happy at that level.
Start using a brain prosthesis. Use a PDA that you can carry at all times to remember all the stuff you need to know on a moment's notice, but might not need to refer to for months at a time. My Palm has a memo from back in the day about how to get into the BIOS of various computers. Its also got a memo for all those geometric equations and conversion factors that I might need once every co
You mean Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) - which has other names in different animals (eg CJD in humans).
Apparently it doesn't exist in the USA though, so most people here are safe! McDonalds for everyone! :-)
I haven't seen anyone mention sleep.
That's when your synaptic pathways are reinforced and new ideas are integrated into memory.
Our brains are as active when we are asleep as awake, just accomplishing a different process.
If you want to know something for a test, don't cram all night before, simply sleep on it.
If you can't figure out the solution to a dilemma, you might after a good night's sleep.
Finally, if you are well rested, you will be content enough to not mind that you can't remember what you did at work yesterday... ...what? Yesterday was Saturday? Did I sleep through it again?
I'm 50. I find that a low-fat diet, regular physical exercise (*gentle* stretches, short sprints combined with walks and the odd steep hill or stairway/steps), lots of rest and a good diet keep my head sharper. KEEP THE WEIGHT DOWN!!! Too much fat on your frame makes you stupid(er) - at any age. Omega3 seems to help, too. But I only mean sharper. Not as sharp as I used to be, but FEELS like it. ;-)
Only boring people are ever bored.
1) Memorize poetry. Something with bounce, rhythm, and meter. And something you decide you like after the first reading. I find Louis Carroll a good place to start...say, "The Hunting of the Snark". (Well, Jabberwocky would be a better start, but be sure you read Humpty Dumpty's explanation of what the words mean.)
2) Exercise...in moderation. Don't go to extremes here or you'll stop. Say 20-30 minutes a day. Walking is good, particularly if you do it with someone.
3) Vitamin D, Fish (not just the oil! Salmon is delicious, but sardines are good too.)
4) Control your blood pressure.
5) Make lists of things that you MUST remember. Use a personal calendar.
6) Get interested in *something*. It almost doesn't matter what.
7) Nothing really works, but all of these together help.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
the one thing which doctors seem to stress over and over is that exercise has the strongest experimental correlation to maintaining mental performance: better than any kind of dietary supplement, drug, meditation or computerized mental training. It also happens that as one gets older, one has less energy, more aches and pains, and above all more time commitments. All this means you get less exercise. So you have to ask yourself, suppose I set aside 90 minutes a day for exercise, everything like showering and changing included. How much of a mental improvement would there have to be in order for that to be a net gain?
Chances are, not much.
Now for the personal testimonial. I am middle aged, and I did notice an increased difficulty with keeping track of what I was doing. Other than getting a good night's sleep, exercise is the one thing that makes a difference. The effect is subjectively subtle but enormous objectively. I feel a bit better when I get my exercise, but I perform enormously better, at least measured by looking back at my day and actually getting things accomplished that I set out to do.
This makes a great deal of sense. The body wasn't meant to sit around doing nothing but being stressed out all day. We know that it plays hell with the circulatory system, but I'll bet the brain takes a beating too. It's an extremely sensitive instrument that evolved to direct hours of daily movement. It shouldn't be pickled in stress hormones all day long as blood sugar levels shoot wildly up and down.
Seriously. Set aside an hour and half; it doesn't have to be at the gym, it could be a five mile walk. Do it for a month and see if all the mental deterioration you're seeing doesn't go away.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
my wife never lets me forget!
I'm pretty sure the research shows that, rather than stick to a consistent routine, you should vary your routine. Creates new neural connections and avoids the use it or lose it effect. Also, this works for exercise too...you need to change it up.
Make a calendar and limit your appointments or meetings to no more than what will fit in the block....three, max.
Remember the old thing about organized data = information, and information that can be used in multiple contexts is called knowledge. The older you get, the more cognitive templates you have, patterns against which you can match problems. This is supposed to make up for the less firm grasp on every tiny detail. Wisdom, the school of hard knocks.
Also, when someone asks for something and you are away from your external memory devices like calendar or journal or Blackberry, ask them to send the request in email, with more details! It's up to them to remember to ask again!
Taking formal courses is fun and challenging....take up something you loved in school and put aside....the A's will come easier because you are better at prioritizing, and have a richer matrix into which you can hang the facts. Quiet place to study is crucial, and take advantage of the textbooks' websites, etc.
Do you know CPR? First Aid? Take a class and become a Red Cross volunteer or EMT or something else equally useful, to help out in the event of a big disaster. Learn to garden, or cook. Have a great time!
Read what the younger folks around you are reading, and check out some of their music, so you have a common framework. If you are good at not being condescending, you can often provide the history or context for something they may not know about. Heck, you were around when the Beatles were recording....or when hip hop was born.......or when AIDS started cutting its swath thru the world...or when Marc Andreesen demo'd Mosaic at Illinois....but limit yourself. Better to be asked than to monologue.
Get a passport and travel abroad. Fifteen minutes a day, consistently, of a foreign language and you will be fluent enough to carry on a conversation in a year. By now you should know what your learning style is...take advantage of it!
One thing I do to help keep my mind sharp is the "SAT Question Of The Day" at collegeboard.com - you can set it up to email the URL for the new one every day. I've been doing this for years, but I've only had the site keeping track of my answer percentages for the last half year or so. My percentages of correct answers in in the 92-93 percent range (most questions are simple and easy, but some can be tricky), but no doubt many Slashdotters of all ages can do better than me.
There are surely similar "questions of the day" out there. I've heard of one for nursing students. Does anyone know of any more that general Slashdotters would enjoy?
There are also "word of the day" emails you can sign up for from m-w.com and other dictionary sites.
On the physical side, I take a multivitamin once a day and 500mG of Vitamin C twice a day. I think that (and the Quaker 5-minute oatmeal every morning) helps mentally as well as physically.
Fifteen years ago I quit smoking, and around ten years ago I did sprint triathlons and on Olympic-distance tri, but I'm not nearly as active now (but I've still quit smoking). Also, I quit drinking 20 years ago. I don't know what damage I did to my brain in my 20's, but I'm just trying not to add to it.
As far as "doing even more" for diet (and exercise, which also matters but somewhat less, compared to a good diet vs. junk food) there are several stages of what you can do (I've been wanting to do the Walford/CRON thing for a while now, but it hasn't been easy):
Light-Duty is the book "Younger Next Year." It's aimed at those of us 50 and above, but much younger people can learn from it.
Medium to Heavy Duty is "Beyond the 120 Year Diet" by (the late) Roy Walford. It's CRON: Caloric Reduction (eating substantially fewer calories) with Optimal Nutrition (carefully choosing food for its nutritional values as well as "supplements" - vitamins and such). Excellent stuff for mind and body.
Extreme Duty is Ray Kurzweil's book "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever" in which he not only does CRON but many other things such as taking 150 pills a day and weekly intravenous stuff. It looks a little 'out there' even compared to Walford's stuff, but Kurzweil just might be onto something.
Tag lost or not installed.
Make lists, lists, lists
When I say "consistant routine", I'm talking about simple things - what to have for breakfast, where to eat lunch, etc - I've deliberately narrowed my choices here, and have a "default", and I use the extra CPU cycles to read a book, read a new white paper, listen to some new Music etc
CPR and First Aid - yep, done that, time for a re-cert. NWS storm spotter - ditto. Local Amateur Radio Emergency Service - County Asst Coordinator
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
+turmeric +memory.
pax causation vs. correlation pedants for a sec,
the most interesting thing i've heard re turmeric is that cultures which eat a lot of it [india] have markedly low rates of alzheimers.
I find I have to juggle about 20 ideas my mind at the same time to write good code. Some are a perspective of the overall project while others are the immediate entities I'm working on. I find these burrow into my subsconious with some active work on them when I'm doing other things. The first day of a vacation or diversions else like jogging they sometimes bubble to the surface. I guess when my short term memory falls below a certain threshhold I wont be able code, or write prose or music either.
The one main concession I make to memory aids now is a notepad to write down new ideas or bugs I plan to return to in a few hours. In my 20s I kept that all in my mind.
I wonder if is why you dont see too many older people *starting* programming. There are older programmers like myself, but we all started in our teens or 20s.
You are paying taxes for your life "footprint" in that country, not just for your income but also when you buy things.
...
Now try to think that whenever you use anything on earth that it is not your own creation (knowledge, art, infrastructure, etc), and try to mentally subtract the value that you can return in exchange to that thing, you will be embarrassed. Are you paying your life time, knowledge and pretty everything you are to humanity by thinking in terms of socialism or not ?
How many colors can you name ? Try that
Health and exercise fight this to a large degree. Both physical and mental exercise. This is much like people saying their bodies get weaker as they age. Not me. I am 46 years old and I am as strong or stronger than I have ever been. Every day I push both my body and my mind to work hard. Then I rest both of them. I also eat right and all of that good stuff. It really does make a difference. If you want strong muscles you work out. If you want a strong brain, work it. This is part of why I chose what I do. I farm. It is very mentally and physically invigorating. I'm outdoors much of the day. There are always new challenges. I also program, write, draw, take photos and do other interesting things. Don't get in a rut.
Cheers
-Walter
Sugar Mountain Farm
in the mountains of Vermont
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/blog/
http://hollygraphicart.com/
http://nonais.org/
Here's an idea: Use a computer to keep track of things so you don't need to remember them or understand them. If you're limited by your ability to remember things then you're doing it wrong. If you're limited by your ability to understand things then you're doing it wrong.
Have you read any of the latest research about nicotine? It seems to promote neuron growth.
Now, let me be very clear. Consumption of tobacco in any form, be it smoking, chewing, or snuffing, will give you cancer. There are lots of crazy chemicals in that old tobacco leaf, and many more are synthesized during curing processing, and burning.
But the drug by itself is not carcinogenic. It's one of those drugs that are shaped like neurotransmitters. As for why it's addictive, I think it's because it casus relaxation, focus, and concentration, and for those people who are constantly stressed out and unable to relax themselves, rely on a drug to do it for them.
So, you might take it as a prophylactic as you age. I plan on chewing the gum when I enter my 60s.
Just as an anecdotal story, my grandma died last year at age ninety. She was losing her marbles, but she was never officially diagnosed with anything. She would mix up dates, still think I was seeing a girl from 5 years ago ( you could see how excited she was that she was able to recall the name of this girlfriend.) After she died, my parents found a scrap of paper on her make-up table where she had written her name.
My grandpa is 91 now, and he's still a cogent storyteller. He has strident opinions about current politics and sports, and also an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of Toledo, Ohio, a lot of which he personally lived through. He smokes a pipe.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I have met several old poets, mathematicians, doctors, etc. which have a very good working brain, and the common thing between them is that they keep creating, thinking about problems, learning new things, i.e. excercising their brains. Probably a good diet helps too.
Remembering is about 2 Pita Bytes of storage for the older humans. Until we can access our personal history, that's a lot of facts to wade through by ourselves. It will be a boon to me when those scientist folks get that "Brain Backup" device thingy working right. But with respect to our Brain, I'm betting on the cure will be some kind of DNA/RNA Therapy, cellular degeneration is curable, not today, but soon. It will be nice when this therapy can be extended to mend the cells to what they were when we were 23 years old; we were invincible then. What a hell of a combination it would be to be 23 years old with the memories that we have now, and the ability to make more memories.
Who needs to remember things when you have Google?
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
people become senile as they get older because the brain, like the rest of your body, deteriorates with age.
I'm a firm believer that meditation can help tremendously to help ward off senility, dementia, and some forms of depression. So, while our brain will undoubtedly age, I think our minds don't necessarily have to.
false dichotomy...older people do not have to be 'set in their ways' and young people do not have to be full of nonsense ideas...it's fallacy to think so.
the best team is one with a range of experience and abilities all devoted to accomplishing a task or goal. people who are 'stuck in their ways' no matter what age are a drag on a work group or creative team. what's most important is that ego and self promotion are set aside by all
now, if you argue that the 'old and stubborn vs. young and nonsense' is the status quo, I agree. my point is, we should strive to move beyond those limitations.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Piracetam is a readily available supplement used to treat aging and cognitive disorders. It increases memory and cognition. It does a good enough job for me that my significant other gets upset when I stop taking it, as my memory isn't nearly as good without it. Available in Europe as a prescription, or available in the USA directly through Amazon as a supplement.
And whatever NEW challenges you feed your brain must be enjoyable and be challenges that hit on a lot of levels. I took up the fiddle, which is one of the hardest instruments to learn. Right Brain, Left Brain, Dexterity and Body Memory are all challenged on a regular basis. If I keep it going, I just might achieve competency at this infernal instrument right around the time I hit 70. I should also mention that it is addicting, and a great way to get even with the neighbors for their loud rap music. :-) It seems also that there are a whole lotta OLD fiddlers around who are still raising hell.
Whatever you choose to be your new "Brain Food" make sure it challenges you on similar levels. If not music, some sort of art, or craft that involves both intellectual skills as well as physical/coordinational ones is what you need to find. Whether it be rebuilding a classic car from the ground up, or furniture making, or refurbishing vintage audio equipment . . . whatever it is, it's got to be something interesting to you as well as challenging, and that when you start to achieve some competency, there are always going to be new levels to reach for.
I'd love to change the world but I can't find the source code.
I've tried a lot of things for this problem. I got the most dramatic improvement from B12, folic acid, calcium-magnesium-zinc. Also, your mind may just be over-confident and getting lazy. Just make an effort to memorize things, don't assume they will just stick. Like you did back in college, study the things you need to remember. Try something like SuperMemo.
Arrrrr! We bound for Tahiti!
(The rest of the video is R rated)
I am anarch of all I survey.
I don't need no stinking chess! I use emacs! It's much more work for the brain to calculate all my keystrokes!
Well here's a bit of information that most people try to avoid. That is, cholesterol not only clogs your heart, it clogs the blood flow into your brain. There was a study that showed lower rates of alzheimers/dementia among people taking cholesterol reducing drugs (statins). Of course, rather than depending on drugs, you could always lower your cholesterol intake and reap the longevity benefits of a plant based diet.
Link to article about study
It kills off the brain cells associated with forming new memories by hypoxia. 10% of people have it, predominantly male and if you are overweight or sedentary it exacerbates it. I've got severe sleep apnea (55 ahi) which means I stop breathing 55 times an hour for 10 seconds or longer. I just started cpap (a device that blows air up your nose to keep your airways open) and my memory has been improving daily.
theaveng - please contact me, I was curious about your signature. email me at userid at msu dot edu
P.S. - channels 3 & 4 are off limits for white spaces devices; also 52 and above.
Tough call here.
Writing produces "what you already know" even if you haven't yet connected all the fragments you know.
But reading steeps your mind in whole expanses of *contextual style* beyond the pure data. When I have to present my stuff from work to my manager I read a lot of fairly unrelated nonfiction simply because the high grade of language seeps in. When I tap into even a quarter of it my results come through better.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You'll still be finding rooks in the fridge, though.
You could join one of the online brain training sites. There seems to be an increasing number of them as our population is aging thanks to the baby boomers.
Some of them seem purely exercise based while others like to wrap the exercises in nice looking games.
Personally, I like going to fitbrains.com. I find it has the best games wrapped around the exercises.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9119971412732023066
Primarily it's a matter of adapting your style of work to fit. Take more time to absorb new information and spend more time mulling it over. Long experience gives you the chance to optimize. Use your experience to decide what is important to know and what you can just bookmark in case you need it again.
Brain exercises are great. There's no reason it shouldn't be a practical exercise like learning a new (computer) language or new and better techniques in an old one.
A key point is to recognize that you can't get away with skipping sleep as much as younger people can. Some of your memory problems might just be from sleep deprivation. No more heroic 24 hour sessions.
You may find that experience allows you to get the same amount done in 8 hours anyway.
And if no autopsies are done to confirm the disease, you know this how? Oh right, it's a wild-all guess dressed up as fact.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
If your knowledge is still relevant and worth, try passing on to some young/new brains.
You are a product of your environment. --Clement Stone
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
"We focus so much on memory that forgetting has been maligned," says Gayatri Devi, a neuro-psychiatrist and memory expert in New York City. "But if you didn't forget, you'd recall all kinds of extraneous information from your life that would drown you in a sea of inefficiency." Memories of mundane, recurring events compete to be recalled, and scientists say the brain appears to be programmed to forget those that aren't important. Neuroimaging studies show that it's the brain's prefrontal cortex, the area of complex thought and executive planning, that sorts and retrieves such "like-kind" memories. Researchers at Stanford University's Memory Laboratory demonstrated last year that the more subjects forgot competing memories, the less work their cortexes had to do to recall a specific one. In short, forgetting frees up brain power for other tasks, says psychologist Anthony Wagner, the lab's director. More here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122635803060015415.html?mod=rss_Health
I totally agree with this 30s thing. Now I am exactly 30 and when I look back to my 20s, I say myself that "what sort of man (boy..) were you ? You bloody stupid." Almost for a year, everthing is clearer than before, mentally and socially. I don't know why but it is like that. I like it. Cheers, Mehmet.
Having done my bachelor degree just recently in biotechnology, I studied phosphatidylserine. This is a natural fat that exists amongst other in milk (and your brain). Consuming 10-50 mg each day have shown good effects in regained memory activity in persons over 50 years old. Things like memory capacity of a 10 years younger brain.
Not enough studies done to prove anything, but the company i worked with is one of the worlds largest diary manufacturer, and they plan to release a functional food with enhanced phosphatidylserine concentration.
Currently you can but it in pill form at health stores. Not as good takeup in the body, but worth it in my opinion.
Useful especially for older persons. No huge effects seen in yournger persons. This is because it affects the concentration of different fatty cells in the brain, and thus are different depending on age.
If you ask me as long as I'm occupied with a subject I don't forget about it and I'm 28, so I don't have those issues your talking about just yet, what I was getting to, since you're forgetting about them is probably due the fact that you're not actively talking/working/whatever on that topic. What makes me wonder why it is important to you.
Most channels are now using virtual numbers. So for example channels 2 and 3 are actually broadcasting at real channels 22 and 31, right where TV Band/whitespace Devices can overlap them.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Hire a personal assistant - it works like a charm.
Now, where the hell did I put that damned string?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I'm 41, and for most of my life I've suffered from depression, insomnia and other problems which have made it difficult to concentrate, focus, or remember things. It's like an advance preview of mild senility, and it isn't always pleasant. Nonetheless, I've found ways to compensate, and have managed to remain a reasonably successful software developer in spite of these.
First and foremost is that I assume *nothing* about my memory, and write down anything I do not wish to forget. Second, I have developed a discipline for breaking down complex or overwhelming objectives into smaller and more manageable tasks. This is part of what helps me to be a good developer - this is the same skill that allows analyzing business problems or algorithms to come up with a solution so simple that even I can understand and implement it. :) Third, I try to be realistic about my strengths and limitations. I realize I couldn't do graphical design or sales to save my life, so I leave these kinds of things to others, and instead focus on the things I know I can do well.
Every person has a different mix of skills, abilities, aptitudes, and interests, which predisposes him or her to success in different areas. Mine doesn't include the ability to remember precise details from decades past, but that's OK. I do learn from both successes and mistakes from the past, and even if I know I won't remember what a particular regex means unless I comment it (which I do!!), I still can learn from the problem I used it to fix, and hopefully anticipate and prevent that same sort of problem in future systems. Even though I can't always remember, I can always learn, and I suspect that's true of everyone, regardless of age or any related challenges that may bring.
Nonaggression works!
I'm 24, but I tend to be absentminded and have a horrible memory, especially as it relates to things outside my daily routine. I read a book recently though that was astounding. The Memory Book. The concepts in this book can be used to memorize basic information (I memorized all the US presidents in an hour or so), appointments, people's names, etc. I wish I had read this back before high school. It is something everybody should know. This is starting to sound like an advertisement. Umm...BUY TODAY!!!
When your mind starts to get old why don't you do the same thing that you do when your hard drive gets a bit dated... WIPE AND RELOAD!!!
http://www.herbsforhealthyliving.co.uk/commonly_used_herbs/ginkgo_biloba.html/ Helps me a bit to remember stuff.
I was sharp when I was 20. At 38 5 breakdowns latter I am just about treading water. I write down in a computer file (utf8) what I used to remember. I played with regurgitating random parts of this memory file - mostly just reminded me what little progress I have made. (Same job 10 years later)
What I really worry about is my bipolar/depressed 72 year old mother and how long we can keep her out of a nursing home.
I am certain there is a software answer for this - but I do not hear any big developments, maybe she should just carry a pencil and paper everywhere - like I do.
I remember meeting a blind man when I was 18 and thought of all the computerized benefits that were just around the corner - oh to be 18 again...
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
...my aging friends. Remember what Tim Leary called it, free dope from God.
And just breathe. You will be surprised at the power of the cleansing breath.
And it is not that your losing your memory - it just slows down. I can remember ANYTHING if you give me three days!
This is not an ad, just anecdotal evidence. I'm a 64 year old tool monger for a major corporation whose brain was wiped out by drugs last year...interferon to be specific. I couldn't even code in ruby after 6 months treatment with that 'stuff'. I finally found BioSynergy's BioEndurance, a blend of Acetyl-l-carnitine, alpha lipoic acid, and CoQ10. Three weeks of two pills a day and I was back in the game, multitasking my admin duties, coding and management handholding like I knew what I was doing. I do exercise every day, don't do hard drugs like caffeine or alcohol and eat a small amount of good for me food every three to four hours but I've been doing that for years so I can't say that saved my brain.
..that we do slow down with age ? Why do we have to keep on running around like an electrified monkey. Is it really out of the question to age gracefully ? For what it's worth I do not intend "to keep up" with all this mess that's called IT these days. Inevitably this will mean a sidestep away from the maniac work culture. Have you ever really, really thought about working on a completely different field ? It can be difficult to switch careers the older you get, but it can also be highly rewarding. There will always be success-hungry youngsters who haven't had their first case of ulcer yet. Why not give them a chance at this glorious profession ?
the 10% rule. It came from GE.
I hate to be "that guy" but if you had taken a history class you should be aware of "decimation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army) as performed by the Roman army, so I'm pretty sure the 10% rule didn't come from GE. Those who don't study history and all that... However to be fair, the Romans probably stole the idea from the Greeks or Egyptians.
Detail memory degrades, but decision-making skills improve. I find that amphetamines and piracetam are helpful, overcoming fatigue, while improving focus and memory. I'm definitely at least twice the engineer at 45 that I was at 25. Thankfully, my pay scale reflects this improvement.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
* I am a brain-damage survivor: these methods, long-term work. *
Vegan DHA ( from algae ) has been proven to be more effective than algal DHA eaten by fish, then squeezed from fish-bodies & then eaten by us.
Difference given, if you eat the stuff every other day, throughout your life,
about 7 years of brain-youth when you reach 70, give-or-take
( eating fish 3x / week gives 4-6 years of brain-youth around 70 or so, but the only thing in fish that is known to increase the braincell proliferation is DHA, and that's found only in mother's milk, and algae, and fish who get it directly or indirectly from that algae -- DHA's the acting brain-healer )
Get capsules, if you can, because it tastes "fishy" or "seaweedy".
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Gingko Biloba increases circulation among one's brain.
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Switch to CampSuds soap ( http://campsuds.com/ doesn't chemically hammer the organ you call "skin" that encloses your whole body ), ...but also use it to clean one's hair/scalp ( get a Kent comb, simply because they don't score/cut one's scalp even when one's scalp is soaked, and after scrubbing one's scalp to get the oil clogging one's skin from it, then comb it through one's hair thoroughly, then comb flowing water through one's hair, to strip the gunk from one's hair ).
and use it not only instead of regular soap ( as-in do not even TOUCH regular soap: bring a little bottle of the stuff for when you're at work -- after a mere 3 months of never touching regular soap, just TRY using "Ivory", and see how your body feels about being smothered in an alkali toxin, for yourself. )...
The reason this one positively affects one's brain-function is 2-fold: one breathes through one's skin, to some degree ( and there is a LOT of blood near the skin atop one's cranium, and that skin tends to clog with oil several times a day, as it's as oily as one's nose ), so getting this skin clean results in, within seconds, a clear & bright shift ( increase ) in one's consciousness. Try it...
Another tip for avoiding chemically-degrading affect among one's skin, and there-through one's whole-body, is to use Camp Suds as shaving-cream: lather once or twice to get the oil out of one's whiskers, then lather again to hydrate/soften the whiskers & make shaving smooth, then go at 'em. No toxic industrial-perfumes, no gunk, always got it ( not extra tins of stupid product ), etc. AND it works better, too.
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Light: get above your light-threshold. There are *3* light-sensing-mechanisms in your eyes:
Rods ( black/white vision ),
Cones ( color vision ), and
pigmented ganglia ( chemically kick-up your brain )
When the space you're in goes from dim to mid-bright, your pupils reduce *to a point*, then stop.
that reduction is due to the rods/cones signalling through their circuitry ( possibly through the brain, possibly local: don't know, meself )
But, the second phase of pupil-reduction, from mid-bright to very-bright, is through the pigmented ganglia that reach directly into one's brain.
Those, however, are somehow wired into how "awake/alive" one chemically is.
If you make certain you are above the threshold where those pigmented ganglia engage ( for me it means having over 120w of "designer" 4200k fluorescent tubes above my desk ), it's like being "kicked-awake/alive": at the flick of a switch, one's ALIVENESS just IS.
Since we were evolved to live among sunshine, that couldn't be surprising to anyone who's worked outside, but to office-types, for some reason, there is established assumption that sunshine ought not have any significant effect.
Notice I don't use "cool-white" tubes ( blue-green ), as the color of those harms my health in a subliminal way that over-time results in my being sick more, losing more of my progress/life, and so that's not accommodatable.
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Physical Exercise, pushing you into aerobics-level, 40-min/day, 3x
Geeks rule, especially in emergencies!
My panacea for this problem is definitely a good bowlpack of some expensive weed (dont smoke the cheap shit). It may not solve the problem, but instead make you totally indifferent to how good your memory actually is.
Nutrition and exercise are the keys. Just eat your favorite food and work out to the point where you feel strong enough to carry a gun and fight as Master Chief....
I lost my last job because I was having considerable mental difficulties working with people and making consistent progress on my tasks.
About 6 weeks before I was released, I was diagnosed as suffering from obstructive sleep apnea (I snored in my sleep and frequently stopped breathing. Most people get 90+ minutes of REM sleep each; I got about 15 minutes). Since my diagnosis (now about 6 months ago) my mental capacities (memory, thinking, and concentration) have been improving back to where I think they used to be.
Since then, I've found people all around me who suffer the same condition. I suspect its much more widespread that most people realize.
I've also wondered how often those obits listing "died of natural causes while sleeping" were really extreme cases of sleep apnea.
Moral of the story: If your sleep isn't restful, and you've been told you snore, talk with your physician. There may be more going on than you think.
You did not indicate your gender. I am female, approaching 50. I did indeed feel my brain was going. I started taking an herbal supplement formulated for aging females and within 2 weeks I had my brain back! My husband is very happy; he can have an intelligent conversation with me again. This herbal supplement only costs me about $15 per month, and it has saved my career. (software engineers need their brains.) If you would like to know what this supplement is you can email me at jgetha@yahoo.com. I don't know if it will be helpful for testosterone-based life forms or not, but perhaps we can find something similar for you.
Do what you can do until you can figure out how to do what you can't do.