6 Ways to Keep Your Brain Young
The latest from neuroscience!
Ask someone how old they are and they’ll surely give you the number of years they’ve been alive. Ask them how old they ‘feel’ and they’ll give a different answer, either much younger or older possibly depending on how their day’s going. We could also look at our age as expected years remaining. By this measure, a 65-year-old woman ≈ 60-year-old man. Then there’s our biological age (sometimes called functional age), which can only be determined in the lab, despite what your smartwatch tells you. Although, there are certainly 60 somethings with the cardiovascular fitness of the average 20 or 30 something.
Now neuroscientists have come up with a new indicator of a person's age, which they call “brain predicted age”. Your brain-predicted age has nothing to do with your IQ or EQ. It does have to do with the physiological health of your brain. In looking at brain health, scientists want to understand how some individuals retain enough mental function to live a long and fulfilling life, while many others lose their independence, sometimes their very essence in the last years even decades of life.
To me, it seems like common sense to care about how my brain is aging because I would like to be able to keep taking pleasure in life and keep finding new things that bring me joy and meaning for as long…
