Research has shown that healthy behaviors are associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, but less is known about the potential link between positive lifestyle choices and milder memory complaints, especially those that occur earlier in life and could be the first indicators of later problems.
To examine the impact of these lifestyle choices on memory throughout adult life, UCLA researchers and the Gallup organization collaborated on a nationwide poll of more than 18,500 individuals between the ages of 18 and 99. Respondents were surveyed about both their memory and their health behaviors, including whether they smoked, how much they exercised and how healthy their diet was.
As the researchers expected, healthy eating, not smoking and exercising regularly were related to better self-perceived memory abilities for most adult groups. Reports of memory problems also increased with age. However, there were a few surprises.
Older adults (age 60-99) were more likely to report engaging in healthy behaviors than middle-aged (40-59) and younger adults (18-39), a finding that runs counter to the stereotype that aging is a time of dependence and decline. In addition, a higher-than-expected percentage of younger adults complained about their memory.
Full story healthy lifestyle and memory at Science Daily
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Beedie Savage – President of Quantum Units Education
You probably feel pretty attached to your memories — they’re yours, after all. They define who you are and where you came from, your accomplishments and failures, your likes and dislikes.
Your memories help you separate friends from enemies. They remind you not to eat too much ice cream or drink cheap tequila because you remember how horrible it felt the last time you indulged.
Or do you?
One conversation with Elizabeth Loftus may shake your confidence in everything you think you remember. Loftus is a cognitive psychologist and expert on the malleability of human memory. She can, quite literally, change your mind.
Her work is reminiscent of films like “Memento” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” where what you believe happened is probably far from the truth — whether you’re the eyewitness to a crime or just trying to move past a bad relationship.
“She’s most known for her important work on memory distortion and false memories,” says Daniel Schacter, a psychology professor at Harvard University who first met Loftus in 1979 and describes her as energetic, smart and passionate. “It’s made people in the legal system aware the memory does not work like a tape recorder.”
Full story of trusting your memory at CNN Health
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Beedie Savage – President of Quantum Units Education
For older adults looking to sharpen their mental abilities, it might be time to log on to Facebook.
Preliminary research findings from the University of Arizona suggest that men and women older than 65 who learn to use Facebook could see a boost in cognitive function.
Janelle Wohltmann, a graduate student in the UA department of psychology, set out to see whether teaching older adults to use the popular social networking site could help improve their cognitive performance and make them feel more socially connected.
Her preliminary findings, which she shared this month at the International Neuropsychological Society Annual Meeting in Hawaii, show that older adults, after learning to use Facebook, performed about 25 percent better on tasks designed to measure their ability to continuously monitor and to quickly add or delete the contents of their working memory — a function known in the psychology world as "updating."
Full story of older adults joining Facebook at Science Daily
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Beedie Savage – President of Quantum Units Education
Older Americans who have hearing loss have an accelerated decline in thinking and memory abilities, compared to those with normal hearing, according to a study published in JAMA Archives of Internal Medicine.
Those with hearing loss experience a 30% to 40% greater decline in thinking abilities compared to their counterparts without hearing loss, according to the findings published Monday.
Hearing loss is common among old older adults, affecting about two-thirds of adults 70 and older, and about one-third of adults younger than 60, according to lead study author Dr. Frank R. Lin of Johns Hopkins University. A large number of people with hearing loss are untreated, Lin explained, because they associate hearing loss with the stigma of getting older.
About two years ago Lin and his associates published a paper showing that hearing loss was associated with greater risk for developing dementia. “Fortunately most of us will never develop dementia, but most of us will experience some kind of cognitive decline over time,” explained Lin.
Full story of hearing loss and memory decline at CNN Health
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Beedie Savage – President of Quantum Units Education
It goes without saying that the human brain is complex, and would be hard to build from scratch. But researchers are looking to simulate how the brain works so that more human-like artificial intelligence can be created and we can better understand damage to our own brains.
Chris Eliasmith of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, led research published in the journal Science on a brain model called SPAUN – the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network.
SPAUN lives inside a computer, can view images with a camera-like eye and can draw responses to questions. For example, show it the number "4" and it will write its own "4." It can even mimic the style of the numeral.
Both in the brain and in SPAUN, neurons communicate by changing their voltages, and the pattern of these voltage "spikes" is what carries information from one cell to another, Eliasmith said. The receiving cell generates a voltage of its own if it receives a particular voltage.
SPAUN has 2.5 million spiking neurons. Neurons are the cells – the individual components – that make up the brain. The human brain has about 100 billion neurons, so there’s still a long way to go in terms of replicating its full capacity.
Full story of building human like robot at CNN Health
Photos courtesy of and copyright PhotoPin, http://photopin.com/
Beedie Savage – President of Quantum Units Education
Research has shown that healthy behaviors are associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, but less is known about the potential link between positive lifestyle choices and milder memory complaints, especially those that occur earlier in life and could be the first indicators of later problems.
