(2020-01-08) Sivers On Medina Brain Rules For Aging Well

Derek Siverson Brain Rules for Aging Well by John Medina ISBN:0996032673 - Current research on brain aging, and how to slow or reverse its effects. Be very social. Read 3+ hours per week. Intensely learn something new, especially a new language. Take dance lessons. Practice gratitude and mindfulness. Flood your mind with nostalgic memories.

For the group that socialized the most, the rate of cognitive decline was 70 percent less than for those who socialized the least.

Relationships take energy to maintain, consistently giving your brain a bona fide workout. Social interactions are the most complex, energy-intensive jobs your brain can consciously perform.

It's not the overall number of interactions that benefit health, but the net quality of the individual interactions. Take the other person’s point of view, actively seeking to understand a different perspective. This effort transforms casual conversation into meaningful brain food.

Cultivate repeated, unplanned interactions, spontaneously rubbing shoulders with good friends. Live close to friends and family so those shoulders are available for rubbing. Create a setting that encourages people to let their guard down.

In our youth, our emphasis is on the future: “promotion motivation.” Heading into retirement, we try to protect what we’ve worked so hard to gain, shifting from promotion motivation to “prevention motivation”.

Reward prediction abilities decline more than 20 percent with age, which means reward prediction errors increase. You become more gullible.

People often confuse depression with normal sadness. People in the grips of depression often don’t feel particularly sad. Instead, they become increasingly unfocused and demonstrably more irritable and restless, and they experience a steady erosion in things they used to find pleasurable.

L-DOPA sparks dopamine : it improves elevates optimism bias. This experiment was done with a younger generation, so optimism may be influenced by dopamine levels even in healthy people

Seniors who are optimistic live a healthy 7.5 years longer than seniors who aren’t. Optimism exerts a measurable effect on their brain. The volume of their hippocampus doesn’t shrink nearly as much as the pessimist’s does.

Martin Seligman has codified the science of what makes people authentically happy: gratitude behaviors. Read Seligman’s book “Flourish”. Summary: Generate a list of the things that bring you true pleasure, then allow the items on the list to become a regular part of your life.

Lose yourself in a hobby: good movies, books, sports - even a dance class.

Pursue a purpose that gives your life meaning: a purpose larger than self.

Achieve mastery in something over which you currently have no mastery at all.

Ideal subjective age is twelve years younger than your actual age.

Mindfulness improves our brains. Emotional regulation (especially the ability to manage stress) and cognition (especially the ability to pay attention).

Create a robust social schedule for the rest of your life.

Practice mindfulness meditation for the rest of your life.

Go back to school. Enroll in a class. Pick up a new language. Plunge yourself into the deep end of learning environments every day

The best exercise is to find people with whom you do not agree and regularly argue with them.

Teaching other people works beautifully, too.

Seniors who read at least 3.5 hours a day, were 17 percent less likely to die by a certain age. The reading has to be of books, long form.

Fluid intelligence is your ability to persuade your problem-solving talents to come out and play - to solve unique problems independent of your personal experience with them. Fluid intelligence is highly correlated with working memory ability.

UC–San Francisco scientists developed a game called NeuroRacer that actually helps. Audio game called Beep Seeker improves working memory

Greater physical activity means greater intellectual vigor, regardless of age.

By exercising (exercise), you are not just slowing age-related decline. Your brain actually gets better at its job. You don’t have to do a lot to reap the benefit. Just take a walk. Or get into a pool. Do strength training two or three times a week

Calorie restriction and plant-based diets exert their anti-aging effects through hormesis. Only five days a month confers the age-related benefits.

Nostalgia didn’t affect just the participants’ attitudes. It also affected their bodies. Eyesight improved. Retrieval bias around age 20, skewed for events in our late adolescence/mid-20s. When did you have the most meaningful experiences of your long life?

The Mediterranean and MIND diets have been shown to improve memory, lessen the chances for stroke, and be robustly associated with long life.