Tag: ageing
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Nine Diet and Lifestyle Tips for Longevity
By studying the world’s Blue Zones–“communities whose elders live with vim and vigor to record-setting age”–Dan Buettner and team discovered a set of common behavioural traits in their subjects. In his TEDxTC talk Buettner discusses what he discovered to be the myths of living longer and the nine common diet and lifestyle habits of those…
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More on the Cognitive Benefits of Moderate Exercise
“There is overwhelming evidence that exercise produces large cognitive gains and helps fight dementia”, says the Harvard University psychologist John Ratey, author of the 2008 book on the subject, Spark. While Ratey propounds the “very clear” link between exercise and mental acuity, saying that even moderate exercise pushes back cognitive decline by “anywhere from 10…
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Ability to Inhibit Prejudices Diminishes with Age
As we age we become less able to inhibit prejudiced inferences, relying more on ethnic and sexist stereotypes to interpret situations, research into the science of prejudice suggests. There are a lot of clichés thrown around about the elderly, but one that seems to be true—or at least is backed up by research—is the belief…
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The Exponential Growth of Death
I was recently reading about supercentenarians–people that have lived to the age of 110 or above–and read the following statistic: [Reaching] the age of 110 years [is] something achieved by only one in a thousand centenarians (based on European data). Furthermore, only 1 in 50 supercentenarians lives to be 115 (1 in 50,000 centenarians). Fascinated…
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Elderly Becoming Redundant
If the elderly are mostly recognised and valued for their accumulated knowledge and skills (a contentious assumption in itself, granted), then technological advances are gradually making the older generations redundant, suggests Philip Greenspun. Let’s start by considering factual knowledge. An old person will know more than a young person, but can any person, young or…
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George Carlin’s Last Interview
Shorty before his death last year, comedian George Carlin gave what was to become his last wide-ranging interview—with Jay Dixit, senior editor of Psychology Today. Carlin discusses many things in this interview; from detailing his method for coming up with material to his use of technology and this on the advantages of being an older…
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Social Cognition and Staving Off Dementia
A longitudinal study of health and mental lucidity in the aged—focusing on the huge retirement community of Laguna Woods Village south of Los Angeles—is starting to show some results. From studying members of the so-called ‘super memory club’ (people aged 90+ with near-perfect cognitive abilities) it is being suggested that not all mental activities are…