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Your ageing brain

About 50 000 neurons die each day in a healthy person. Eventually this adds up to about 10 per cent of the original total. At 75 the physical weight of the brain is about nine tenths of its maximum and blood flow through the brain has been reduced by almost one-fifth.

Does the loss of grey matter mean we all become less intelligent as we grow older? Not necessarily ? instead of losing our faculties, brain function can even be improved.

The brain is a specialised machine with specific regions handling specific operations. The greatest divergence is between the left and right hemispheres, which often work almost independently of each other. One hemisphere can be solving an equation while the other tends to basic chores.

As we age, the two halves work increasingly in tandem, because the walls between the hemispheres seem to fall away. Sometimes the hemispheres are so efficiently integrated that our thought processes are considerably better than before.

When the whole organ works better than the sum of its parts you begin to use the entire body of information in your brain ? which is exactly what wisdom is. Because of their capacity for reflective thinking, older adults play particular roles in human culture, as in the case of judges and peacemakers.

The upside of being older

The upside of the ageing brain is that it brings new thinking patterns online and cross-indexes existing systems like never before. You manage information much better than when you were younger. Your brain makes leaps it couldn't make as easily before.

The middle-aged brain (35 to 65 and even beyond) is much more elastic and supple than previously thought. Healthy adults have lots of myelin (fatty white sheathing) in the frontal and temporal lobes, where big thoughts live. And guess what: it peaks at around 45 or 50!

There is no known limit to the amount of information you can store or the amount of learning you can enjoy. Any cerebral activity challenges the brain and maintains healthy neural networks. Whenever you learn something new, new branches of nerve fibres and new connections are formed. If you don't stimulate your brain the connections are destroyed. Remember the old saying, "Use it or lose it"!

75 and beyond

Grandpa has become ever so cranky and granny so forgetful! The reason for this is men lose their brain tissue earlier than women and they lose more of it.

This happens mostly in the frontal and temporal lobes, which are concerned with thinking and feeling, and may explain personality changes in older men such as irritability. Women tend to lose brain tissue in the areas where memory and visual-spatial abilities are located, which is why some older women have difficulty remembering things and finding their way about. Some older people have trouble with memory tasks either because their memory skills have become rusty or because they never learnt any in the first place.

Medical matters

What can go wrong?


Dementia is a condition resulting from disease in the brain and involves the decline of normal brain functions, memory loss, confusion and personality changes. It affects about one in 100 people aged between 65 and 70 and one in 20 aged between 70 and 80. For the very elderly ? people over 80 ? figures are uncertain.

Alzheimer's disease


It's the most common cause of dementia (diagnosed in 80 per cent of cases). The first symptoms are poor shortterm memory, followed by an inability to concentrate as well as personality changes. Mental activity such as reading, writing and attending adult education classes can help maintain thinking abilities.

Stroke

The brain has the power to mend damage caused by a stroke. Nerve cells affected by the stroke usually die, but connections between surviving cells can regrow and bypass damaged areas. The brain can resculpt itself and often regains some of the functions lost immediately after a stroke.

(Health24)

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