Memory and plasticity: “Avoid sloth and pessimism”
What about memory in the BFP? We get pretty obsessed by memory changes in later life. And why does the BFP focus on hearing and listening? The key idea is that if you can improve hearing comprehension, memory improves. This is because of “the well-known fact that richer signals leave stronger memories.”
Merzenich, one of the founders of the plasticity field, says his program (the BFP) works by reversing what he calls the “negative plasticity” of aging. Plasticity of the brain is a two edged sword: it can have positive effects like learning a new skill or hobby, or negative effects like learning bad habits. To the brain it is simply change.
Mine's pessimism.....about your sloth...
An Easy Life?
“Older people tend to want an easy life,” Merzenich says. “They don’t realize how bad that is for them. Normal wear and tear gets compounded by sloth and pessimism in this scenario: as people age, the brain starts to shrink, and the cerebral cortex thins. An older person suffers what Merzenich calls “noisy processing”: bad signal reception, like a radio tuned between channels. “Pretty soon, Grandpa finds it increasingly difficult to understand Junior’s rapid speech and in frustration begins to avoid the kid completely. His confidence ebbing, he ducks other kinds of challenges, and his skills slowly erode from disuse—unless he does something to build them back up.”
This is like getting “rusty”: getting too set in your ways. You can read the full interview from DISCOVER magazine.
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