Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Intelligence and Aging

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/a-sharper-mind-middle-age-and-beyond.html
A Sharper Mind, Middle Age and Beyond
By PATRICIA COHEN
New York Times
January 19, 2012

...

As it turns out, one essential element of mental fitness has already been identified. �Education seems to be an elixir that can bring us a healthy body and mind throughout adulthood and even a longer life,� says Margie E. Lachman, a psychologist at Brandeis University who specializes in aging. For those in midlife and beyond, a college degree appears to slow the brain�s aging process by up to a decade, adding a new twist to the cost-benefit analysis of higher education � for young students as well as those thinking about returning to school.

...

To isolate the specific impact of schooling on mental skills, Dr. Lachman and her colleagues tried to control for other likely reasons one person might outshine another � differences in income, parental achievement, gender, physical activity and age. After all, we know that the children of affluent, educated parents have a raft of advantages that could account for greater mental heft down the road. College graduates are able to compound their advantages because they can pour more resources into their minds and bodies.

Still, when Dr. Lachman and Dr. Tun reviewed the results, they were surprised to discover that into middle age and beyond, people could make up for educational disadvantages encountered earlier in life. Everyone in the study who regularly did more to challenge their brains � reading, writing, attending lectures or completing word puzzles � did better on fluid intelligence tests than their counterparts who did less.

And those with the fewest years of schooling showed the largest benefits. Middle-age subjects who had left school early but began working on keeping their minds sharp had substantially better memory and faster calculating skills than those who did not. They responded as well as people up to 10 years younger. In fact, their scores were comparable to college graduates.

�We have shown that those with less education may be able to compensate and look more like those who have higher education by adopting some of the common practices of the highly educated,� Dr. Lachman says.

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I think the causation runs in both directions. Mental exercise may keep someone sharp, but the predilection for mental exercise depends partly on intelligence.

This article is also about how intelligence changes over time but looks at the role of genetics.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204555904577168973230172642.html
New Insight Into Aging Brains:
Study Links 24% of Intelligence Changes Over a Person's Life to Genetic Factors
Wall Street Journal
JANUARY 19, 2012
By GAUTAM NAIK

Nearly a quarter of the changes often seen in a person's intelligence level over the course of a lifetime may be due to genes, a proportion never before estimated, new research shows.

The study suggests that genes may partly explain why some people's brains age better than others, even though environmental factors likely play a greater role over a lifetime.

Understanding the factors behind healthy mental aging has become an increasingly vital one for societies with large elderly populations. However, it isn't an easy task.

Traditional methods of estimating the influence of genes and the environment on intelligence have largely been limited to comparisons between people who are related, such as identical or fraternal twins. The shortcoming of such studies is they didn't clearly apportion the effects of each factor on intelligence.

Modern DNA-based techniques are now helping to refine the search.

The new study, published in the journal Nature, offers one of the first estimates of how much genes and the environment contribute to fluctuations in a person's intelligence between adolescence and old age. It found that genetic differences account for 24% of the variation.

However, the paper didn't identify any of the myriad genes or environmental factors that might be involved.

"The nature-nurture controversy is never more contentious than when it concerns the genetics of intelligence," wrote Robert Plomin, a psychologist at King's College in London, in a commentary accompanying the study, in which Dr. Plomin wasn't involved.

The Nature paper, he said, "may mark the beginning of the end of this controversy" because it relies on DNA data from unrelated people, which is harder to dispute.

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ETA: I think the paper is
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10781.html
"Genetic contributions to stability and change in intelligence from childhood to old age" by Deary et al.

Makes sense, pretty much every part of our body is a 'use it or lose it' type of prospect.

I tend to agree, viewing it from a "three ring" perspective. General drive and specific interest are important aspects of giftedness that can have a major impact on intelligence, and highly gifted people may tend to self-stimulation much more than those of average intelligence.

My mother had some college but no degree. She always did a lot of reading and after she retired, she read even more and did crossword puzzles every day. She also watched Jeopardy. Because she had loved learning knew things all her life she could answer more Jeopardy questions than anyone I knew. At her funeral several people told us that she used to be one of the smartest people they knew. It all changed in one day with one minor little surgery. Her short term memory and a large chunk of long term memory, including the fact that she had a grandson she adored that lived next door, were destroyed. With no short term memory she could never learn another thing. It was one of the saddest things I have ever seen. It got worse and worse over the next 8 1/2 years until her death. Keeping her mind active after retirement didn't seem to do much for her brain. She was only a few years older than my husband is now when her mind was destroyed. She never abused alcohol or drugs and she never smoked, yet her mind was in worse shape than those who had. I sometimes wonder if it would have been better for her if she had spent less time reading and more time exercising since she was overweight and diabetic, two things that I think can contribute to surgery complications.

I have to homeschool my child. I need to keep my mind sharp so I am trying to exercise more and maintain a healthy weight in addition to learning new things every day. I also try not to get too upset about things I can't control. I don't want to have a stroke. Strokes can really speed up that aging process.

I have been wondering if it is possible for a middle aged person to learn calculus.

I remember when I was in the Navy, assigned to the ship, and had spent enough time on board that I was reasonably comfortable that I had learned what I needed to do my various jobs effectively. Then we'd go out to sea, the hours of not much anything to do with my mind began to wear on me, and I began to feel like my brain was dying. So I started supplementing my fantasy/sci-fi diet with some serious literature and taking correspondence courses.

Mind you, this was a process I felt I was undergoing as a fairly young man.

These days the responsibilities of my job keep changing violently every couple of years, so I'm always learning. Plus, I'm currently immersed in learning about the nature of giftedness and teaching myself to play guitar.

Gotta feed the beast.

It is certainly possible for a middle-aged person to learn calculus if they first get enough background in the math leading up to it. Plenty of people successfully go back to college in their middle age.