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Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives
Daniel J. Levitin
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Fending off Alzheimer’s, he says, involves five key components: a diet rich in vegetables and good fats, oxygenating the blood through moderate exercise, brain training exercises, good sleep hygiene, and a regimen of supplements individually tailored to each person’s own needs, based on blood and genetic testing.”
“APPENDIX REJUVENATING YOUR BRAIN Don’t retire. Don’t stop being engaged with meaningful work. Look forward. Don’t look back. (Reminiscing doesn’t promote health.) Exercise. Get your heart rate going. Preferably in nature. Embrace a moderated lifestyle with healthy practices. Keep your social circle exciting and new. Spend time with people younger than you. See your doctor regularly, but not obsessively. Don’t think of yourself as old (other than taking prudent precautions). Appreciate your cognitive strengths—pattern recognition, crystallized intelligence, wisdom, accumulated knowledge. Promote cognitive health through experiential learning: traveling, spending time with grandchildren, and immersing yourself in new activities and situations. Do new things.”
“What are the determinants in how we age? The different systems in our brains age at different rates. Some systems decline as others actually increase in efficiency and effectiveness. The basic message”
“We need to somehow separate out the learning experiences a person has had- knowledge acquisition- from their innate ability to use whatever information they have. Scientists call the things you've already learned crystallized intelligence, and they call your potential to learn fluid intelligence. There's also a third intelligence I call acquisitional intelligence- that's the speed and ease with which you can acquire new information (if given the right opportunity). Think of it as coming before both crystallized and fluid intelligence: You can't amass a store of learned information quickly without acquisitional intelligence. p122”
“Spend time with people younger than you. See your doctor regularly, but not obsessively. Don’t think of yourself as old (other than taking prudent precautions). Appreciate your cognitive strengths—pattern recognition, crystallized intelligence, wisdom, accumulated knowledge. Promote cognitive health through experiential learning: traveling, spending time with grandchildren, and immersing yourself in new activities and situations. Do new things.”
“Spend time with people who encourage you to grow, to explore new things, and who take joy in your successes.”
“Remember also that memory is mood-state dependent. If you're in a bad mood, you tend to have easier access to memories of other times you were in a bad mood or were sad, or times when things didn't go right, and it's easy to fall into a despondency cycle of "this pain is just going to get worse and worse...this always happens to me." If you're in a good mood, your mind tends to recall happy events, and you predict a more positive future. This good mood can lead to a virtuous cycle in which the positive-mood neurochemicals help with healing and you do actually get better more quickly. p228”
“Relieved of all these stressors, including the pressure of actually being evaluated, and fears that they might come up short, the older adults performed as well as younger controls.”
“In one experiment people who forced a smile actually felt happier than people who forced a frown, just because that muscle was engaged. It turns out that the nervous system is bidirectional. It doesn’t matter whether the brain makes the mouth smile or the mouth makes the brain smile. So smile, think positive thoughts, and try new things. If you’re not feeling good, act as if you are. A cheerful, positive, optimistic outlook—even if it starts out fake—can end up becoming real.”
“Gardner's intelligences are: 1. musical-rhythmic, 2. visual-spatial, 3. verbal-linguistic, 5. bodily-kinesthetic (athleticism, dancing, acting), 6. interpersonal (or "social" intelligence), 7. intrapersonal (or self-knowledge), 8. spiritual (think Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, for example), 9. moral (ability to solve problems within a moral and ethical frame, think King Solomon), and 10. naturalistic (knowledge of nature, plants, animals, and the sorts of things one might need to know to survive in the wilderness). p124”
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