08 JUL 2016 by ideonexus

 Exercise Releases Brain-Healthy Proteins

We all know that exercise is important for a strong and healthy body. Less appreciated is that exercise seems also to be important for a strong and healthy mind, boosting memory and learning, while possibly delaying age-related cognitive decline [1]. How is this so? Researchers have assembled a growing body of evidence that suggests skeletal muscle cells secrete proteins and other factors into the blood during exercise that have a regenerative effect on the brain. Now, an NIH-supported study...
Folksonomies: cognition exercise
Folksonomies: cognition exercise
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08 JUL 2016 by ideonexus

 Age-Related Decline in Strength as Decline Neurons

“What we have here is (a) failure to communicate,” said the Captain in the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke. This line rings true today as it relates to the failure of physiologists to communicate the mechanisms of muscle strength to the geriatrics community, where the lack of muscle strength observed in older adults holds high clinical significance. Similarly, there is a relative under recognition in the scientific community for the potential role of the brain’s failure to communicate with ske...
Folksonomies: cognition aging strength
Folksonomies: cognition aging strength
  1  notes

As the neurons controlling muscle fibers die off, those muscles grow weaker. Possibly exercising muscles might keep signals going to those neurons and keep them alive, staving off age-related cognitive decline.

02 FEB 2014 by ideonexus

 Alternative Reason for Age-Related Cognitive Decline

As adults age, their performance on many psychometric tests changes systematically, a finding that is widely taken to reveal that cognitive information-processing capacities decline across adulthood. Contrary to this, we suggest that older adults'; changing performance reflects memory search demands, which escalate as experience grows. A series of simulations show how the performance patterns observed across adulthood emerge naturally in learning models as they acquire knowledge. The simulati...
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The idea that as we grow older, our brains have more information to sort through, which makes it take longer to find the data we need.