New Rules for Saving Your Memory

Q | And what’s the second piece of good news?

A |  Let me begin by explaining that there are two different ways people age. The first I call the Mike Wallace style of aging. Wallace just turned 91, and he still has a lion of an intellect. And there’s a whole gigantic population of people who are aging just like him; they’re smart, they’re sophisticated, they retain their cognitive function well into their eighties or beyond. Then there’s a whole other population that is not aging well at all, even in their sixties. So the question was asked almost 20 years ago, “Is there an independent variable that can predict whether you are going to age like Mike Wallace or like that other segment of the population?” And the answer turns out to be yes, there is.

The first piece of data came from geriatric studies done with people over 75. Statistics showed that if you had a physically active lifestyle, your risk of Alzheimer’s was low, your risk for vascular dementia was low and even your risk for affective disorders like depression was low. If you had a sedentary lifestyle, you were debilitated, had heart attacks early and had a much higher risk for Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.
Studies also suggest that the ac-tive population is smarter than the sedentary population; that is, people who are active seem better able to “fully mobilize their IQ,” as we say in the lab. Active people score overwhelmingly better in cognitive abilities, spatial reaction times, and a whole range of other things than people who are sedentary.

Q | What, exactly, do you mean by an active lifestyle?

A |  Active is defined as the presence of aerobic exercise as a regular part of your life, forever. It’s only been in the past three or four years that we’ve known how important this is. The bot-tom line is, aerobic exercise boosts brainpower, including the ability to pay attention to things and get back your capacity for controlled forgetting. Interestingly, strength-training exercise doesn’t produce this benefit, though it does deliver others.