June 2009

It helps to remember what to remember

People in very early stages of Alzheimer’s disease already have trouble focusing on what is important to remember, a UCLA psychologist and colleagues report.

One of the first telltale signs of Alzheimer’s disease may be not memory problems, but failure to control attention, said Alan Castel, UCLA assistant professor of psychology and lead author of the study.

The study consisted of three groups: 109 healthy older adults (68 of them female), with an average age of just under 75; 54 older adults (22 of them female) with very mild Alzheimer’s disease, who were functioning fine in their daily lives, with an average age of just under 76; and 35 young adults, with an average age of 19. [continue reading…]

Dr. O’s Rap: Friendship

dr-oFor many years Social Psychologists have recognized the importance of what they termed social support as a vital ingredient of good physical and emotional health. No surprise then that a recent 10-year Australian study found that having good friends can have a significant psychological impact on well-being and ‘help you live longer. This was attributed in part to the fact that you can choose your friendships, as opposed to your family.

Recently, my family & I celebrated the wedding of my son & daughter-in-law. This significant and important day was made all the more special because 8 of my high school friends traveled to Canada from Wales to enjoy this time with me and my family. We had all become friends at age 13, and have remained close ever since.

Those truly linked don’t need correspondence. When they meet again after many years apart, their friendship is as true as ever.
Deng Ming-Dao

Our friendships of over 40 years, have survived among other things, leaving for college, marriage, divorce, and living “over 40,000 miles apart We go back so far we can talk about anything. They knew my parents, where I grew up, my antics as a teenager and my favourite haunts. Yes they really can fill in a lot of blanks-even the blanks I don’t want them to fill in!!

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Am I suggesting we were a little stupid when we got together? The answer in short is … Hell yes, you bet we were! That’s what drives this dance of life.

Link to read more posts from Dr. O

Image:iStockphoto

Image:iStockphoto

University of Queensland neuroscientists have, for the first time, been able to demonstrate that moderate exercise significantly increases the number of neural stem cells in the ageing brain.

In research published in Stem Cells, Dr Daniel Blackmore and his colleagues at the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) have shown that moderate exercise directly increases the number of stem cells in the ageing brain.

Despite the conventional wisdom that we only have a set number of neurons or brain cells, neuroscientists have known for some time that, in healthy brains, the creation of new neurons is an ongoing and lifelong mechanism. [continue reading…]

Baby-boomers and Facebook?

My son is always telling me that I ‘buck the trend’ when it comes to my interest in technology (as a baby boomer I should add, I joined Facebook well before he had even heard about it). However I am a bit short of friends -(not that I’m complaining)- while his ‘friends’ run into the hundreds, mine number only 39. But what more can you expect from a baby boomer— and a new study is now asserting that social network sites should be ‘designed’ to better meet the needs of us 55-65-year-old people. Researchers at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT found out that many baby-boomers think social network sites like Facebook are unfit to them. This is the reason why so few of them use any social network services on the net. [continue reading…]