Lost your keys again? Can’t remember whatshisname? Don’t blame your age — you’re just as smart now as you were in your youth, says the neuroscientist behind this year’s most inspiring book: Why 70 really is the new 30

• Dr Daniel Levitin, 62, explores the neuroscience of ageing in a new book
• He says older people often pinpoint 82 as the happiest age of their life
• Author of five bestselling books, aims to banish the myths associated with aging 
• He also shares advice on how conversation and walking can keep you young 

Being old today means being healthier and having more opportunities than at any other point in history.

Now, 60-year-olds do the things 40-year-olds used to do. It is no longer surprising to hear about people in their 80s who still work, while some scientists believe human lifespans could eventually extend to 150 or even beyond.

For more than 25 years, I have been a neuroscientist, cognitive psychologist and author of books that attempt to translate brain science for the public. I have written five best-selling books on the science of the brain (as well as being a dedicated musician who once played saxophone with Sting, and a record producer who has worked with Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder). At the age of 62, I’m slipping into the older adult bracket myself, and in my new book, I turn my attention to the neuroscience of ageing.

Bestselling author Dr Daniel Levitin, 62, banishes the myths associated with aging as human lifespan continues to increase, pictured: Anna Wintour, 70

It’s a fast-moving field, with plenty of subjects to study. It has been claimed, after all, that two thirds of the people over 65 who have ever lived are alive today (and three quarters of those over 75).

Compared to the stereotypes — a frail old lady with a fading memory, for example, or the grumpy old man who won’t leave his armchair — the latest science argues for a very different vision of old age that sees our final decades as a resurgence.

True, 80-year-olds are not the same as 30-year-olds physically. But mentally they have distinct advantages: impulse control, the ability to delay gratification, to get along with others and make decisions.

In fact, life after 75 can be a period of true intellectual growth. At 80, the great cellist Pablo Casals was asked why he continued to practise so much. His reply was: ‘Because I want to get better!’ Casals believed self-improvement was possible at any age — and I agree.

When older people are asked to pinpoint when in life they were happiest, the age that comes up most often is 82! My goal is to help raise that number by ten or even 20 years. Science says it can be done.

So let’s do some myth-busting and prove that, far from losing it, we oldies are just entering our prime.

MYTH: Memory declines steeply with age

REALITY: It declines far less than you think

The difference between a short-term memory lapse in a 70-year-old and one in a 20-year-old isn’t what you think.

I’ve taught undergraduates my entire career and they make all kinds of short-term memory errors. They walk into the wrong classroom; turn up to exams without a pencil; forget something I taught two minutes ago. These are similar to the kinds of things 70-year-olds do.

Dr Daniel claims 70-year-olds and 20-year-olds make similar memory errors, but older people observe the events with worry about brain health, pictured: Arianna Huffington, 69

The difference is how we self-describe these events. Twentysomethings don’t think: ‘Oh dear, this must be early-onset Alzheimer’s.’ They think: ‘I’ve got a lot on my plate’ or ‘I must get more than four hours’ sleep.’

The 70-year-old observes these same events and worries about brain health.

This is not to say that Alzheimer’s and dementia-related memory impairments are fiction. They are very real and very tragic. But every little lapse of short-term memory doesn’t necessarily indicate a biological disorder.

What about forgetting words? One neuroscientist, Deborah Burke, of the Project on Cognition and Ageing at Pomona College, California, found the decline in retrieval of individual words among older adults was a by-product of atrophy in the left insula of the brain, a region associated with the phonological form of the word.

That is, we don’t actually forget the word itself, just the sound of it — that’s why it feels as if it’s there on the tip of our tongues.

It’s why, if someone volunteers the right word, we recognise it straight away. That doesn’t happen when we truly forget something.

The adult hippocampus, a part of the brain crucial to memory storage and retrieval, grows 700 new neurons a day on average, and there seems to be no decline in that number with normal ageing.

MYTH: Older people are grumpy

REALITY: They are more affable than under-50s

Despite that grumpy old man or woman stereotype, older adults are generally more concerned with making a good impression, co-operating and getting on with others. Among the chemical changes we see in the ageing brain are a tendency towards understanding, forgiveness, tolerance and acceptance.

Mood disorders, anxiety and behavioural problems decrease past 60, and the onset of these problems after that age is very rare. Some older people even describe a ‘burning off’ of previously distressing mental states.

The singer and poet Leonard Cohen, for example, was amazed that his chronic depression, which no medication could relieve, disappeared in his 70s.

The 62-year-old author said older people are much more likely to describe their lives as happy than those in their 30s and 40s, pictured: Meryl Streep, 70

TEASERS TO GIVE YOUR BRAIN AN MOT 

JOIN THE DOT TEST

Take a look at the three rows of three dots on the right. Your job is to connect them all by drawing four straight, continuous lines that pass through each of the nine dots only once. Oh, and you must never lift the pen from the paper. Answer below.

THE GRAB TEST

Hold a pen upright, pinched between your thumb and forefinger near the writing end of the instrument. Open your grip and then, as the pen is falling, try to grab it as quickly as you can, and measure how much of the pen passed through your fingers. Compare this with what younger people can do, or make a monthly log to see if you can stay quick or improve.

THE DIVERGENT THINKING TEST

In two minutes, how many uses for chopsticks can you come up with? Most people can only think of about 10-15 ideas (drumsticks, conductor’s baton, child’s magic wand, coffee stirrer, to toast marshmallows — you get the idea) but the really good divergent thinkers can come up with many more.

Try it while wandering outside. Older adults who were allowed to walk around an outdoor landscape freely, compared with those who were made to walk around a rectangular path, showed significantly higher scores in a battery of creativity tests, including divergent thinking.

With age, men typically show increased emotional sensitivity, and women experience decreasing emotional vulnerability. Agreeableness increases substantially.

It is hard to give exact reasons for this. The brain’s neurochemistry is a system with complex, dynamic interactions and it is too simplistic to say things such as ‘dopamine increases X’ or ‘serotonin decreases Y’. What we do know is that older people are much more likely to describe their lives as happy than those in their 30s and 40s.

MYTH: Ageing means cognitive decline

REALITY: Intelligence increases as you age

Yes, the brain slows down and gets smaller — most adults lose 5 per cent of volume per decade after the age of 35 — and oldsters aren’t as fast, perhaps, at answering questions on University Challenge or retrieving names. But at other forms of mental processing, we get better — and faster.

Abstract thinking, for example, improves with age. This is the kind of processing that underlies mathematical ability, language and problem-solving, and occurs in higher brain centres.

Dr Daniel revealed that most adults lose 5 per cent of their brain’s volume per decade after the age of 35, however abstract thinking improves with age, pictured: Rita Wilson, 63

ANSWER 

Ever heard the phrase thinking outside the box? James L. Adams, emeritus professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University, who is 85, popularised it from the solution to this puzzle.

Many people start with their pen on one of the dots (the problem doesn’t say you must) and never let their lines extend beyond those dots (the problem doesn’t say they can’t). In effect, they are imposing a frame around the dots and they don’t let their imagination go beyond the box’s confines.

So, too, does practical intelligence, which peaks after 50 or 60. An example of a practical question is: ‘If you were stranded on the motorway during a blizzard, what would you do?’ Or it might involve social tasks, such as dealing with a difficult landlord or what to do if you’re passed over for promotion. People over 50 do far better on these questions than those under 50.

Traditionally, this sort of mental processing might have been called wisdom. From a neurocognitive standpoint, wisdom is the ability to see patterns where others don’t, to extract generalised common points from prior experience and use those to predict what is likely to happen next. And what is intelligence if not that?

MYTH: Older people are stuck in their ways

REALITY: You can learn new things at any age

Julia ‘Hurricane’ Hawkins, a retired teacher, took up competitive athletics at the age of 75 and discovered a natural aptitude. At 102, she set a world record by running 60 metres in 24.79 seconds.

And our brains are capable of change, too — what neuroscientists call plasticity.

Four decades ago, medical students were taught that neuroplasticity peaked in young adulthood and that over-60s could not hope to experience any significant remodelling of their brains. But research in the past ten years has shown this to be wrong. Older adults’ brains are capable of great feats of adaptation and learning; it just takes a little longer.

Dr Daniel advises jobs and hobbies that require interacting with the world and giving different responses each time, to help protect the brain against dementia, pictured: Iman, 64

The process of learning new skills is most efficient in people who have made demands on their brains for many years. If you are involved in the creative arts — painting, writing or music, for example — you have been pushing your brain in interesting ways all along, because every project you undertake means looking at the world differently, then acting on it.

Any job or hobby that requires you to interact with the world and respond to it differently each time helps protect the brain against dementia, rigidity and neural atrophy. This can apply to gardeners, athletes, publicists, crossword-solvers and so on.

We can learn well into our 90s and beyond — it just takes a bit more concentration and time.

MYTH: You don’t need as much sleep as you age

REALITY: Everyone needs eight hours

Each individual has their own sleep requirement, which can vary from only a few hours to ten or 12 a night. But the proportion of people who can get along on fewer than five hours’ sleep a night without showing major impairment is statistically tiny — less than half of 1 per cent.

It’s not that we need less sleep as we age, it’s that changes in the ageing brain make it difficult for older adults to get the sleep they need. Changes in neurochemistry, disruption of core body temperature rhythms and more frequent urination all lead to poor sleep quality and quantity.

Age-related variation in sleep patterns may have been an evolutionary adaptation. For older people whose hunting skills had diminished, it could have been a survival advantage to stand on guard at night so the younger, sharper hunters could sleep.

Yet the consequences of poor sleep are serious: the risks of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s all increase with sleep deprivation or poor sleep quality.

Prioritise sleep and practise good sleep habits.

How to stay young 

• Work towards achieving and maintaining a happy marriage. A bigger predictor than cholesterol level at age 50 for health at age 80 is the quality of your relationships. Good relationships protect the brain. Especially in their 80s, a person who feels they are in an attached relationship will retain sharper memories for longer and enjoy better health.
• But don’t fear divorce. The longest study on health and happiness ever conducted, the Harvard Grant Study, found that those who remarried were often just as happy as those who stayed in their first marriage.
• Cultivate your CQ. We all know about IQ and your emotional intelligence quotient, or EQ, is an increasingly familiar metric too. Cognitive scientists now talk about a third, CQ — the curiosity quotient. Openness and curiosity correlate highly with good health and long life.
• Get sketching. If you need to remember something, draw it. The deeper we pay attention, the more likely we are to form robust memories. 
• Have a good conversation. Navigating the complex mores and potential pitfalls of dealing with another human being is about the most complex thing we humans can do. It exercises vast neural networks, keeping them tuned up, in shape and ready to fire.
• Go for a walk outside. Every minute you walk on an unpaved trail requires you to make hundreds of microadjustments to foot pressure, angle and pace. These stimulate the neural circuitry of your brain in the precise way that it evolved to be used.
• Or just get out of your chair! Even the tiniest amount of physical activity improves brain function.

Adapted by Alison Roberts from The Changing Mind: A Neuroscientist’s Guide To Ageing Well, by Daniel Levitin (£18.99, Penguin Life), out on February 27. © 2020 Daniel Levitin. To order a copy for £15.20 (20 per cent discount), go to mailshop.co.uk or call 01603648155. Offer valid until March 5, 2020. P&P free. 

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