How [Not] to Grow Old

It’s not about slowing or reversing the effects of aging—the physical and mental and even psychological alterations that come with passing time. It’s really about retention and augmentation, about memory processing and personal growth.To the young aging is a distant, medically enhanced, easeful promise coupled with the hope or expectation that aging, like cancer, will be vanquished. We each regard our death, the standard endpoint of aging, as unthinkable. We know it must come, like winter, but many many springs, summers and falls will precede it.We should consider the positive aspects, the virtues of aging.Our brain is key to the advantage of longevity. We now know that the brain has an almost endless capacity for refining, renewing and further enabling most of its key functions. But we also know that, like most animal life, humans are genetically programmed to age and eventually to die. We, like all creatures, are caught in the Great Chain of Being.The brain, perhaps more than any other organ in our body, is a communication beehive. Cells intercommunicate through various kinds of messengers: some from genes, some from hormones, some from neurotransmitters, some from various cellular emissions, and many from external experiences transmitted to the brain through all our senses. All these internalized experiences are then interpreted by centers of response within the brain, each in ready contact with all the others. The brain is far and away the most complex computer-like system we know of. And it operates at warp speed..

"The brain is in a continual state of balance challenge."

.Although for thousands of years of evolution, human lifespan tended to top out at age thirty, rising to around age forty and then gradually increasing only after 1800. However average lifespan tends to disregard the outliers—infant and early death from disease and accidents on one end and sages living to age seventy on the other. With improvement in sanitation and medicine aging has been allowed to flourish. We have to assume, therefore, that the human brain has always evolved with the capacity to endure to later and later stages of life.Of course, the brain has many fault lines: addictions can cement themselves through the ever thirsting reward center coupled to memory functions and genetically transmitted predilection; anxiety and its conjugal attendants—phobias, obsessive and compulsive rituals, panic attacks; depression as the unloosed grief response; violence, our ever-present drift toward xenophobia; and the distinct anomolies—autism, ADHD, schizophrenia.The brain is in a continual state of balance challenge. All those fault lines have wired themselves in because they conferred some benefit to promote maintenance of our species. Given the exponential growth of human life in numbers and in ever-increasingly sophisticated interaction with our surround, our brains have done us well. Even with those fault lines, for which we pay a steep price, we steam forward.So where is the good in an aging brain?First, though not necessarily foremost, is the direct experience of historical moments, personal, social, cultural. These moments are encapsulated in our memory. They are available for recall and remembrance and can serve as a resource toward evaluating current circumstance as well as deepening the appreciation of historical events that pre-date us.Our brains have equipped us with the capacity to anticipate future eventualities and to plan and strategize methods to maximize survival and improve physical and social status. The older brain potentially carries greater information and more experience in that cerebral anticipatory behavior. This is what is meant by the concept of the sage.With this well equipped, fully matured and optimally constituted brain, older people are well set to contribute to their social, cultural and political environment. That role seems mostly reserved for artists, high-positioned professors, and politicians.The vast majority of older people are assigned the diminutive designation “senior.” They are pressed to retire from positions that preclude their capacities. Families align them into a late-life category. They are more or less left to wait out the rest of their lives.Another relatively new discovery about the aging brain is the ever-present capacity for new growth, new learning, new functions. While studies document the evidence of decline with aging, much if not most of the population studied doubtless fall into the relatively indolent group of older individuals.Protective measures against this decline fall into three areas of endeavor, all requiring perseverance and persistence. These are: exercise, diet, and cognitive stimulation. And there are never any guarantees. Cognitive stimulation is perhaps the most rewarding and also the most demanding. It means seriously undertaking challenging study: another language, mathematics, learning to play a musical instrument, getting involved with social media and digital language.Among centenarians, the top five causes of death are heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, cancer, and influenza and pneumonia. If 100 years is the lifetime ceiling, how does one get there more-or-less physically and mentally intact? Gaming this limit can never be assured. Any one of those medical conditions could pull one down decades earlier.The real task is to maximize those preventative and maintenance efforts. The reward is living life to its fullest, a very familiar nostrum but difficult to apply.Evolution, both physical and social, has prepared us all for the final slide. But we can stand our ground much longer and in better shape with the kind of effort we had when we were much younger. We went to school and learned our trade because we had to. Now, being older, we have that option still open.It just requires a lot of will and a little luck.