Characteristics of cognitive health in older adults do not include

The public's default belief is that "cognitively healthy elderly people will inevitably suffer from comprehensive cognitive decline", "cognitively healthy elderly people will naturally have reduced social needs", and "cognitively healthy elderly people cannot master complex new skills". Not at all a normal feature of elderly cognitive health , are the three most widely circulated stereotypes.

Last week, a family member asked me, saying that her mother, who is 72 years old, still remembers the welfare details issued by the union at her old workplace 40 years ago, and then turns around and forgets where to put the eggs she just bought. Is she suffering from cognitive problems and leading to dementia? Really, I encounter this problem a dozen times a month. Many people’s misunderstanding about the cognitive health of the elderly is that “as long as they forget things, they will decline, and the decline will become more and more serious.” However, in the elderly with normal cognitive health, only the processing speed, working memory capacity, and episodic memory retrieval speed related to fluid intelligence will experience a slight age-related decline. However, the crystallized intelligence related to the accumulation of experience, such as language expression, logical judgment, and accumulation of common sense in life, will remain stable or even continue to increase. The academic community has also had different views here: Early aging psychology research indeed once believed that "comprehensive cognitive decline is an inevitable result of normal aging." However, large-sample tracking data from active gerontology in the past 10 years has overturned this conclusion. As long as the elderly's cognitive function test results are within the normal threshold range for the same age group, even if they occasionally forget to bring their keys or cannot remember the names of new neighbors, it is a completely normal state and has nothing to do with "comprehensive decline".

In addition to the misunderstanding of cognitive ability itself, many people also mistake the "passive solitude" of the elderly as an inherent characteristic of cognitive health. I have met the 76-year-old Uncle Li before, and his children always said that he "just likes to stay at home, doesn't like to join in the fun, and is very clear-minded." Until our community opened a bridge interest class, the uncle signed up on the first day with his certificate of bridge playing when he was young. Now he has regular activities three times a week, and he also leads the team to participate in the district's senior bridge competition. His overall appearance is much better than before. Later, when we talked, I found out that it wasn’t that he didn’t want to go out before, but that the old friends around him either moved away or were in poor health and couldn’t play with him. His children always said, “It’s not safe outside, just stay at home.” Over time, this gave people the illusion that he “loves purity.” The conclusions of different studies on this point are also different: the traditional socio-emotional selection theory believes that the elderly will actively shrink their social circles and reduce their social needs. However, in recent years, qualitative research on cognitively healthy elderly groups has found that the social needs of most elderly people are not significantly different from those in middle age. It is just that they care more about the quality of social interaction and are unwilling to deal with meaningless entertainment, which is misunderstood as "reduced social needs."

There is also a very widespread misunderstanding, which is that "no matter how smart the old people are, they can't learn new things." I have seen too many children teach their parents how to use smartphones until they collapse. Then they turn around and say, "My parents are good at everything, but they can't learn this. They just can't do it when they get old." Last year, we conducted a smart phone training for the elderly, enrolling 22 cognitively healthy elderly people with an average age of 74. We only taught one function at a time, for 15 minutes each time, with large-print step cards. After three weeks, 80% of the elderly people were able to independently send WeChat messages, make video calls, and scan health codes. A few elderly people also learned to cut short videos for Douyin and show off the flowers they grew and the meals they cooked. The one with the highest views has more than 100,000 likes. There has been debate in the academic community on this point: early neuroscience research believed that the synaptic plasticity of the brains of the elderly has almost disappeared, making it difficult to form new neural connections and learn new skills. However, recent brain imaging studies have confirmed that as long as methods are adopted to adapt to the learning rhythm of the elderly, the brains of healthy elderly people can still form new synaptic connections. The speed of mastering new skills may be slower, but the degree of solidity after learning is no worse than that of young people.

The most common thing I say when doing science popularization for family members is, don’t label the elderly casually. Many of the “characteristics of cognitive health in the elderly” that you think are either stereotypes, or you fail to see the real needs of the elderly, or use the wrong method. After all, getting older doesn’t mean “becoming useless”, it just changes the way you interact with the world.