I thought of my aging parents when I read this article and wondered if verbal fluency could be a skill they could retrain in
The most striking result was that only verbal fluency—specifically, the ability to quickly list animals and words beginning with the letter “s”—predicted how long participants lived. People who performed better on these tasks tended to live longer, regardless of how they performed on other tasks like memory or vocabulary. The effect was sizable. On average, participants who could name many animals or words lived up to nine years longer than those who struggled with these tasks. To put it simply, naming more animals in 90 seconds was associated with living longer.
That would be an interesting to try and slow the clock by trying to improve the list making speed over time. Two words to begin and graduating to twenty or more in ninety seconds. I tried to recall a game I found useful when I got my first smartphone. It was meant to help with keeping your brain from slowing down. This was also the time in my life where I felt like I was on a single train of thought almost all the time - being mother to J. My brain was definitely missing a range of stimuli a person of my age would routinely get. I introduced a few other moms to it and they loved it too. While most had partners and were not pulling the weight of parenthood alone, everyone could relate to that one-track state of brain and the fear that there would not be much of it left on the other side of our kids' adulthood. I could not recall the game.
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