A quick, active mind often stays younger than the body, no matter what your birth certificate says.
Tech glitches
When you are troubleshooting your home Wi-Fi connection or pairing your smartphone to that new Bluetooth speaker without looking at instructions, you’re exercising great problem-solving skills.
Our technology is constantly changing, and it takes a flexible mind to solve problems and memorize new standards. Rather than freeze up or stress out, a younger brain sees these technological hiccups as a complex game of logic.
Driving navigation
Finding an alternate route home during rush-hour traffic when your normal road is inexplicably blocked off by large construction cones is an exercise in exceptional spatial memory.
Successfully driving through an evolving environment without reaching for your dash-mounted GPS shows that your brain’s spatial navigation system is still working fine.
Distraction filtering
Trying to follow complicated recipe directions in a loud kitchen with the television blasting and someone talking to you at the same time takes elite multitasking skills.
A young brain has the capacity to create a cognitive wall that blocks out distractions, allowing you to correctly follow the next step in the recipe without losing attention.
If you can flip back and forth between what someone is saying to you and watching the pot without burning your food, you are handling heavy cognitive loads.
Face matching
Spotting an acquaintance at the local crowded supermarket that you haven’t seen in ten years, and remembering their name moments later, is a huge victory for your brain.
There are thousands of facial databases stored in your head that you will need to quickly sift through. Not only that, you must discount the aging process that naturally occurs and access that one specific file from your hard drive.
Mental math
Being able to mentally calculate a fifteen percent tip at a restaurant, or exactly how much a sale item shirt will cost you at the mall, requires significant working memory. This type of problem requires your brain to keep multiple digits stored in its short-term memory while also using them in calculations.
The exercise is great for your prefrontal cortex and shows you can still crunch numbers without having to text them into your cell phone calculator.
Word finding
Not getting stuck on the “tip of your tongue” phenomenon, where you draw a blank midway through a sentence because you can’t recall one word, shows verbal fluidity.
When your brain has a youthful reserve of vocabulary words it has meticulously categorized, it can quickly scan through its expansive lexicon to retrieve the exact word necessary to eloquently complete a sentence.
Fast pivoting
Being able to stay totally calm and craft an entirely new schedule after something unexpected blows up your afternoon agenda requires serious emotional and mental agility. Inflexible, aged brains panic or shut down when something throws a wrench in their schedule because they can’t release what was expected to happen.
Smoothly shifting into Plan B means your brain has to rapidly evaluate new priorities, calculate new risks, and map out an entirely new timeline instantly.
Riddle solving
Solving a non-linear puzzle like a lateral-thinking brain teaser, a cryptic crossword clue, or a complex murder mystery plot shows strong pattern perception.
To do this, you need to interpret clues in a non-literal way and associate remote clues that seem unconnected to identify an underlying pattern. If you stay mentally inquisitive like this, your brain’s capacity for lateral thought is fighting back against the cognitive decline of ageing.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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