What is not included in the characteristics of cognitive health in older adults?

I have been doing community-based cognitive intervention for the elderly for almost six years. This is the question I am asked the most. First of all, it must be clear that the characteristics of cognitive health in the elderly do not include "the inevitable overall decline in cognitive ability with age." This is also the biggest misunderstanding of the public about cognitive health in the elderly.

When many people talk about the cognitive status of the elderly, their first reaction is "poor memory, slow response, and inability to learn new things." In fact, this is not the case. I just met a 73-year-old Uncle Wang in the community activity room last week. Before retiring, he was a senior engineer in a machinery factory. Now he is thinking about 3D printing at home and making custom orders for his grandson. I remember Men Erqing clearly about the part parameters and modeling steps of the Ultraman model I made. Sometimes the operating software gets stuck. I checked the tutorials and learned it faster than I, a born in the 90s, did. The final model even added a micro light-emitting circuit that he had researched. When my grandson took it to school, the whole class of children were envious.

When it comes to this, some people will definitely refute, saying that my elderly people forget things easily, and even forget to buy soy sauce when buying vegetables. Isn't this cognitive decline? In fact, normal incidental forgetting and pathological cognitive decline are two different things. The cognitive changes of healthy elderly people are selective: for example, "fluid intelligence" such as instant memory and motor reaction speed that require rapid response will indeed decline slightly with age, but things like logic will decline slightly with age. Not only will the "crystalline intelligence" accumulated through life, such as logical judgment, empathy, experience-based decision-making, and language expression, not only not decline, but many elderly people can maintain or even improve it into their eighties or nineties. We often say that "having an elder in a family is like having a treasure" refers to the value of these abilities.

There were related debates in the academic circles in the past two years. Some scholars insisted that the learning ability of the elderly will inevitably decline and they will be unable to master new digital tools. However, the results of our community smart device training in the past few years have just confirmed the opposite conclusion. The short video editing class we opened last year recruited healthy elderly people between the ages of 60 and 82. At the end of the course, 80% of them were able to independently complete a short video with transitions and subtitles. Several aunts have now become the backbone of publicity in the community, specializing in filming neighborhoods. Interesting facts and clips from courses at the University for the Elderly were posted to the video account. Among them, the 78-year-old Aunt Li filmed a collection of her own succulents, which was paired with a Yue opera she sang as BGM. The number of views exceeded 100,000, and it also attracted several succulent enthusiasts from other places to come to her to exchange their maintenance experiences. The previous group of scholars who held opposing views later came to our community for research and revised their views. They believed that it was not that the elderly could not learn, but that the previous teaching methods did not fit the cognitive habits of the elderly. If the teaching content was combined with the life scenes they were familiar with, the learning effect would not be much worse than that of young people.

The reason why people have the misunderstanding that "the elderly will inevitably experience a comprehensive decline in cognition" is because most people regard the symptoms of cognitive impairment diseases such as Alzheimer's disease as the normal state of cognition in the elderly. As long as there is no pathological damage, they maintain a regular schedule, use their brains more, and participate in social activities. The cognitive function of the elderly can be maintained at a high level for a long time. There is no inevitable rule that "people become confused when they get old".