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This photo shows ways to help maintain your brain's cognitive functioning. All of these ideas will help keep your brain healthy over time. I found this graphic to be helpful because it showed things that you are able to take control over. "Challenge your brain"

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This video talks all about how the brain develops and changes as we grow. It specifically discusses how they test brain development and what factors affect the health of the brain. I thought that this video was very informative and taught me a lot about how the brain changes over time. "Some cognitive functions are maintained and others are not."

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How does the brain change with age? Part #1 Cam-CAN project overview

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What Happens to Your Brain As You Age? by Mental Health

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This article describes different factors that affect your brain and how you can keep your brain healthy. I found this to be very important because it lists specific examples of things you can do to help stimulate your brain. One example is where the article states, "The good news is, there are proactive steps you can take to keep your brain healthy in every stage of life. In fact, there are lots of proactive measures you can take to protect your aging brain." This shows that there really are ways to help keep your brain functioning correctly.

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What Happens to Your Brain found from Twitter post

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This article explained how the brain adapts and changes. It also talks about how our memory changes and we slowly start to forget things we didn't before. I found this article to be very informative because it states very specific details on how our brains are wired. One quote from this article states, "Without cues to recall the information, the brain may put appointments into “storage” and not access them unless something jogs the person’s memory." This describes remembering things and how our brains start to lose that skill.

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This article provides lots of information on how different parts of your brain change as you age. I found this to be helpful because it allowed me to know more about each part of the brain and how it changes over the course of a human life. One quote I found important was,“ I significant portion of the American population is reaching old age, with life expectancy‘s having increased by 30 years relative to a century ago. since scientific maybe it’s his hats distillate dated these prolonged life spans, but a critical question is whether these additional years of life or of high-quality.” This shows that they are trying to investigate of your brain functions are improving or declining over time.

Scullin, Michael K., et al. “Healthy Heart, Healthy Brain: Hypertension Affects Cognitive Functioning in Older Age.” Translational Issues in Psychological Science, vol. 3, no. 4, Educational Publishing Foundation, 2017, pp. 328–37, https://doi.org/10.1037/tps0000131

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The Effects of Alzheimer's on the Brain by Christine Kennard

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This article mentions Alzheimer's and how this disease affects a person's brain functioning. It shows the correlation between intellectual functioning and a person's memory. I feel that this article explains how Alzheimer's can make someone lose cognitive functioning. An example is where the author of the article writes, "In Alzheimer’s Disease, the appearance of the Alzheimer's affected brain is very different to a normal brain. The cerebral cortex atrophies. That means that this area of the brain shrinks and this shrinkage is dramatically different from the cerebral cortex of a normal brain.” This directly relates to my topic and how the brain changes over the course of a lifetime especially due to diseases like Alzheimer's.

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The Mysterious Wonders Of The Brain Over A Lifetime

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Does the brain become wiser as people grow older?
This essay includes information on all three sides of this argument, yes, no, and maybe. It explains my research process as I looked into the brain's functioning over a lifetime to learn more about how Alzheimer's affected my grandpa's brain. It includes examples from many different journal articles on how the brain develops over time and what different changes the brain goes through as humans age. I was able to gain more knowledge on how cognitive functioning and memory are affected due to aging.
"A person’s environment has a great impact on how they process things."

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This article describes the different ways to exercise your brain and keep it healthy over time.  I think this article shows solid evidence as to why your brain may be wiser over time. One example from this article says, " This specificity of learning is a major obstacle to the design of efficient rehabilitation paradigms, whether they are targeted to overcoming deficits related to injury or to slowing/reversing the normal declines associated with aging." This shows that the brain has some cognitive decline as humans age.

Green, C. S., and D. Bavelier. “Exercising Your Brain: A Review of Human Brain Plasticity and Training-Induced Learning.” Psychology and Aging, vol. 23, no. 4, American Psychological Association, 2008, pp. 692–701, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014345

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The Brain: The Story Of You by David Eagleman

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This book discussed the many functions of the brain and how they all work together to help people to function and grow. It was incredibly descriptive and informational. I thought it was very easy to follow along with and understand due to Eagleman's unique descriptions. One quote from this book says, "...but here’s the good news: in the same way that your environment and behavior shape your brain when you’re younger, they are just as important in your later years.”(29) This explains that there are steps you can take to keep exercising your brain's functions.

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Read 1,725 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Locked in the silence and darkness of your skull, your brain fashions the rich narrative...

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Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain by Sara Reistad-Long

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This article talks about detailed examples of how the brain works at different ages. It speaks about distinct examples of trials and experiments they have done to research brain functioning. I thought this article was very informative and included lots of good data and explanations. One quote from this article says, "“In studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.” This allowed me to actually picture how the brain is actively working at different stages of life.

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Credit... Yarek Waszul

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, "Progress in Brain Research."

Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer's disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.

"It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing," said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. "It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind."

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.

"For the young people, it's as if the distraction never happened," said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. "But for older adults, because they've retained all this extra data, they're now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they've soaked up from one situation to another."

Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others' yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker's real impact.

"A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what's going on than their younger peers," Dr. Hasher said. "We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser."

In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students' ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.

This phenomenon, Dr. Carson said, is often linked to a decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Studies have found that people who suffered an injury or disease that lowered activity in that region became more interested in creative pursuits.

Jacqui Smith, a professor of psychology and research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the current research, said there was a word for what results when the mind is able to assimilate data and put it in its proper place — wisdom.

"These findings are all very consistent with the context we're building for what wisdom is," she said. "If older people are taking in more information from a situation, and they're then able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge, they're going to have a nice advantage."

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Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain (Published 2008)

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When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong. Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.