hey guys do you can't believe you came back that's awesome who would think do you remember where we were hahaha just kidding we just finished human memory right the cognition for memory I hope you had a good break open took a snack we're on the second part of chapter 4 and we're talking now you remember we were talking about cognitive changes as you age and we did all the memory changes and now I want to talk about some real-world cognitive changes so out in the real world things that actually can happen to you as you age so for example you could look at problem solving and problem solving it's just any situation that requires everyday concrete complex thinking and younger adults do better on traditional problem-solving tasks and this increase happens until like until you about 40 or 50 and then you start seeing a bit of declines for traditional problem-solving tasks when it comes to judgment and decision making though older adults actually come to the same decisions as younger adults but they actually do it quicker which is really weird because you would think that older adults are slow at most things but not when it comes to making decisions they could do it quicker and they do it with less information when you're in a lab study and you're making decisions about things like buying a car renting an apartment or what's the better situation and most people attribute that the advantage of being older to the fact that you have more life experience doing these things than a younger person right so I've owned a lot more cars than any of you of own right because I'm older and I've just owned a bunch of cars so I know I've had a bunch of experience about how to buy and what not to buy and when to buy and things like that human factors are like another part of cognition that a lot of people don't think about and there are things that we have to do all the time so things like medication so medical instructions at older adults tend to take a lot more medicine than young people and therefore they need to remember doses dosages and things like that and a lot of the medical companies are working on trying to simplify that I remember when I had to move my mother in she was taking so much medication she was so confused about when to take it she had like she had a uh what's it like a water pill that she needed to take right for her heart but it works like like a diuretic so it makes you have to go to the bathroom right that's what it does try to get rid of the water in the system she'd always ended up taking it right before going to bed then she'd be up peeing all night long it was like oh my god you know so I finally it's getting one of those pill boxes we could figure out when to take it when when she should take her pills and when she chiton like morning and night it's right now over 20 million licensed adults are over 70 how scary is that 20 million old people walking around not walking around driving around right the fatality rate for drivers over 70s is nine times the fatality rate for drivers between 26 and 65 so driving is a really crazy thing and one of the reasons why old people tend to be bad drivers is a lot of different reasons their vision is off their attentions off right their memories off but yet they want to drive they put that big car I remember my mom holy God I come home from work and there be a piece of the car missing the fenders gone the side view mirrors gone Schmeichel someone musta hit me and no she was just she drove her car like a bumper car she just drive it right into in the end the last thing she did was she drove her car through my front fence took down half a tree then parked the car two inches away from my front door went inside made herself a cup of tea did a little wash then went back and moved the car back into the driveway she could have killed someone she could have killed herself it I had to say no more driving after that the car was totaled she was very upset older people do not like having their driver's license taken away as I'm sure you can understand taking away a lot of their ability to get out around you know she end up dying couple months later not from being depressed but she ended up I swear I if she was driving I think she would have recouped she got the flu and she just couldn't get better it was just horrible and she was in the hospital for like a month and she just ended up dying it's very sad but she was old she lived a good life but I always felt bad I took the car away because she told everybody she's taken the car from me like I was a terrible person and then I'd have to tell everyone she drove it through a fence through a tree almost took the house down like you know she can't drive and people understood anyhow all right the next group I'm gonna go through really really quickly individual differences in cognitive change I'm gonna just take them one at a time like I do and then we'll be done with this chapter I told you the second one shouldn't the second half of the video shouldn't be as long as the first so hopefully that'll work let me start with health so individual differences in health poor health can actually is not going down yeah poor health can actually up your cognition for example declines in vision and hearing or related to declines in I to scores that's called the common cause hypothesis I remember I told you about it a little bit when we were talking about intelligence when we talked about sensory memory I said that it's not that people's sensory memories are bad it's that their vision and their senses are declining and therefore their scores are gonna go down they're gonna skip the next kinetics this is good news for some of you that cognitive abilities are among the most her edible of all behavioral traits so genetics explained about 60% of your individual differences in general cognitive ability so if you've got parents that you think are smart and you might be saying it's up oh that's good but if you think your parents are idiots hmm it might be all right because remember there's another 40 percent that can be explained by other things like your ability to get education things like that and you've got two parents so it really depends I think I got my my my smarts from my all their who's really bright guy my mom she's pretty smart but she wasn't very educated screw up in a farm in Ireland one of 17 kids I don't even think she got through high school I'm probably probably closer to middle school I mean she was old think about it and they sent her over to England at 14 just start working because to help support the family and then she never went back she actually came to America and by herself you know so she um she didn't have a good opportunity for getting educated but she was bright woman so you're that oh sorry that just bought there um something was on the bottom sorry about that um so yeah there are differences that can be explained in your cognitive abilities and I should point back I want to go back one more time here that genetics kind of outlays it so they're not just talking about genetic lays down the cognitive ability it's how your parents progressed to like I told you my father super-bright one I don't know if I told you this story already I might've but I'll tell you it again that when my father was dying this craziest story I wonder if I told you but I'll tell you it again my father was dying he was dying at home that's what he wanted and um he was pretty much he he wasn't eating anymore and he wasn't drinking he was on the hospice care we'll talk about that a little bit and um he was in a hospital bed in the middle of the living room and everyone like came and everyone's sad you know and the whole family's there and we have the TV on in the background and Megan's Megan was young she was like maybe going into ninth grade and my father started saying something he's like hmm and someone's like did he say something cuz he hadn't been speaking you know and he was like hmm and so Megan goes up to him just like grandpa what what are you saying hmm and um she she's listening and none of us could figure out what he was saying let me tell you what he was saying it is the last word that my father said never said another thing again make him figured it out she was looking at the TV he was giving the answer to the final Jeopardy question jeopardy was on the TV the question was going to anything and like that my father was giving the answer the question was what is the name of the house where the Prime Minister lives in Britain I forget the name but that's what my father was saying he gave the right answer so he kept his cognitive abilities right up to the end and that's good because that you know genetics plays a big role in whether you're gonna be able to keep your cognitive abilities that honestly was last word he ever said and he didn't die for another two days or so but he didn't speak again I thought that was kind of funny okay demographics and social biographical history so women have a slight advantage over men in episodic memory that's the ability to remember your own personal episodes of your life verbal tasks and maintaining brain weight your social biological history is the level of professional prestige social position and income that you actually have right so your social biological so where were you able to get these things the rated cognitive decline is the same regardless of that history so it doesn't matter what your position is doesn't matter what your income was it doesn't matter what your social prestige is the rate of cognitive decline is consistent now it's not consistent that every person has the same rate of cognitive decline but you see people with very bad cognitive decline who are very high in professional prestige and you would see people with very low rates of cognitive decline who are very high in income right like it goes it's regardless except for a couple of things I mean I will talk about a little later that having having the ability to have access to good health care and things like that actually makes your aging better but not necessarily your cognitive decline the way your thinking and the way things go down schooling formal education predicts the raid cognitive decline with age so the more that you are educated the less likely that you're gonna have cognitive decline so good for you you guys are going to college most you're finishing up that's great because it'll lower your car decline but it is actually a confound and the confound is this remember that compounds when two things are moving at the same time and so people who are educated tend to take better care of themselves they tend to have higher incomes therefore have better access to health care they also tend to do things that educated people do like read or sudoko or closer puzzles and remember we said that keeping your brain active is use it or lose it kind of situation so the more educated you are the more likely you are to do these things then you then you will end up at a better spot with it right intellectual activity adults you read books that's why I was just saying take classes travel seem to face better intellectually over time particularly in terms of crystallized intelligence remember crystallized intelligence is your ability to have good vocab that now remember look at this you could see from this slide to the slide that we just looked at those with higher education tend to read more books take classes travel they tend to have better jobs that allow them to travel and fare better so there's a lot of confounds going on here when you look at cognitive ability and education and intellectual activity it is who has the ability to do these things who who looks more prone to do these things who will end up doing these things physical exercise there is a causal causal link between physical exercise and intellectual skill exercise helps maintain cardiovascular switch is linked to mental maintenance I told you you get more oxygen to your brain if you're exercising and if you have more oxygen to your brain there's higher links right so all of this will help to lead to better cognitive ability what about your subjective evaluation of decline there's a strong relationship between age and subjective reports of cognitive decline however there's not a relationship between subjective reports an actual decline this is what I was telling you about in the last video is the idea of stereotype threats this we feed into these things so what does it mean that there's a strong relationship between age and subjective reports of cognitive decline the old does it get the more you say oh I can't remember anything I feel like my mind is all jumbled I'm guessing right right but when you actually test them it's not true their memory is not worse right I mean obviously when you're really old your memory is worse but people will start reporting cognitive decline way before it's there they I think what happens is there we have this stereotype in our society that we're gonna our cognitive abilities are gonna go down when we get older people get paranoid and every slip of the tongue every oh I can't think of that word every time I can't bring down something I'm thinking I'm getting old just like when I was telling you last week when I fell down the hill and I thought oh my god I'm gonna keep falling now I hadn't full I only fell one more time when I broke my foot since then it's not like I'm on a falling all the time thing but you think oh my god I'm getting old and now I'm just gonna fall all the time or oh my god I can't remember this and I think we feed into that stereotype all right that's it for chapter four chapter four quiz you should take it right now remember the sooner you take it after the chapter the better you're gonna do on it there ten minutes there real quick most you should be able to get like a 95 or a hundred on these because they come right from the notes even though they're time-pressured you have the notes kind of there and you should kind of remember them this chapter didn't add much to the movie selections next chapter does so let me talk about the movies after the next chapter and the chapter after that right come back remember we have a lot more chapters to do see you soon