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physical stress response that the brain is responsible for. Likewise, when older people get overwhelmed by too much sensory input (a noisy traffic jam, a crowded department store), their brains are probably exhibiting diminished function to take in tidal waves of data from the busy world.
    Much of the time, however, the mind dominates the mind-brain connection. As we get older, we tend to simplify our mental activities, often as a defense mechanism or security blanket. We feel secure with what we know, and we go out of our way to avoid learning anything new. The behavior strikes younger people as irritability and stubbornness, but the real cause can be traced to the dance between mind and brain. For many but not all older people, the music slows down. What’s most important is that they not walk off the dance floor—which would pave the way for decline of both mind and brain. Instead of your brain making new synapses, it keeps hardwiring the ones you already have. In this downward spiral of mental activity, the aged person will eventually have fewer dendrites and synapses per neuron in the cerebral cortex.
    Fortunately, conscious choices can be made. You can choose to be aware of the thoughts and feelings being evoked in your brain at every minute. You can choose to follow an upward learning curve no matter how old you are. By doing so, you will create new dendrites, synapses, and neural pathways that enhance the health of your brain and even help stave off Alzheimer’s disease (as suggested by the latest research findings).
    If inevitability has been called into question, what about the irreversibility of the effects of aging? As we get older, many of us increasingly feel that our memories are going downhill. We cannot remember why we entered a room and joke, rather defensively, about having senior moments. Rudy has a wonderful cat that follows him everywhere like a dog. More than once, Rudy has gotten up from his chair in the living room and headed for the kitchen with the cat in tow, only to find, when he gets there, that he andthe cat are staring blankly at each other. Neither of them knows the purpose of the journey. While we may refer to these lapses as instances of age-related memory loss, they are actually due to a lack of learning—registering new information in the brain. In many cases, we become so jaded or distracted about what we are doing that simple attention deficit leads to lack of learning. When we cannot remember a simple fact like where we put our keys, it means we did not learn or register where we put them in the first place. As users of our brains, we didn’t record or consolidate the sensory information into a short-term memory during the process of putting down the keys. One cannot remember what one never learned .
    If you remain alert, a healthy brain will continue to serve you as you age. You should expect alertness, rather than dread of impairment and senility. In our view—Rudy speaks as a leading researcher on Alzheimer’s—a public campaign that created alarm about senility would have a damaging effect. Expectations are powerful triggers for the brain. If you expect to lose your memory and notice every minor lapse with anxiety, you are interfering with the natural, spontaneous, and effortless act of remembering. Biologically, up to 80 percent of people over seventy do not have significant memory loss. Our expectations should follow that finding, rather than our hidden and largely unfounded dread.
    If you become apathetic and jaded about your life, or if you simply become less enthusiastic about your moment-to-moment experiences, your learning potential is impaired. As physical evidence, a neurologist can point to the synapses that must be consolidated for short-term memory. But in most cases a mental event has preceded the physical evidence: we never learned what we believe we have forgotten.
    Nothing solidifies a memory like emotion. When we are children, we learn effortlessly because