AARP Advocates People Working Past 65
by Alex RoseSunday, October 12, 2008 - Everybody benefits when people who want to work during their so-called retirement years continue to do so. Working beyond retirement helps people stay active, engaged and independent. Sixty-five used to be the magic number everyone recognized as retirement age. Now it is necessary to do everything we can to redefine the age of retirement for those who want, or need to keep working.
One out of four people between the ages of 65 and 74 nationally -- 23 percent -- were still in the labor force, according to the 2006 American Community Survey. Since I fit into this category I can speak from the heart.
The world of work is changing. Some people work because they have to, while others work because they want to or perhaps want to have a new career. Many people have said good-bye to high-stress jobs to follow a passion. Sometimes the money is not the motivating force.
Just go out into your community and see those 65 and older who work as greeters, sackers, school crossing guards or clerks.
We need to promote the companies that hire the mature adults. Remaining in the workforce can be very beneficial to older workers, but it also benefits employers and society. The employee builds financial security and stays productive and engaged. The company gets mature, skilled motivated workers. The Social Security and Medicare systems are strengthened because more people are paying into them.
Unfortunately, older workers are not always valued and age discrimination still persists 40 years after the passage of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Many still feel the pain of age discrimination.
With the current crisis on Wall Street, many will have to keep working beyond the years that they had hoped to retire. It is important that there be opportunities for those who can work to be able to work.
People should be able to work for as long as they like. We simply need to find ways to make it easier, not harder, for mature workers to stay in their current jobs or find new work.
AARP promotes working as long as you can. This organization is open to those 50 and older, and much of their program is designated to keeping those of retirement age healthy and active and productive in fields where one can be an asset.
Midland Reporter-Telegram
Pentagon Ships Troops To The U.S.
To Prepare For Civil UnrestFinancial crisis is not over
Jim Kingsdale on Seeking Alpha:As Churchill said during another time of great public anxiety, “This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning.” At this time of possibly the greatest American economic crisis since 1929, I think that description applies to today’s news that both the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government are determined to deal with the guts of the sub-prime problem. To date they were only supplying bandages and graves for the wounded and dead victims of the sub-primes.
Recently, I speculated in this blog about the purpose of the militarized police presence in St Paul and the tough tactics usd against protesters and journalists outside the Republican Convention, in what was proclaimed a so-called National Security Incident. I suggested that there have been indications that the government fears civil unrest if the economy collapses more, and that the skirmishes in St Paul was one more training exercise for what is to come.Now the US Army is getting involved in the name of being available for humanitarian assignments. See below.
On Thursday, the conservative Carl Worden suggested that the government’s fears and contingency plans are well founded:
A CONSTITUTION IN TATTERS:
“There is no question that the Government of the United States is operating in panic mode right now due to the ever-escalating bad news in our financial markets, and they are doing whatever they believe is necessary to soften the economic fall taking place no matter what the Constitution allows. That alone should tell you how desperate things really are right now.
“Public officials of all stripes are facing a public backlash when the inevitable crash occurs, and I’m not talking about people showing up in town meetings and venting their frustrations. No, I’m talking about the consequences public officials face when all forms of Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and general welfare dry up. When that happens, and I am quite certain it will, there will be a level of violence that erupts all over this nation, from attacks on all forms of government to ransacked commercial firms by armed gangs to in-home invasions by desperate people who cannot feed their children.”
It is very likely that this fear is linked to this breaking news story from Army Times:
GOVERNMENT SHIPS TROOPS HOME TO BE READY FOR UNREST
3rd Infantry’s 1st Brigade Combat Team trains for a new dwell-time mission……Helping ‘people at home’ may become a permanent part of the active Army
The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.
Now they’re training for the same mission - with a twist - at home.
Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command [created by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Tenet et al. after 9/11], as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.
HERE IS THE KEY PARAGRAPH
…..They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.
The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.
“It’s a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they’re fielding. They’ve been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we’re undertaking we were the first to get it.”
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
The Surprising Power of the Aging Brain
By JEFFERY KLUGERIt took Barbara Hustedt Crook an awfully long time to get around to writing her first musical. She started last year, shortly before her 60th birthday. Her friend and collaborator, Robert Strozier, waited even longer; he's 65. It's not that they didn't have the creative chops for the job. The two have spent their careers writing and editing in New York City, and Crook has a background in performing, singing and piano. But creating a musical always felt just out of reach--until now.
"Somehow I have a confidence I didn't have before," says Crook. "I find that my brain makes leaps it didn't make so easily. I can hear my inner voice and trust instincts and hunches in ways I didn't used to."
And, says Strozier, they're both a lot more willing to take chances than in the past. "At a certain age," he says, "you either get older or you get younger. If you get younger, you venture out and take risks."
Risk-taking seniors making daring mental leaps? That's not the stereotype. Indeed, until quite recently most researchers believed the human brain followed a fairly predictable developmental arc. It started out protean, gained shape and intellectual muscle as it matured, and reached its peak of power and nimbleness by age 40. After that, the brain began a slow decline, clouding up little by little until, by age 60 or 70, it had lost much of its ability to retain new information and was fumbling with what it had. But that was all right because late-life crankiness had by then made us largely resistant to new ideas anyway.
That, as it turns out, is hooey. More and more, neurologists and psychologists are coming to the conclusion that the brain at midlife--a period increasingly defined as the years from 35 to 65 and even beyond--is a much more elastic, much more supple thing than anyone ever realized.
Far from slowly powering down, the brain as it ages begins bringing new cognitive systems on line and cross-indexing existing ones in ways it never did before. You may not pack so much raw data into memory as you could when you were cramming for college finals, and your short-term memory may not be what it was, but you manage information and parse meanings that were entirely beyond you when you were younger. What's more, your temperament changes to suit those new skills, growing more comfortable with ambiguity and less susceptible to frustration or irritation. Although inflexibility, confusion and even later-life dementia are very real problems, for many people the aging process not only does not batter the brain, it actually makes it better.
"In midlife," says UCLA neurologist George Bartzokis, "you're beginning to maximize the ability to use the entirety of the information in your brain on an everyday, ongoing, second-to-second basis. Biologically, that's what wisdom is."
If your mind does indeed grow more agile as you age, one of the things that may help it do so is the amount of glue you carry around in your brain--glia (Greek for glue) being what the 19th century German anatomists called it. Only about half the mass of the brain is composed of gray matter, or nerve cells; the rest is white matter, the connecting tissue that, in a sense, glues it all together. Much of that white matter is made of conductive nerve strands, and covering each fine wire is a fatty sheath of myelin that keeps nerve signals from sputtering out or cross firing during transmission. "Myelin is what makes us human," says Bartzokis. "We have 20% to 30% more than other primates do."
Throughout our lives, fresh layers of myelin sheathing are laid down in the brain. In infants and children, who grow increasingly coordinated as they mature, the bulk of that takes place in the motor and sensory lobes. If we acquire better reasoning skills in middle age, Bartzokis long suspected, it would follow that most of the myelin added in those years would appear around the signal-transmitting axons in the higher brain regions that are the seat of sophisticated thought. Essentially, the brain spends decades upgrading itself from a dial-up Internet to a high-speed version, not fully completing the job until age 45 or so.
To test that idea, Bartzokis used magnetic resonance imaging to study the volume and distribution of white matter in 300 healthy subjects from 18 to 75 years old as well as in hundreds of older people suffering from such brain-related ills as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. As he suspected, the healthy adults had the most myelin in the frontal and temporal lobes--where big thoughts live. The quantity of sheathing reached its peak around 45 or 50, exceeding the amount in unhealthy older subjects and healthy younger ones.
"This last little bit of myelination essentially puts us online," Bartzokis says. "You may not have the same amount of information you had when you were 20, but you can use it better in everyday life."
It's not just the wiring that charges up the brain as we age, it's the way different regions start pulling together to make the whole organ work better than the sum of its parts. For all its plasticity, the brain is a specialized machine, with specific regions handling specific operations. The greatest divergence comes between the left and the right hemispheres, which often work almost independently of each other. That is not such a bad thing because one hemisphere can be busy writing a grocery list or solving an equation while the other scans the environment and tends to other basic chores. As we age, however, the walls between the hemispheres seem to fall, with the two halves working increasingly in tandem. Neuroscientist Roberto Cabeza of Duke University dubs that the HAROLD (hemispheric asymmetry reduction in older adults) model, and judging by his work, the phenomenon is a powerful one.
Cabeza recruited a sample group of adults 65 to 95 years old who had scored high on a memory test, along with a group of lower-performing adults of the same age and a group of younger, college-age adults. He then asked them all to perform a series of tasks that called on numerous skills, including language, memory, perception and motor functions. Throughout the tasks, he conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of their brains. Again and again, he found that the high-functioning older adults were using either a hemisphere different from the one the other subjects were using or both hemispheres at the same time.
Why that is so is still unclear, but Cabeza doesn't believe the brain is programmed to get stronger as it ages. Rather, he acknowledges, in many ways it gets weaker, with neurons processing information less efficiently. The bilateralization may be a trick the brain uses to compensate for the decline, sometimes integrating the hemispheres so efficiently that our thought and reasoning processes are actually better than they were before.
"It's similar to the way you need both hands to lift a weight that you could lift with one hand when you were younger," Cabeza says. "In the brain, there's a nice, natural distribution of resources. You get more neural tissue to support the task."
As the brain's flexibility improves, so too may the temperament we bring to our work. There's no question that personalities can calcify with age, causing us to become less receptive to new experiences and flat-out crabby when faced with them. But that's not the case with everyone. In fact, in many people the opposite happens.
In 1958 psychologist Ravenna Helson, now an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, began a long-term study of 142 women, all of them 21 years old, at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. She interviewed the subjects and took measures of their personalities, drives, relationship skills and the like. Then she reinterviewed them at ages 27, 43, 52 and 61 to determine how those traits changed over time. Just last year she and a graduate student, psychologist Christopher Soto, collated the data from the 123 women who stuck with the study. The results were surprising.
On the whole, they found, the women's highest scores in inductive reasoning occurred from their 40s to their early 60s. Similarly, their so-called affect optimization (the ability to highlight the better aspects of one's personality and restrain the less attractive ones) and their affect complexity (the ability to evaluate various contradictory ideas and remain objective) did not peak until their 50s or 60s. There was also an increased tolerance for ambiguity and an improved ability to manage relationships.
The Mills sample group was hardly random, consisting principally of white women of the same age who attended the same college. Still, they were 123 different individuals, and the results were nonetheless uniform. "People generally describe personality change in middle age as a midlife crisis, with all its negative connotations," says Soto. "In the Mills women, the change was positive--a reorienting, not a crisis."
If such a change occurs, says psychologist Robert Levenson, also at U.C. Berkeley, it may be shaped in part by evolutionary forces, offering advantages for the whole species. Human beings' comparatively long life spans and extended families are very good things, but keeping big broods healthy and well behaved over the decades takes more than the energy of young parents. It takes the cool heads and wise counsel of the family graybeards too. "Evolution isn't just about reproduction," Levenson says. "When you get into your 40s and 50s, you're caretaking, looking after your children, grandchildren, even the people who work for you. There's an advantage to having a more relativistic mind."
It's that talent for reflective thinking that explains the role older adults have always played in the human culture. It's not for nothing that history's firebrands and ideologues are typically young, while its judges and peacemakers and great theologians tend to be older. Not everyone achieves the sharp thought and serene mien that can come with age. But for those who do, the later years can be the best years they have ever had.
For more information about the Crook/Strozier musical go to http://www.workshoptheater.org/
Reported by Dan Cray/ Los Angeles
Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain
By SARA REISTAD-LONGMay 20, 2008 - 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.”