Why Early Retirement May Be Bad For Our Brains

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It turns out that “use it or lose it” is the key to our memory retention, too.  If we don’t keep active- we lose our memory.  A new article (“Mental Retirement) in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (obviously by economists) indicates that when we retire, as a group, we do more poorly on cognitive tests than when we are employed.  Moreover, those claims that doing memory exercises, crossword puzzles, and the like does not seem to make a difference.

Drs. Susann Rohwedder (RAND)  and Robert Willis (University of Michigan) employed the data generated from the National Institute of Aging study, which examines 22000 Americans every two years (over the age of 50), where memory tests are part of the longitudinal study.  This study (not these results, but others) has induced European nations, Japan, and South Korea to also survey their populations.

The analysis is based upon how folks can recall ten (10) nouns immediately and again after a ten minute waiting period.  Scoring is provided as one point per recall.  The test results for Americans were 11, while the English and Danes scored 10, the  Italians 7, the French 8, with a score of around  6 for the Spanish. The researchers identify the key differential is ages at which citizens retire in these various countries.

The paper described a straight line relationship between memory performance at ages 60 through 64, if they were still working.  (You remember:  y=mx+b, where y in this case is test score and x is the age of the subject.)   Early retirement seems to be the primary variable- regardless of the work performed prior to retirement.  Obviously, more study is needed to reach conclusive public policy.

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