Blog: The Brain Dialogues, filtered by tag: Thomas Foundation

Does Social Interaction Reduce Risk of Dementia?

DR ANNE-NICOLE CASEY How people interact with and perceive one another, and each person’s thoughts and feelings about the quality of those interactions and relationships, can affect physical and mental health and well-being. Social cognitive function, which broadly refers to the way our brain processes social information, is recognised as an important marker of how efficiently our brain processes information in general1. Interestingly, the number of individuals with whom a person interacts frequently is associated with their short-term memory capacity2. Some studies report that having larger… Read More

A New Direction in Positive Ageing

HEIDI DOUGLASS | h.douglass@unsw.edu.au It's official. Centenarians are the fastest growing demographic in Australia, which means that the likelihood of living to 100 and beyond is increasing exponentially. Today, females born in a Western country have a 40% chance of reaching 100. And the odds are increasing. Much of this is, of course, down to advances in medical science and its ability to keep our bodies functioning far longer than that of our predecessors.....but what about our brains? With an ageing population comes a myriad of implications, good and bad. Positively, we get to live… Read More