What Actually Sharpens Aging Brains —7 Quick Cognitive Tests

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Whether your motivation is preserving or expanding neuromotor and cognitive function, or if it's preventing dementia, the options are many and well-studied.

[00:00:10]It mainly comes down to where the best opportunities are for you, based on what excites you and where you feel the need.

[00:00:18]Welcome. I'm Scott Fulton, professor of health span and aging. My courses go out to over 50 colleges across the US, and I'm the author of function and wealth span.

[00:00:28]The question I'm asked most often is about recalling names, things that are capitalized.

[00:00:35]Could be a person, a restaurant, a store, a street. You name it.

[00:00:40]Pardon the pun.

[00:00:41]Name retrieval fails first because it's a pure retrieval task with no context support. Most cognitive functions have environmental cues, redundancies, or workarounds built in, but with proper names, they don't come with helpful reminders unless we consciously apply them with focused attention.

[00:01:01]There are a few things going on with normal aging.

[00:01:04]Names are arbitrary labels. Unlike words for objects, names have no semantic meaning to anchor them. Chair connects to a concept. David connects to nothing except the one person.

[00:01:17]And we typically don't practice retrieving names daily the way we practice common vocabulary.

[00:01:23]There's often also no recovery pathway.

[00:01:26]If you can't retrieve a name, there's no logical chain to get you there. With objects or facts, you can reason your way back. With names, you either have it or you don't.

[00:01:37]Hippocampal dependency.

[00:01:39]Name-face binding is one of the most hippocampus-dependent tasks, and the hippocampus is among the earliest structures to show age-related change.

[00:01:50]The pronoun substitution is the tell.

[00:01:53]The brain recognizes someone, but the name retrieval pathway stalls, so it routes around it with a placeholder. You know her, the woman who lives around the corner.

[00:02:04]The function's preserved, but the label is lost.

[00:02:07]One of the keys to memory is during the initial intake of information and the subsequent storage. Let's take a look at 12 well-studied everyday memory factors that will influence how well we retrieve and store information.

[00:02:21]We'll begin with sleep. It's where consolidation occurs. If there's poor sleep, there's poor memory encoding.

[00:02:28]Information becomes hard to find.

[00:02:31]Stress.

[00:02:32]Interestingly, acute stress can sharpen emotional memory encoding, while chronic stress, on the other hand, degrades the hippocampus and interferes with memory consolidation.

[00:02:44]Time of day matters, too. Peak cognitive performance varies, but for most older adults, it will tend to be in the morning.

[00:02:50]Spikes and crashes in blood glucose levels can impair concentration and encoding.

[00:02:57]Drugs and medications like antihistamines, sleep aids, and some blood pressure medications can also impair memory.

[00:03:04]Even modest amounts of alcohol can impair consolidation.

[00:03:08]A big one is a lack of focused attention. We never get a chance to learn it because we were so distracted by all the other things going on around us.

[00:03:18]Hydration. Even a mild hydration of 2% can reduce attention and working memory.

[00:03:24]Uncorrected or out-of-date vision prescriptions can lead to isolation and faster cognitive loss.

[00:03:30]Hearing. It's one of the largest modifiable risk factors for dementia, often easily addressed with hearing aids.

[00:03:38]Exercise also improves memory, primarily associated with BDNF, or brain-derived neurotrophic factor. It gets released during exercise and improves encoding even hours after the activity.

[00:03:51]And finally, a meaningful social interaction with eye-to-eye contact will generally have far better encoding than passing encounters that come and go through the day. There are many regions of the brain, each with unique strengths, associations, and specialties.

[00:04:06]Brain experts stress that it's more a collaboration of information processing and storage, and how these regions all work together.

[00:04:14]And for these regions to work together, we want to be stimulating them in a variety of ways.

[00:04:20]We're going to look at some of those today.

[00:04:23]One of the biggest influences in memory function and aging has to do with synaptic transmission. The body manufactures and maintains about 100 trillion signaling molecules. These are chemical molecules that transmit information from neuron to neuron, from transmitter to receptor. In total, we have about 86 billion neurons.

[00:04:46]That's a lot of information flying around up there, isn't it?

[00:04:50]With aging, there's typically a drop in the number of neurotransmitters that are released and fewer receptors to receive them. As a result, we experience a drop in signal, and it often takes a bit longer to process the same information than it did just a decade or two ago.

[00:05:07]We can reach into different parts of the brain with some short challenges we can do now.

[00:05:13]At some point, I can share some tests with measured values, but initially, there's a lot of value in experiencing how every brain has strengths and weaknesses, just like we see in all five functional domains.

[00:05:26]You might want to pause to grab a pen and a piece of paper, so you'll be able to score yourself, as I suspect many of you will want to repeat this a couple of times over the next week or so to measure your progress.

[00:05:36]First, let's try quick associative memory exercise.

[00:05:39]You're going to see four objects.

[00:05:42]Try to remember the object and its location.

[00:05:55]Where are the keys?

[00:06:00]Remembering what something is and remembering where you put it are two separate memory operations, both depending on the hippocampus to bind them together. This binding function is among the first to weaken with age, which is why the keys are in your hand, but not in your memory.

[00:06:18]Now, let's try a name recall. I'll show you six faces one at a time.

[00:06:23]Use any memory trick you like, except the pen and paper.

[00:06:27]Save that for the end.

[00:06:47]Now, you'll see the faces in a different order and position with a letter.

[00:06:52]Write down the name next to the letter as they appear. I'll give you a moment at the end to make any last-minute changes.

[00:07:12]Okay, let's see how you did.

[00:07:14]Write down your name and face recall score. How did you do?

[00:07:18]Face recognition and name retrieval are also handled by separate brain systems, which is why you can know someone well and still draw a blank on their name.

[00:07:28]This gap widens with age as the hippocampal binding between visual identity and verbal label gradually weakens.

[00:07:36]This is a figure matrix reasoning exercise. Write down or draw the next shape in the sequence.

[00:07:54]How did you do on this one?

[00:07:57]Your brain identified the pattern by extracting a rule from incomplete information, exactly the kind of flexible reasoning that makes humans adaptable problem-solvers.

[00:08:07]This ability, called fluid intelligence, is the most age-sensitive cognitive domain we have, showing measurable decline earlier than memory or language.

[00:08:17]We can also look at number reasoning.

[00:08:19]What's the next number in the sequence?

[00:08:30]23. It's increasing by threes.

[00:08:34]This one's a bit more challenging.

[00:08:59]You might have been looking for a pattern, but it's a series of prime numbers, 47 being next.

[00:09:07]Solving a number sequence requires holding the pattern in working memory while testing rules simultaneously, a demanding coordination between numerical processing and fluid reasoning.

[00:09:19]Both decline with age, and notably, processing speed often slows before accuracy does, meaning the ability is intact, but the quickness is not.

[00:09:30]This is another variation on associative memory capacity. You'll see five objects appear in each column, then three of the objects will reappear.

[00:09:39]Try to recall the column and row they are located in.

[00:10:35]>> Great.

[00:10:37]Give yourself a point for remembering the correct column and a point for the correct row for a maximum of six points.

[00:10:46]Recalling both what and where requires the brain to bind two separate pieces of information into a single memory. Again, another hippocampal function that weakens noticeably.

[00:10:57]The grid format adds a working memory demand on top of that reflecting the kind of layered spatial tracking we rely on for navigation and everyday orientation.

[00:11:08]Okay, last one. This is a fluency exercise. You'll have 60 seconds to write down as many names of non-family people you can recall in 60 seconds.

[00:11:19]Okay, go.

[00:12:22]Okay, stop.

[00:12:24]Count how many you got.

[00:12:26]Names are arbitrary labels with no semantic meaning to anchor them, which is why retrieval fails before recognition does.

[00:12:34]When the pathway stalls, the brain substitutes a pronoun or descriptor instead.

[00:12:39]You know her, the one from the gym.

[00:12:41]The person is known, only the label is out of reach. For many, this is the first noticeable sign of an aging brain.

[00:12:48]The good news is that it's still trainable. It just requires regular practice.

[00:12:53]There are many ways that can help write them into memory more securely.

[00:12:58]Let me know in the comments if you'd like to get better at that.

[00:13:01]Hopefully, this was a fun challenge and you identified areas you are both strong and challenged.

[00:13:07]That's normal because part of it can be a lifetime of both good and lazy habits that have little to do with aging.

[00:13:15]Either way, now might be a good time to start investing a bit more energy into the brain.

[00:13:21]This is a good grounding and in future videos, I'll share how to really boost your memory based on some well-documented scientific methods that are also a lot of fun.

[00:13:31]They are what really motivated me to write Function and part of why it's been such a big hit. Try these tests a couple more times this week and see if your score improves. If you want more like this, let me know.

[00:13:43]Meantime, subscribe for updates and we'll see you back here soon.

[00:13:48]Take good care of you and those you love.