Gerontology and the Brain

September 7, 2008/Alvaro Fernandez/

Last Fri­day, dur­ing the Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging’s Brain Health day, a par­tic­i­pant made a com­ment along the lines, “I just com­plet­ed my Mas­ters in Geron­tol­ogy at Uni­ver­si­ty XYZ. Despite my best efforts, I could not find a sin­gle brain-relat­ed class to attend as part of my stud­ies. Which is why I decid­ed to come to a con­fer­ence like this”.

Incred­i­ble that this hap­pens in 2008, a decade after the “Decade of the Brain”.

Health­care and cog­ni­tive sci­ence seem to have inhab­it­ed dif­fer­ent uni­vers­es for too long. I hope we start to see more active cross-pol­li­na­tion between both fields. Geron­tol­ogy would be a great place to start, giv­en the grow­ing demand for pre­ven­tive pro­grams to con­tribute to the cog­ni­tive health of an aging population.

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1 Comments

  1. M. A. Greenstein on September 8, 2008 at 9:09

    Alvaro,

    After years of work­ing to cre­ate “inter­dis­ci­pli­nary” dia­logue with­in under­grad and grad pro­grams, and in light of the low pub­lic atten­dance at the UCLA Anti-Aging Fri­day forum offered this sum­mer, I’m not sur­prised by the Geron­tol­ogy stu­dents claim.

    I will write to you under sep­a­rate cov­er, how I think we as a bud­ding brain empow­er­ment com­mu­ni­ty can speak to the issue.

    M. A. Green­stein, Ph.D., R.Y.T.
    The George Green­stein Insti­tute for the Advance­ment of Somat­ic Arts and Science



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