I almost hate myself for drifting into something so seemingly "foo foo new age" as what I'm about to suggest. But, what can I say, it's worked far better for me in this respect than any pill.
Write down your dreams every morning. Each and every one, with no exception or delay in getting directly to it on waking. For most people dreams are intensely heavy on imagery. The act of writing them down has a number of potentials for offering the improvements you're looking for. By writing down your dreams, your recall of the imagery will improve. You'll get active practice and training in manipulating large amounts of remembered visual data as you work out what aspects went in which sequence or location. And along with that is the chance to directly combine the written word with image heavy experiences.
Not scientific to be sure, and I do find myself a bit annoyed to be offering up advice so unsubstantiated by actual study. But, oh well, anecdotal evidence for the perceived win.
When you get older you get smarter, not stupider(ya I know I'm stating the obvious)
I'd argue that it's more a potential for wisdom which comes from life experience. But, along with that comes a lot of unfortunate aspects of aging. Like everything else, our brains don't have an easy ride into old age. The older we get, the more neurons die and the faster the rate at which it occurs. The plasticity which allows for learning and adaptation to new situations becomes more and more difficult. The neurotransmitters and other chemicals that govern so much of our mental processes wind up becoming more and more scarce as the body struggles to keep up production with failing mechanisms. We may kick ass when it comes to using some of those established neural circuits, but making modifications to them is probably going to prove a lot more difficult than it would be to a youngster. Yet another negative for older brains is age-related neurological disease. Most of them don't suddenly appear overnight, and may even slowly creep into effect over a nine or ten year period of steadily lowered mental function. Time in which a person certainly isn't suffering from any kind of dementia, but whose edge is being rapidly dulled all the same.
Still, with all that there's the flip side that comes from having seen enough of the environment around one to get a good grasp of nuances that those younger would miss. And there's certainly evidence that keeping ones brain active into old age will do a lot of good in keeping it functioning far better than ones contemporaries. There's also a fair amount of evidence showing that the brain attempts to adapt itself to what the persons habits as age sets in. A kind of emergency system that kicks out systems which aren't of much use to allow for necessary regions with lowering functionality to grab onto those resources in an attempt to stabilise itself. There was a recent study of how young and old brains work when confronted with facial recognition that bears this theory out pretty well.
All in all a lot has to be taken on an individual basis. Genetics plays a huge role here. And like most biological processes, exercise of those functions has at least a strong chance of mitigating damage while hopefully still gaining those positive mental aspects of age. And as the topic here suggests, there's a lot of potential for chemical intervention. When it comes to the brain, a little can go a very long way. And the bulk of evidence for most nootropics has seen the best showcase within an aging population.
LongeCity
