What is the Neuropsychology of Aging and Does Bilingualism Protect Against Dementia? A Clinical Psychology Podcast Episode.
- Connor Whiteley
- 2 days ago
- 11 min read
To celebrate the release of my brand-new book, How Does Ageing Affect Us, I want to share with you some fascinating facts about the psychology of ageing in this insightful clinical and cognitive psychology podcast episode. By the end of this episode, you’ll understand what is the neuropsychology of ageing, does bilingualism protect against dementia, what are superagers and so much more. If you enjoy learning about ageing, mental health in older age and how the brain changes as we age then this will be a great episode for you.
Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by How Does Ageing Affect Us? A Cognitive Psychology and Neuropsychology Guide to the Ageing Process, The Ageing Brain and More. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.
Extracts from How Does Ageing Affect Us? (COPYRIGHT 2026 CONNOR WHITELEY)
Introduction To The Neuropsychology Of Ageing
Personally, as an aspiring clinical psychologist, I’ve always been rather interested in how the ageing process impacts us. Also, a few years ago, my Great-Uncle died from dementia and even though other family members looked after him a lot more than me because I was too young at the time. I did get to hear and occasionally see how the dementia was impacting his cognitive abilities and his behaviour.
In addition, in the United Kingdom to become a qualified clinical psychologist, let alone get onto the Doctorate of Clinical Psychology (DClinPsych), you need to have clinical experience working with older adults. Hence, why I’ve always been interested in the neuropsychology of ageing because I knew one day I would have to focus on it as part of my clinical psychology journey.
And I wanted to learn more about dementia as the condition had a massive impact on my family.
As a result, to kick this book off, before we can start exploring how ageing impacts our memory, our brain amongst lots of other areas. We need to understand what actually the neuropsychology of ageing is and what topics we’re going to be investigating.
Therefore, in this book, we mainly want to answer the following questions because by answering these questions, we’ll be able to get a deep understanding of how ageing impacts us from a healthy ageing perspective and a pathological ageing perspective:
· How does the brain change as we naturally age?
· How does this affect cognition?
· How are our brain and cognition further affected in pathological conditions of ageing?
· What are the clinical considerations when working with older adults?
· Can we prevent cognitive decline and the incidence of pathological ageing conditions?
Furthermore, the ageing process is important to study because there are a wide range of economic and social implications of ageing societies. For example, around 40% of government spending is spent on health care and pensions and when we consider the stark health outcomes and needs of an ageing population, this works out as a lot of money. As well as the proportion of the population that is of an advanced age is increasing decade upon decade.
In addition, with people living longer, there is an associated increase in the frequency of dementia cases and cognitive decline. For example, in 2000, around 50% of people aged 85 years old and older had Alzheimer’s Disease with the greatest risk factor of Alzheimer’s Disease being age itself.
As a result, according to Harper (2014), if you want to become an applied psychologist in the future, like a clinical or neuropsychologist then you need to be aware of age-related cognitive changes. Whereas if you want to become a more research-focused psychologist, like an academic, then you still need to be aware of ageing because researchers need to provide empirical evidence both to understand age-related cognitive change, and to inform us, clinical psychologists. Since without researchers, we wouldn’t know the cognitive baselines that differentiate “normal” or “healthy” cognitive changes from “pathological” age-related changes.
It is by combining the work of researchers and clinical psychologists and other professionals that we can reduce the risk of pathological ageing.
Is Ageing All About Decline?
One aspect of ageing I do want to stress in this introduction to the book is that I’m not going to downplay and hate on ageing. That is not the point of the book, and I don’t want you to think that ageing is all bad and that ageing is a death sentence or a cliff edge that all of us are marching towards.
There are a lot of beautiful things about ageing. For example, in older age, people are more prosocial, they’re wiser and they have more life experiences because they have more free time. Such as when my Grandma was still alive, her and my Grandad would go on holidays, cruises and exploring a good few times a year. As well as they had the time to do their different social groups and Church activities.
Also, I’m constantly hearing from older adults how they don’t know how they ever had time to work because they’re so busy enjoying their life after retirement.
There are good things about ageing, and older adults have increased vocabulary as well.
Is Ageing A Disease?
Finally for this chapter, I want to mention that there is a weird argument going on in the literature and wider world about whether ageing is a disease. Personally, I do not believe ageing is a disease because that’s a very negative and hopeless way of looking at it, because ageing is a perfectly natural thing that we cannot escape.
However, there are people and organizations that argue ageing is a disease. For example, the ICD-11 (Jan 1, 2022) defines “ageing-related” disease as “caused by pathological processes which persistently lead to the loss of organism's adaptation and progress in older ages”.
Which is weird because older adults experience a hardening of the arteries which is problematic, but it’s natural. As well as older adults experience wrinkles. Are both wrinkles and a hardening of the arteries a disease?
I’m not sure.
Here are some questions for you at the end of this chapter:
· What are your attitudes towards ageing? Positive or negative?
· How are you feeling about getting older? Nervous? Excited? Sad?
· Do you think ageing is a disease?
DOES BILINGUALISM PROTECT AGAINST DEMENTIA AND ARE SUPERAGERS REAL?
For the final chapter in this introductory section, I wanted to show how pop-psychology isn’t always correct or clean-cut. That’s why in this chapter, I’m going to show you two studies about bilingualism and superagers, because in the mainstream media, there are a lot of articles saying how learning another language is going to stop you ever developing dementia.
A lot of people believe those pop articles and this is where my personal rules about if an idea from psychology has entered the mainstream media and everyone from news channels to celebrities to social media influencers are promoting it. Then chances are it is not the best finding ever.
This chapter might support my personal rule. Let’s find out.
Does Bilingualism Protect Against Dementia?
Anderson et al. (2020) conducted a meta-analysis to see if bilingualism does protect someone against developing dementia. The background to this study was that as you can imagine, ageing is associated with a loss of cognitive function and we’ll look more at this loss in later chapters. As well as this loss of cognitive function is likely because in the brain, there’s a decrease in white matter, grey matter and neural connectivity as we age.
In addition, age is the strongest risk factor for dementia with dementia affecting more than 50 million people worldwide and this number is doubling every 20 years. Therefore, you can see why it’s important to identify protective factors that can delay or prevent the onset of dementia.
Moreover, in past studies, there has been some evidence that bilingualism can contribute to cognitive reserve (more on that in the next section) and neuroplasticity (how the brain changes in response to environmental demands) in the brain. This allows people to resist the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s Disease.
Although, within the literature, this “evidence” is controversial and instead of bilingualism eliminating the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease, it might instead only delay the onset.
Still, delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease is a lot better than not having an impact at all.
Whereas another meta-analysis by Mukadam et al. (2017) found that bilingualism wasn’t a protective factor against Alzheimer’s Disease. And the analysis suggested that other studies that had found a significant effect for bilingualism being a protective factor had failed to control for education or cultural differences.
Nonetheless, this previous meta-analysis had only considered the incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease and not the age-at-onset. In other words, this meta-analysis was only considering if bilingualism stopped Alzheimer’s Disease developing in the first place, not if it delayed the development of the condition, and this analysis only considered prospective studies too.
That’s where Anderson et al. (2020) comes in because they wanted to see did bilingualism protective against incidence rates and/or age of onset of Alzheimer’s symptoms? As well as does the evidence differ when only considering prospective studies?
To test these research questions, Anderson et al. (2020) conducted a meta-analysis of studies into the bilingualism, age-at-onset and incidence rates of Alzheimer’s Disease with a total of 21 studies being included in the final analysis.
The results showed that bilingual people might show a greater cognitive reserve than people who could only speak one language, so their brain was better able to adapt to the decline of certain brain areas. For example, bilingual people showed alternate functional circuits compared to other people, so there was a shift in their brains from frontal areas to more posterior and subcortical neural circuits.
In other words, the brains of bilingual people were able to use other brain areas to compensate for the deterioration of neurons in the frontal parts of the brain.
Overall, this is believed to happen because learning another language might help to strengthen synaptic density and coupling. This increases cognitive reserve and protects people against the effects of pathological ageing, but it doesn’t stop the ageing process entirely.
This will make more sense in the next section of the book where we focus more on brain ageing and the different theories academics have put forward to explain changes in our cognitive abilities as we age.
What Are Superagers?
The last paper I want to show you in this introductory section involves the idea of superagers from Harrison et al. (2012) with their paper on “Superior Memory and Higher Cortical Volumes in Unusually Successful Cognitive Ageing”.
Now what’s interesting about this paper is that it was published before the replication crisis in the mid-2010s, but so modern research standards, this is a bad paper. I’ll explain why in a moment, yet it does have some interesting findings that help us to understand why as some people age they maintain their cognitive abilities whereas other people do not.
We’ll learn more about “successful ageing” in the last section of the book, but until then please enjoy Harrison et al. (2012).
The background to this study is that Superagers are people who despite their advanced age retain superior cognitive performance compared to other people of the same age. As well as this is important to researchers because these Superagers can be helpful to us in identifying protective factors against cognitive impairment.
Also, it’s important to understand how the brains of Superagers might be different to the brains of non-Superagers.
On the whole, the topic of Superagers can be very useful to society as a whole because if we “unlock” the protective factors that stop Superagers from experiencing cognitive decline and pathological ageing. Then we can create interventions and lifestyle tips that will do the same for others so the rates of dementia and other age-related diseases will hopefully decrease. And the burden on health and social care can decrease too.
This led Harrison et al. (2012) to want to research do Superagers even exist and how do their brains differ from non-superagers.
As a result, to test their research questions, the researchers got 12 Superagers who were aged over 80 years old and they were defined as people who’s episodic memory performance was comparable to individuals aged between 50 and 65 years old. There was an elderly control group made up of 10 people aged over 80 years old, and there was a middle-aged control group made up of 14 people.
To test their episodic memory, the Delayed Verbal recall score from the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT), Boston Naming Task, Trail Making Test Part B and Category Fluency Test.
To test their brain structure, each participant went through an Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan (MRI) and three-dimensional MP-RAGE sequences were used to map the structure of the brain with their cortical thickness calculated by measuring the distance between representations of grey and white matter and the CSF.
The results showed that the Superagers had an anatomic structure that deviated from “normal” agers and was similar to the younger cohort so Superagers might have an unusually prominent anterior cingulate cortex.
Nonetheless, there were a lot of issues with Harrison et al. (2012) because there was only one measure of brain structure and no inclusion of brain function, and in all honesty, modern researchers aren’t sure if the study even used the right statistical analyses when comparing grey-matter volume across the three groups.
The conclusions might be completely wrong or the differences might not be as stark as previously believed.
Personally, my massive issue with the study was the sample size. There were around ten people in each group and this study is meant to be making generalisations and conclusions about the brains of humans as a species. The entire point of this study was to help identify differences in the brains of Superagers and non-superagers. There are over 7 billion people on the planet and this study only used ten people per group.
How are ten people per group representative of the entire species?
It is not, so this sample size is extremely small and in my very harsh opinion, almost pointless.
Finally, this study is cross-sectional rather than longitudinal analysis, which is the most common issue with the ageing literature. This is a problem because a cross-sectional design doesn’t allow us to monitor a person as they age so we cannot see the influences and other factors that impact their cognitive performance as they age.
On the whole, I would really like to think that this type of research paper would not be published today.
Here are some questions to get you thinking at the end of this chapter:
· Are you surprised bilingualism might not protect against dementia?
· What do you think about Harrison et al. (2012)?
· What factors do you think can protect us against the onset of dementia?
Now that you’ve been introduced to the fascinating topic of the neuropsychology of ageing, let’s start exploring how the brain changes as we age and how this impacts our cognitive abilities.
I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode.
If you want to learn more, please check out:
How Does Ageing Affect Us? A Cognitive Psychology and Neuropsychology Guide to the Ageing Process, The Ageing Brain and More. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.
Have a great day.
Clinical Psychology References and Further Reading
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