“The preparation before work each morning starts in a methodical fashion. By 6 a.m., Morris Wilkinson, a 91-year-old letter carrier, irons his postal worker uniform—a crisp, collared shirt and gray slacks—a habit he formed while in the Marines during World War II.

He enjoys a hearty breakfast of eggs or pancakes with his wife. He shines his black shoes. And he’s off to work,” arriving at a Birmingham, Alabama post office by 7 a.m. as he has for six decades.

“I’d rather work than be idle,” he said one morning before heading off on his route to deliver mail to 550 families in his white mail truck.

So began CNN’s story today taking note of the fact that across the nation, more men and women—even in their 90s and 100s—are choosing to forgo retirement and staying at their jobs longer and seeking new employment later in life. The reasons, of course, are not always voluntary.

“It’s a combination of economics and just seeing they bring a lot of value to the workplace in terms of skills and ability,” says Deborah Russell, director of workforce issues with AARP, told the network.

By 2012, nearly one-fifth of the U.S. work force will be older than 55, the AARP reported. As they prepare to retire, baby boomers likely will continue to work well beyond the traditional retirement age of 65, Russell said.

While a daily job can provide older individuals with a schedule, alleviate boredom and sometimes improve their physical health, many older people also are continuing to work to supplement their retirement savings or help provide extra money for their families.

For some, like Sally Gordon, 101, of Lincoln, Nebraska, it’s a preference. Gordon, assistant sergeant at arms for the Nebraska Legislature, was recognized in August by Experience Works as America’s Outstanding Oldest Worker for 2010. She says she likes the extra income. Besides she’s had a steady job since the 1920s and as long as the state wants to pay her to continue to work, she’ll be happy to oblige.

“I used to be a model, and now I’m a Model T,” Gordon jokes. “I hope there’s a lot of mileage left.”

See the entire CNN story @ http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/09/07/older.workers.100s.90s/index.html?hpt=C1

Once again, he’s betting on intrinsic value and longevity: This time, his own.

While talk of who will succeed Buffet as the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway continues to ramp up, he has revised the outlook he offered shareholders in 2007. Back then, based on actuarial tables, he figured he’d hang around until at least 88. Now, he tells Deal Journal, “I plan to work past 100, but to do so I may have to learn to think outside the box.”

Meanwhile, Buffett’s followers say he is only getting better with age, writes Serena Ng in today’s Wall Street Journal. Because he loves his work, “Buffet has no intention of stepping down.”

The return on his investments, including taking positions in Geico, Benjamin Moore, See’s Candies, Dairy Queen, and NetJets, must make his work easy to love. An investment of just $1,000 into Berkshire Hathaway in 1965, would be worth millions today.

The relationship between his food choices and longevity is harder to figure. Well known for his love of hamburgers, Cherry Cokes, hash browns, in The Snowball he tells his biographer Alice Schroeder, “Broccoli, asparagus, and Brussels sprouts look to me like Chinese food crawling around on a plate.  Cauliflower almost makes me sick.  I eat carrots reluctantly.  I don’t like sweet potatoes.  I don’t even want to be close to a rhubarb, it makes me retch.”

But last year, he said he had reformed. In answer to the advice from a New Jersey nutritional dentist who encouraged him to eat more healthy food and take nutritional supplements, he claimed in the Omaha World-Journal:

“My diet, though far from standard, is somewhat better than usually portrayed. I have a wonderful doctor who nudges me in your direction every time I see him.  All in all, I’ve enjoyed remarkably good health — largely because of genes, of course — but also, I think, because I enjoy life so much every day.”  When his doctor told him that he had to either change his diet or exercise, he picked “the lesser of two evils,” he said. 

Of course, I would be quick to point out that it’s not really a choice. Long-term well being depends on both. And investing an hour a day in exercise is known to offer the kind of long-term returns he appreciates.

So far, though, Buffett has shown no signs of ill health. “But he has acknowledged there may come a time when his mental faculties begin to fade,” writes Ng. “He said he expects Bill Gates— a longtime friend, bridge partner and member of the Berkshire board—to tell him if it is time to step down.” In his letter to shareholders a few years ago, he also noted that when a person’s abilities decline so usually do their powers of self-assessment. “Someone else often needs to blow the whistle.”

Noticing the other day how many riders on the subway were wired up, I mused that it was no wonder Dr. Rudolfo Llinás, a giant of modern neuroscience, speaks of the the life of cells in the brain as looking “like a Riverdance perfomance,” with “some cells tapping in harmony and some … silent, creating myriads of patterns that represent the properties of the external world. Cells with the same rhythm form circuits to bind information in time.”

Nor does it surprise that an explosion of studies in recent years has suggested that music on the brain is a good thing, good for learning and longevity. Consider this disparate group of musicians and their current ages: BB King, 84; Earl Scrugg, 86, Ravi Shankar, 90, ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, 95; and Pinetop Perkins, 96; or the world’s oldest performing musician, Bill Tapia, the Duke of the Uke, 102, who appeared recently at the New York Uke Festival.

” title=“Duke of Uke”>Bill Tapia, 102

Now a data-driven review has pulled together studies linking musical training to learning, from skills ranging from language to memory. And scientists who published their work this week in Nature Reviews Neuroscience say that collectively the research has significant implications for education.

Playing an instrument, the researchers say, primes the brain to choose what is relevant in a complex process that may involve reading or remembering a score, timing issues and coordination with other musicians.

“The brain is unable to process all of the available sensory information from second to second, and thus must selectively enhance what is relevant,” Nina Kraus, lead author of the Nature perspective, the Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology and director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory.

” title=“Krau”>Music and the Brain

“A musician’s brain selectively enhances information-bearing elements in sound,” Kraus said. “In a beautiful interrelationship between sensory and cognitive processes, the nervous system makes associations between complex sounds and what they mean.” The efficient sound-to-meaning connections are important not only for music but for other aspects of communication, she said.
 
Musicians are more successful than non-musicians in learning to incorporate sound patterns for a new language into words, according to literature gathered in the Nature review. Children who are musically trained show stronger neural activation to pitch changes in speech and have a better vocabulary and reading ability than children who did not receive music training.

And musicians trained to hear sounds embedded in a rich network of melodies and harmonies are primed to understand speech in a noisy background. They exhibit both enhanced cognitive and sensory abilities that give them a distinct advantage for processing speech in challenging listening environments compared with non-musicians.

Children with learning disorders are particularly vulnerable to the deleterious effects of background noise, according to the article. “Music training seems to strengthen the same neural processes that often are deficient in individuals with developmental dyslexia or who have difficulty hearing speech in noise.”

Their review,  Northwestern researchers conclude, argues for serious investing of resources in music training in schools accompanied with rigorous examinations of the effects of such instruction on listening, learning, memory, attention and literacy skills.

(Part of this post was adapted from materials provided by by Northwestern University.)

These stories seemed to ask, albeit gingerly, whether Merwin would be vigorous, public, or peripatetic enough to promote poetry in our celebrity and internet-dominated age. After all, Merwin (Heavens!) even eschews the computer for his writing of poetry.

I found myself wondering about the subtle ways of ageism.

Were Merwin younger, wouldn’t reporters have been curious if the poet, who has written deeply for years about the environment, saw irony in being named poet laureate as the worst environmental accident in history, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, was still unfolding? I wondered, too, at the curiosity that one of America’s most mindful poets would assume office at the very moment there is a debate roiling over whether life on the web is harming our ability to concentrate and think profoundly.

Forty years ago, Merwin, the Princeton-educated son of a Presbyterian minister who won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1971, was well-known as a powerful voice in protests against the Vietnam War. Last year, he won his second Pulitzer for his most recent collection, The Shadow of Sirius, in which he writes about memory and mortality.

The Christian Science Monitor’s Elizabeth Lund reported that there were those who were disappointed that a poet more like “Robert Pinsky, the most effective laureate to date,” had not been selected. She commented that Pinsky had, as laureate, exhibited the “zeal of an activist and the charisma of a celebrity. The George Clooney of the poetry world, if you will.”

New York Times reporter Patricia Cohen, noted that Merwin “retains traces of the extravagant handsomeness of his youth,” and reported that after he had learned of the announcement of his appointment, he told her by telephone he wasn’t looking forward to having his life disrupted, though he does “relish” taking a more public part in the conversation about poetry. “I do like a very quiet life,” he said. “I can’t keep popping back and forth between here and Washington.”

It should be said that in their stories both reporters ultimately embraced Merwin’s masterful, elliptical, and frequently mysterious poems. Rooted in mindful attentiveness to the everyday, his poems often have a quicksilver quality to them.

“It’s a joy to be part of everything that’s living, and to be able to give something back sometimes,” Merwin, who moved to Hawaii in the 1970s, told NPR’s Melissa Block. His move to Hawaii was inspired by his interest in Zen Buddhism and the notion of living a wholistic life.  He has said that he plans to use his new post to draw attention to the poetry of indigenous cultures and the power of translation, something at which he has also given great service in his career as a poet.

What’s important about naming Merwin poet laureate is the degree to which his mind, not the lineaments of his face, has retained and deepened a life and a body of work made of the mix of devotion to craft, consciousness, and imagination. Perhaps his tenure will be quieter and more contemplative than Pinsky’s was, but it will be the manifestation of his way of being in the world, not solely a function of age. And it seems that we could, at this moment, profit considerably from his mindful example.

Here’s “Separation,” a beautiful 3-line poem he wrote early in his career and which Block asked a surprised Merwin to read on air.

Your absence has gone through me  
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

—

And here’s one I like a great deal:

“I Live Up Here”

I live up here
And a little bit to the left
And I go down only
For the accidents and then
Never a moment too soon
Just the same it’s a life it’s plenty
The stairs the petals she loves me
Every time
Nothing has changed
Oh down there down there
Every time
The glass knights lie by their gloves of blood
In the pans of the scales the helmets
Brim over with water
It’s perfectly fair
The pavements are dealt out the dice
Every moment arrive somewhere
You can hear the hearses getting lost in lungs
Their bells stalling
And then silence comes with the plate and I
Give what I can
Feeling It’s worth it
For I see
What my votes the mice are accomplishing
And I know I’m free
This is how I live
Up here and simply
Others do otherwise
Maybe

——
And here’s Merwin talking to NPR’s Terry Gross in 2008 on memory, mortality, and the writing process.

One study focused on the cellular mechanism that keeps neural stem cell division in check. The other correlated the lack of teenage exercise with cognitive impairment in later life.

In the first, scientists at the Salk Institute of Biological Research in La Jolla, California, underscored how physical activity balances neural stem cell quiescence— stem cells are at rest— and keep them from their dormancy from becoming dominant in later life while it helps stimulate the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus, the brain’s hub of memory.   

          Image: Courtesy of Dr. Helena Mira, Carlos III Health Institute, Madrid

The other study, of 9,344 women from Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, compared at activity levels at teenage, age 30, age 50, and late life with cognitive decline. Reported June 30 in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, it held alarming implications in an era of declining physical activity for youths.

“Our study shows that women who are regularly physically active at any age have lower risk of cognitive impairment than those who are inactive,” said lead researcher Laura Middletton, Ph. D., of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto. “But … being physically active at teenage is most important in preventing cognitive impairment.”

Researchers, led by Laura Middleton, Ph. D., of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, found that being physically active at any stage of life lowers the risk of cognitive impairment in old age. But “being physically active at teenage is most important in preventing cognitive impairment,” said lead researcher Laura Middleton, Ph. D., of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Canada.

The researchers also determined that women who were physically inactive at teenage but became physically active at age 30 and age 50 had significantly reduced odds of cognitive impairment relative to those who remained physically inactive. In contrast, being physically active at age 30 and age 50 was not significantly associated with rates of cognitive impairment in those women who were already physically active at teenage.
“To minimize the risk of dementia, physical activity should be encouraged from early life,” Middleton said, adding, “Not to be without hope, people who were inactive at teenage can reduce their risk of cognitive impairment by becoming active in later life.”

The mechanisms by which cognition benefits from physical activity across the life course are believed multi-factorial. Much evidence already suggests that physical activity positively effects brain plasticity and cognition and that physical activity reduces the rates and severity of vascular risk factors, such as hypertension, obesity, and type II diabetes associated with increased risk of cognitive impairment.

“Low physical activity levels in today’s youth may mean increased dementia rates in the future. Dementia prevention programs and other health promotion programs encouraging physical activity should target people starting at very young ages, not just in mid- and late life,” said Middleton.

Some of the cognitive issues of aging may be the result of an unchallenged process by which stem cells in the brain remain dormant until called upon to produce more neurons, ensuring a pool of neurons that lasts a lifetime.

In research published in the July 1 issue of Cell Stem Cell, researchers identified the importance of bone morphogenetic factor protein (BMP) in preventing the rampant proliferation and depletion of neural stem cells.
Using prior observation that quiescent neural stem cells express the BMP receptor 1A as a starting point, co-first author Helena Mira, formerly a post-doc in senior author Fred H. Gage’s Laboratory for Genetics at the Salk Institute and now an assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Development at the Carlos III Health Institute in Madrid, and her collaborators investigated the role of BMP signaling in regulating the proliferation of stem cells located in the hippocampus, one of two brain regions harboring neural stem cells.

They found that BMP signaling, which is triggered by the interaction of BMPs with their receptors, is inactive in most proliferating cells, whereas it is active in non-dividing cells, including quiescent stem cells and differentiated neurons. Unlike stem cells, mature neurons express BMP receptor 1B, which will be the focus of future studies.

Experiments with cultured neural stem cells confirmed that it was indeed BMP that kept them quiet. BMP’s anti-proliferative effect was blocked when BMP was replaced with a protein known as Noggin, which binds and inactivates members of the BMP family.

The researchers observed the same effect when they delivered Noggin directly into the brains of adult mice. Here, too, Noggin successfully interfered with BMP signaling and raised quiescent stem cells out of their slumber. After one week, those neural stem cells had started dividing and their offspring were well on their way to becoming neurons.

When neural stem cells were forced to proliferate over prolonged periods of time, however, the pool of active neural stem cells was depleted, suggesting to Gage and his team that quiescence functions as a protective mechanism that counteracts stem cell exhaustion.

“It tells you how finely this process is regulated,” says Mira. “BMP ensures a sufficiently big population of quiescent stem cells that can feed into the system when called upon.”

Gage, the Vi and John Adler Chair for Research on Age-Related Neurodegenerative Diseases, will next investigate whether BMP is the linchpin that links exercise, aging and neurogenesis. “As we age, the number of new neurons declines but physical exercise brings that number back up,” he said. “Our findings raise the possibility that the BMP signal becomes dominant over time, forcing neural stem cells deeper into quiescence and thus making it harder to generate new brain cells.”

This post was based on reports at the Salk Insitute website, at http://www.salk.edu/news/pressrelease_details.php?press_id=428

In February “Little Canon” Francisco Varallo, the last living member of the second place team from Argentina, was honored by Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) at celebration of his 100th birthday.

He was also the youngest player in that first World Cup, played in Montevideo, Uruguay. Argentina lost the final game 4-2 to the hometown team. 

Here’s a more recent photo.

“It was like a dream come true,” Varallo told FIFA’s World magazine for it’s March issue. “I was just a boy and I was in awe of players like Luis Monti, Manuel Ferreira, Guillermo Stabil. In those days the coaches barely spoke, and it was the most experienced players who decided on the starting 11. On the day of my debut against France, I asked the captain, Ferreira, how I should play, and he replied: “Play the way you know how, do what you want.”

Varallo injured his knee during a match against Chile and had to sit out the semi-final match in which Argentina defeated the U.S. team. “I was in pain and I shouldn’t have played in the final,” but he was determined to play for his country. “I played my heart out in the second half and I could feel it in my knee. We were down to ten men, and as the match went on, another was injured, and another. There were no substitutions then: we were left with eight players on the field. But they beat us fairly and squarely, what can you do?”

Training was much different in the 1930s. They practiced only three days a week, sometimes less often. The only nutritional advice Varallo’s coach offered was not to eat salami sandwiches. “I always ate very well, a variety of things. I had a typically Argentinian diet, with a lot of meat. And before a match I would ask for seconds. Roberto Cherro used to ask me, ‘Panchito, how come you eat more than the rest of us?’ And I would explain ]If I don’t, I won’t score any goals.’ He didn’t smoke or drink alcohol or carbonated beverages.“It must have been a good diet because I’ve still got my own teeth,” he said. “Some of that is down to genetics, of course, but I was never fat and I maintained my muscles. I also never had a medical check-up during my career. The advances that have been made in that area are fantastic. I never fully recovered from the injury I sustained at the World Cup in Uruguay. Nowadays, players recover in no time from operations – it’s extraordinary, they walk out of surgery!”

After the historic final match, played at the Estadio Centenario, Varallo went on to glory with Boca Juniors, where he scored 181 goals in 210 matches – a record that remained unshattered until 2008.

“I find it incredible that young people know who I am,” he mused. ” When I was in France, people from Germany, Poland, England, Switzerland ... they all wanted to meet me, with a lot of passion and respect. They still send me letters to my house. And some even send presents. They are unforgettable gestures that make me very happy. And it’s all thanks to football! Here in La Plata, everybody knows me: old folks, young people, children…they all say hello to me. I was named an ‘illustrious citizen’. Now that I’m old, more tributes are being paid to me than before. It seems I’m still important!”