Normal Aging: Cognition and the Brain

In Paul Baltes words, the Janus head of aging is that we all wish to get old, but at the same time we do not wish to be old. With respect to the demographic development at least in the industrialized countries, we need a clear understanding of the problems involved in normal (sound) aging in addition to what we have learned about pathological aging. There are many social, psychological and neurobiological facets of normal aging, a few of them discussed in this contribution. The problem is looked at from the perspective of cog-nition (mainly executive functions), morphometry/stereology, and neuroimaging (function…