Brain: Playground Swing or Rocking Chair?

Being young at heart can be a little problem for those who've lived more years than they'd like to admit. And of course, solutions involve people dying a few strands, having a lift here and there or shaving off a few years to seem, look and appear young. But is appearing young the real issue? What if your brain aged faster than other people's? What if you're young at heart, high on the swing when your brain is already resting on a rocking chair?

Reported by Tina Hesman Saey in ScienceNews, Ahmad Salehi's study with pilots show that a specific version of a gene may impact the aging of a person's brain. The specific version of a gene is called BDNF. Specifically, Salehi's research involved the performances of pilot's distinguished into two groups - one group made up of pilots with the BDNF gene and the other group with those who don't -  on a flight simulator test. The study carried out for over two years and the results proved that pilots who had the BDNF gene showed a drop about three times more in their flight stimulator test compared to the pilots who didn't. Differences in scores were seen in areas such as reaction time, navigational skills, positioning of planes and performance/decision making in emergency situations.
There was also an obvious decrease in areas associated to learning and memory in the brain for those who had the BDNF gene. For example, those who had this particular gene had lost more volume of their hippocampus (part of the brain used for navigation and spatial memory) in comparison to those who have the normal version of the gene. This contributes to the possibility that the BDNF gene impacts the brain to age faster as all of the pilots that had the volume of their hippocampus measured were 65. Although they were all the same age, their hippocampus volume differed due to the presence of this gene.
But having this gene does not cause a person to be at a disadvantage at all. "The drop in scores was not so dramatic that pilots should be removed from the cockpit", as Tina Hesman Saey quotes Salehi. None of the pilots were more or less capable than the others at a drastic measure. It is also important to keep in mind that the degree of impact this BDNF gene has on the brain aging is not clear entirely as it is still an ongoing research topic and is fairly recent. A neurologist and neuroscientist from University of California, William Mobley, states that "It could be one of a thousand factors that play a role (in the brain aging)". With this statement, other scientists are trying to figure out how to counteract this gene and possibly slow the brain aging. But until further research is done, for now, whether you have this brain aging gene or not, it seems as though being young at heart is the best young you can be.