The billion-dollar question is: Why do some people in their 80s and 90s remain mental champions?

A column in The New York Times reports that the brains of those who still are sharp in the last years of their lives may have brains also riddled with Alzheimer’s disease.

There may be a protective gene, one which has been identified and is being studied, which enables these individuals to stay high performers despite anatomical damage the disease causes.

There also is the memory-protective benefit of keeping engaged—-both with challenging activities (reading counts) and with people. Many studies support this finding.

Researchers want to understand whether people stay mentally capable because they are active—-they have lots of personal relationships and interests—-or whether they are able to do those things because they are mentally capable.

Which is cause? Which is effect?

Those people who are “killers” at bridge are the focus of this story. Players quickly can tell when one of them is starting to experience memory changes. The ways in which this community of 80 and 90-somethings manage their friends’ changes is telling.

The Question for the Rest of Us Who Never Were Good at Puzzles and Games

Then there are those of us who never were good at card games.  How will we prove we are still with it? Studies consistely include reading on the list of important tasks in keeping mentally sharp. You do not, however, hear scientists talking about the reading lists of the cognitively fit who are in their 90s.

My father can remember any telephone number he has dialed one time. I am not making this up. I have the problem in which the brain scrambles numbers—-numerical dyslexia—-so that 14 becomes 41 unless I am staring at it on a piece of paper.

How will I prove I am OK, assuming that is true? No good at puzzles, card games or telephone-number- remembering, maybe I should start keeping a list of how many books I read a week and their titles . If I start now, I will have decades of reading data by the time I am in my 80s or 90s. The fact that I tracked the reading patterns ought to count for something, don’t you think? I could do trending data—-make charts of complexity of topics read as a percentage of the whole.

I want to be ready in case someone inspects me because, aside from reading, writing and having lots of friends, my absolute total lack of proficiency in the measured areas will have them carting me away the minute I hit 80. Fortunately, I have plenty of time.

I long have had the view (starting in school where this was not terribly popular with teachers), that if a fact was written down somewhere, why in the world would you take brain space for it? You could be thinking about other things, things no one had found the answers to yet. For certain kinds of people, I hold that is true. Why would you want to work on a puzzle a whole lot of people already have solved? Where is the fun in that? My mother understood but shook her head. “That’s not how the world works,” she said. Right again, Mom.

My husband could remember obscure treaty dates and, to the penny, how much money was in which academic account for his college when he was a dean. Impressive. Until you knew that when he went to the drive-in window of the bank, he drove off with the tube. Until you knew he couldn’t remember a debit PIN number if robbers had a gun in his ribs. Until you knew he could not remember where he parked.

So much for the utility of remembering obscure treaties and equally obscure state legislative tricks, which could have dazzled testers for people in their later years.

Help! We non-memorizers need an advocacy group. We should have started last week.

Scientists consider mental fitness in the last years of life a hot area for research. Let us hope that we who are more, um, conceptual in our thinking will get some scientists to study us or we are doomed. They won’t even admit us to active retirement communities because we are no good at bridge.

Stay tuned.