The “Our Research” page on the Center for Healthy Minds Web site features a vibrant silverhaired woman astride a motorcycle, wearing a leather jacket and a beaming smile. Below her are links to four of the Center's major study areas where visitors can click and learn about the research into cognition and aging that makes this facility distributed throughout the Beckman Institute a world leader in the field.
On the Web site's home page the phrase “aging brilliantly” is headlined, with a link below leading to practical tips for maintaining or even increasing cognitive health in older adulthood. The message of the Web pages is clear: research at the Center is serious and academic, but also geared toward the goal of helping older adults live a mentally healthy life. Center researchers want older adults to know what they've learned — that research points to positive mental health benefits from certain lifestyle strategies.
The Web site is one way to publicize the message. The Center has also played host to motivational speaker and author Mitch Albom, while its co-directors, Denise Park and Art Kramer, have been quoted on the aging mind in publications from The New York Times to USA Today. Park testified before the United States Senate's Special Committee on Aging in 2005 on why older adults may be more susceptible to fraud. While its researchers are already considered a go-to resource for expertise in the field, the Center for Healthy Minds is poised to make even more news over the next few years.
As the baby boomer generational bulge pushes age demographics upwards, the boomers are also pushing the boundaries of what it means to be an older person in the early part of the 21st Century. Medical care, exercise, diet, lifestyle choices, and other factors have people in the United States living longer and in better physical shape than preceding generations. But, as Park points out, the mind may not be keeping pace with the body.
“Our bodies are starting to outlive our minds, so we need to play catch-up,” Park said. “All of this work (at the Center), it's still in the discovery phase.”
That discovery phase is why the Center for Healthy Minds can play an important role in contributing to the science of the aging mind. Begun at the University of Georgia in 1993 under Park's direction with funding from the Roybal Center, the Center for Healthy Minds moved with her to the University of Michigan in 1998. Park came to the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign in 2002, where she is a member of the Cognitive Neuroscience group at Beckman.
Kramer said most of the funding for specific projects comes from separate grants, primarily from the National Institute on Aging. The Center's goal, Kramer said, is “to promote research in successful aging and the distribution of research results to the scientific community, as well as the general community of citizens.”
Park said the Center is there to spur new research and empower researchers who are relatively new to the field of cognitive aging.
“The Center is about innovating and about developing new ideas and test beds for some of these ideas and funding them, so if they are good ideas they can develop significant research programs,” Park added.
The Center serves as a focal point for projects involving cognitive aging and possible mediating factors such as fitness, skill acquisition, social engagement, and other interventions that seem to point the way to improved mental health for older adults.
Park said the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is one of the premier aging research institutions in the world, and the Center for Healthy Minds is a key part of that standing. The research done there is on the leading edge of cognitive aging studies, and the Beckman Institute offers an unparalleled array of technology support for its investigations. Researchers use magnetic resonance imaging machines from Beckman's Biomedical Imaging Center, as well as other imaging techniques developed by Beckman researchers. Park said imaging work on the brain and cognitive aging is in its infancy.