Presidential Age How and Why Normal Cognitive Aging Impairs Chief Executives

This book on presidential age is not about Alzheimer's Disease and associated pathologies of the aging brain. It is instead about the normally aging brain. Brains don’t simply develop and maintain their functionality into older adulthood unless otherwise impaired by neurocognitive disease. Were this the case, this book might be about leveraging prodromal biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases to screen prospective presidential candidates. Instead, the normal decline age brings to all human brains begs a different type of book—and a broader and more blanketed warning about electing increasingly older presidents.

1. Arousal, Attention, and Executive Functioning.- 2. Myriad Forms of Memory.- 3. Senescent Slowing.- . Part I Integrative Metacommentary.- 4. Toward a Consolidated Understanding of Intelligence.- 5. Global Decline in General Intelligence.- 6. Aging Brains and Bodies: Evidence and Evolutionary Context.- . Part II Integrative Metacommentary.- 7. The Demands of Office.- 8. The Executive Functioning of the Chief Executive.- . References, Intro, Preface.

Aurelio José Figueredo, PhD, is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona. Until his retirement in 2022, Dr Figueredo served as Director of the Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology (EEP) Laboratory, which engages in cross-disciplinary research integrating studies of comparative psychology, ethology, sociobiology, behavioural ecology, genetics, and development.

Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre, PhD, currently serves as a research associate in the School of Animal and Comparative-Sciences Research at the University of Arizona. His lines of scientific research include the evolution of lethal coalitional aggression in human and nonhuman animals, socioecological correlates of sociopolitical complexity, and multilevel selection.

Steven C. Hertler, PsyD, serves as assistant professor in Saint Elizabeth University’s Psychology Department teaching assessment, methodology, and physiological psychology. He reads and writes about history as it documents war, pestilence, migration, famine, agricultural innovations, as well as the social, industrial, and agricultural revolutions which have rapidly shaped our species’ evolutionary history over the last few millennia.