As a person who has long made his living in part though my tendency to be a sponge for information of all sorts, I confess to being a little worried that my brain in midlife might be morphing into the equivalent of those compulsive collectors' messy houses in the TV show Hoarders. Every time I have trouble remembering a name or phone number, I can't help but imagine the disorder within my disorderly medial temporal lobes. Snippets of the internal monologue of James Joyce's Ulysses, scenes from 1950s Noir films, Frida Kahlo's eyebrows, the first names of various members of the Ramones, and the scoring averages of the 1967 Philadelphia 76ers starting lineup seem to be swirling around in an increasingly viscous mix, slowly but surely slowing my intellectual processes to a confused crawl.
But not to worry, says New York Times health and medical editor Barbara Strauch in her just released book, The Secret Life of the Grownup Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind.As it turns out, my midlife brain--and probably yours, too--is not only not declining, but actually is still peaking. After studying the state of the art in neuroscience, Strauch reports that researchers no longer believe that the aging brain simply decays and loses functionality over time, becoming less agile and more forgetful. Instead, she writes:
Researchers have found out a great deal about the middle-aged brain. They have found that--despite some bad habits--it is at its peak in those years and stays there longer than any of us ever dared to hope. As it helps us navigate through our lives, the middle-aged brain cuts through the muddle to find solutions, knows whom and what to ignore, when to zig and when to zag. It stays cool; it adjusts. There are changes taking place that allow us to see a fuller picture of the world, even be wildly creative. In fact, the most recent science shows that serious deficits in important brain functions--ones we care most about--do not occur until our late seventies and, in many cases, far beyond.
I've just plunged into the book, which--if you're in a hurry to check it out--is available as a download from the Sony eBook store. But in a recent NPR interview, Strauch reveals that people in midlife actually tend to score higher in tests of inductive reasoning, verbal memory, vocabulary and other skills than they did in their twenties.
In some ways, Strauch notes, the midlife brain actually is more agile than its younger version, because the brain's white matter, which is composed of fat and coats the tails of brain cells, keeps increasing as we get older. White matter was once thought to be largely inactive, compared to the more familiar gray matter that we usually associate with intellectual activity. But as a 2009 study published in Nature Neuroscience indicates, white matter also plays an important role in learning and utilization of information.
"As we do things, as we learn things, the white matter increases and the brain signals move faster," she says. "And this was also a shock but they find that the white matter peaks in middle age. So that itself might [help explain] middle-aged wisdom. Because the brain sees connections, it sees the full picture. And one friend of mine, she's an AIDS doctor in her 50s, she says 'When I walk into a hospital room now, I can size up the situation much faster.' We get to the gist of an argument faster."
In an article for Wowwowwow.com, Strauch also notes that there's a lot we can do to improve our brainpower in midlife. And she's not just talking about crossword puzzles. Instead, it's crucial to move beyond recalling information that we know, and grapple with complicated new ideas and new activities that force us to step outside of our comfort zones. That can range from making new friends or learning to play the banjo or the upright bass, to having friendly debates with people who differ with us about health care reform or whether Rocky really deserved the Oscar for Best Picture in 1977, instead of Taxi Driver. She notes that learning experts say that transformative learning requires us to confront a "disorienting dilemma," - that is, concept or contradiction that challenges our view of the world.