Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

ALSO BY BARBARA STRAUCH

The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell Us about Our Kids

VIKING Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

Copyright © Barbara Strauch, 2010

All rights reserved

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Strauch, Barbara.

The secret life of the grown-up brain : the surprising talents of the middle aged mind / Barbara Strauch.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-19008-1

1. Middle-aged persons—Mental health. 2. Memory disorders. 3. Brain. I. Title. RC451.4.M54S77 2010

616.890084’4—dc22 2009030815

 

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To my family

Introduction

The Changing Landscape of Middle Age

For most of human history, middle age has been largely ignored. Birth, youth, old age, death have all been given their due. But middle age has not only been neglected, it’s not even been considered a distinct entity.

For most of human history, of course, such neglect made perfect sense. Lives were brutal and brief; there wasn’t time for a middle. By the time of the Greeks, there was a reverence for maturity; Greek citizens could not become jury members until age fifty, for instance. But a Greek middle age was not even close to our current version. Not that many Greeks made it that far, for one thing—the average life expectancy in ancient Greece was thirty years old. For those lucky souls who lived longer, it was more like reaching a high peak, taking a sniff of the bracing mountain air, and then quickly descending into the valley of old age.

Now, of course, all that has changed. With human life spans stretching out—the average life span in the developed world just a century ago was about forty-seven years and is now about seventy-eight—we have a long expanse of time in the middle when we’re no longer chasing toddlers and not yet rolling down corridors in wheelchairs. With that shift, middle age has come into its own. Books have been written, movies made, studies launched.

But even with this newfound attention, one aspect of middle age has remained neglected—our brains. Even as science began to pay attention to what was happening to our bodies and our lives in the middle years, it did not think about what was taking place inside our heads. The prevailing view was that a brain during midlife was, if anything, simply a young brain slowly closing down.

Now that’s changed, too. With new tools such as brain scanners, genetic analysis, and more sophisticated long-term studies, the middle-aged brain is finally getting its due. Much of the new attention, to be honest, is driven by fear. Many of us—and many scientists themselves—have watched parents suffer the devastations of dementia. We’re frightened.

A few years ago, after I wrote a book on the teenage brain, I would sometimes give talks for juvenile justice or school groups. After a speech, I was usually driven to the airport by the person who had arranged the event. More often than not, that person, like me, was middle-aged, and as we drove along, he or she would say something along the lines of: “You know, you should write a book about
my
brain; my brain suddenly is horrible, I can’t remember a thing. I forget where I’m going or why. And the names, the names are awful. It’s scary.”

I would smile and nod in agreement, thinking of my own middle-aged brain. Where
do
all those names go? Do they float out of our heads and into the trees? Are they up there bouncing around the interstellar clouds, gleefully watching us fumble about? And
is
this the start of something truly awful?

Not long ago, the writer Nora Ephron, who at sixty-seven was at the outer edge of what’s considered the modern middle age, wrote an essay about all this called “Who Are You?”

“I know you,” she wrote. “I know you well. It’s true. I always have a little trouble with your name, but I do know your name. I just don’t know it at this moment. We’re at a big party. We’ve kissed hello. . . . You’ve been to my house for dinner. I tried to read your last book. . . . I am becoming desperate. It’s something like Larry. Is it Larry? No it’s not. Jerry? No it’s not . . . I’m losing my mind. . . .”

Originally, I shared such concerns. My aim was to find out where the names go, the Larrys, the Jerrys, the “who are you’s.” From a neuroscience point of view, I wanted to know if those names were hidden somewhere, a brain equivalent to the secret hole in the universe where all the library cards, favorite pens, and glasses disappear. I wanted to find out what was going wrong in middle age, and what it meant.

After all, it’s more than just memory and names. Our brains at midlife have other issues as well. Sometimes when I’m driving now, I look up and realize that I’ve not been paying the slightest attention to the road but instead have been thinking of something else entirely, like how I’m going to brine the turkey for Thanksgiving. The smallest interruption can be distracting, my brain flitting away from what it was doing and off into another land. Just the other day, while packing for a trip, I spent five frustrating minutes looking for my toothbrush to put in my suitcase only to find that I had, just minutes before, already
put
my toothbrush in my suitcase. After I’d packed it, I’d gotten distracted looking for a sweater and, whoosh, all thoughts of toothbrush-already-in-suitcase were swept out of my head.

It would be nice to say that this kind of thing happens rarely. In fact, it happens all the time. And while other ages have their troubles, too—one would hardly call your average teenager a model of mind-fulness, for instance—the changes in my brain now seem to have a qualitative difference. In areas of memory and focus, in particular, a tipping point has been reached—a point at which I now find myself in a kind of automatic way relying on my twenty-something daughters not only to remind me of things I fear I’ll forget but also to bring my mind back to where it started. What
was
I talking about? At middle age, we know we’re different. We know our brains are different. What has happened? Where have our minds gone? From a neuroscience perspective, are we all—bit by bit—losing our minds?

In the end, I spent considerable time tracking down the lost names, and I will tell you where they go and—according to current thought anyhow—what it all means. I also dug into the latest science on our tendency to lose our train of thought as well. Over the past few years, scientists have begun to examine this mindlessness, finding where, in fact, our middle-aged brains go when they wander off track.

Along the way, though, this book took an about-face. It’s not that I forgot what I was writing about. But when I looked deeper into the latest science of the modern middle-aged brain, I found not bad news but good.

As it turns out, the brain in middle age has another story to tell that’s quite the opposite of the one I’d expected. This is the middle-aged brain that we’ve all, in a sense, mislaid. As we bumble through our lives, it’s easier to notice the bad things.

But as science has begun to home in on what exactly is happening, a new image of the middle-aged brain has emerged. And that is this: Our middle-aged brains are surprisingly competent and surprisingly talented. We’re smarter, calmer, happier, and, as one scientist, herself in middle age, put it: “We just know stuff.” And it’s not just a matter of us piling facts into our brains as we go along. Our brains, as they reach midlife, actually begin to reorganize—and start to act and think differently.

In the end, the brain I had not expected to find was the brain I wanted to write about: this middle-aged brain, which just as it’s forgetting what it had for breakfast can still go to work and run a multinational bank or school or city, a whole country even, then return home to deal with cars that talk, teenagers who don’t, sub-prime mortgage meltdowns, neighbors, parents.

This is a brain—a grown-up brain—that we all take for granted. In a way, it’s quite understandable. As we live longer, middle age is a moving target. A lot is not yet clear. Recently, columnist William Safire was taken to task by a reader for calling the actor Harrison Ford middle-aged at 64. “If he were literally middle-aged, then he could expect to live to 128,” the reader pointed out. “By describing themselves as middle-aged, are not those in their 60s and even 70s guilty of some rather over-optimistic math?”

Most researchers locate modern middle age somewhere between the ages of forty and sixty-eight. But even that’s a bit squishy. As life spans continue to stretch, what’s the end and what’s the middle?

As I write this, I am, at age fifty-six, decidedly middle-aged. No one, not even me at my most optimistic, would describe me as young. And no one, with the possible exception of my children, would call me old.

So middle-aged it is. But what, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, does that actually mean? And what does it mean for my brain?

This book is an attempt to answer that question.

Over the past few years, in fact, 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.