Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain (27 page)

I got research help from Stephen Sinon, as well as Chris Goelitz, who is not only wise herself but did a lot of the early digging into the topic of wisdom.

The direction and guidance from my editor Wendy Wolf was invaluable, as was the continued support in all sorts of areas from my agent Katinka Matson, whose assistant Karla Taylor also helped.

And, then there’s my family. To Richard, thanks for everything. And thanks, too, to my daughters, Hayley and Meryl, who while not yet middle aged, are already wise in their own ways.

Sources

This book is based primarily on extensive interviews with dozens of neuroscientists, psychologists, and cognitive researchers either in person, on the phone, through e-mail, or at conferences on the aging brain. When appropriate, I have also cited the principal scientific studies whose findings form the framework of the book. I relied, too, on a number of excellent books on aging and the brain, as well as interviews with just about anyone with a middle-aged brain who agreed to talk with me. The following gives sources by chapter.

Ephron, Nora. “Who Are You?” Op-Ed,
New York Times,
August 12, 2007.

 

Safire, William. “The Way We Live Now: On Language; Halfway Humanity.”
The New York Times Magazine,
May 6, 2007, 32.

 

Patchett, Ann. “Mind Over Matter.”
Real Simple,
September 2007, 83.

Much of the beginning of this chapter comes from interviews with and the work of Sherry L. Willis, professor of human development at the Gerontology Center at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania. Willis and her husband, K. Warner Schaie, have for many years run the Seattle Longitudinal Study, whose ongoing results are reported in dozens of scientific studies, books, and articles.

 

Following are the books I found particularly useful:

 

 

Willis, Sherry, and Mike Martin, eds.
Middle Adulthood
. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 2005.

 

Willis, Sherry, and James D. Reid, eds.
Life in the Middle
. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1999.

 

Willis, Sherry, and Susan Whitbourne, eds.
The Baby Boomers Grow Up
. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2006.

The cognitive abilities quiz is from a sample test from the Adult Mental Abilities Test Word Series. (Adapted by special permission of Consulting Psychological Press, Inc., Palo Alto, California. From Schaie-Thurstone Primary Mental Abilities Test, 1985. Constructed by Judith Gonda, 1978.)

Other major studies and book segments on which parts of this chapter were based:

 

Schaie, K. W., S. L. Willis, and I. L. Caskie. “The Seattle Longitudinal Study, Relationship between Personality and Cognition.”
Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition
11 (2004): 304.

 

Birren, J. E., and K. W. Shaie, eds. “Intellectual Development in Adulthood.”
Handbook of the Psychology of Aging,
3rd ed. San Diego: Academic Press, 1996, 291-319.

 

Willis, S. L., K. W. Schaie, and A. O’Hanlon. “Perceived Intellectual Performance Change over Seven Years.”
Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences
49 (1994): 108-18.

 

Willis, Sherry L., Sharon L. Tennstedt, Michael Marsiske, Karlene Ball, Jeffrey Elias, Kathy Mann Koepke, John N. Morris, George W. Rebok, Frederick W. Unverzagt, Anne M. Stoddard, and Elizabeth Wright (for the ACTIVE study Group). “Long-term Effects of Cognitive Training on Everyday Functional Outcomes in Older Adults.”
Journal of the American Medical Association
296, no. 23 (2006): 2805-14.

 

Zelinski, Elizabeth, and Robert F. Kennison. “Not Your Parents’ Test Scores: Cohort Reduces Psychometric Aging Effects.”
Psychology and Aging
22, no. 3 (2007): 546-57.

 

Krampe, Ralf, and Neil Charness. “Aging and Expertise.” Chap. 40 in
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance
. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 723- 42.

 

Charness, N., M. Tuffiash, R. Krampe, E. M. Reingold, and E. Vasyukova. “The Role of Deliberate Practice in Chess Expertise.”
Applied Cognitive Psychology
19 (2005): 151-65.

 

Salthouse, T. A. “The Processing Speed Theory of Adult Age Difference in Cognition.”
Psychology Review
103 (1996): 403-28.

 

Taylor, Joy L., Art Noda, and Jerome A. Yesavage. “Pilot Age and Expertise Predict Flight Simulator Performance.”
Neurology
68 (February 2007): 648-54.

University of Michigan, Press Release.
http://www.med.umich.edu/opm/newspage/2008/hmcognitive.html
.

The beginning of this chapter draws primarily on interviews with and the work of Laura Carstensen, Mara Mather, Susan Turk Charles, Joe Mikels, and John Gabrieli.

 

Among the principal studies I referred to:

 

 

Mather, Mara, Turhan Canli, Tammy English, Sue Whitfield, Peter Wais, Kevin Ochsner, John D. E. Gabrieli, and Laura L. Carstensen. “Amygdala Responses to Emotionally Valenced Stimuli in Older and Younger Adults.”
Psychological Science
15 (2004): 259-63.

 

Charles, Susan Turk, Mara Mather, and Laura L. Carstensen. “Aging and Emotional Memory: The Forgettable Nature of Negative Images for Older Adults.”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
132 (2003): 310-24.

 

Carstensen, Laura, and Joseph A. Mikels. “At the Intersection of Emotions and Cognition: Aging and the Positivity Effect.”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
14, no. 3 (2005): 117-20.

 

Carstensen, L. L., and B. L. Fredrickson. “Influence of HIV Status and Age on Cognition Representations of Others.”
Health Psychology
17 (1998): 494-503.

 

Charles, S. T., M. Mather, and L. L. Carstensen. “Focusing on the Positive: Age Difference in Memory for Positive and Negative and Neutral Stimuli.”
Journal of Experimental Psychology
85 (2003): 163-78.

 

Carstensen, L. L., H. H. Fung, and S. T. Charles. “Socioemotional Selectivity Theory and Regulation of Emotion in the Second Half of Life.”
Motivation and Emotion
27 (2003): 103-23.

 

Mather, M., and M. R. Knight. “Angry Faces Get Noticed Quickly. Aging Does Not Impair Threat Detection.”
Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences
61 (2006): 54-57.

 

Mather, M., and L. Carstensen. “Aging and Attentional Biases for Emotional Faces.”
Psychological Sciences
14 (2003): 409-15.

 

Mather, Mara, and Marisa Knight. “Goal Directed Memory: The Role of Cognition Control in Older Adults’ Emotional Memory.”
Psychology and Aging
20, no. 4 (2005): 554-70.

Mikels, Joseph A., Gregory R. Larkin, Patricia A. Reuter-Lorenz, Laura Carstensen. “Divergent Trajectories in the Aging Mind: Changes in Working Memory for Affective Versus Visual Information.”
Psychology and Aging
20, no. 4 (2005): 542-53.

 

Carstensen, L. L., D. M. Isaacowitz, and S. T. Charles. “Taking Time Seriously: A Theory of Socioemotional Selectivity.”
American Psychologist
54 (1999): 165-81.

 

Charles, Susan Turk, Chandra A. Reynolds, and Margaret Gatz. “Age-Related Differences and Change in Positive and Negative Affect over 23 Years.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
80, no. 1 (2001): 136-51.

In addition to interviews, I referred to or used as background the following studies, articles, and books:

 

 

Hess, Thomas M., Nicole L. Osowski, and Christine M. Leclerc. “Age and Experience Influences on the Complexity of Social Inferences.”
Psychology and Aging
20, no. 3 (2005): 447-59.

 

Hess, Thomas M. “Adaptive Aspects of Social Cognitive Functioning in Adulthood: Age-Related Goal and Knowledge Influences.”
Social Cognition
24, no. 3 (2006): 279-309.

 

Charles, Susan Turk. “Viewing Injustice: Greater Emotion Heterogeneity with Age.”
Psychology and Aging
20, no. 1 (2005): 159-64.

 

Goldberg, Elkhonon.
The Wisdom Paradox
. New York: Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2005.

 

Bartzokis, George, Mace Beckson, Po H. Lu, Keith H. Nuechterlein, Nancy Edwards, and Jim Mintz. “Age-Related Changes in Frontal and Temporal Lobe Volumes in Men.”
Archive of General Psychiatry
58 (2001): 461-65.

 

Benes, F. M., M. Turtle, Y. Khan, and P. Farol. “Myelination of Key Relay Zone in the Hippocampal Formation Occurs in the Human Brain During Childhood, Adolescence, and Adulthood.”
Archive of General Psychiatry
51 (1994): 477-84.

 

Sowell, E., P. Thompson, C. J. Holmes, R. Batth, T. Jerrigan, and A. W. Toga. “Localizing Age-Related Changes in Brain Structure between Childhood and Adolescence Using Statistical Parametric Mapping.”
Neuroimage
9 (1999): 587-97.

 

Giedd, J., J. Blumenthal, N. O. Jeffries, F. X. Castellanos, H. Liu, P. Zijdenbos, T. Paus, A. C. Evans, J. L. Rapoport. “Brain Development during Childhood and Adolescence in a Longitudinal MRI Study.”
Nature Neuroscience
2 (1999): 861-63.

 

Hall, Stephen S. “The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis.”
New York Times Magazine,
May 6, 2007, 58.

 

Ardelt, M., and G. E. Vaillant. “Wisdom as a Cognitive, Reflective and Affective Three-Dimensional Personality Characteristic.” Paper presented at the Gerontological Society of America Annual Meeting, San Francisco, November 2007.

 

Raz, N., F. M. Gunning, D. Head, J. H. Dupuis, J. McQuain, S. D. Briggs, W. J. Loken, A. E. Thorton, and J. D. Acker. “Selective Aging of the Human Cerebral Cortex Observed In Vivo: Differential Vulnerability of the Prefrontal Gray Matter.”
Cerebral Cortex
7 (1997): 268-82.

 

Reistad-Long, Sara. “Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain.”
New York Times,
May 20, 2008, sec. F, p. 5.

 

Betts, Lisa R., Christopher P. Taylor, Allison B. Sekuler, and Patrick J. Bennett. “Aging Reduces Centre-surround Antagonism in Visual Motion Processing.”
Neuron
45 (2005): 361-66.

 

Reyna, V. F., and B. Kiernan. “The development of gist versus verbatim memory in sentence recognition.”
Developmental Psychology
30 (1994): 178-91.

 

Koutstaal, W., and D. L. Schacter. “Gist based false recognition of pictures in older and younger adults.”
Journal of Memory and Language
37 (1997): 555-83.

 

Reyna, V. F., and C. J. Brainerd. “What Theories of Memory Tell Us About the Brain.” Plenary address at the 112th annual convention of the American Psychological Association, Honolulu, 2004.

 

Some material in this chapter also came from a three-day conference called the “Summit on Cognitive Aging” in Washington, D.C., October 10-12, 2007. Organized by the National Institute on Aging, it brought together for the first time psychologists, neuroscientists, nutritionists, geneticists, and animal researchers.

In addition to interviews, I relied on the following:

 

 

Wahl, Hans-Werner, and Andreas Kruse. “Historical Perspectives of Middle Age Within the Life Span.” Chap. 1 in
Middle Adulthood,
edited by Sherry Willis and Mike Martin. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 2005.

 

Moen, Phyllis, and Elaine Wethington. “Midlife Development in a Life Course Context.” Chap. 1 in
Life in the Middle,
edited by Sherry Willis and James D. Reid. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1999.

 

“The MIDUS National Survey: An Overview.” In
How Healthy Are We?: A National Study of Well-Being at Midlife,
O. G., Brim, C. D. Ryff, and R. C. Kessler., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

 

Helson, Ravenna, and Christopher J. Soto. “Up and Down in Middle Age: Monotonic and Nonmonotonic Changes in Roles, Status, and Personality.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
89, no. 2 (2005): 194-204.

 

Helson, R., C. Jones, and V.S.Y. Kwan. “Personality Change Over 40 Years of Adulthood.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
83 (2002): 752-66.

 

Wink, Paul, and Ravenna Helson. “Practical and Transcendent Wisdom: Their Nature and Some Longitudinal Findings.”
Journal of Adult Development
4, no. 1 (1997).

 

Mroczek, Daniel K., and Avron Spiro III. “Change in Life Satisfaction during Adulthood: Findings from the Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
88, no. 1 (2005): 189-202.

 

Levinson, Daniel J., Charlotte N. Darrow, Edward B. Klein, Maria H. Levinson, and Braxton McKee.
The Seasons of a Man’s Life.
New York: Ballantine Books, 1978.

 

Fingerman, Karen L., Pei-Chun Chen, Elizabeth Hay, Kelly E. Cichy, and Eva S. Lefkowitz. “Ambivalent Relations in the Parent and Offspring Relationship.”
Journal of Gerontology
61B, no. 3 (2006): 152-60.

 

Fingerman, Karen L. “ ‘We Had a Nice Little Chat’: Age and Generational Differences in Mothers’ and Daughters’ Descriptions of Enjoyable Visits.”
Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences
55B (2000): 5-106.