Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain (4 page)

What’s more, we’re quite smart. And, on some level—if we think about it—we know that, too. For instance, my friend who complained about battling her brain every day was recently promoted to a new, high-level job that involves intense scrutiny of detail. And despite her middle-aged brain—perhaps
because
of her middle-aged brain—she’s already handling that job with ease. She knows what to pay attention to and what to ignore. She knows how to get from point A to point B. She knows what she’s doing.

The middle-aged brain is a contradiction. Some parts run better than others. But perhaps more than at any other age, our brains in middle age are more than the sum of their parts.

In fact, as we shall see, long-term studies now provide evidence that, despite a misstep now and then, our cognitive abilities continue to grow. For the first time, researchers are pulling apart such qualities as judgment and wisdom and finding out how and why they develop. Neuroscientists are pinpointing how our neurons—and even the genes that govern them—adapt and even improve with age. “I’d have to say from what we know now,” says Laura Carstensen, director of the Stanford Center on Longevity at Stanford University and a leader of the new research, “that the middle-aged brain is downright formidable.”

A friend who is a poet told me recently that she does not think that she could have written the poetry she does until she had reached her mid-fifties—until her brain had reached its formidable age.

“It feels like all the pieces needed to come together,” she said. “It’s only now that my brain feels ready. It can see how the world fits together—and make poetry out of it.”

2 The Best Brains of Our Lives

A Bit Slower, but So Much Better

Here’s a short quiz. Look at the following list:

January February March April January February March May January February March June January February March—

What would the next word be?

Got it? Now, how about this one:

January February Wednesday March April Wednesday May June Wednesday July August Wednesday—

What would the next word be?

Now try it with numbers. Look at this series:

1 4 3 2 5 4 3 6 5

What would the next number be?

Did you get them all?

These are examples of questions that measure basic logic and reasoning. The answers are, in order, July, September, and, for the number sequence the next number would be 4 (and then 76. The series goes like this: 1-43 2-54 3-65 4-76 and so on).

Such problems test our abilities to recognize patterns and are routinely used by scientists to see how our cognitive—or thinking—processes are holding up. And if you’re middle-aged and have figured out all of them, you can be proud—your brain is humming along just fine.

Indeed, despite long-held beliefs to the contrary, there’s mounting evidence that at middle age we may be smarter than we were in our twenties.

How can that be? How can we possibly be smarter
and
be putting the bananas in the laundry basket? Smarter and still unable, once we get to the hardware store, to remember why we went there in the first place? Smarter and, despite our best efforts to concentrate on one thing at a time, finding our brains bouncing about like billiard balls?

To begin to understand how that might be, there is no better person to start with than Sherry Willis. A psychologist at Pennsylvania State University, Willis and her husband, K. Warner Schaie, run one of the longest, largest, and most respected life-span studies, the Seattle Longitudinal Study, which was started in 1956 and has systematically tracked the mental prowess of six thousand people for more than forty years. The study’s participants, chosen at random from a large health-maintenance organization in Seattle, are all healthy adults, evenly divided between men and women with varying occupations and between the ages of twenty and ninety. Every seven years, the Penn State team retests participants to find out how they are doing.

What’s important about this study is that it’s longitudinal, which means it studies the
same
people over time. For many years, researchers had information from only cross-sectional human life-span studies, which track different people across time looking for patterns. Most longitudinal studies, considered the gold standard for any scientific analysis, were not begun until the 1950s and are only now yielding solid information. And they show that we’ve been wildly misguided about our brains.

For instance, the first big results from the Seattle study, released just a few years ago, found that study participants functioned better on cognitive tests in middle age, on average, than they did at any other time they were tested.

The abilities that Willis and her colleagues measure include vocabulary—how many words you can recognize and find synonyms for; verbal memory—how many words you can remember; number ability—how quickly you can do multiplication, division, subtraction, and addition; spatial orientation—how well you can tell what an object would look like rotated 180 degrees; perceptual speed—how fast you can push a button when you see a green arrow; and inductive reasoning—how well you can solve logical problems similar to those mentioned above. While not perfect, the tests are a fair indicator of how well we do in certain everyday tasks, from deciphering an insurance form to planning a wedding.

And what the researchers found is astounding. During the span of time that constitutes the modern middle age—roughly age forty through the sixties—the people in the study did better on tests of the most important and complex cognitive skills than the same group of people had when they were in their twenties. In four out of six of the categories tested—vocabulary, verbal memory, spatial orientation, and, perhaps most heartening of all, inductive reasoning—people performed best, on average, between the ages of forty to sixty-five.

“The highest level of functioning in four of the six mental abilities considered occurs in midlife,” Willis reports in her book
Life in the Middle,
“for both men and women, peak performance . . . is reached in middle age.

“Contrary to stereotypical views of intelligence and the naïve theories of many educated laypersons, young adulthood is not the developmental period of peak cognitive functioning for many of the higher order cognitive abilities. For four of the six abilities studied, middle-aged individuals are functioning at a higher level than they did at age 25.”

When I first learned of this, I was surprised. After researching the science on the adolescent brain, I knew that our brains continue to change and improve up to age twenty-five. Many scientists left it at that, believing that while our brains underwent large-scale renovations through our teens, that was about it. I, too, thought that as the brain entered middle age, it was solidified and staid, at best—and, more likely, if it was changing in any big way, was headed downhill.

After speaking with Willis one afternoon, I went out to dinner with friends and couldn’t resist talking about what was still whirring in my head. “Did you know,” I asked the middle-aged group over pasta and wine, “that our brains are better—
better—
than they were in our twenties?”

The reaction was swift.

“You’re crazy,” said one of my dinner companions, Bill, fifty-two, a civil engineer who owns his own consulting firm. “That’s simply not true. My brain is simply
not
as good as it was in my twenties, not even close. It’s not as fast; it’s harder to solve really hard problems. Come on, if I tried to go to Stanford engineering school today, I would be toast.
TOAST!
”

Bill is not wrong. Our brains do slow down by certain measures. We can be more easily distracted and, at times, find it more taxing to tackle difficult new problems, not to mention our inability to remember why we went down to the basement.

Bill does not have to go to school anymore, but even in his day-to-day work he compares his current brain to his younger brain and sees only its shortcomings. However, Bill is
not
seeing that his brain is far more talented than he gives it credit for. If you look at the data from the Willis research, the scores for those four crucial areas—logic, vocabulary, verbal memory, and spatial skills—are on a higher plane in middle age than the scores for the same skills ever were when those in her study were in their twenties. (There are also some interesting gender gaps. Top performance was reached a bit earlier on average for men, who peaked in their late fifties. Men also tended to hold on to processing speed a bit longer and do better overall with spatial tests. Women, on the other hand, consistently did better than men on verbal memory and vocabulary and their scores kept climbing later into their sixties.)

So why don’t we all know that? Why is Bill, along with so many of us in middle age, swallowed by the sense that, brain-wise, we are simply less than we were? In part, it’s the steady drumbeat of our culture, determined to portray aging as simply one loss after another. In part, it’s because for years people in aging science studied only those in nursing homes, hardly the center of high-powered inductive reasoning. Researchers simply skipped the middle.

But our own brains are not helping, either. Brains are set up to detect differences, spot the anomaly, find the snag in the carpet, the snake in the grass. So we notice changes in our own brains, too. But the differences we register in all likelihood refer to our brains of a few years ago, not the brains we had twenty-five years earlier. And when we notice slight shifts, which is certainly possible, we’re convinced that our brains have been in a downward trajectory since graduate school.

In other words, we pick up on the tiny defects in the carpet but fail to notice the more subtle, gradual process that over the years has painstakingly built our brains into a high-functioning, formidable force—a renovated room.

In the Seattle study, those between the ages of fifty-three and sixty, although still at a higher level than when they were in their twenties, nevertheless had “some modest declines” compared with a previous seven-year period. This difference in certain mental abilities from the earlier years, however slight, is what we notice. But it’s an illusion.

“The middle-aged individual’s perception of his or her intellectual functioning may be more pessimistic than the longitudinal data would suggest,” says Willis. “Comparisons . . . may be more likely to be made over shorter intervals. One may have a more vivid or accurate perception of oneself seven years ago than twenty years ago.”

In short, Bill was most likely thinking of his brain being slightly worse in some small ways at fifty-two than it was at forty-five—not twenty-five—when he assessed how poorly he thought he was doing now. The result is that, like most of us, he is keenly aware of flaws and completely unaware of the overall high level of ability of his own middle-aged brain.

“Your friend Bill does not realize how well he is doing because he is a fish in water” and can’t see how nice the water is, says Neil Charness, a psychologist at Florida State University and an expert in this area of research.

Of course, Bill is not the only fish in that particular body of water.

“For a long time we all thought that the peak was in young adulthood,” Willis told me. “We thought that the physical and the cognitive went in parallel and, partly for that reason, we funnel our educational resources into young adulthood thinking that is when we can most profit from it. But remember all this is new. We have never had this long middle age when we are doing so much. And we are finding out new things about this new period of life all the time.”

Indeed, some of the more recent research has started to break up aging into more distinct segments for examination. It is no longer just young versus old. Now we are looking even more closely at the middle years, even breaking those years into smaller segments to see how our current brains compare to those in previous decades.

A study by Elizabeth Zelinski at the University of Southern California, for instance, compared those who were seventy-four now with those who were that age sixteen years ago. She found that the current crop did far better on a whole range of mental tests. In fact, their scores were closer to those of someone fifteen years younger in earlier testing, findings that, as Zelinski points out, have “very interesting implications for the future, especially in terms of employment.”

There’s also a heartening downward trend now showing up in broad measures of cognitive impairment in individuals, the kind of mild forgetting that can plague brains as they age. A recent study by University of Michigan researchers found that the prevalence of this minor type of impairment in those seventy and older went down 3.5 percentage points between 1993 and 2002—that is, from 12.2 percent to 8.7 percent.

Nevertheless it’s easy to be concerned. Many of us have watched parents who, instead of dying quickly by falling off cliffs or tractors, spent years dealing with the debilitating effects of chronic ailments such as heart disease or Alzheimer’s.