Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain (6 page)

Brad Burtner, an air-traffic controller, told me that as far as he’s concerned, there’s “no question” that he’s a better air-traffic controller now than he was when he was younger. “Definitely, definitely, I would say I am much, much better at the job now,” he said.

After nearly thirty years as an air-traffic controller, most of them spent working at the large international airport outside Cincinnati, Burtner was forced to retire in 2008 after he reached age fifty-five. A marathon runner who jogs twelve miles a day, Burtner considers the idea of retiring in middle age so silly he plans on continuing his work at a nearby small private airport that does not have age cutoffs.

This is not to say that he, like most of us, doesn’t notice some missteps. When I spoke with Burtner, he had no trouble ticking off his brain’s deficits. “I clearly have more problems with my memory now,” he said. “When I was younger I could keep all the different altitudes of all the planes in my head, thirty planes at a time. And now I can’t do that. I have to write them down.

“But, you know,” he added, “that’s the way we are supposed to do it anyhow and it’s probably safer. If I had a stroke someone could come up and see where every plane was because I am so careful about writing it down now.”

Burtner sometimes finds it harder to concentrate. “I think I am more easily distracted than I used to be,” he said. “But I know that and I make changes. If someone has the radio on, I will say, hey, could you turn that down?”

And even with those concerns, Burtner insists he is a far safer controller in his fifties than he was in his twenties or even his early thirties.

As Neil Charness says: “The simple fact that older workers do just as well as younger ones in overall performance, despite fairly predictable declines in speed, is a testament to how important these other abilities are.”

Like my friend the poet, Burtner finds he can do his work better largely because it is only now that “all the pieces come together.”

“Now I anticipate situations before they happen. And I always have a backup plan. If there’s a thunderstorm, I know what I’m going to do if the first plan doesn’t work,” he told me.

“The big point,” he said, “is that now I control the situation instead of letting the situation control me. Now I think about the whole situation, how things fit.”

3 A Brighter Place

I’m So Glad I’m Not Young Anymore

The Santa Cruz campus of the University of California sits at the crest of a hill, a small cluster of buildings tucked into a forest of red-woods. To get there, you turn off Highway 1, south of San Francisco, leave the Pacific Ocean behind, and head up a mile-long road that winds its way up to the campus.

In the early 1970s, even those of us at nearby Berkeley considered Santa Cruz the most laid-back place of all. Of course, much of that has changed. As Silicon Valley money flowed over the mountains, roads became clogged with cars that these days are more likely to be BMWs than VW vans.

Still, on the bright warm February day that I visited, I was relieved to find that Santa Cruz had not lost all of its flower-child flavor. As we drove up the hill, we passed long-haired students pedaling clunky-tired bikes, still in tie-dyed shirts. There was a sign that said, simply, PEACE CORPS, and on campus, professors sat on the ground, speaking with circles of smiling students.

Santa Cruz had aged, but in a calm and happy sort of way.

So perhaps it is fitting that it was at Santa Cruz—amid the serene and ancient trees—that a quiet effort had been under way to figure out why humans, as we age, also get happier. Indeed, scientists are finding that, starting around middle age, we begin to adopt a rosier worldview.

This was, of course, not supposed to be. Many of us grew up dreading middle age. We read John Updike’s chronicle of poor Rabbit’s descent into disappointment as he reached middle age, “his prime is soft, somehow pale and sour. . . . [his] thick waist and cautious stoop . . . clues to weakness, a weakness verging on anonymity” We shuddered at Gail Sheehy’s message in
Passages
warning us to beware the impending doom, the “Forlorn Forties.”

What happened to all that?

Well, it turns out that what actually happens is that our moods get not worse but better. In fact, our brains may be set up to make us more optimistic as we age.

It is, even now, a revolutionary view. And it was to hear about this view that I went to Santa Cruz on that day to see Mara Mather
¹
. A cognitive psychologist, Mather is slender, short, athletic, and glowing. She has blond curly hair, light blue eyes, pale and pretty. When I caught up with her, she was sitting in her plant-filled office, sunlight streaming in through a large window. She wore gray pants, a black turtleneck, and dangling silver earrings, and if I hadn’t known that she already had tucked securely under her belt hefty degrees from both Princeton and Stanford as well as a file drawer full of solid science, I would have guessed she was about fifteen years old.

Rather, when we first met, she was thirty-four, and, perhaps because she was only thirty-four, she appeared never to have been exposed to any gloomy assessment of midlife. “I don’t know, maybe I was lucky,” she said. “I ended up with a good view of getting older. I knew my grandmother and she was fun, vital, sociable, extroverted. When I was growing up in Princeton my great-grandfather came to visit us. He was one hundred and he was fine. I thought that’s what getting old was.

“It is a bit surprising. I mean, in middle age, there’s a lot of loss, I know,” she said. Friends die. Parents get sick. So it’s hard to think about our moods improving, but they do.”

I must say, this idea seemed more than odd to me at first. In the thick of middle age myself,
cheeriness
is not the first word that comes to my mind. Stressed-out might be a better description. Most others I spoke with also greeted the idea with hefty skepticism as well. But—slowly and consistently—an alternate thought emerged.

Not long ago, for instance, I was walking to get coffee with my colleague Erica, then fifty-two. We were talking about being in our twenties, as her niece and my daughters were at that point. We talked about how incredibly hard that age is, with its ups and downs, with boyfriends in and out, the “who-am-I’s” and “what-am-I-doing’s.”

“I would never, ever want to be twenty again; it was awful being twenty, awful,” Erica said as we crossed a street in Manhattan. “Now, I know, I’m older and there’s loss.”

We walked a bit farther in silence. “But you know,” she added after a bit, “when I think about it, it’s strange, but even with all that, I’ve never been happier. Isn’t that weird?”

Another woman, who is in her late fifties and a writer at a large magazine, told me she has never had so much to do, with a testy teenager and a mother exhibiting the early signs of dementia. But she said that she, too, noticed something new recently. For whatever reason, she now finds herself focusing less on the downside of life. “I see them, the bad things around or in my day or with my mom, but I am not quite as beaten down by them,” she said.

So how can we explain this newfound serenity? Are we just so fed up with bad things that we simply shut them out? Certainly, such contentment does not at all match the picture we’ve been presented about how this would all play out. Where are the midlife crises? The empty nests? What is going on here?

To understand what might be happening, the best place to start is—again—inside the brain. In particular, we have to look at a tiny sliver deep in the brain called the amygdala. Even if you know nothing about the brain—or think you know nothing—you are nevertheless quite aware of your amygdala. This is your body’s Homeland Security Department. If you see a scary-looking fellow plane passenger, have to talk with your boss about your performance, even speak with your teenager about sex, it’s your amygdala that goes into action, revving up the rest of the body to make that crucial call: fight or flight?

The amygdala is a primitive part of the brain. It is small. (Well, technically that should read, “They are small.” You have two, one on either side of your brain, and in proper plural they are called amygdalae, or “almonds” in Latin, named for their shape and size.)

So what could this ancient alert system, set up to keep early humans away from rampaging lions, be up to in our modern middle age? Not long ago, Mara Mather set out to find out. Working with Laura Carstensen, the Stanford psychologist, and neuroscientist John Gabrieli, now head of a brain-imaging lab at MIT, Mather and her colleagues found—after scanning the amygdalae of young and old—that as we get older, in a remarkably linear fashion, we, and our amygdalae, actually react
less
to negative things.

Over and over, Mather and the other researchers tried to get older people to take the negative view. While they lay in brain scanners, those in the study were shown pictures of standard scenes that are known to elicit positive reactions—puppies, children on the beach—and scenes that trigger negative responses—cockroaches crawling on pizza, people standing over a grave.

And over and over, the positive won out. As we get older, our amygdalae respond less and less to negative stimuli. And since the amygdala is pretty much set up to respond the
most
to the negative, this finding is extraordinary. Even Gabrieli says he was taken aback by the strength of the results, which were compelling. And it’s important to remember that the brain scans were detecting changes in the amygdalae long
before
the people ever became conscious of what they were seeing. Indeed, those in the study had no idea what their brains were doing.

“We are seeing the moment of perception,” Gabrieli says. The study found that our brains—in some automatic, preconscious way—begin to, as they say, accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.

To see how impressive this is, it helps to know a little context. For years it was simply assumed that as we aged—and our bodies started to slow—our emotions would generally follow suit, all becoming fainter as the years went by. On one level that view held sway with scientists because it seemed to make perfect sense.

But, like a lot of what we thought we knew about the brain, that, too, was wrong. Indeed, when the study of aging began in earnest (the serious study of aging is only a few decades old), quite the opposite turned out to be the case. As we age, our emotions not only remain largely intact but are also considerably more robust than our abilities in some other areas, such as how well we recall certain facts. As we get older, for instance, it’s easier to pinpoint how we felt on a given day—“I felt sad”—than what was actually happening—“it was raining.”

But even that research still got one large part of the picture upside down. It assumed that if our moods stayed strong, the strongest moods would be the negative ones. Early aging researchers, as we’ve said, based nearly all their work in nursing homes and, not surprisingly, found considerable grouchiness.

Luckily, as she started her own investigations, Mather didn’t even think of looking in such places. She had a more open mind. And when she arrived at Stanford to do postdoctoral work, she found that Laura Carstensen not only had a mind as open as hers but was already deeply engaged in upending long-held views of how our brains act as we age.

“I got to Stanford and Laura was doing all these incredible studies about aging and I was interested in memory and it just seemed natural,” Mather said.

At first meeting, Carstensen, too, hardly seems a scientific revolutionary. When we first met for lunch at the elegant faculty dining room at Stanford University, she looked—with a swath of white hair at her forehead—every bit the serious university professor that she is. But this was not the full picture. As I got to know Carstensen and began to appreciate her instincts for looking at issues in new and different ways, I began to think of her as a kind of Che Guevara of science, determined to, as she says, “change the nature of aging.”

Growing up in upstate New York, Carstensen was already a rebel. Even though her father was a college professor, she initially thumbed her nose at college and at age seventeen got married (“And I wasn’t even pregnant,” she says, still a bit amazed at her younger self). At one point, Carstensen got into a car accident, broke her leg, and ended up stuck for months in a rehabilitation center “with all the old women with broken hips.”

And it was there that the seeds of insurrection were sown. Seeing that she was young and bored, the staff put Carstensen, then twenty-one, in charge of watching out for the older women, and as the months went by, she saw that some did well and some did not.

“So many of them had run out of money and were alone and had to sell their houses to pay for their care,” Carstensen told me. “But others had a lot of family that came to visit and were the matriarchs of their families and were doing fine, and I began to question whether aging was just a biological process. It is biological, but it has to do with circumstances, with social context, even with emotions.”

Carstensen became more intrigued by what she was seeing around her at the rehab center, and when her father brought her tapes of a psychology lecture class at a nearby university, Carstensen was hooked. “I didn’t want to study medicine and just find out about the biology of aging. I wanted to know how biology and social influence interacted.”

Once at Stanford, Carstensen set out to do just that, conducting study after study that looked at the intersection of aging and emotion to figure out exactly what was going on.

First, she tackled memory. In one of her most influential studies, published in 2003, Carstensen, along with Mather and psychologist Susan Turk Charles, at the University of California at Irvine, found that, starting in early middle age, around age forty-one, people recalled more positive images (smiling babies) than negative ones (ducks caught in an oil spill). They found that the shift continued for a number of years—they tested people up to age eighty—and applied equally to men and women, office workers and plumbers, and showed up consistently across ethnic groups.