A New Recipe for Aging Brains

I have been travelling recently – New Zealand, Goa, Delhi—and one of the interesting surprises has been the increasing emphasis that the old people are placing on their physical conditioning nowadays. Wherever I went, I saw old men – and women- out jogging in their jumpsuits, lugging bottles of water, and talking breathlessly of other physical pursuits they were pursuing or intended to pursue. Even in staid India, it was a shock to see old men in shorts—and not all of them belonged to the RSS- out for a stroll or a run early in the morning. In my own neighborhood, groups of men in shorts and the latest Nike shoes now often gathered in the nearby lawns for a brisk walk or “laughing therapy” and then long desultory gossip sessions.

It was clear that older people in India at least were paying a great deal more attention to their physical condition than their parents ever did. And this was also reflected in the statistics. The average life expectancy in India has gone up from 49 years in 1950 to 69 years in 2000.

What I was curious about was what they did to keep their minds similarly invigorated. I had noticed an increase of interest in crosswords and sudoko in my contemporaries. The new word among them was “a crossword a day keeps Alzheimer’s away”. But really besides the obligatory morning crossword session in the bathroom, what else could one do to keep the aging brain muscles alive and well, if not bursting with creativity.

With age, it seems that most people accept a slowing down and lack of memory as a given and do little to stimulate its activities. Also brains in middle age also get more easily distracted. Start searching for your reading glasses to read a headline go answer the doorbell and — whoosh — not only do all thoughts of glasses search disappear but also why you were searching for them in the firs place. Indeed, aging brains, even in the middle years, very often falls into what’s called the default mode, during which the mind wanders off and begins daydreaming.

Given all this, the question arises, can an old brain learn, and then remember what it learns? Put another way; is this a brain that should be in school?

The latest research says that it is not necessary to give up and even an aging brain can be made to learn new things. While it’s tempting to focus on the flaws in older brains, that observation unfortunately overlooks how capable they’ve become. Over the past several years, scientists have looked deeper into how brains age and confirmed that they continue to develop through and beyond middle age. Many long held views, including the one that 40 percent of brain cells are lost in the aged, have been overturned. What is stuffed into your head may not have vanished but has simply been squirreled away in the folds of your neurons. And it is possible to find and to revive them.

Recently, researchers have found that the brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can. The trick is finding ways to keep brain connections in good condition and to grow more of them.

“The brain is plastic and continues to change, not in getting bigger but allowing for greater complexity and deeper understanding,” says Kathleen Taylor, a professor at St. Mary’s College of California, who has studied ways to teach adults effectively. “As adults we may not always learn quite as fast, but we are set up for this next developmental step.”

It seems that one way to nudge neurons in the right direction in aging brains is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young. With a brain already full of well-connected pathways, adult learners should “jiggle their synapses a bit” by confronting thoughts that are contrary to their own. Continued brain development and a richer form of learning, according to these researchers, require that you “bump up against people and ideas” that are different. If you always hang around with those you agree with and read things that agree with what you already know, you’re not going to wrestle with your established brain connections. It is such stretching that will best keep a brain in tune: get out of the comfort zone to push and nourish your brain. Do anything from learning a foreign language to taking a different route to work, from arguing with young people with different ideas to reading columnist you vehemently disagree with!

So there you have the latest scientific research telling you that the way to remain young in mind is to well become young in mind, questioning all that wisdom you have patiently accumulated over a lifetime and arguing once again with unformed and young minds! And just when you thought you had laid to rest all those pesky questions from your children, researchers are telling you to once again encourage them to question all your authority and hard earned sagacity if you want to remain young in mind and keep your brain muscles in trim.