Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain (5 page)

“We have a lot of firsthand experience caring for our parents and we know we share genes with them and we watched what happened to them and we are very worried,” Willis says.

When I spoke with Willis, she was on sabbatical, trying to learn a new way of analyzing human life-span data with a dizzying array of complex equations. She readily admitted to some frustration with her own middle-aged brain.

“Look,” she told me, “I am fifty-nine and I have to make lists of the things I have to remember. I have to write down that I am going to talk to you and where I am going next, and now I’m trying to learn this new methodology and maybe it takes a little longer than it used to and it can be frustrating.”

But she adds quickly, “I am quite proud that I am beginning to understand it and, remember, when students learn these new things they are
just
studying and nothing else. They have a whole semester to devote to it. But here I am trying to learn it and at the same time I am very, very busy. I’m answering a gazillion e-mails and shopping and writing and talking to you.

“So really, I have to tell myself, give yourself a break. There is no question, the brain does get better at middle age.”

Extending her research, Willis is now digging even deeper into the folds of the middle-aged brain. Using new imaging technology, she is looking to see what kinds of structural changes occur in brain volume in middle age and if those changes affect cognitive abilities as people age. She’s also trying to find out what effect such chronic diseases as diabetes and cardiovascular problems in midlife have on a person’s ability to maintain high levels of brain function later on. All in all, she fully expects to find that the brains of her grown-up subjects do not stand still.

“If we are lucky,” she says, “our brains continue to develop and improve.”

So, if that’s so, how do we do both? How can a brain at age fifty-two be wandering around the living room trying to remember what it is looking for
and
galloping along on a higher plateau than it did in college? Can we break apart that inherent contradiction further? And if so, what do we call the good aspects of our brains? Is it knowledge? Is it expertise? Is it experience? Maybe it has more to do with intuition. Or how about simple survival instincts?

More important—aside from strict cognitive tests—is it possible to measure all this in the real world?

A few years ago, the answer would have been no. But that has changed, too. Researchers have now gone looking for this middle-aged stuff—this middle-aged je ne sais quoi
—
and they’ve found it both in the real world, by following real people through their entire lives, and, increasingly, by using new scanning technology deep inside the complex structure of our brains.

One of those who have looked the hardest is Art Kramer, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Illinois. A couple of years ago, Kramer decided to see if he could find out how a middle-aged brain actually functioned in day-to-day life. In particular, he and his colleagues wanted to see how a middle-aged brain would do in a job that calls for rapid-fire decision making. So they decided to look at air-traffic controllers.

In this country, air-traffic controllers must retire at age fifty-five. Many other countries let controllers work much longer and don’t have more accidents than we do. Who is right? Are we somehow safer here because we insist that those in such jobs, on whose top-level brain function we rely for our safety, have a mandatory age cutoff, regardless of health or ability? Or, asked the opposite way, is it possible that by forcing retirement at age fifty-five, we’re losing out on the best brains—grown-up brains—that could keep us even safer?

To test this, Kramer went to Canada, where controllers can work until they’re sixty-five. There, they put a group of young and older controllers through a seven-hour battery of cognitive tests and then had them, for a long stretch of time, do work that simulated their daily jobs.

“In real life controllers work at computers, and in our simulation we used computers and we had them do all sorts of things, just as if they were working,” Kramer explained when I spoke with him. “Sometimes they were really busy and talking to pilots and watching a screen and having aircraft coming in at different speeds. We also had them sequencing flight patterns. There were a lot of things for them to deal with.”

And what did they find? Older controllers did just as well as their younger colleagues. “They clearly performed as well on simulated tasks as the younger group. There was no difference in level,” said Kramer.

On the cognitive tests, there were differences, but they, too, were instructive. In areas such as processing speed, younger controllers did better. But in two important cognitive areas—visual orientation (the capacity to look at a plane in two dimensions on a computer screen and imagine it in three dimensions in the sky) and dealing with ambiguity (coping well with conflicting information, computer crashes, or even the possibility that the computer might be wrong)—older controllers, again, did just as well.

Studies of pilots find the same thing. In research led by Joy L. Taylor of Stanford/VA Aging Clinical Research Center and published in the journal
Neurology,
118 pilots aged forty to sixty-nine were tested over a three-year period in flight simulators that involved piloting a single-engine aircraft over flat terrain near mountains. Taylor found that older pilots did not do as well the first time they used the simulators, which tested skills in communicating with air-traffic controllers, avoiding traffic, keeping track of cockpit instruments, and landing. But as the tests were repeated, the older pilots were actually better than younger pilots in the underlying point of the whole exercise—avoiding traffic and collisions. In other words, the older pilots took longer to catch on to the new test at first, but they outperformed younger pilots when it came to doing what was most important—keeping the planes where they were supposed to be.

“The thing is, if you have many years of experience, that serves you well and is very, very useful,” Kramer says. “And if an older person maintains the skills he needs, perhaps he can perform in professions that we thought he could not in the past.”

In an odd way, of course, we think we know this, too. We talk a lot about experience, often in glowing terms. We praise it in an architect or a lawyer; we look for it in presidential candidates.

But even as we give experience its due, strangely, we overlook its true nature and impact.

Granted, this is elusive. Can you plot on a graph how well a person manages a staff? Can you count the number of times a person sagely decides to hold her tongue or, through well-practiced tact, leads a bickering group to consensus? For that matter, how do you nail down the exact moment when a parent is being an expert parent, determining whether to hug or scold a difficult child? Can you find, with cognitive tests, the enthusiasm, judgment, and patience an experienced teacher brings to his class?

It’s easy to throw experience around as a catchall—and leave it at that. But that has led to an astounding lack of appreciation for the very place where such experience makes its home—in middle-aged brains. All those years of know-how and practice and right-on-the-money gut feelings aren’t, as one researcher put it, “building up in our knees.”

Over the past few years, there has been an attempt to address this neglect. A whole field has developed to pin down what scientists like to call “expertise.” This does not completely capture the whole nature of what we call experience, either. But it certainly takes some steps in that direction.

Neil Charness, for one, has spent his career looking at all this. Now fifty-nine, Charness first got interested in what makes aging brains retain their power at his first job when he studied bridge players.

Although the prevailing view had been that older bridge players were slower and had poorer memories and were, therefore, weaker players, Charness found, in a sample of real people playing real games, that simply wasn’t true. He found that if the task in the game required mostly speed, the older players performed at a lower level than younger ones. But in the most fundamental task in bridge—basic problem solving—older players “could easily play at high levels.”

Some argue that brain-processing speed is so fundamental to the brain that a decline that comes with age fouls up the works overall, making all functions worse, but Charness and many other neuroscientists are now convinced otherwise.

“So we were left with a kind of paradox,” Charness explained when I spoke with him. “We had tended to think that one skill—processing speed—underlies all skills, but this study helped raise my awareness that that was not true.”

Most recent research in this area has focused on bridge and chess because their outcomes are easy to measure. And Charness says research continues to show that while age takes its toll on the speed of older players, that specific decline in our brains, which begins in our twenties, does not affect overall performance.

“There’s no question that players slow down, but if what you are doing depends on knowledge, then you’re going to do very well as you get older,” Charness says. On average, it takes ten years to acquire a high level of skill in a whole range of areas, from golf to chess. “And it makes sense,” he says. “Which would you rather have on your team, a highly experienced fifty-five-year-old chess master or a twenty-five-year-old novice?”

There have been recent attempts to measure this talent in other real-life settings as well. And those studies, too, find that despite loss of speed and the fact that it can sometimes take older individuals longer to learn certain new skills, they navigate their work lives with increasing ease and dexterity.

One recent study found that older bank managers showed normal age-related decline on cognitive tests, but their degree of professional success depended almost entirely on other types of abilities, the kind that Charness refers to as the “acquired practical knowledge about the business culture and interpersonal relations that made a manager work more effectively.” Over the past few years scientists have developed new ways to measure success in the real world by looking at what they call practical, or tacit, knowledge. One way they do that is to give managers actual scenarios followed by different solutions that have been shown to work or not work in professional settings. Once study participants choose their solutions their scores are rated. And in this case, as in many other similar studies, older workers, calling on their richly connected, calm, pattern-recognizing middle-aged brains, consistently won expert ratings.

And in some ways, our brains are increasingly being given a cultural boost as well. It is not just biology that’s helping. For many years, many people thought that midlife brought only depression or declines in energy or zeal. But now we know that such difficulties can—and do—occur at all ages, not just in the middle years. As the average life span has lengthened, we now have plenty of people growing older in fine cognitive and physical shape whom we can not only look to as role models but also study to figure out what actually takes place to make that happen. While some parts of all this—including, in some cases, our own perceptions of ourselves, as well as the official world of employment—have lagged behind, overall attitudes show signs of a shift. There are more people who are simply not giving in or giving up. And science, increasingly, backs them up.

There is now, for instance, a growing field of study that seeks to figure out how, precisely, to maintain peak performance as we age. It used to be assumed that high levels of achievement at any time of life was mostly a result of luck and genes, with effort only a small part of it all. But it turns out that continued success has much less to do with inborn genius and more to do with what Charness and his colleagues now call “deliberate practice,” a commitment to working at a skill over and over and meticulously zeroing in on faults—the kind of strategic practice that can work at any age.

And science is also now showing how as we age we develop compensatory tricks when necessary. Many of the best baseball pitchers start their careers as fastballers, relying on lightning speed to work their magic. But as time passes, and the edge comes off those ninety-eight-mile-per-hour throws, they adapt and fully develop other pitches—curves, sliders, breaking balls—to remain competitive. The fastball is still there, it’s just not as fast—and the most talented use their wiles to remain the best. It is much the same with the middle-aged brain.

Even the pianist Arthur Rubinstein adopted new tricks as he aged. He sometimes made up for an age-related decline in movement speed by slowing down
before
a difficult passage to, as Charness says, “create a more impressive contrast.”

And the good news is that such masterful skills, for the most part, accumulate naturally, especially in our multilayered modern world. The simple act of survival—in the course of living and making a living in our challenging environment—may make our heads ache, but it also strengthens what’s inside our heads.

As Sherry Willis says: “I think the scores are so much higher in midlife than in young adulthood because we have had so much more life experience, especially on the job. Even computers are helping us to be more logical linear thinkers. The job environment is an intense learning environment, much more intense than when we were in school.

“And it’s odd to think that the brain would
not
continue to develop,” she adds. “Most professional jobs are very stimulating and complex and, even in leisure time, we have more opportunities to take up complicated things like photography. All that complexity can bring on what we call stress, of course, but I think that if we can handle that emotionally, it might all be very good for us—and good for our brains.”

And while outright appreciation is rare, many of those in middle age, when pressed, do offer a surprisingly glowing testament to their own brains.