Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain (8 page)

Perhaps not surprisingly, there aren’t many scientific studies that focus on the ability in middle age to keep one’s eyes closed or mouth shut. But the James notion does have an uncanny similarity to work by Laura Carstensen and Mara Mather showing that emotional regulation increases with age.

As we get older, we also have more mixed emotions, a trait that works in our favor. A study by Susan Turk Charles found that when viewing a scene of clear injustice—a film clip from the movie
The Great Santini,
for instance, in which an African-American man with a lisp is mocked by a white man, or a clip from the movie
The Curse of the Working Class,
where a husband yells at and hits his wife—younger people react only with anger, but older people are both angry
and
sad.

This more complex, nuanced response to the world slows us down, restricting impulsive acts. And that may be good for our own survival, as well as that of the group—another case in which a middle-aged brain may function better simply because of how it’s set up. “If you have one emotion it is easier to act,” Charles explained. “And if you’re on the savanna and a lion is chasing you, that quick action may help you get out of there. But in our complex world, it might be good to go slower, to think twice.”

Even among scientists, the search for wisdom has a rich history and one not reserved to pure biology. One of the most prominent of the early life-span researchers, Paul Baltes, was, before he died several years ago, head of the highly respected Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Baltes became fascinated with the possibility of scientifically deconstructing the building blocks of wisdom and spent years on what became known as the Berlin Wisdom Project. That project searched for wisdom anywhere it could, including the study of proverbs such as the Serenity Prayer (“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference”).

In the end, Baltes and his colleagues settled on a series of hypothetical questions about life choices, the right answers to which, they believed, equaled wisdom. The answers rested largely on the ability to consider variables—to look at the big, messy picture. For example, one question might be: What’s the best way to get to Chicago?

Responding off the tops of their heads, some might answer quickly, saying something like, “Get on a plane.”

But a few would take the time to consider the variables—the messy picture—and ask more questions to narrow the possibilities: “Well, tell me, how many people are going? How much time do you have to get there? How much do you want to spend? How long will you stay?”

And while such hypothetical questions might seem simplistic, they nevertheless illustrate the complex ways our brains operate day in and day out. Considering the various ramifications of a situation, Baltes believed, means you have a brain that takes the measured, long—and wise—view.

After many years of such testing, Baltes and colleagues, while allowing that it’s possible to be wise and young, decided that those who scored the highest on this sort of question and were, therefore, in their terms, the wisest were around sixty-five years old—and that peak was reached after a fairly long trek along the middle-aged “plateau” of sustained wisdom-ness.

Following in Baltes’s footsteps more recently, Monika Ardelt, a sociology professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, has put together an intriguing scale that determines how wise a person is by his ability to cope in the actual world. She measures a person’s wisdom according to how well he performs in three dimensions:
cognitive,
which she describes as the “desire to know the truth and be able to look at gray and not see everything in black and white,” as well as the ability to “make important decisions despite life’s unpredictability”;
refl ective,
the ability and willingness to look at different perspectives; and
affective
, the level of sympathy and compassion for others.

Ardelt has now matched outcomes on her measures against a set of data from Harvard University, which has been tracking a group of 150 men for more than forty years. Although she is still refining her findings, Ardelt told me that she’s found distinct correlations between high scores on two different three-dimensional wisdom measures at midlife and in old age, and certain personality traits found in the Harvard study.

In an in-depth study of eight long-term participants, the most decisive factor that predicted wisdom was their level of self-centeredness. By her measure and Harvard’s, it was those who focused on something outside themselves who turned out to be the most wise, a message, of course, that we’ve been told—and often ignored—for centuries.

“It was really striking,” Ardelt told me. “Those who were high-high (wise at both fifty and eighty) also scored very low on self-centeredness. They cared about others. They were giving in some way or another. And those who were primarily concerned about themselves, or their standing in the community, scored very low on the wisdom scale.”

Ardelt believes such wisdom comes directly from taking a broader perspective over time. Clearly, as she says, there are still “a lot of old fools” out there. Wisdom does not always develop automatically. And, as she puts it, we live in a society that, rather than rewarding those who are selfless—who teach or care for others—instead glorifies those who think mostly of their own gain—those who seek money for money’s sake, for instance.

“We could have a society that fosters wisdom more,” she said, a bit ruefully.

For the most part, die-hard neuroscientists have regarded this kind of discussion as squishy nonsense. But that’s changing rapidly. Some are finding what they now call wisdom deep in the brain’s very structure and workings—and in the midst of middle age.

In particular, many equate wisdom with an increased capacity, as we age, to recognize patterns and anticipate situations, to predict a likely future, and to act appropriately. As Neil Charness, who studies expertise, puts it, human brains are “pattern recognizers par excellence.

“Humans are not called homo sapiens sapiens—knowing man—for nothing,” Charness says. “We can size up what is going on and figure out what course of action is most promising and we use hundreds of millions of patterns to guide the process.”

John Gabrieli, the neuroscientist at MIT, says it helps to understand this signature talent by thinking of something as simple as an apple. Even if the apple is only an outline on paper, or painted purple, or has big bites taken out of it, we still recognize it as an apple because that’s how our brains are set up. It might not look like a standard apple, but our brains, through years of building up connections, become quite good at recognizing even vaguely similar patterns and drawing appropriate conclusions. Studies have found that we handle situations better when we know something about the situation beforehand, when we recognize at least part of a pattern we’ve seen before, which is more likely to occur for a middle-aged brain than for a younger one. “It’s stunning how well a brain can recognize patterns,” Gabrieli says. “And particularly at middle age, we have small declines, but we have
huge
gains” in this ability to see connections.

In our own worlds, while we may take this for granted, we often have a sense that we can see patterns and grasp underlying concepts with greater ease. Elkhonon Goldberg, a professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine, calls these established brain patterns “cognitive templates” and believes they’re behind an older brain’s ability to better predict and navigate life. Not long ago, Goldberg—at the “ripe middle age” of fifty-seven—decided to take stock of his own brain and the results were fairly good. Indeed, as he writes in
The Wisdom Paradox,
he began to realize that while he might have a harder time at strenuous mental workouts, he was also increasingly capable of a kind of “mental magic.”

“Something rather intriguing is happening in my mind that did not happen in the past,” he writes. “Frequently, when I am faced with what would appear from the outside to be a challenging problem, the grinding mental computation is somehow circumvented, rendered, as if by magic, unnecessary. The solution comes effortlessly, seamlessly, seemingly by itself. . . . I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight. . . . Is it perchance that coveted attribute . . . wisdom?”

If an older brain is confronted with new information, it might take longer for it to assimilate it and use it well. But faced with information that in some way—even a very small way—relates to what’s already known, the middle-aged brain works quicker and smarter, discerning patterns and jumping to the logical endpoint.

A friend of mine who has been a doctor for more than thirty years said she can now often instantly evaluate a situation, making it easier to come up with effective solutions. “When I walk into a hospital room now, there’s a lot in my head already,” she said. “I can still be surprised. But in a lot of cases I can foresee what will happen and that helps a lot to figure out what to do, what will work best.”

In many ways, of course, all this sounds a lot like what we like to call intuition or gut instinct. Neuroscientists don’t like to use such words. They prefer the word
gist.

Defined broadly, gist is the ability to understand—and remember—underlying major themes. Here again, we get better at grasping the big picture—because of the intrinsic nature of how our brains operate.

A series of intriguing studies has shown that we more easily wrap our brains around a main idea and remember it better, too, as we age. If you give a child a list of fruits—apple, pear, banana, grape, for instance—he will be quite good at reciting the list verbatim. But beginning sometime in our teen years—probably due to the natural pruning of little-used brain connections and a corresponding fine-tuning of our brains—we focus less on individual units and instead look at groupings. By middle age, we easily recognize broad categories.

“Verbatim memory begins to decline after young adulthood but ‘gist memory’ remains intact and gets better even into older old age,” says Valerie Reyna, a neuroscientist at Cornell University who has done some of the most extensive studies in this area.

Another recent study along these lines found that as doctors gained more experience and became more accurate in making medical decisions about heart disease, for example, they made decisions, much like my friend the doctor, based less on a labored process of assembling remembered facts and more on gist—gut instinct—a shift that made reaching a conclusion both simpler and speedier.

“If you know a great deal about a topic, you can infer rather than remember,” Reyna told me. “But, in addition, the nature of your reasoning, judgment, and decisions changes. You use gist to get to the bottom line more effectively, reducing the need to rely on memory for details.”

In a way, it makes evolutionary sense for the brain to be set up this way. Confronted with vast savannas of stimuli, those who quickly brought all the stimuli together—odor, noise, movement—to understand the big picture would certainly have a better chance of surviving than those concentrating on tiny changes in the color of the leaves underfoot. Even in today’s world, this talent proves handy. It serves us well—and studies back this up—to know from the get-go that a salesperson, for instance, is unlikely to give us the information we really need. We know we need to get a broader view. And as we age, we get better at looking beyond the obvious, in part because of how our brains develop.

“It makes sense as we age,” says Reyna, “to rely on the part of our memories that is best preserved, and part of that is gist.”

Linda Fried, dean of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and a longtime expert in aging, says the abilities to see the vast canvas can foster creativity as well. We become more inclined to tie disparate threads together to make a new whole. “As you get older you can draw on objective knowledge and life experience and perhaps even intuition and they all get integrated and we can be more creative and solve complex problems that we could not solve when we were younger,” she says. “I think we even get better at recognizing those complex problems to begin with. It’s only when we are older that we have the patience and the strength and the willingness to go after the big core issues.”

In fact, some have watched this sort of brain integration, or wisdom, with their own eyes—or at least the eyes of a sophisticated scanner. One of the most passionate of the current crop of wisdom hunters, George Bartzokis, a UCLA neuroscientist, believes that whatever we call this—judgment, expertise, wisdom, magic—it happens quite naturally as our brains move into middle age. And it may be what gives humans our edge.

A lively, self-confident Greek who spent much of his childhood in Romanian refugee camps before coming to America, Bartzokis remembers seeing nature documentaries as a child and wondering, Why are we so different from, say, chimpanzees? Since we share nearly 98 percent of our DNA with the chimp, our closest relatives, what makes the difference?