Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.)

Equating Age with Loss
    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.

“Smarter and Smarter” by Generation
    Of course, Bill is not the only fish in that