By Natasha Josefowitz, Ph.D.
LA JOLLA, California — Let us start with how a normal brain ages. This should help us older folk to stop worrying whether we have Alzheimer’s; most of us don’t. If your wallet is not in the toaster and your keys are not in the fridge, you’re okay.
In our twenties, we form long-term memories and these are productive years. However, it is important to remember that the decision-making parts of the brain do not fully mature until the mid-twenties, hence the stupid stuff adolescents and young adults engage in. In our thirties, the brain begins to slowly lose volume, but not noticeably so. In our forties, we begin to notice some change in our short-term memory; some cognitive slippage—such as forgetting phone numbers—becomes more apparent. In our fifties, the loss of brain volume accelerates so that learning new things takes longer, not remembering the name of the movie we just saw drives us crazy, and multi-tasking is more difficult, but we still feel at the top of our game. In our sixties, the tip of the tongue experiences become more common because the brain has to work harder to retrieve names and words. We tend to mix up dates and events. The seventies, eighties, and nineties continue to show decline in cognitive skills, but at different speeds for different people. Some can remain sharp as a tack well into their late nineties and some even beyond past a hundred.
This is not all as dire as it sounds. According to Dr. Molly Wagster of the National Institute on Aging, “the brain does not lose cells in the numbers once supposed and remaining cells retain the capacity to replicate.”
Starting at about age 50, the brain shrinks. The average 50-year-old brain weights three pounds; 15 years later it weighs 2.6 pounds. This shrinkage is due to loss of water content and shrinking dendrites which are responsible for our taking time to remember. Often at breakfast, someone asks me to do something. By the time I come home, not only do I not remember what was asked, but who asked. I have been known to call my breakfast mates and ask if anyone remembers who asked me what; no one else remembers either.
Even through we continue to form new synapses, they seem to lose strength more quickly in older brains. However, there is an upside to this. What we have learned, such as walking, talking, reading, and writing cannot be overwritten by new connections.
The old saying that wisdom comes with age has proven to be correct. Dr. Shelley H. Carson of Harvard University finds that while the aging brain’s gradually widening focus of attention makes it more difficult to remember one fact, such as a name or a phone number, it increases the amount of information available to the conscious mind. Older people have a broader attention span; their peripheral awareness helps them take in more information from a situation and combine it with their greater store of knowledge, giving them a nice advantage. This characteristic plays a significant role in why we think of old people as wiser.
As John H. Cochrane III, President and CEO of HumanGood retirement communities, explains, “there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that our overall sense of well-being actually improves with age. Friendships deepen and grow stronger, and we do a better job of prioritizing what’s more important to us.” (be.magazine, Volume 5, Issue 1) This increase in emotional stability means we not only grow wiser as we age, but mellower.
According to Dr. Dilip V. Jeste, Director of The Stein Institute for Research on Aging, wisdom is the prerogative of aging. Some of what defines wisdom: “Acknowledgements of uncertainty, self-reflection, sense of humor, tolerance, gratitude, positivity, pro-social behaviors, finding peace and joy.” (UC San Diego School of Medicine, SIRA Successful Aging newsletter, March 2018)
Wisdom is knowing the difference between the extraordinary and the ordinary; it is finding extraordinary pleasure in ordinary things. “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” (William James). (The amygdala of older people has been shown to overlook the negative.)
I would like to end with my two favorite quotes:
The first one from Gandhi, “It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom.”
And the second from Thomas Gray, which humorously obliterates all of the above, “…where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.”
So now you know!!!
© Natasha Josefowitz. This article appeared initially in the La Jolla Village News. You may comment to natasha.josefowitz@sdjewishworld.com