Behind the Scenes of The Brain Show

by Zeev Nitsan

  There is also a retreat related to brain processing abilities and the speed of brain activity—also due to thinning out of neural networks that operate the brain. It is reflected in brain scans as a slowing down of metabolism.

  Among old people who suffer from dementia, deterioration processes in thinking functions usually take place gradually and do not occur at once. Just as the sun does not set at once, the transition from the light of clearheadedness and clarity of thought to the twilight of mental decline is mostly gradual.

  An increased tendency to suffer from dementia relies on genetic tendency, vulnerability that increases as the brain ages, and a lifestyle that increases brain morbidity.

  Memories with Aging

  There is a common saying that “a moment of old age fell on me” with respect to memory failure, and indeed the synapses do not “synapse” as in the past.

  Old people usually remember fewer details compared to young people when witnessing the same event. Some of the main explanations for this phenomenon: decreased sharpness of sensory organs (decreased quality of hearing, etc.) and difficulty with division of attention, which increases as we climb the ladder of the years.

  Memory functions are not homogeneous, and some of them are prone to failure during old age more than others.

  As we get older, our brain stores a large number of patterns that share similarities. The reason for that is that our memory tends to be built from modular parts, a sort of repertoire of subunits, like Lego blocks that might be suitable for building numerous memory towers.

  Over time, many memories lose their uniqueness. Memories that share perception impressions in which there is “overlapping” with similar memories tend to merge with each other, which makes it difficult to attribute them to a specific frame of time and place.

  According to a harsh, painful description related to those who suffer from dementia in old age, an aging person loses the memory of this world, just as a baby loses his angelic memory once he come to this world (Bronson Alcott, quoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson).

  The Last to Mature—the First to be Damaged

  The brain areas that mature last, in terms of their structural and functional competence throughout a person’s life, were the last to appear on the stage of evolution. In other words, these are the newest structures in the human brain, from a phylogenetic perspective. In a noncoincidental manner, these structures are the most sensitive to the harm of time and the first to sense the negative aspects of old age. The ones that are most prone to damage as we grow older are the areas of the prefrontal lobes, which are the newest purchased players in the dream team of the human brain in terms of ontogenetics (development axis at the individual level) and phylogenetics (evolutionary development axis at the species’ level).

  Wrinkles in time: The age wrinkles of the brain, which are formed throughout the years, are expressed, inter alia, in the fact that as we grow older our ability to preserve episodic memories in our brain decreases. We are prone to having memories that are more and more general (generic). The generic memories tend to take control and color everything in a uniform shade. For example, young spectators of a sports game tend to remember more details more accurately compared to old people who watch the same game. It is likely that the older fans have watched many games in the course of their life, so they will not encode the memory of an average game as unique enough. For them, this game shares many similarities with previous games they have watched, and the lack of uniqueness results in encoding details in a more superficial, less detailed manner.

  From a Tsunami to Bath Waves—the Level of the Waves of Emotion

  The waves of emotion are mostly motivated by the amygdala, which blows winds in higher intensity at a young age.

  The level of the waves of emotion and their intensity are at their peak among young people. As we grow older, it seems that the average level of the waves of emotion decreases. Romeo and Juliet scenarios probably belong to the young ones, with respect to the romantic storm of emotions.

  An Intellectual Challenge

  The mental life expectancy is sometimes tragically shorter than the physical life expectancy. We all know people whose general health is considered to be good, but their brain has betrayed them and they live in mental twilight, although their body, except for their spirit, is fit and functions well. Thus, it is of utmost importance to preserve and even reinforce our cognitive abilities as we grow older.

  Using Our Brain in a “Learning” Mode Versus Using Our Brain Based on “Past Learning”

  As the years are piled on top of each other, we tend to place ourselves in conceptual comfort zones and act less and less as students do to use the skills that were previously learned. We usually tend to avoid tasks that require focused attention and concentration.

  An attempt to cope with a threatening challenge, such as learning a foreign language at an old age, encourages the aging brain to act contrary to the comforting trend of decreasing “learning” mode and relying mostly on “past learning.”

  Don’t Close the Right Door

  Findings that reviewed processing of cognitive, emotional, and sensory-motor information show that the right half of our brain tends to lose its functions, in old age, at a higher speed compared to the left half of our brain.

  Learning as a way of life, and initiated coping with the new, might slow down the degeneration of the right hemisphere.

  Functional flexibility is one of the prominent characteristics of our brain.

  The ability to wander from the comfort zones at the core of thinking functions to the peripheral zones is a central layer of the term “brain flexibility.”

  The brain is not a stagnated structure—it shows flexibility and liquidity, in accordance with its owner’s richness of experiencing.

  Cognitive encouragement by means of taking part in brain-challenging activities, particularly according to a graded pattern of increased levels of difficulty, strengthens the “brain’s muscles” and increases its reserves that are kept for rainy days.

  The level of cognitive reserve, which is mostly reflected in the ability of the brain to compensate for damage by means of “delegating” functions of the damaged area to brain areas that are still healthy, might derive from a fortunate array of genes, from an adequate environmental exposure, and from practice. The correlation between brain pathology at the structural level and cognitive retreat is not linear. The effect of the cognitive reserve might significantly blunt the level of damage to the structure, even with respect to the darkest diseases, such as Alzheimer’s.

  Education and literacy are risk-decreasing factors in relation to sweeping brain retreat.

  Intellectual challenging is a lifetime project. It is an attempt to preserve mental flexibility in an active manner, which leads to the formation of new threads (new webs of neurons’ networks) constantly.

  Preserving the flames of thought is the recipe for “mental longevity,” hoping that, as old people, we will be the proud owners of a “used brain in great condition.”

  Intellectual challenge is also reflected in structural change in the brain. As aforementioned, words and thoughts also have a “chemical manifestation” in the brain (i.e., they are reflected at the material level of molecules). Brain cells continue to multiply at the brain structure of the dentate nucleus in the hippocampus, which has an important role in assimilating new information in advanced adulthood, as well.

  Brain Actuary

  Actuarial calculations that rely on studies in which multiple subjects participate support the approach according to which mental vigor throughout the course of life can be compared to purchasing an insurance policy. Like any insurance policy, it is not free of breaches, but, not as with any policy, its range of coverage is rather wide. Maintaining intellectual vigor was proved to guarantee the preserving of our cognitive skills and increase their durability in front of time’s harms. The Notre Dame “Nun Study” supports these finding as well. In this study, which began in 1986, researchers
from the University of Kentucky followed about seven hundred nuns from a Notre Dame convent in Minnesota. One of the most prominent findings from this longitudinal study was that the nuns who excelled in lingual richness and verbal creativity as young women, as well as in expressing positive emotions, as reflected in the autobiographic reviews they wrote in their early twenties, maintained their cognitive skills better and were less prone to dementia compared to their friends who did not demonstrate such characteristics at a young age.

  An Expert Brain and a Novice Brain

  Simultanagnosia—difficulty in merging single impressions into an inclusive impression—characterizes the brain of a novice who starts to study a new discipline. The brain of a novice tends to perceive forest trees as separate entities and has difficulty in identifying the holistic pattern of the forest that is created out of the individual trees.

  Over time, if the novice’s brain becomes thoroughly familiar with the specific discipline, it turns into an expert’s brain, and, thus, the synthesis of individual impressions might take place in a blink of an eye.

  There are numerous possibilities in a beginner’s cognition, though there are only a few possibilities in an expert’s cognition.

  “The magic wand of expertise” is expressed in the fact that an expert’s brain enables him to solve problems related to his field of expertise, as if by a magic wand, without the blood, sweat, and tears that are sometimes part of the task when performed by a novice in the field.

  As we climb the different steps of the ladder of expertise, clusters of neurons create new webs among them that serve as infrastructure for information encoding, according to new aspects or higher levels of resolution.

  A treasure of implicit knowledge that derives from a lifetime of being you is imbedded in the perception of our experiences and the products of our activities during the various periods of our life.

  Senior, Economical Brain

  Senior brains in our world are more prudent consumers of brain power.

  As we grow older, our skills, experience, and “life wisdom” turn our insights into thinner ones, in terms of metabolism (consuming a relatively small amount of brain power), but muscular ones, in terms of their contents.

  The energy saving takes place courtesy of the expertise and seniority of pacing in the paths of life.

  Practice and repetitive experiencing, with respect to performance of a familiar task, decrease the metabolic burden involved in it. The main cause for that is related to the different information processing approach that is usually used by an expert’s brain. Such an information processing approach, which derives from thorough familiarity, relies on identification of patterns and requires the involvement of fewer neurons at the different phases of performance, compared to information processing according to other approaches, such as tiresome serial and logical processing of a task.

  The combined effect of expansion of patterns’ representation areas and transferring to the pattern recognition approach leads to a decrease in metabolic consumption. This effect turns the brain into a more sensible and reasonable energy consumer, and, during challenging times, this economical approach is of great value to it. When, at an old age, the blood supply to the brain decreases, which is accompanied by a reduction in oxygen and various nutrients’ supply, the brain is well prepared and performs its task with decreased energy consumption.

  Senior Brain—Song of Degrees

  Our culture tends to present old age as an inevitable sequence of losses. When our hair turns white and thin, we assume that the same process is taking place underneath it, in our brain, and that the flame of our brain is slowly extinguishing.

  Is our brain, indeed, slipping down an inevitable slope as we climb the height of the mountain of years and grow older? New findings do not support this “inverted topography.”

  The brain at an old age is an oxymoron. On the one hand, it is slower in terms of processing information and tends to scatter the beam of attention, but, on the other hand, its gaze penetrates more layers of reality.

  The speed of information processing, in which a young brain has a built-in advantage, does not guarantee the quality of performance with respect to many tasks of life.

  The ability to “see beyond the matrix”—to understand the essence of things or the core of an idea—is a skill that is related to a senior brain more than to its younger version.

  The “Seattle Longitudinal Study” is a study that has followed subjects for many years. This study began in 1956 and, from then, has traced the cognitive functions of six thousand people over a period of forty years. The subjects’ population was divided equally between men and women whose age ranged from twenty to ninety. Analysis of the results has yielded some surprising findings: “middle-aged” subjects, from the age of forty to the midsixties, yielded better results in most of the thinking-function tasks examined, compared to the group of subjects who were in their midtwenties. It was found that, in four out of the six examined categories—logical inference ability, spatial orientation, verbal memory, and vocabulary—the results of the middle-aged subjects were better than the results achieved by the subjects who were in their twenties. In two categories—speed of calculation of numbers and speed of perception (the time gap between stimuli and response)—the younger subjects showed better performance. In terms of gender, male brains were better at spatial performance and female brains were better at verbal functions.[54] It seems that the “expert in life” brain owned by middle-aged people is a well-lubricated machine in the various senses of brain functioning in which it shows its superiority (contrary to the common prejudice regarding its fading competence) compared to young adults’ brains.

  Thinking Skills Over Time:

  Changes over time in six thinking skills from the age of 25 to the age of 65.

  Some of the skills fade out significantly over time.

  Others, such as vocabulary, inference ability, and verbal memory, are preserved and even improve over time.

  When we tell a person on his birthday “May you live to be a hundred and twenty,” we are usually infected with mathematical overoptimism, although it seems that in the near future we will not be accused of that.

  As life expectancy grows, gerontologists (researchers of aging) have started to divide old age into more specific sections. They do so with respect to all periods of life. A period that became more specific is “middle age,” which is referred to by many as the period between the ages of forty and the midsixties.

  The mature brain during middle age is the preferred residence of expertise. An expert brain performs tasks related to its field of expertise in an elegant manner, which is free of disruptions, in its “left hand,” as they say in Spanish.

  It seems that, during middle age, our parenting skills also improve; we act more as an “expert parent” and tend to create a better “situation-compatible interface” with our children. Our social skills are also at the peak during this period.

  The Age of Good Advice

  At different stages in our life we act as both students and teachers.

  The older ones among us, who are rich in terms of mileage on the path of life and its accompanying insights, are a promising source of good advice, which is mainly based on shortcuts based on pattern recognition.

  The saying “The wisdom of old age resembles winter sun—illuminating, but no longer warming” is only partially true. Indeed, numerous insights that arrive in later stages of life can no longer be implemented in our personal life, but they might be passed to the next generations and be preserved in a manner of memetic transfer.

  As we grow older, the insight regarding our ability to understand the world only partially (in the sense of “I am not young enough to know everything”) is often established.

  Old age brings along the “roughly,” the insights of “both,” and fuzzy logic, which are suited to many situations in life.

  In brain-imaging studies it was found that the reaction of “senior brains” to sens
ory stimulations with negative contents (as was reflected in increased activity at the amygdala) was more moderate compared to the more stormy reaction of the amygdala among young brains.

  Although our brain is programmed to focus on the negative aspect, due to the survival-related advantage that directs us to deal with danger first, at an old age we tend toward a softer interpretation of reality and toward increasing the dosage of rosy shades in the picture of our life. We tend to be more optimistic—a mirror image of our tendency at a young age. It seems that part of the tilting of the pendulum toward the end of positive interpretation derives from an improved ability to regulate our emotions.

  Some might see it as evidence that supports the hypothesis that emotional sensibility is often intensified as we grow older. In this sense, old people are more positive than young ones. It seems that they are capable of producing a more “subtle” and reasonable emotional reaction in situations that induce emotional stress.

  Wisdom and Expertise as the Fruit of Maturity

  A common view sees wisdom as a threshold passage of a critical number of core insights. The threshold refers both to the quality of insights and to their quantity. Genius resembles the eruption of a volcano. It bubbles and comes up against world orders. The strength of wisdom is usually like the strength of still waters that run deep. One can choose to remain at a place of naivety, but life unfolds as a place of experience in the battles of life (also known as “life’s wisdom”), and the experience relies on memories and is usually in correlation with an older age.