Working in Movement

Brains change, as anyone who has watched a helpless baby grow into a curious, able person in a short time. Among other things, this is due to the young brain's property of neuroplasticity, the ability to grow changing networks of connections whenever it needs to. Used to be that most of us thought this adaptability limited to the young brain; older brains were largely fixed and much less adaptable.

Good news for us geezers. The brain's neuroplasticity, it's ability to change and form new patterns, seems to stay with us for a long, long time. Do we get older and wiser? talks with Elkhonon Goldberg, a clinical professor of neurology at New York University. Goldberg writes about this in The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As Your Brain Grows Older.

"Until recently one of the fundamental premises of neuroscience was that a person's ability to make new brain cells or neurons was limited to the young and, as we get older, this process stopped and from then on it was essentially all downhill. That now turns out to be false. The advances of the last decade have demonstrated loud and clear that the capacity of the brain to make new neurons remains in place throughout our whole lives - even well into the advanced age."

"Furthermore it has been shown that the type and rate of neuroplasticity (the basic mental drive that networks your brain, giving you cognition and memory) that you have is, to some extent, under your control. Being active means you stimulate the growth of new neurons and this process continues well into old age."

Maybe geezerdom isn't so bad after all. According to Goldberg, while advancing years do compromise some information processing ability, pattern recognition skills can actually increase. Can is the operative term here. After all, there has to be some patterns if any matching is going to take place:

"It is not an entitlement of advanced age, like grey hair or bad teeth," says Goldberg. "It is something which some people acquire and that depends on the kind of mental life you have led. Someone who has spent their life watching soap operas and not doing anything with their mind will not acquire them."

I suppose you could make some argument about what kind of soap opera and how engaged you are in the watching. Steven Johnson argues in Everything Bad is Good for You that much media content today develops mental faculties instead of helping them wither away. But I'll give Goldberg points here when he says "Use it or lose it."