The Wisdom Paradox Page 2
But all the rational argument notwithstanding, I recognize that what I did was an exercise in neurotic behavior first and foremost. I am sure that a neurotic response to aging is common among millions of my contemporaries, no matter how enlightened (and perhaps the more enlightened the more so). It may take many forms. Being a neuroscientist, I immediately ordered a brain MRI. Others deal with their age neuroses in different ways. Often the neurosis takes the form of denial or, to put it more precisely, a refusal to know, which I have witnessed in several colleagues.
The whole experience provided a point of departure for some serious thinking about the fate of an aging mind in an aging brain in modern society. Like most things in life and in nature, brain health versus brain damage is not a simple binary distinction. There are shades of gray . . . even when it comes to the gray matter, so to speak.
The expression “baby boom” has a distinctly American ring to it, but the phenomenon itself is universal. During the decade following the end of World War II, birth rates exploded in Europe and in Russia, just as they did in North America. Today, in societies increasingly abuzz with concerns about “Alzheimer’s epidemics,” my anxieties are shared by millions of my enlightened contemporaries worldwide. Many of them, perhaps most, carry some baggage similar to mine in one form or another. What in their anxiety is neurotic, and what is justified? Part reality, part neurosis, a certain amount of anxiety about the state of one’s mental faculties is common and expected in anyone approaching the “ripe middle age.” In my case, this state of mind was colored, for better and for worse, by my professional knowledge of how the brain works, and of the many ways in which the brain may fail to work. I am different from most of my worried contemporaries in that I am a brain scientist and clinician diagnosing and treating various effects of brain damage for a living, dealing with aging minds and with dementia on a daily basis. This may make my insights into my own anxieties particularly useful to other people. And so I hope that the ruminations of an aging neuroscientist will be informative and useful to my aging contemporaries from every walk of life.
As young people, we are driven by the lust for the unknown, for forward motion. We dare. The folkloric cliché is that as we age, we yearn for stability. Does “stability” inevitably equal “stagnation”? Are age-associated mental changes all losses, or are there also some gains? As I am surveying introspectively my own mental landscape, I conclude that, despite my anxieties and increasingly precarious epidemiological odds, things are not all bad. I notice, with some satisfaction, that on balance I am no more stupid, in some intuitive sense, than I was thirty years ago. My mind is not dimmed; in some ways it may in fact be working better. And as psychological (and hopefully also real) protection against the effects of aging, I find myself constantly propelling myself into forward motion. I wage an unending internal war on stasis. A life too settled is no longer a life but an afterlife, and I want no part of it for myself.
What strikes me most in this introspective pursuit is that if there is a change, it cannot be captured in quantitative comparisons. On balance, my mind is neither weaker nor stronger than it was decades ago. It is different. What used to be the subject of involved problem-solving has become more akin to pattern recognition. I am not nearly as good at laborious, grinding, focused mental computations; but then again I do not experience the need to resort to them nearly as often. In my early twenties, I took pride (somewhat flippantly) in being able to follow a lecture on an arcane topic in advanced mathematics without taking notes, and to pass a test a few months later. I will not even attempt this feat at my ripe age of fifty-seven. It’s simply too hard!
But other things have become easier. Something rather intriguing is happening in my mind that did not happen in the past. 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. What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.
And another interesting bit of introspection: As I am trying to solve a thorny problem, a seemingly distant association often pops up like a deus ex machina, unrelated at first glance but in the end offering a marvelously effective solution to the problem at hand. Things that in the past were separate now reveal their connections. This, too, happens effortlessly, by itself, while I experience myself more as a passive recipient of a mental windfall than as an active, straining agent of my mental life. I have always strived to reach across the boundaries of professional and intellectual domains, but now, as this “pop-up” phenomenon is happening more often, I am finding this “mental magic” productive and incredibly satisfying—like a kid who finds a hidden cookie jar and helps himself with impunity and glee.
Then there is something else, even more profound, almost too good to admit: the feeling of being in control of my life, like I had never experienced before. At the risk of sounding hypomanic (I am not, which is why I feel free to say it), there is increasingly the feeling that life is a feast, when in the past the prevailing feeling had often been that life was a struggle. And despite the full awareness of the biological imperative that the feast will sometime come to an end, or maybe precisely because of this awareness, an urge swells, powerful like a force of nature and getting more powerful with age, to prolong the feast. The existential paradox of aging—to marvel about its effects and yet follow the drive for prolonging the feast. Because life is not a one-way street of decay. There are both currents and counter-currents to be lived, examined, understood, and enjoyed.
What are they, these strange phenomena of mental levitation, when solutions come instantly and without apparent effort? Is it, perchance, that coveted attribute of aging, that stuff of sages called wisdom? At first I feared getting carried away, lest my foray into the mysteries of wisdom prove to be an exercise in foolishness. I sought to stay away from such expansive poetic language and stick to the austere language of science, which has been my language most of my life, to speak not of “wisdom” but of “pattern recognition.”
Yet as I caution myself against making extravagant claims, I find myself inexorably tempted by them, and the existential paradox, which intrigues me so, gradually takes on a new name: the wisdom paradox. Our minds are a function of the natural organism that is the brain. And though the brain may age and change, each phase of this progression presents new and different pleasures and advantages, as well as losses and trade-offs, in a natural progression, like the seasons. If our mental seeds are sown through curiosity and exploration early in youth, and experience in more mature life tends and nurtures the mental crop, then wisdom is the harvest of mental rewards that we can only truly enjoy in what Frank Sinatra famously called “the autumn of the years.” And having taken a deep breath, I am plunging head-on into my new project, this project, a book about the seasons of a human mind as the passage from daring to wisdom. As I am embarking on my project, the thought cannot escape me that wisdom, with its cognitive, ethical, and existential dimensions, is far too rich a concept to be explored in its entirety in a single narrative, or by a single explorer such as myself. So I am deliberately limiting the scope of this book to the cognitive dimension of wisdom—a perspective that is admittedly narrow but eminently worthy of exploration nonetheless.
Book Overview
The multifaceted nature of the subject is reflected in the book’s eclectic content and interweaving themes. In the narrative to follow, certain chapters focus on history and culture (chapters three, four, five, and twelve); others focus on psychology (chapters one, four, five, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve); yet others focus on the somewhat more technical matters of how the brain is wired and how it functions and malfunctions (chapters two, six, seven, thirteen, and fourteen). Finally, I talk about what can be done to forestall the aging of the brain (chapters fourteen, fifteen, and the epilogue).
These seemingly disparate subjects are united in a coherent logical thread driven by the central questions: What enables the aging brain to accomplish remarkable mental feats, and how can we enhance this ability? All the names of my patients are disguised to protect their privacy, but their stories are authentic and unembellished. I did my best to explain all the technical terms in the text where they first appear.
We will start with a casual walk through the not-so-casual brain machinery powering the seemingly mundane activities of everyday life in chapter one, “The Life of Your Brain.” A tour of brain development, brain maturation, and brain aging will follow in chapter two, “Seasons of the Brain.” This chapter leads to the central question of the book: What enables the remarkable feats of the mind powered by an aging brain? In chapter three, “Aging and Powerful Minds in History,” I will amplify the point by reviewing the lives of several historical personalities remarkable for their pivotal roles in society despite their age and, in some cases, despite their dementia. The resilience of the brain to the effects of age-related decay is greater than most people realize, and you are likely to find some of the examples nothing short of amazing.
We will then proceed to examine the coveted mental attributes of aging—wisdom, expertise, and competence (chapter four, “Wisdom Throughout Civilizations”). Then we will be ready to introduce one of the central concepts of the book—the concept of pattern recognition. We will examine various types of pattern recognition and the role they play in the workings of the human mind. Language is also a pattern-recognition device, but many other such devices operate in human cognition (chapter five, “Pattern Power”).
Now it is time to examine how patterns are formed in the brain, and the relationship between patterns and memories (chapter six, “Adventures on Memory Lane”). As it turns out, all patterns are memories but not all memories are patterns. Exactly what distinguishes patterns from other kinds of memories, and what makes patterns less vulnerable than other memories to brain decay, will be the subject of chapter seven, “Memories That Do Not Fade.”
How does the well-developed pattern-recognition machinery aid us in everyday life, and what ensures the emergence of such mental machinery? This will be discussed in chapter eight, “Memories, Patterns, and the Machinery of Wisdom.” Here we will also introduce a pivotal distinction between “descriptive knowledge” (dealing with the question “What is it?”) and “prescriptive knowledge” (dealing with the question “What shall I do?”).
Prescriptive, “what shall I do” knowledge is critical to our success in virtually every endeavor. The ability to accumulate and store such knowledge depends on the brain’s frontal lobes, which tend to be particularly susceptible to age-related decline. The pivotal role of the frontal lobes in cognition will be the focus of chapter nine, “ ‘Up-Front’ Decision-Making.”
Duality is one of the main features of brain design and its enduring enigma. Why is the brain divided into two hemispheres? Numerous theories and speculations have been offered to account for this fundamental feature of brain design, but none of them has been able to unravel the enigma. We will examine a radically new idea about brain duality: The right hemisphere is the “novelty” hemisphere and the left hemisphere is the repository of well-developed patterns. This means that as we age and accumulate more patterns, a gradual change in the hemispheric “balance of power” takes place: The role of the right hemisphere diminishes and the role of the left hemisphere grows. As we age, we rely increasingly on the left hemisphere; we use it more. This radically new way of understanding the brain’s duality throughout the life span will be addressed in chapter ten, “Novelty, Routines, and the Two Sides of the Brain,” and in chapter eleven, “Brain Duality in Action.”
Division of labor between the two halves of the brain is not limited to cognition. Emotions are also lateralized: Positive emotions are linked to the left hemisphere and negative emotions are linked to the right hemisphere. What does this have to do with different cognitive styles and with aging? This will be the focus of chapter twelve, “Magellan on Prozac.”
Aging affects the two halves of the brain differently: The right hemisphere “shrinks” but the left hemisphere shows greater resilience. This is addressed in chapter thirteen, “The Dog Days of Summer.” What is behind this mysterious disparity? The answer lies in the lifelong brain plasticity, discussed in chapter fourteen, “Use Your Brain and Get More of It.” Contrary to the beliefs held by most scientists until very recently, new nerve cells (neurons) are born in the brain as long as we live. The birth of new neurons and where in the brain they end up are regulated by mental activity. The more we use our brain, the more new neurons we grow, and these new neurons end up in the most-used parts of the brain. As we age, we increasingly use our left hemisphere, which in turn protects it from decay.
This leads to a startling conclusion, deemed fantastic even a few years ago: You can increase your brain longevity by exercising your brain. In chapter fifteen, “Pattern Boosters,” we will introduce the various forms that brain exercise may take.
We conclude our exploration in the epilogue, “The Price of Wisdom.” Aging, on balance, is not all bad. In fact, it may be something to look forward to and to enjoy. If we value wisdom, then aging is a fair price to pay for it.
So, let’s proceed with our exploration of the paradox of wisdom as we age.
1
THE LIFE OF YOUR BRAIN
It’s the Brain, Stupid
Most people don’t think of wisdom, or for that matter competence or expertise, as biological categories, but they are. Most people understand, generally and vaguely, that our mind is the product of our brain. But it is not always easy to realize just how intimate the relationship is. Despite their acceptance of the mind-brain connection as an abstract proposition, most people don’t quite get it on an everyday level. This is a recalcitrant vestige of “mind-body dualism,” a philosophical doctrine most closely (even though some students of philosophy say unfairly) associated with the name of René Descartes, according to which the brain and the mind are separate and the mind exists independently of the body. Numerous volumes have been written on the subject, including the excellent books Descartes’ Error, by Antonio Damasio, and The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker. The centuries-long inability to grasp the idea that the mind is the product of the body has inspired the vivid images of homunculus, a little creature sitting inside our brain and doing the hard work of thinking, and of the “Ghost in the Machine.” In my earlier book The Executive Brain I lamented that even though “today a literate society no longer believes in the Cartesian dualism between body and mind . . . we shed the vestiges of the old misconception in stages” and continue to have difficulties with fully embracing the idea of brain-mind unity when it concerns the highest reaches of our mental life.
I was surprised, even shocked, to discover how fragile and skin-deep this understanding often is. This became starkly apparent a few years ago, when some colleagues and I launched an educational workshop about the brain, titled “The Mind-Brain Institute.” The purpose of the workshop was to inform the general public about the basics of brain science, about what may go wrong with the brain and how this may affect the mind, and about the current treatments of various brain disorders. To our great astonishment, the public reaction was often one of incomprehension. “What does the mind have to do with the brain?” was the rhetorical question I heard more than once, to my utter disbelief. Similarly, when in a public lecture about memory I mentioned the brain, a question came from the audience, sounding dismayed more than genuinely inquisitive: “What does memory have to do with the brain?”
Even more incredibly, I encountered similar incomprehension from a much more rarified audience when I was asked to participate in a high-powered symposium on the secrets of extraordinary achievement. The symposium panel was an international “Who’s Who” of superachievers: world-renowned scientists, corporate leaders, Olympic champions, famous artists, and high-profile political figures. One
by one, these undisputed “champions” in their chosen fields of endeavor were standing up at the podium sharing insights into the secrets of their own achievement. The consensus was rapidly building that the key to achievement is the convergence of two ingredients: Talent in a specific field was unanimously identified as one ingredient of achievement. The presence of certain personality traits, such as drive and the ability to focus on a distant goal, was with equal unanimity identified as the other. The symposium participants agreed that without a special talent there can be no significant achievement and that the special talent is something one is born with, the biological destiny of the few. After all, everyone accepts as a given that hard work alone will not make you a Mozart, a Shakespeare, or an Einstein. But the other ingredients of extraordinary success, drive and ambition, were “up to the individual,” the speakers maintained one after another, as if the person in question was a Platonic, extracorporeal entity.
When it was my turn to speak, I tried to convey the idea that “drive” and “the ability to focus on a lofty goal” are also biologically-based attributes, at least in part, and that one of the reasons people vary in these attributes is because their brains are different. Personality, I maintained, as I had done in front of various audiences before, is not an extracranial attribute. It is a product of your brain.
My admonition was met with a stone wall of silence, then impatience, and after a few minutes a comment came from a fellow panelist, an illustrious, internationally renowned diplomat: “Professor Goldberg, what you are saying is extremely interesting, but this conference is about the mind, it is not about the brain.”
As my jaw dropped in disbelief that such a basically ignorant comment was possible in this highbrow company, I was contemplating a spirited rebuttal in defense of the mind-brain connection, but decided to let it go, for reasons social rather than intellectual.