Word: braining
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That, as it turns out, is hooey. More and more, neurologists and psychologists are coming to the conclusion that the brain at midlife--a period increasingly defined as the years from 35 to 65 and even beyond--is a much more elastic, much more supple thing than anyone ever realized...
...from slowly powering down, the brain as it ages begins bringing new cognitive systems on line and cross-indexing existing ones in ways it never did before. You may not pack so much raw data into memory as you could when you were cramming for college finals, and your short-term memory may not be what it was, but you manage information and parse meanings that were entirely beyond you when you were younger. What's more, your temperament changes to suit those new skills, growing more comfortable with ambiguity and less susceptible to frustration or irritation. Although inflexibility, confusion...
...midlife," says UCLA neurologist George Bartzokis, "you're beginning to maximize the ability to use the entirety of the information in your brain on an everyday, ongoing, second-to-second basis. Biologically, that's what wisdom...
...your mind does indeed grow more agile as you age, one of the things that may help it do so is the amount of glue you carry around in your brain--glia (Greek for glue) being what the 19th century German anatomists called it. Only about half the mass of the brain is composed of gray matter, or nerve cells; the rest is white matter, the connecting tissue that, in a sense, glues it all together. Much of that white matter is made of conductive nerve strands, and covering each fine wire is a fatty sheath of myelin that keeps...
Throughout our lives, fresh layers of myelin sheathing are laid down in the brain. In infants and children, who grow increasingly coordinated as they mature, the bulk of that takes place in the motor and sensory lobes. If we acquire better reasoning skills in middle age, Bartzokis long suspected, it would follow that most of the myelin added in those years would appear around the signal-transmitting axons in the higher brain regions that are the seat of sophisticated thought. Essentially, the brain spends decades upgrading itself from a dial-up Internet to a high-speed version, not fully completing...