Think Smart: A Neuroscientist's Prescription for Improving Your Brain's Performance (23 page)

Overall, expertise neutralizes age-associated performance differences. This fact leads to an eminently practical application: as you get older, you can better your odds of remaining active in the workplace by enhancing crystallized intelligence.

As you reach your sixties and seventies, your success will become increasingly dependent on what you know and how well you can apply that knowledge, especially if you possess special skills or expertise that distinguishes you from other workers.

Recently leaders of major corporations have become interested in finding ways to increase the brain fitness of their employees. This interest stems in no small part from the challenge of a graying workforce.

Ours is the longest-lived generation in history. Until about two hundred years ago the average human life span was about thirty years. During the twentieth century that average life span doubled. Nor is there any sign of its slowing down. It has been increasing at the bewildering rate of 2.2 years per decade (or five hours a day) for the last hundred years. The impact of this life span expansion on the workforce is certain to be profound. By 2010 the number of U.S. workers ages forty-five to fifty-four will grow by 21 percent; the number of fifty-five- to sixty-four-year-olds, 52 percent; and the number of workers sixty-five and older, 30 percent.

Nor can employers rely on a dependable source of younger workers to take the place of aging ones. Thanks to differences in what’s been termed “generational knowledge transfer,” younger workers, as a rule, are less likely than their older counterparts to remain permanently at the same company.

Thus corporations are hit with a double whammy: older workers are retiring, while the younger ones can’t be persuaded to stay. In response to these trends, businesses are now interested in increasing the number of employees who keep working beyond the usual retirement age. But in order to do that they have to learn how the brain of the older worker differs from his counterpart who is twenty or thirty years younger.

The table on page 211 depicts the four generations currently working alongside one another. Each has operational styles fashioned at least in part by critical events that occurred in their lifetimes (World War II, the Cold War, the
civil rights movement, the women’s movement, gay rights, and advances in communication technology). Notice that two traits of the Mature/Silent workers are likely to bring them into conflict with members of the other three generations: their respect for hierarchies and authority figures, and their preference for structure and rules.

If you’re sixty years of age or older, you won’t be able to count on doing things in the workplace in “traditional” ways. Instead, you will be working with coworkers who, on the whole, bring very different styles, attitudes, and skills according to their age. So if you plan to keep working beyond age sixty, you will have to adapt to the patchwork of operational styles that characterize the current workplace.

Fortunately, many corporations now recognize the value of retaining mature workers. In order to avoid the loss of what is called “institutional memory”—shorthand for how the company gets things done—many of them are adopting new policies aimed at retaining valued older employees. One retailer’s recent recruiting poster reads: “Now hiring WISDOM.”

Institutional memory and wisdom are components of crystallized intelligence—the intelligence that isn’t affected by aging. This includes brain networks involved in expert knowledge, among others. If you’re older and want to remain employable in the twenty-first-century marketplace, establish an expertise that distinguishes you from your younger coworkers.

Despite your own wishes on the matter, you will eventually reach an age when retirement will be forced upon you (unless you’re self-employed). At the moment, almost all organizations enforce mandatory retirement by seventy at the latest. The challenge then involves transferring and incorporating the brain-enhancing activities you’ve developed over a lifetime to your retirement years.

From the point of view of brain health, traditional retirement doesn’t make sense. Instead of recreation, anyone contemplating retirement should be seeking
re-creation:
finding new and healthy ways of challenging the brain by continuing to apply one’s natural talents and skills. As an example of what can happen when that isn’t done, consider the experience of Roger, a recently retired lawyer I know (his name has been changed to preserve anonymity).

During a successful legal career Roger spent hundreds of hours in meticulous research and artful analysis of his cases, both within and outside the courtroom. This persistence had served him well: at retirement he was a senior partner and highly regarded by the associates in his firm for his thoroughness.

Finding himself with nothing to do during the first few weeks of his retirement and with unlimited time on his hands, Roger decided for no pressing reason to commission a re-survey of the property line separating his land from his neighbor’s. This seemed curious even to his own family, since Roger had never expressed any curiosity about the property line during the forty years the family lived in the house. When the surveyor reported “perhaps” a one- to two-foot-wide swath of land that wasn’t clearly assignable to either property, Roger began a fractious disagreement with his neighbors over the need to establish the “exact” boundary between the two properties.

While both the neighbors and Roger’s family agreed that something should probably be done to clarify the boundary, why not simply mutually decide on a new boundary line at the halfway point and be done with it? But such a casual approach didn’t soften Roger’s resolve, despite the likelihood that his intransigence would force a confrontation with neighbors with whom he had maintained friendly relations for decades. Everyone was puzzled and searched for an explanation for Roger’s sudden interest in firmly establishing property boundaries.

The most likely explanation, I believe, is that Roger’s careful, methodical, and meticulous approach to his work—an asset in his profession—turned into a liability after his retirement. Finding himself with too much unstructured time to fill, and deprived of an outlet for his preoccupation with accuracy, Roger applied his obsessive and compulsive traits to a question that demanded flexibility and tact. His rigid approach to the boundary question alienated and angered his neighbors, who, in turn, responded with more emotion than usual for them, largely because of Roger’s petty exactitude and lack of accommodation.

Like Roger, most of us will be bringing to retirement the same personality traits that served us well or ill during our careers. That’s why it’s important to find some postretirement activity that lets us express these traits in healthy ways. For instance, a retired surgeon I know has shifted his interest since retirement from surgery to his hobby: the management of his stamp and art collections. He can now apply the exactitude he had during his surgical career to his collections.

The failure to find positive ways to use old habits and propensities accounts, I believe, for much of the dissatisfaction and unhappiness of retirees. Changing these habits is possible, of course, but probably unrealistic for most people: habits formed over five or six decades aren’t likely to disappear the month after retirement. Rather than attempt to eliminate socially troublesome traits such as competitiveness and compulsiveness, retirees should seek out new ways of expressing them in a socially acceptable manner. The passion for golf, tennis, bridge, and other “competitive” activities at clubs or in retirement communities serves this purpose, I’m convinced. They offer the opportunity to channel lifelong competitiveness in ways that won’t lead to social friction. So if you’re thinking of retiring, first take stock of what you liked about your work and the personality traits that were important to your success. Then think of ways to apply these traits during your postretirement life.

To manage the complexities of twenty-first-century life we need to retain our mental powers throughout the course of our lifetime. That’s why Alzheimer’s disease strikes a particular note of fear in industrialized countries such as ours, where great emphasis is placed on the clarity and vigor of one’s thinking.

Alzheimer’s disease embodies two of our greatest fears: a loss of control and a dependency on others. Think of all the television commercials for investment firms you’ve seen that feature smiling past-middle-age couples strolling hand in hand in front of their beachfront retirement homes. “Security, independence, and total control of your life after retirement should be your goal—and you’ll reach it by investing now with . . .” is the stated or implied message.

But since the brain is susceptible to cognitively impairing diseases at all stages of life, optimal brain function can’t be
guaranteed,
no matter what measures you may adopt. “If brain function becomes impaired, it’s the result of disease, not age,” says John Morris, lead investigator of the Memory and Aging Project, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Morris’s point is something that I emphasize to my patients every day. Although we can do much to lessen our chances of coming down with Alzheimer’s disease or other dread dementias, there are no guarantees. Although lifestyle changes can be effective in maintaining brain health, genetics still plays a role. Some people are more at risk for dementia, probably secondary to genetic defects that neuroscientists are homing in on. So, given all this, what is the best attitude and strategy to employ under these circumstances?

Unless you come from a family with a high rate of Alzheimer’s or another late-onset brain disease, it’s not unreasonable to think positively. The prevalence of Alzheimer’s is only about 1 percent at age sixty-five. It doubles every five years after that, to between 16 and 25 percent of Americans at eighty-five. In the United States about 46 percent of people over eighty-five are thought to have at least early Alzheimer’s disease. While these are not totally reassuring numbers, why not look at the situation from the positive point of view? In fact, the number of people free of dementia, even among the oldest old (ninety or higher), exceeds the number of those afflicted with it. So even if you live well into your nineties, you are still more likely than not to be Alzheimer’s free.

In addition, milder, slower-progressing forms of Alzheimer’s are the rule rather than the exception. Many people with Alzheimer’s continue to work at less demanding jobs for some time after diagnosis. Further, currently available drugs provide some measure of improvement if not cure in a significant number of people affected with mild forms of the disease. Several very promising drugs and other treatments such as vaccination are in clinical trial.

Most important, we can reduce the likelihood that these pernicious alterations occur in our brain by making the lifestyle changes described throughout this book. This isn’t intended to deny the seriousness of Alzheimer’s disease, but to provide some perspective—and some hope.

Twenty years ago, pathologists came upon an unexpected finding when examining the brains of people who had died without any signs of Alzheimer’s disease. In order to highlight their findings, here is a one-paragraph review of the brain changes typically found in Alzheimer’s:

If you look through a microscope at brain tissue taken from a patient who died with Alzheimer’s disease, two findings stand out. First, up to a quarter of the neurons in the cortex (the 3-millimeter rim of tissue covering the cerebral hemispheres) are reduced to dense, intricately tangled bundles that look like the rusted cables of a long-sunken ship. Second, you’ll see clusters of degenerating nerve endings enclosing a homogenous central core that when viewed with the aid of special chemical stains resemble ink smudges. The German neurologist Alois Alzheimer, after observing these tangles and plaques, first pointed out that they could serve as a shorthand marker for the mind-destroying brain disease named after him.

Now for that unexpected finding. At autopsy the researchers discovered Alzheimer’s changes in the brains of a coterie of deceased elderly patients who had functioned perfectly normally even during the last years of their lives. Even though they had functioned without any signs of Alzheimer’s disease, their brains contained the high plaque and tangle counts usually associated with that disease.

Investigation of these exceptions to the plaque-tangle-dementia association turned up a common trait: increased levels of education. In general, people with more education were less likely to have been diagnosed with dementia during their lifetime. Nor did the subject matter of their education seem to matter. A degree in physics provided as much protection as one in medieval history.