What happened to your brain? Barbara knows

Secrets of the Grown Up Brain, Barbara Strauch
Auckland Writers and Readers Festival
May 13, 5.30pm
ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre

If you haven’t worked out who to see at the this month’s Writers and Readers Festival, or you can’t remember if you have read any of them, you definitely need to go to Barbara Strauch talking about her book, The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain.

At least she will help with next year’s festival by getting the old grey matter into better shape.

Like a lot of people over 40, she wrote the book because she had been having trouble remembering things.

"It was driving me crazy. I couldn't remember what I had for breakfast or the movie I saw last weekend. And you know, we all have a lot going on in our lives, but I think there was sort of a qualitative difference in this. Things ... vanished from my brain, and I was concerned. ... So I began to think, 'What is going on? Where do those names go? ... What is happening in middle age that makes our brains so forgetful?'"

Strauch, who is the health and medical science editor at the New York Times, seems to know her stuff about our tendency to lose capability in the brain department and she also knows we can also do something to help with the problem.

Forgetting is normal
She notes that scientists are working out what parts of forgetting are normal and what parts are related to pathology leading towards decline. “They now know that dementia is not inevitable, and that basically this 'normal forgetting' is part of normal aging. And in many ways we can — if we keep ourselves healthy — actually improve our brains."

She suggests all sorts of simple exercises and tips for increasing brain capacity and highlights some of the problems about the ways that older brains function.

In a sense our brains have too much information in them and we make the wrong connections so she recommends things like have a personal filing system, running through the alphabet to find out names and places. Otherwise the information just stays jumbled in the brain.

"These thoughts simply bounce out of our heads and you can suddenly — as you age — fall into what scientists call sort of a default mode. This is kind of a daydreaming mode. It's kind of an inner dialogue. ... And what they think happens is that you do tend to fall into a daydreaming default mode more easily.

"And this default daydreaming mode is brand new. They didn't know it existed in the brain before, and they're now studying it and trying to figure out how that happens."

We also think slower which makes us think we are losing the ability to think.

"So one thing they tell you is to focus very, very hard at the beginning of things so that you can sort of get past that moment where sometimes we are more distracted," she says.

Remembering names
As we get older some things we are good at such as our autobiographical memories and the semi-automatic things like driving a car.

However, things that need to have a context such as remembering a person's name when we meet in a different place can be a problem.

"Short-term memory for names gets a little bit dicey along the way," Strauch says. "And the problem with names is not a storage issue. It's a retrieval issue. Those names are not really lost. They're just kind of temporarily misplaced. The way that they're stored in our brain — the sound of the name and the information about what that name is — is kind of weak."

In many areas, however, our brains appear to improve.

"We think we're sort of the smartest in college or in graduate school, but when we do the tests we find that's not true in many areas, including inductive reasoning," she says. "We are better than we were in our 20s. And that to me is amazing.

"We are better at getting the gist of arguments …and …We are better at recognising categories. And we're much better at sizing up situations. We're better at things like making financial decisions, which reaches a peak in our 60s. Social expertise — in other words, judging whether someone's a crook or not a crook, improves and peaks in middle age."