What Is Brain Power?

Am I Already Losing It?

You may have recently read about a scientific paper arguing that older brains are slower than younger because they've had so much more material to sift through, not that they're necessarily losing brain power in nosedive fashion as they age.  

And if you did hear of such a paper, and you're older, you, like me, probably let out a sigh of relief.  The original paper and a summary by National Geographic.

What precipitated the paper were studies that showed how older brains lose the speed at which younger brains can retrieve random words or numbers.  But what Michael Ramscar, a linguistics researcher at the University of Tubingen, in Germany, did to come up with his finding was to create computer simulations of relatively full and empty brains, then compare the difference in processing speed.

Not surprisingly, the fuller brain simulation took longer, and Ramscar then had his finding.

But what all that ignores is context.  Here's an example: I open the garage door, fish for the car keys in my pocket, then realize I've 'forgotten' them in the kitchen.  The first thing most people do is feel beaten down by old age and let out an anguished 'argh'.  The first thing I do is examine my reasons for being on my current path.  Why am I getting in the car?  Almost invariably I'll take my 'forgetfulness' as an omen, or sign that, to again use this example, I didn't really want or need to go anywhere.  Maybe I was asked to get groceries and hadn't had time to remember that I planned to cook something from the garden.

So, imagine a test of brain power that doesn't focus on retrieval speed, but instead asks for contextual awareness.  Let's say 20-year-olds and 60-year-olds are given a day of the year, a time of day, a relationship, and asked what would make a good gift from among a list of a dozen possibilities.  I bet such a test would find older brains more adept at picking out the likelier gift.  That's because they've had more practice.

Possibly, what we'd be measuring is not just 'practice', but the migration of brain activity from one lobe (focused on strength and speed of processing) to the integration of lobes (both the former, strength/speed and the other, contextual timeliness) as an individual ages.  

If this is the case, 'forgetfulness' is what we do to attempt to force one lobe to integrate with the other.  And sometimes the result can be jarring--especially if we pay no heed to the little hints we provide for ourselves--in the above example, we might think of watering our garden when fishing for our car keys.  Or, we have an 'accident' on the way to the grocery store, as our 'forgetfulness' provokes all out mutiny.

There's also real mental decline in some middle aged and older brains.  We all probably know or have heard of people who really are losing it.  In these cases medical science is hot on the trail of drugs to stave off the worst.  I predict, however, that most mental loss, up to a certain age, is simply the loss of purpose in life.  And if I'm right, I wouldn't be surprised if 'purpose' is another name for the way we integrate our two brain lobes into a fruitful singularity.