Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain (11 page)

To Nowlin, the concepts of midlife crises and empty nests have proven to be overblown and may just “have applied to a few people.” When her two sons left home, Nowlin says she did have a bad moment. She recalls standing in the dining room one evening and “feeling a bit lonely.” But that was it for her empty nest syndrome. Now she finds she is not only busier than ever but also more optimistic and calmer. And she finds that taking a broad view often helps.

“I see some younger teachers and they harp on the smallest things and destroy their relationships with the kids,” she says. “Now every day I think, Have I done something to help a kid? And if I have, I really feel like I accomplished something. Maybe that is why I am so happy.”

Part Two: The Inner Workings

6 What Changes with Time

Glitches the Brain Learns to Deal With

I was talking with Deborah Burke, a neuroscientist at Pomona College in California, and we were having one of those maddening conversations in which neither of us could remember the name of the person we were talking about.

She was telling me about a dinner she’d been to the night before where she could not, for the life of her, remember the name of a well-known scientist.

“I was at this party and I was talking and I just could not remember Richard Dawkins’s name,” Burke was telling me. “Then I couldn’t remember the name of that evangelical guy, you know, the one who was against homosexuals and then turned out to be one? Oh, you know. What was his name? Oh, dear, now it’s happening again.”

I tried to think myself. I wanted to help. I could see this guy in my mind, picture him giving a news conference. I, too, knew his name well. Just not at that moment.

“I think his name was Ted. Ted something. And I think it had an
H
in it,” I offered, doing the best I could.

In fact, over the course of our conversation—for the next
two
hours—neither Burke nor I could come up with this man’s name. At certain points, Burke would stop and wonder out loud, “Oh, what is his name? This is really bugging me. I can see his church. It’s like a big warehouse. What
is
his name? I’m going crazy.”

We were not going crazy. We were mired in the Swamp of Lost Names.

And this time, I was mired along with one of the leading authorities on why we lose names to begin with. In particular, Burke studies what we call “tip of the tongue,” that gnawing feeling that you
know
something but you just can’t find it in your brain, a sensation likened to being on the brink of a sneeze.

Over the last few years, Burke has tried to figure out why, in fact, we can’t sneeze. Where are those names anyhow? If they are on the tips of our tongues, why can’t we spit them out?

Despite all the newly recognized powers of the brain in middle age, there are—as we all know—a few glitches as well. The truth is, by midlife, most of our brains show some fraying around the edges and names are often the first edge to go ragged. Even names we know well vanish. We have the strong feeling we know the name, but we just cannot bring it to mind. Who are you?

It’s annoying. It’s frightening. In her research, Burke has found that tip-of-the-tongue incidents, or “Tots,” as she calls them, start to creep in as young as thirty-five and are a big part of middle age. Tots are much more common with proper names than with the names of objects. And they also occur more often with proper names than, say, the names of occupations.

“If I say Mr. Baker is a potter and Mr. Potter is a baker, you will remember the occupation, that someone is a baker or a potter, much easier than the names Mr. Potter or Mr. Baker,” Burke told me. Indeed, when I see my plumber, my brain easily says to me, “There’s my plumber,” but his name . . . well. That’s not popping into my head.

In survey after survey, this tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is listed as the most irritating, embarrassing, and worrisome part of the aging brain.

So why does it happen? After all, remembering names—Mama, for instance—is one of the first vocal tricks we learn and seems fairly crucial to the species. Why lose that? As we age, our overall vocabularies improve. As Burke says, “A seventy-year-old has a better vocabulary than a twenty- or thirty-year-old. We just keep accumulating words and our verbal abilities get better.”

So with all those words and stacks of names stuffed inside our heads, why can’t we reach in and grab the one we want? Do we have too many names in there? Do they get lost in the clutter—or just lost?

Well, for starters, the names are not technically gone. Research into the cellular activity of the aging hippocampus—where most memories are processed—indicates that much of what we learn, in the form of chemical markers, is not missing, it’s just at the bottom of the pile. For the most part, it’s a problem of retrieval, not storage. It’s like trying to find the right book in a well-stocked library.

Burke’s work has shown this elegantly. In one study, she found that if an older person is shown a picture of someone well known—say, Brad Pitt—and has the feeling that he
knows
the name but can’t recall it—a Tot—he will be much more likely to retrieve the name successfully later on if he is, in between, asked to answer a question whose answer is “cherry pit.” Even though he is unaware that the mention of
cherry pit
is in any way connected to the picture of Brad Pitt, the twinning of the sounds in the two words—
pit
and
Pitt
—is enough to prime the memory on a subconscious level and help him get over his tip-of-the-tongue problem and retrieve that name. Interestingly, such prompting does not generally improve performance with young brains, but does help middle-aged and older brains, presumably because that’s when we need the help.

Burke has also discovered why lost names often come to us, seemingly out of the blue, later on, usually long
after
we need them—again because of certain clues we’re unaware of. If you’re trying, unsuccessfully, to recall the word
Velcro,
for instance, and you later hear the word
pellet,
it’s much more likely that the heretofore-missing word,
Velcro,
will spring to mind. Even when it’s only an internal sound that is similar—in this case, “el” occurs in both words—the second word can draw out the lost word. To us, it seems the words come out of nowhere. Burke calls these “pop-ups.” And they, too, occur more often as we age.

But if our brains are doing so well in middle age, why do names go missing in the first place? Burke’s theory is that “it’s because of the way words are stored and organized in the brain.” She says, “The sound of the word—its phonology—and the information about that word—the concept of the word—are in different areas of the brain and the connection between them weakens. It can weaken if we don’t use the name. But it also weakens as we age,” much like that running muscle you haven’t used much lately, either. It happens most often with the names of people we know but have not seen recently.

It happens, too, because the link between a person and his name is so arbitrary. Names that are unusually descriptive, like Grumpy, or names that have acquired meaning from the characteristics of a person they refer to, such as Scrooge, are remembered more easily than random names such as Peter Pan. (This must be why I’ve never forgotten the name of my childhood dentist, Dr. Smiley.) In general, there’s absolutely no reason for Brad Pitt to be called Brad Pitt. There’s no reason for Mr. Baker to be called Mr. Baker.

At the same time, we remember what a person does. That’s because a person’s occupation embodies a wide range of information that’s stashed all over the brain, and that can be retrieved through various paths. When we hear that someone is a baker and later we’re trying to come up with that fact, we might get there through an assortment of associations, from
white
and
apron
to
flour
or even
hats
.

“If I say
baker,
all sorts of information is called to mind,” Burke says. “There are different ways to activate the 100,000 neurons, lots of different connections that lead you to that concept.”

The thing to remember—if possible—is that forgetting names is part of normal aging and it is only one piece of processing an identification or recognition. If you forget that your husband’s boss’s name is Ed, it might be a bit embarrassing at the office party. But it’s not Alzheimer’s, a progressive disease where you might forget you have a boss, or even what a boss is.

At age sixty, Burke says she doesn’t spend much time fretting about all this and she doesn’t think the rest of us should, either. But it might help to plan ahead. Before going to a party, Burke sometimes makes a list of who will be there. She also uses a trick many of us secretly use. If she meets someone she knows but whose name she has forgotten, she resorts to the alphabet, going through each letter until she gets to one that prompts the name.

Still, it’s unsettling. At the end of our talk, Burke still could not remember the name of the evangelical pastor. As we spoke, she’d interrupt herself to say, “This is driving me nuts.”

“That is the emotional part of this,” she said. “It can make you very upset. What was his name?”

At that point, I decided I’d better do something. While I was talking with Burke on the phone, I stopped taking notes, went to Google, and typed in “evangelical, resigned, homosexual.”

That’s the other lesson here, of course. As we learn to love and accept our middle-aged brains, we should—rather than panicking over these little peccadilloes—relax and get help. We’re lucky. Those of us in middle age now are the first group to have a neurological elf standing by—the World Wide Web.

And, of course, in a second I had our answer. “It was Ted!” I told Burke, feeling triumphant. “I looked it up and his name was Ted and it did have an
H.
Ted Haggard.”

Together, we sighed in relief. “Ah, that’s it,” Burke said. “I just knew it was Ted something. Thank you.”

And so we both felt a bit better. But—as we all know, too—it doesn’t end with a name here and there. By middle age, if our brains are not misplacing names, they’re often misplacing themselves. We get distracted.

And it doesn’t take much to knock us off course. A doorbell rings and we forget we’re boiling water for the potatoes. We meet a friend at the hardware store and, after a brief chat, we no longer remember we went to the store to get a rake. My friend Phillis, fifty-one, who runs her own consulting company, told me that as she was climbing her building’s stairs to go to her office on the fourth floor not long ago, she suddenly looked up and found herself on the eighth floor. As she climbed, she had glanced out a window to see who was in her parking spot, got distracted, and simply went right by her own office door. “Oh, my goodness,” she said, “I’ve never done that before. Is that middle age?”

Such wanderings become increasingly common as our brains age. “When I ask my patients what is troubling them, distraction comes up again and again,” says Adam Gazzaley, a neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco. “They’ll tell me that they’re sitting on the couch and they go to the kitchen to get something and by the time they get there they don’t remember what they went there for. I hear that all the time. And when I ask them how that occurs, they say that something distracts them, maybe the phone rings, something makes them not pay attention.”

Not long ago, the writer Judith Warner, talking about her new distractibility, confessed that she had “invited a couple to dinner and forgot to give them our unlisted phone number or address” and sent her daughter “to dinner at another family’s house and neglected to tell anyone that she was coming.”

Later on, Warner was heartened when, undergoing an MRI for migraines, her mindlessness was explained. She had a “hole” in her head. Her neurologist told her it was an inconsequential “small cystic area,” but its very existence, however unrelated to any brain difficulties or maladies, was reassuring, at least to Warner, who, perhaps only half kidding, wrote:

So, is that it? Do we all just have holes in our brains? Losing names is one thing, but losing entire dinner plans? If our brains are capable of so much at middle age—such expertise and wisdom and clarity and optimism—why do we walk right past our own office door?

Memory is a strange phenomenon and not completely understood on the molecular level. (One part likely involves the astonishing capacity of brain cells, sometimes described as “soft cells,” to physically change their structure as needed. As it’s often said, “brain cells that fire together, wire together.” If two brain cells are activated at the same time, they will actually change their structure, form stronger connections—and let us form memories and learn. That means, for instance, that if you see a red bird and hear its song enough times, the neurons that recorded the sight of the bird and the neurons that registered the bird’s sound are linked and physically altered. And the next time you hear that song, those neurons will fire up more or less in tandem and you’ll think, “Hey, it’s that noisy red bird again!”)

While there remains considerable fussing over how this works, it is clear that memory is not a single mechanism. Names are arranged one way, plans for an upcoming dinner party another, and that vivid picture of the giant dog that chased you down the street when you were four years old yet another.

And by middle age, most memory functions—I’m happy to report—
are
still humming along nicely. Biographical material, for instance, generally stays intact. You remember who you are and who your brothers and sisters and cousins are, where you went to second grade. Even personal information that’s acquired in middle age or later generally stays put. You know where you last worked. You remember how to make oatmeal, where the milk is. You can still ride a bike and drive a car, and you can, if you practice enough, perfect your tennis forehand—motor and muscle memory remain intact.