Mid-life liberties

I do not know what my teacher was thinking then but aside from teaching us pre-WWII songs, she asked us to memorize “Liberty” by Lamberto Avellana. In another season of our lives, it might have been understandable but we were in second grade. So there I was, tiny buck-teethed me at seven years old, committing to memory 356 words that started with “One hundred and fifty years is not a long time in the reckoning of a hill but to a man it is long enough…” At one point, when I reached the line “Liberty is what made four GIs throw caution to the wind…” I remember wondering what “caution” was and how awfully wrong it must be that it had to be thrown so ceremoniously.

Guess what? Thirty-six years later, I can still recite that oration no sweat. My friends tease that “Liberty” is what I will utter repeatedly if I get Alzheimer’s later in life. Maybe so, but right now, at middle age, I really wonder why I can still recite “Liberty” but cannot easily remember my car’s plate number or where I spent the holidays two years ago.

Welcome to midlife where you meet a seemingly scheduled conspiracy to announce that your agile life as you knew it, is over. And to make the welcome even more substantive, you have to know that on the average, you are about 20 percent heavier than when you were in your twenties.

Some studies have suggested that our brain reaches its peak by midlife and starts to have problems after that. Scientists once thought that we lose a substantive portion of our brain cells when we reach midlife. Imagine if that were true, we start to lose our minds just when we start claiming that we are wiser. I came across a 2004 study by Dr. George Bartzokis, a neuroscientist in UCLA, and later published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging. In it, he said that our brains are like high-speed Internet connections and that the service starts to slow down at mid-life. His evidence pointed to the breakdown of a substance called myelin in our brains. Myelin is a very fatty tissue that serves as the protective sheath for the connections between our neurons — our brain cells. The connections between your neurons are essentially your “thoughts.” He says that the continued production of myelin which served us well as our wiring developed until midlife is the same process that causes the overproduction of proteins that give rise to the plaque that dims these connections later in life. He was, in fact, saying that the beginnings of Alzheimer’s could start at midlife.

But further and more peeks by science into our midlife brains have shown that we really do not necessarily lose our minds when we go into midlife. The accumulation of experience seems to just crowd our brains. That is why it takes a bit of jiggling before we remember a word or a name. This, the experts say, is what makes it harder to retrieve more recent memories, as opposed to the deeply engraved memories of childhood like my “Liberty.” Experts are also recently suggesting that our older brains see the “big picture,” the patterns. We have, ahem, perspective. Maybe for that, we sacrifice the details of new memories. The cause of Alzheimer’s being the plaque alone is also being questioned, as they point to other causes that even involve the spine. In fact, there have been studies on brains of deceased aged people which showed that their brains had the tell-tale plaque of Alzheimer’s, yet they did not exhibit any of the outward manifestations while they were alive.

One thing that seems certain is that a brain at midlife needs to work more in order to keep the connections it has and to grow more connections. Settle into what you already know at midlife and chances are, it will really be downhill for your brain. An article by Barbara Strauch in the New York Times this week contained advice from psychologists to keep us from volunteering our midlife brains to camp downhill. Essentially, they said you always have to surprise your brain by learning something new — not just in terms of a new gadget or a new hobby but getting down to seeking other views so different from your own. They said that jolting the adult brain with new ways of looking at things help keep it alert. They even mentioned that if you read the same viewpoints, or keep company who always agree with you, where you never had the need to closely examine what they had to say, then your brain may not really grow. This does not mean you will agree with them but by exposing yourself to other views, your brain stretches and makes new connections. Hey, if you can’t join them, just use them for brain training. Risk your beliefs or unbeliefs. Turn them on their heads and see if they still hold meaning for you.

So the advice for the midlife brain for now is to, well, get out of the comfortable worldview once in a while and pry your own beliefs. In other words, throw caution to the wind. Go forth then, fellow mid-lifers. Seize your liberties.

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