The Guru of Grey Matter

By Sarah Hampsonm, The Globe and Mail

June 16, 2009

Canada

Those words of wisdom you have to offer?

Thank your aging brain.

“It moves to all-wheel drive,” explains Gene Cohen, a gleeful Father Time in professorial corduroy and bow tie.

Think of it as a senior smart moment. That's right: an age-smart moment. (No adjustment of your bifocals required.) The founding director of the Center on Aging, Health and Humanities at George Washington University in Washington, Dr. Cohen is an author, noted gerontologist, psychiatrist and award-winning designer of brain-fitness games, who has an important message for the aging population.

What awaits is not “a wasteland, but a frontier.”

Forget about hope in a magic pill, he suggests. Aging should not be viewed as a problem. The best way to accept the passage of time is to realize that while the body will suffer inevitable losses, a healthy brain adds positive changes. And seniors can stimulate their own brain health by engaging in challenging activities, including education courses, book and writing groups, arts programs and work, whether volunteer or paid.

It is a message he supports with scientific evidence in his latest book,The Mature Mind: The Positive Power of the Aging Brain , and which he gives in lectures, such as the one he delivered recently at Toronto's Ryerson University as part of its Silver Screens Arts Festival.

The study of age-related brain functioning “is an exploding science,” he says. “We are finding that changes happen not in spite of aging but because of aging. A lot of new research has turned upside-down the myths of aging.”

The most significant myth-busting revelation is that the brain is not a static organ. “We have the capacity to produce brain cells all of our lives,” Dr. Cohen says. But that was not discovered until the close of the 20th century, he states, noting that up until then, there was “intergenerational warfare” – epitomized by that sixties saying, “You can't trust anyone over 30” – and a “nihilistic view of aging.” The predominate assumption that only negative changes lay ahead was based on “an illusion of knowledge,” he says, because there was little scientific interest in aging.

Even the big thinkers in psychiatry, Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget, concluded that we reached our peak intellectual development by the end of adolescence and early adulthood, he notes.

But whereas younger adults have hemisphere asymmetry in their brains – one side is more dominant than the other – recent research at Duke University involving MRIs and PET scans on people over 50 showed that when they were performing tasks, they were using both sides of the brain together. That phenomenon is what Dr. Cohen describes as “the four-wheel drive” capacity of the senior brain.

Call it the biology of wisdom. “The convergence allows you to look at things in different ways. … Older people have more integration of thinking and emotions,” he says.

And if you notice an inclination to dwell on positive rather than negative emotions, thank your amygdala. That's the almond-sized brain structure linked to one's emotional and mental state. Brain-imaging studies show that while young and old people process positive emotions in the same way, that part of the senior brain lights up less intensely and for a shorter interval when dealing with negative emotions such as fear, rage and envy.

Psychological imperatives also force positive changes, Dr. Cohen adds. As people enter their 50s, they experience what he calls a “liberation phase.” With the realization that time is limited, mid-lifers are willing to take more risks. They want to make the most of their remaining years. “If not now, then when?” the inner voice whispers, Dr. Cohen explains. “What can they do to me now?” the inner prompting continues, he says. Combined with biological changes in the mature mind, such psychological adjustments allow for a highly creative phase of adult life.

When Dr. Cohen first expressed interest in gerontology as a young medical student, his mentors thought he was crazy. “You're throwing your life away,” they said, he recalls. He had always been interested in aging, he says, but when his medical studies required that he work temporarily in an older adult retirement centre, he knew he had found his calling. “Everybody told me, ‘This will be the most morbid experience that you ever have,' but it turned out to be everything they said it was not. They were among the most grateful patients. They had such little care and such standard care. Extraordinary changes were possible, and to see people in their 70s, 80s and 90s improving was really remarkable. I was very challenged by that.”

Ironically, the course of his own life has turned him into the best lesson in positive aging.

Due to health issues, he looks older than what the current culture expects for a man of only 64 years. He uses a cane and looks frail under a thinning nimbus of white hair.

“A bum knee,” he explains when asked about the physical complaints of aging.

Is that the worst of it?

“Oh no, it's a lot worse.” He laughs lightly.

He then volunteers that in his late 40s, he was misdiagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. After two years, doctors changed their minds because the early symptoms of the devastating neurodegenerative disease, which is progressive, had remained unchanged. “The best they could come up with was that as a child, I was exposed to polio, which is another neurodegenerative disease,” he says.

But in the acceptance of his state of health, he is an inspiring example of the defiance that all people who reach an elderly age will eventually have to muster.

“It affected me. … But I saw that I could modify how I experienced it. Nietzsche said, ‘You can destroy a man, but not defeat him.' I felt this was going to destroy me, but I wasn't going to add to that by defeating myself, and so I saw that the physical outcome is not the only measure in terms of what happens. It's also how you could live through something.”

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