The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain

Here’s a short quiz. Look at the following list:
January February March April January February March May
January February March June January February March—

What would the next word be?

Got it? Now, how about this one:
January February Wednesday March April Wednesday
May June Wednesday July August Wednesday—

What would the next word be?

Now try it with numbers. Look at this series:
1 4 3 2 5 4 3 6 5

What would the next number be?

Did you get them all?

These are examples of questions that measure basic logic and reasoning. The answers are, in order, July, September, and, for the number sequence the next number would be 4 (and then 76. The series goes like this: 1- 43 2- 54 3- 65 4- 76 and so on). Such problems test our abilities to recognize patterns and are routinely used by scientists to see how our cognitive— or thinking— processes are holding up. And if you’re middle- aged and have figured out all of them, you can be proud— your brain is humming along just fine. Indeed, despite long- held beliefs to the contrary, there’s mounting evidence that at middle age we may be smarter than we were in our twenties.

How can we possibly be smarter and be putting the bananas in the laundry basket? Smarter and still unable, once we get to the hardware store, to remember why we went there in the first place?

How can that be? How can we possibly be smarter and be putting the bananas in the laundry basket? Smarter and still unable, once we get to the hardware store, to remember why we went there in the first place? Smarter and, despite our best efforts to concentrate on one thing at a time, finding our brains bouncing about like billiard balls?

To begin to understand how that might be, there is no better person to start with than Sherry Willis. A psychologist at Pennsylvania State University, Willis and her husband, K. Warner Schaie, run one of the longest, largest, and most respected life- span studies, the Seattle Longitudinal Study, which was started in 1956 and has systematically tracked the mental prowess of six thousand people for more than forty years. The study’s participants, chosen at random from a large health- maintenance organization in Seattle, are all healthy adults, evenly divided between men and women with varying occupations and between the ages of twenty and ninety. Every seven years, the Penn State team retests participants to find out how they are doing.

What’s important about this study is that it’s longitudinal, which means it studies the same people over time. For many years, researchers had information from only cross- sectional human life- span studies, which track different people across time looking for patterns. Most longitudinal studies, considered the gold standard for any scientific analysis, were not begun until the 1950s and are only now yielding solid information. And they show that we’ve been wildly misguided about our brains.

For instance, the first big results from the Seattle study, released just a few years ago, found that study participants functioned better on cognitive tests in middle age, on average, than they did at any other time they were tested.