Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky, calling out brain damage where he sees it
What I'm reading: An article on Big Think about the “great rewiring” that happens to the brain after age 40.
The “great rewiring” is a polite way to say something that’s not pretty. From the article: “Older adults tend to show less flexible thinking, such as forming new concepts and abstract thinking, lower response inhibition, as well as lower verbal and numeric reasoning.”
That part about "lower response inhibition" reminded me of a Robert Sapolsky lecture. Sapolsky was talking specifically about the decline in the prefrontal cortex as we age. In his humorous way, he said the following:
"What this begins to explain is this whole world of grandmothers telling you exactly how hideous they think your new hairdo is. That's the world of disinhibited eighty-year-olds speaking.
“And what has always been the case in that literature, it has always been interpreted in a social, psychological, maturational framework. You know, by the time you get to a certain age, you finally accept, 'This is who I am. I'm not in middle school anymore, just trying to be popular. If I need to march to a different drummer, so be it, because I'm at peace with who I am. I accept myself.'
“It's not that. It's the brain damage."
What causes the great rewiring? From the Big Think article: "As we get older, our bodies tend to slow down and the brain becomes less efficient. So not only is the brain getting less glucose, it’s also not putting the fuel to good use. Thus, the networking changes likely result from the brain reorganizing itself to function as well as it can with dwindling resources and aging 'hardware.'"
Is there anything we can do? Consider the curious case of 45-year-old Bryan Johnson, the world's first “professional longevity athlete.” Johnson has spent 2+ million of his own money on implementing longevity lifestyle interventions.
In a recent interview, Johnson said that that most surprising effect has been that the quality of his ideas has improved, even relative to his thinking earlier in life. In other words, hope still exists that the "great rewiring" is not inevitable, and that perhaps it's even reversible, using interventions that are already available today.