January 13, 2008

‘AN old, mad, blind, despised and dying king…’ Thus wrote a certain poet on King George III of England. Incidentally, we heard at primary school that the early Georges were unpopular, partly due to their bad table manners! Well, in any case it’s doubtful whether this unfortunate king would have been able to read the treatise here reviewed, given his poor intellectual equipment; though since he taxed his brains mightily almost to the end, mentioning him is not altogether irrelevant in this context.

When he was in his 60’s, world-renowned neuropsychologist Goldberg decided — with much trepidation — to undergo a brain MRI. The results though good, showed mild brain damage and á propos of this he felt that since so many of us have preventative physical tests, particularly for early cancer detection, we should also opt for brain scans every three to five years.

And why don’t we? Much of this, he suggests, is due to our inheritance of Cartesian mind-body dualism, though the educated public are now increasingly at home with the understanding that the mind is of the brain, and thus of the body. This is one of the main ideas running through the book, along with such ideas as whether all age-related mental changes are necessarily losses.

In this latter connection he discusses the generic memory (the memory for patterns) and explains how it may become more resistant to the effects of brain damage, allowing us to make decisions at more intuitive levels. Then he looks at procedural and declarative memory, the first being the memory for skills and the second being that which stores up facts.

This is the age of Alzheimer phobia, and he mentions this disease in several contexts. As to its effect on productivity, viewing the work of renowned Basque artist Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) and finding that quite a number of his works dated from the late 1990s to 2000, Goldberg points out that this dreaded disease does not incapacitate us all at once, but causes a gradual decline over years, not months. This artist, he says, lost his memory but not the secrets of his craft. Note also his perspicacious comments on Ronald Reagan’s gradual defeat by Alzheimer’s, and Margaret Thatcher’s series of mild strokes.

But wisdom is the good news and ‘the precious gift of aging’. However, what is it? He describes it as the seemingly effortless ability to see through things, and to anticipate events that catch most people unawares. This may appear to leave it on a fairly pedestrian level, since he is delving not into the esoteric or the spiritual, but into the biology of wisdom.

He further defines it as ‘the condensation of mental activities across years and decades of life,’ adding that the scope and quality of one’s mental lifetime will shape that of its final stages, though ‘One is not born to be a sage — one becomes one as a reward for a long journey’.

If you cast your net widely you can apply this equally even to the tulkus (the repeated reincarnations of important sages and teachers) of Tibetan Buddhism. They too have to exercise their mental and spiritual faculties throughout, in order to remain worthy of their rich wisdom inheritance.

Now for the NNN — No New Neurons — axiom, the idea that our fixed collection of nerve cells in the brain dies out as we age, without possibility of regeneration. The work of Elizabeth Gould and others, though, has shown that new neurons develop constantly out of stem cells, even as we age, even in Alzheimer’s, the rate depending upon cognitive activities just as muscle growth can be influenced by physical exercise.

Thus Goldberg would replace the ‘Use it or lose it’ dictum with ‘Use it and get more of it’. So be of good cheer, and for heaven’s sake use your brains vigorously and rigorously by accepting new mental challenges from cradle to grave.
 

The Wisdom Paradox: How your mind can grow stronger as your brain grows older
By Elkhonon Goldberg
Pocket Books, Available with Liberty Books, Karachi
ISBN 1-4165-2262-X
337pp. Rs395