Brainstorms

The premise of my research, speeches and workshops over the past three decades has been based on the question, "If it's your job to develop the mind, shouldn't you know how the brain works?"

Kenneth Wesson works as a keynote speaker and educational consultant for pre-school through university-level institutions and organizations. He speaks throughout the world on the neuroscience of learning and methods for creating classrooms and learning environments that are "brain-considerate."

We can all vividly remember the name, face, voice and kindness of a teacher who took a true interest in us back in elementary school (it is often our third grade teacher), so why can't we remember where we parked our own car in the shopping mall just one hour ago? Octogenarians, who remember every minute detail of their wedding day or graduation, but often cannot remember whether or not they took their medications that very same morning. It is the emotional connections that determine what we choose to remember and what we elect to disregard. Dr. Robert Grant refers to this process as learning to “essentialize.”

For eons, we were convinced that the aging brain was also a rapidly deteriorating brain on the fast track of mental decay. However, new research is now suggesting that the notions of cognitive decline and excessive brain cell loss are not entirely attributable to the aging process. “Growing older” instead seems to prompt a particular series of physical and neurological changes, but some individuals meet the resulting challenges better than others. While there are indeed some predictable neurological consequences of the maturing brain, there also appear to be some unexpected processing advantages.

Getting the human brain to outlive the human body is our goal in the aging process:

• Most U.S. Presidents take office in their 50s, 60s and 70s
• Most Nobel Prize winners are in their 50s, 60s and 70s
• Hockey player, Gordie Howe, scored 19 goals for the New England Whalers when he was 50
• Leonardo da Vinci started painting Mona Lisa after his 50th birthday
• Sculptor John Borglum began the presidential carvings of Mt. Rushmore in his mid fifties
  

Skills performance and memories go through a “graceful degradation” over time. As many people over forty will attest to, there appears to be a rapid falloff in memory functioning known as age-associated memory impairment (AAMI), which also accompanies more than four decades of processing and storing vast amounts of vitally important personal information. Throughout one's life, the critical neural circuitry that represents an individual's memories are stored and actively retained. Given forty years of data, it sometimes takes more time sifting through and retrieving the specifically sought-after memory, its details, or related facts, when we are challenged with the task of sorting through the massive number of other mental files and the ever-changing systems of neural connections representing that accumulated information. Unless we were initially highly motivated or emotionally invested in encoding a particular name, fact or event, then “recollecting” it (which accurately describes the neurophysiological process of remembering) can become difficult.

Decreased processing rates are considered part of an overall slowdown in general cognitive agility and age-related responsiveness. We don't run as swiftly. We don't jump as high. We often move more slowly and our recollections take more time for us to reconstruct than they once did. Are these all normal aspects of the benign course of aging? There are several good practices” that can prolong the effective use of the human brain at close to optimal levels well beyond the age of fifty.

Kenneth Wesson (408) 223-6728
Kenneth.Wesson@sjeccd.org