Book of the week: The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind by Barbara Strauch

(Viking, 256 pages, $26.95)

Science writer Barbara Strauch has great news for that generation of Americans that “never did want to grow up,” said Amanda Heller in The Boston Globe. The brains of people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s apparently actually work better in many ways than the brains of younger adults, and most people can postpone meaningful mental decline nearly indefinitely, as long as they treat their brains right. Occasionally Strauch’s “anecdotal evidence is arbitrary in the extreme,” but she has plenty of fresh neurological studies to back her argument. Younger brains may be better at absorbing new information, she says, but overall peak performance seems to arrive after 40.

Science apparently had middle age wrong until recently, said Clint Witchalls in New Scientist. Strauch acknowledges that absent-mindedness probably does increase with age—in part because the brain becomes saturated with information—but she shows that elaborate myths about mental or cognitive decline have been constructed atop thin evidence. “Empty-nest syndrome,” for instance, turns out to be a concept based on a study of 16 people who all had an unusually small number of friends and interests. Strauch knocks down countless other supposed “facts” about the aging brain, said Terry Plumb in the Rock Hill, S.C., Herald. Scientists once taught that brain cells died off in adults at the rate of 3 percent to 4 percent per year. They were dead wrong—it’s now believed that brain-cell counts hold remarkably steady throughout adulthood.

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Best of all, what we used to think of as “wisdom” can now be mapped, said Maureen Callahan in the New York Post. Past age 40, the hemispheres of the brain “suddenly begin acting in concert,” aiding inductive reasoning, creativity, and the regulation of emotions. The mind becomes better at judging character and sizing up complex situations quickly, in part because the fatty tissue that coats the long tails of our neurons—and reduces information noise—is thickest in middle age. Yes, forgetfulness remains a problem: Even Strauch sometimes seems to lose track of the points she’s already made. But repetitions can be forgiven in a book this convincing. True wisdom, as William James said, is “the art of knowing what to overlook.”