I am known in my family of origin
as the one who’s always asking questions, and
often too many. The answer I often got was an exasperated,
“WE don’t know!”
Perhaps that is why I am drawn to
books that answer the question “Why?”
Although
I love a good story I can lose
myself in, at this point in my life I am more likely to
browse the nonfiction shelves of
our library, looking for answers to questions about
health, nutrition, sleep and other
quality of life topics. I’m finding
books that address
these questions in depth and
satisfy my curiosity in the process. Two
of the topics
I’ve read about recently are memory
and sleep.
Like most of us in middle or late
middle-age, I wonder what has happened to my
memory. These days I am making lists like crazy in
order to remember important
appointments, errands, and my daily
to-do list. I can’t seem to remember
anything for
long. Why is it that in the 10 seconds it takes to
walk up the stairs from the clothes
dryer in the basement to the
kitchen, I forget I was planning to remind myself with the
stove timer to go back down in 5
minutes? Only when the dryer buzzer goes
off and
the clothes are dry, do I recall
how important this was, and now it’s too late.
My son’s
sweater – a gift from his
girlfriend – has shrunk 3 sizes. Is this
lack of focus part of a
steady decline in my mental
function? And exactly why does it keep
happening? I
know I had a very good memory when
I was younger! Barbara Strauch’s book,
“The
Secret Life of the Grown-up
Brain: The Surprising Talents of the
Middle-Aged Mind,”
provides answers to these questions
– and gives me hope. Yes, we all have
more
difficulty focusing by middle age,
and a major reason is that the frontal lobes of our
brains don’t do as good a job of
blocking out distracting information as they did when
we were younger. Our brains easily go into default
“daydreaming” mode, allowing
irrelevant details to interfere
with our focus on the task at hand.
Fortunately there is
an upside to this annoying
phenomenon. Studies show that brains
that block out less
effectively also tend to be more
creative, and thinking about lots of things at once can
lead to useful and interesting new
associations. In her book, Strauch
discusses the
declines in our brains in middle
age, but she points out that there are also very large
gains made at this time of
life. We’re able to see connections,
patterns, and
underlying concepts, all of which
leads to insights, and more importantly, wisdom.
Strauch explains, “By middle age,
our brains have trillions of carefully constructed
links and pathways that make us
smarter, calmer, wiser, happier.” She
points to the
example of the pilot who was able
to safely ditch his plane in the middle of the Hudson
River after losing power in both
engines. He and his entire crew were all
middle-aged
and had the judgment and wisdom to
do the right thing automatically. An air
safety
investigator called it a “testament
to experience.”
Sleep, or the lack of it, is
another topic frequently of interest to those of us in
middle-age. Not being able to fall asleep or go back to
sleep in the middle of the night
is a common problem. When I picked up “The Secret Life of Sleep”
by Kat Duff, I
wasn’t really looking for a “how
to” book. I’d already read enough about
good “sleep
hygiene” and suggestions for coping
with sleep issues. This book is an
exhaustive
survey of sleep through the ages up
to the present day, and I was curious to see what
new perspectives I might find in
it.
One interesting fact was that sleep
can improve memory and learning. It’s
not
just that we feel rested after a
good night’s sleep – we actually learn when we’re
asleep and our skills improve. Duff’s book explains how this happens. Another topic
that gave me a broader perspective
on sleep issues is the history of sleeping.
When
you’re lying awake in the middle of
the night, you may find it reassuring to know that in
other centuries, people didn’t
expect to sleep through the night. Prior
to the Industrial
Age, most Europeans had two spans
of sleep a night with an hour or two of calm
wakefulness in between. This was considered normal. Communal sleep, the practice
of sharing a bed with other family
members, was also common before modern times,
and still is today, except in
Northern European and American cultures.
The topic of
“sleep training” for babies is
certainly of current interest – what to do when babies cry
at night. Even within my own extended family, there are
differing views on this issue.
Some parents respond quickly to
sooth a crying baby while others take the approach
that allowing a baby over six
months to cry for a time will eventually lead to sleeping
through the night. And then there’s the difficult problem of
insomnia and what to do
about it. Duff points out that insomnia has been with
us throughout history, but in our
fast-paced, stressful culture it
has become a problem for more and more people.
One
result of this is the widespread
use of sleep medications whose effectiveness can be
limited and whose side effects are
sometimes dangerous.
The topics of the middle-aged brain
and sleep are but a few of the many
subjects I’ve explored by reading
nonfiction books in our library.
Sometimes I am
searching for an answer to a
question; at other times I see a title that piques my
interest and I glance through the
book to find out more. You may want to
browse the
new nonfiction shelves at our
library to see what interests you, or ask a Reference
Librarian to direct you to the area
containing books on a topic you’re exploring.
The
answers to your questions await
you.
