How sharp is the grown-up brain?

The number of adults returning to college or starting a degree for the first time is in steady growth. One of the biggest concerns of those adult learners is whether or not their brains are as sharp as they were in adolescence or early adulthood. Would I be able to learn and succeed in college at my age?, is one of the frequent questions I constantly deal with as an adult education practitioner.

Research shows that our memory declines with age. But, does that mean that you can’t make it through college? NPR News interviewed Barbara Strauch, health and medical science editor at The New York Times, and author of the book The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain. In her book, the author presents some studies showing that the middle-age brain (ages 40 through 65) improves in certain areas as time passes:

Scientists tell us that as we careen through middle age, our brains do slow down. We have trouble retrieving names, or we get easily distracted. But the news is nowhere as bad as we think. In fact, science writer Barbara Strauch set out to explain why our brains falter in middle age. There [are] some studies that started in the ’50s that traced the same people throughout their lives. And they find that in this middle span, we get higher scores on all our tests in a whole range of areas, including inductive reasoning, verbal memory, vocabulary — we’re better in that span than we were in our 20s.

Below is the audio of that interview [6min 38 sec]. Full story and transcript AVAILABLE HERE.