Now that we are done with this casual review of your brain 1 % in action, stand back and think (your brain again). If activities as trivial as a day-in, day-out morning routine or watching the news on television are so demanding of brain resources, can you imagine the brain machinery behind the complex professional activities of a physician or an engineer, the intellectual rigor of a mathematician or a chess player, or the creative surge of a violinist or a dancer? Cognitive neuroscience is only beginning to address these issues, but it is no longer possible to think or talk about the mind without the brain, or about the brain without the mind.
As a typical reader of this book, you are not a brain scientist, but you are a brain user, a consumer of brainpower, so to speak. And the odds are that you have not been particularly inquisitive about the inner workings of your brain. This is a curious phenomenon, and it concerns all of the human body, not just the brain. Ironically, most of us generally do not care about our body, as long as it leaves us alone, does not ache, hurt, itch, or malfunction, and allows us to feel good. If Johnny contracts hepatitis A from bad oysters, he does not go to the doctor because his liver enzymes are elevated and viral titers are up; he goes because he feels lousy and tired, and because his face and eyeballs have turned yellow—not a highly valued trait on the dating circuit.
Even though Johnny does not particularly care to know about the inner workings of his body, he accepts the general premise that how he feels depends on, among other things, the condition of his liver, which has to be dealt with in order for Johnny to feel good again and regain a desirable complexion. But when it comes to the mind-brain relationship, the closeness of this link does not seem to have trickled into the public awareness yet. The general public is only beginning to appreciate the fact that any assault on the brain will affect your mind.
But is the inverse true? Can we improve the quality of the mind by improving the function of the brain? If the answer to this question is “yes,” then Johnny should start learning how to take care of his brain, just as, in the last few decades, he has embraced the notions of healthy physical living (raw oysters notwithstanding). In this book, I will argue that what happens to one’s brain as one ages depends to a great extent on what one does with it at a younger age. I will also argue that it may be possible to improve one’s mind by improving one’s brain even at an advanced age. I will discuss how this happens in everyday life and what can be done to accomplish it better in a more structured manner.
First, though, we need to understand the natural processes in the brain throughout the life span. “Seasons of the mind” or seasons of the brain is, of course, a metaphor, but not too farfetched a metaphor. The brain and the mind go through stages in the course of a lifetime. Like the seasons of the year, the seasons of the mind are not separated by clear-cut absolute boundaries, but morph gradually and seamlessly into one another. So any attempt to link these boundaries to precise chronology is a matter of convention rather than of real biological discontinuities. Just as the change between seasons may vary from year to year (early summer one year, late spring another year), so too the exact timing of transition from one “season of the mind” to the next varies somewhat from person to person. To complicate matters even further, not all aspects of the mind and the brain move through the stages in perfect synchrony. This means that how exactly you set the boundaries between the stages depends to a large degree on your choice of the criteria. Unlike the four seasons of the year, it is common to speak about three seasons of the brain: development, maturity, and aging.
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