Save My Brain!
The mind, like the body, gets flabbier with age. Can a crash course in, well, anything, keep it in shape? We sent a boomer to One Day University to find the answer.
(Photography by Peter Dazeley/Getty)
IT'S THE BRAIN THAT SETS US APART from other creatures. That's why its decline fills us with dread - it foreshadows not just death, but also a shuffling toward being something less than human. We fear devolution. * My brain is my bond to the baby boom, to which I belong only demographically. I was born in 1964, the last year of the boom, so I feel like a Generation Xer. But I'm a boomer about my brain. * Baby boomers like to try to stave off the inevitable - inventor Ray Kurzweil even thinks he can beat death. So why should my brain slip? I regularly play Brain Age or Big Brain Academy, games that claim to keep my neurons firing. I try to drive different routes, to keep my brain from falling into a routine (it's never boring to get lost). I force myself to read things like Paradise Lost (a better exercise when my brain was younger). And, recently, I attended One Day University - after all, what could be better for my brain than a little schooling?
One Day U offers sessions in various cities throughout the year, with each featuring four lectures on diverse topics, given by gifted teachers from top schools. The day I go, the profs come from Brown, Harvard, Syracuse, and Dartmouth. It's open to anyone (a cadre of high school students from Boston regularly attend), but it's clearly targeted at boomers, and we make up most of the class. We sit though four lectures of about 70 minutes each, including time for questions at the end.
The program, based in Northampton, bills itself as "the most stimulating day of college available anywhere." Sprinkle some salt on that: One Day U's cofounder and director, Steve Schragis, bankrolled Spy magazine back in the day. Schragis tells the several hundred of us gathered in our "classroom," an auditorium at Babson College in Wellesley, that "there is no homework, no exams, you can't fail, and you've already earned an A." Today's classes will be political science, psychology, history, and cosmology. I know something about all these things, and in two of them, I think I know quite a bit. But the only thing I care about is, will I feel brainier at the end of the day?
THE FIRST SESSION, A LOOK AT the presidential campaign, will be telling. We are saturated with politics right now, and I know plenty about political science. Right away, the professor, Wendy Schiller of Brown, puts this election in its historic context: a woman, an African-American, and a septuagenarian are all unprecedented candidates. Yup. I knew that, though I like her framing. The money is unprecedented, too - by April, more than $700 million had been spent. "Public financing is almost irrelevant now," she tells us, weeks before Barack Obama decides to decline such funds.
She goes into the minutiae of the muddled way Democrats count delegates, tracing the system back to the party's effort (led by George McGovern) to blunt the power of Southern Democrats. Then she gets into why it matters that this election is bringing out new voters in every demographic, citing research that people who vote keep voting, meaning we'll probably see a far more engaged electorate for years to come. I'm feeling smarter already.
Plus, Schiller is fun and full of useful bits of trivia - I learn, for instance, why New Hampshire gets the first primary: During an early-20th-century wave of populism, numerous states adopted nominating primaries, but party machines regained control of the process by killing them off everywhere except New Hampshire. So when primaries came back in vogue in the 1960s, New Hampshire was allowed to keep holding the first one.
I also learn the back story of Lloyd Bentsen's famous dis of Dan "You're No Jack Kennedy" Quayle. Schiller said it was an aside Bentsen made during debate rehearsal, and Bentsen's advisers urged him to use it in the real thing.
One Day U is already a good investment of my time, and we have three lectures to go. I figure psychology will be a waste; it's really positive psychology, the so-called study of human happiness and potential - I think it's pseudoscience. As if some Shakti Gawain think-alike is going to make me smarter by telling me how to be happy.
I AM SO WRONG. Harvard lecturer Shawn Achor is funny, self-deprecating, and devastating to my notions of what his field is all about. He's got research that makes the "genes + environment = potential for success" model look like an idea only Flat Earthers could harbor. Even better, he's got tips for how we can improve our brains. By the time he starts talking about "activation energy" and tells us we can prime our brains for enhanced achievement by doing one simple activity every day, I'm butter to his knife. As an example, he suggests we write down five things we're grateful for each day. I start immediately. Will it work? Who knows? But I'm fired up now.
I learn a few more things from David Rubin, a First Amendment scholar from Syracuse University, and better yet, get to feel skeptical about some of his statistics, and I come to think he's wrong to speculate that the Bush administration will sue a journalist for espionage before its term ends (but if it happens, I can espionage before its term ends (but if it happens, I can tell you what it means, which was not true before). There's nothing like thinking you're smarter than a smart person to make you feel, well, smart.
And Marcelo Gleiser, a Dartmouth physicist, is full of wonderful anecdotes. I knew that Galileo was put under house arrest not for pushing the idea that the earth goes around the sun, but because Galileo kept telling everyone that the pope - his friend - was an idiot about theology. But I did not know that Luther didn't like heliocentric theory, or that Newton was probably a virgin (physicists turn out to be quirky, to say the least). Plus, despite having to stuff 2,500 years of cosmology into just over an hour, Gleiser manages to greatly improve my grasp of 20th-century physics - did you know that it was only in 1924 that Edwin Hubble figured out the Milky Way was not the only galaxy?
I didn't.
Michael Fitzgerald, a frequent contributor to the Globe Magazine, is still trying to finish Paradise Lost. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
