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I KEEP PHYSICALLY active and exercise on a semi-regular basis. Maybe not as much as my wife suggests, but enough that I feel the burn during a workout, and experience those pesky muscle group aches the next day. However, there is one muscle that I should probably exercise more, and with greater fervor, especially now that I am retired.
That muscle is the brain. In my humble opinion, the brain should be considered a critical retirement asset.
I am keenly aware of my diminished mental acuity as I enter my third trimester of life. My ability to sort, store, and retrieve information has weakened. Furthermore, at two years into retirement, I find that I no longer push my brain muscles for hours at a time as I did during my working years. When I do push, my focus is shorter; my thoughts are not quite as deep. Where I used to swim deep with the fishes, I now wade shallow with the minnows.
I joke with friends and colleagues that, as a former scientist-researcher-educator, my brain was my most critical piece of “capital equipment”. In reality, regardless of occupation or social status, the brain serves everyone as his or her most important asset for career placement, advancement, and success.
There is irony in carefully protecting a financial retirement portfolio while paying considerably less attention to the biological asset responsible for managing it. Many of us pour over our spreadsheets to ensure existing monetary assets will support our retirement years. I suggest that just like any other valuable asset, the brain requires continued monitoring. I am certainly guilty of giving my fiscal portfolio more attention than I do preserving the cognitive asset required to maintain it.
During my working years, brain “maintenance” was automatic; daily doses of research investigations, teaching and writing, kept this capital equipment asset exquisitely tuned. Now that I am retired, I find that much of the built-in capital expenditure for maintaining the brain is gone. I have this extraordinarily valuable piece of equipment lying around the house (upstairs) with no scheduled maintenance program.
Recognition that I require increased brain maintenance may be the first step. Perhaps all I need is simply a continued re-investment; a minor amount of intellectual capital deposited every day might do the trick to keep my most important muscle asset from depreciating.
I thought to start by fortifying existing neurons. My twins bought me a subscription to Spotify, a music service that has eerily learned my likes and dislikes all too well. Figuring to rekindle teenage memories of the ‘70s, I created playlists that included the earliest albums I owned. Curiously, I am able to recall all the words from favorite songs written by The Beatles, Elton John, and The Kinks. Unfortunately these exercises can backfire. Let’s just say that once Bee Gees tunes, or associated images of John Travolta dancing in tight bell bottoms, get into your head, no amount of cognitive therapy can force them out.
On the flip side, some neurons simply left no forwarding address. Try as I may, I am unable to remember anything I learned in physics or calculus from that same decade. Those capital assets left no receipts; the intellectual ledger entries have been simply wiped clean from the grey matter processing center.
The creation of new neural pathways remains a challenge. I try to stay mentally engaged. While my time spent reading is probably similar to when working, the breadth of subjects has expanded. Less pure science, and more science fiction. What I really need is a way to consistently exercise and strengthen my brain’s problem-solving circuitry.
I’ve tried jigsaw puzzles, however, my color deficiency leads to more frustration than completed projects. Apps are fun, but become less engaging once the logical paths to successful completion have been mastered. I tried to learn a new language, but the slow progress made me depressed.
There is an oft-cited figure that it takes 10,000 deliberate and focused hours to achieve mastery in any particular field. At a realistic pace of 2 hours a day, for 6 days a week, mastery in any new field chosen would take roughly 16 years. That’s a significant time-related investment, and that investment comes with an opportunity cost. Time spent mastering one pursuit is time unavailable for another. At my current stage of life, time may actually be the capital asset in the shortest supply.
I began new hobbies, such as woodworking and hydroponic gardening. Each brings the challenge of new cognitive skills. Yet I don’t engage in those activities every day. Furthermore, it seems unrealistic that these activities will hold my interest intently for the time required to master these subjects.
Indeed, the only constant activity I’ve kept since retiring is that of napping. So, I guess I am on track to be a nap master in another decade or two. I could speed the process by taking longer naps, but on the surface that seems to defeat the overall goal of strengthening mental muscle growth and cognitive conditioning.
For now, I am beginning to realize that the overall goal may not truly be mastery of new skills at all. Rather I should focus on continued cognitive maintenance and investment. A little intellectual capital deposited every day may not make me an expert in anything new, but perhaps it will keep my most important capital biological asset from depreciating too quickly.
Jeffrey K. Actor, PhD, was a professor at a major medical school in Houston for more than 25 years, serving as an academic researcher with interests in how immune responses function to fight pathogenic diseases. Jeff’s retirement goals are to write short science fiction stories, volunteer in the community and spend time in his garden. Check out his earlier articles.
May I suggest you take up racket sports? Activities like badminton and tennis aren’t just great physical workouts; neuroscientifically, they’re “open-skill” activities that act as real-time cognitive training.
Because you’re constantly tracking unpredictable movement at high speed, your brain has to perform high-level executive functions (processing visual cues, calculating trajectory and making split-second decisions) under physical effort. That combination triggers a surge of Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), which promotes neuroplasticity, sharpens reaction speed and builds cognitive reserve far more effectively than repetitive “closed-skill” exercise like running, gym work or cycling.
Studies demonstrate that regular racket sport players display superior executive function and greater cognitive flexibility off the court than non-players. There’s an added bonus, too: you can enjoy those retirement naps safe in the knowledge that you’ve worked your neurological real estate hard while chasing a small spherical object. 😉
Thanks for a great article. I think a lot about this.
One thing I will suggest that you haven’t touched on is learning new skills and movements with your body. You already exercise, so maybe this will appeal to you. Learning to move and control our bodies in different ways creates new neural pathways as well as making our bodies more capable. This has been really good for me the past few years since largely leaving equipment behind and usually only having my body to train with. My handstand is a journey but is coming along.
I still have a good capacity in one foreign language, but two others have slid, and one of those I had spent a lot of time on getting good at. I’ll never be where I was and I have no great desire to use it much in real life, but it would be good for my brain to wake those neural connections back up.
They say learning a musical instrument is good for the brain. Being nomadic I need brain activities I can carry with me. I had started the ukelele a few years ago but maybe I should consider the harmonica 🙂