When infant mice are made to learn a complex task like traversing a maze to reach a source of food, the process leads to increased branching and connectivity among nerve cells in the brain. Learning literally leads to a structural change in nerve cells in the mouse brain, and these changes can become permanent, resulting in superior memory and intelligence. In children, we call this education. In the mice experiments, the branching of dendrites slows down and then stops as age advances, so that new learning becomes more limited. Similarly, in people, the ability to learn new information is greatest during childhood and decreases in later life when nerve cells lose their capacity to grow and branch out to form new contacts with other nerve cells. This topic reminds me of an incident that taught me a great deal about our capacity to learn, and how this changes as we grow older.
Back when I was at Yale, I met Anil Deolalikar, an economist who was then a junior faculty member. Later, he got married and settled down in Seattle. When I visited him there, his daughter was barely three years old. One morning, he played a game in which he showed her several large cards filled with red polka dots closely packed across the white surface. One card had sixty-seven a third seventy-one, and so on. Each time he flashed the card in front of her, she would immediately
blurt out the right number of dots. For the life of me, I couldn’t make out the differences between the number of red dots on these cards, and neither could Anil. I was impressed, because clearly his threeyear-
old daughter wasn’t familiar with the concept of numbers, let alone the meaning of sixty-nine or seventy-one. Anil explained to me that his daughter wasn’t really unique— very young children normally possess a nearly perfect visual photographic memory. This ability is lost when they grow older, perhaps because it is displaced by the development of language.
This experience increased my awareness of the fact that there are many untapped resources within each one of us. Cultivating these skills is essential to developing and maintaining our intellectual faculties, including memory. Even though prime time for learning is when you are young, learning and memory can still be enhanced in middle age and beyond, provided you undertake the right steps.
Taken From: The Memory Program How to Prevent Memory Loss
and Enhance Memory Power
