You’re never too old
What’s the saying about old dogs and new tricks? Mrs Moneypenny takes it to heart and does her brain a favour with a cell-boosting hobby.
LEARNING SOMETHING new should be a yearly goal for all of us. Why? Studying new things does more than keep your brain cells working – it actively creates new ones. Which, as we get older, is important. Stop learning and you lower the survival rate of new brain cells. Plus you end up with fewer connections between them, or neural pathways, to use their technical term.
I set myself a challenge every year, mainly to help my self-con dence. You may think I don’t need more self-con dence (my husband would say that I had more front than Myer), but even I get nervous from time to time. I recently agreed to do a major current affairs program for the BBC beside two well-known politicians and a trade union leader. Panel members have dinner with the BBC presenter before the show goes on air, while the producer is choosing the questions that the live audience have brought with them. You are not told the questions, but there is a warm-up one in advance. Our warm-up question was a nice easy one about our favourite radio and TV programs. Then we went live on air and the rst real question was invited. “Does the panel think,” asked the questioner, “that the poor should be paying for the mistakes of the rich?” My 21-year-old son, Cost Centre 2, was listening live at home, pacing the room, very worried for me. He said afterwards that when he heard that, he immediately thought, “What on earth is Mum going to say to that?” I explained he was not the only one with those thoughts. Mum was thinking exactly the same thing.
All attempts at humour fell at. At one point, one of the (male) politicians made reference to the so-called “tampon tax”, the fact that sales tax is levied on sanitary protection, an iniquity in the UK as it is in Australia. I tried to make a joke about being post-menopausal. Not a laugh. Never again will I do anything as terrifying as live current affairs. Next time the BBC calls, I shall tell them I am washing my hair.
So I continued to look for a 2016 challenge. Whole papers have been written listing things you can do to encourage new brain cells. Learn to play a musical instrument? I have never got on well with music. Switch careers? I own my own business, so a bit tricky. Keeping up with current affairs? My BBC appearance showed me how useless I was at that. So I decided on a new hobby and booked myself onto a three-day residential course to learn to play bridge.
The course was at Arisaig House on the west coast of Scotland, a beautiful location looking out to sea. Not that I was able to look out to sea much as I was too busy looking at my hand. Six hours of bridge tuition a day, three days in a row, required incredible concentration and I was exhausted at the end of the day. Plus, no one explained to me in advance that bridge was a combination of maths and learning a new language. For those bridge players among you, I can tell you I have learned to play “weak no trump”, which isn’t a slogan from the US election campaign, but a way of opening the bidding. The language of bidding I found more complicated than any French class and I’m sure just as good for stimulating grey cells. A paper published in the journal Brain & Language in 2013 suggests acquiring a second language after infancy stimulates new neural growth and connections among neurons in ways seen in acquiring complex motor skills, such as juggling. I’ve never learned to juggle, but I can’t believe it’s harder than learning bridge.
I’m glad I learned to play, though I have yet to nd a regular partner outside of my iPad, where an app allows me to play with three invisible others. There is no doubt I will have encouraged some new brain cells, although the ones already there are exhausted from the effort needed to generate their new cousins. I’ve already decided my 2017 challenge – whatever it will be – will be less challenging than bridge.