Free Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain by Barbara Strauch Page B

all this sounds a lot like what we like to call intuition or gut instinct. Neuroscientists don’t like to use such words. They prefer the word gist.
    Defined broadly, gist is the ability to understand—and remember—underlying major themes. Here again, we get better at grasping the big picture—because of the intrinsic nature of how our brains operate.
    A series of intriguing studies has shown that we more easily wrap our brains around a main idea and remember it better, too, as we age. If you give a child a list of fruits—apple, pear, banana, grape, for instance—he will be quite good at reciting the list verbatim. But beginning sometime in our teen years—probably due to the natural pruning of little-used brain connections and a corresponding fine-tuning of our brains—we focus less on individual units and instead look at groupings. By middle age, we easily recognize broad categories.
    “Verbatim memory begins to decline after young adulthood but ‘gist memory’ remains intact and gets better even into older old age,” says Valerie Reyna, a neuroscientist at Cornell University who has done some of the most extensive studies in this area.
    Another recent study along these lines found that as doctors gained more experience and became more accurate in making medical decisions about heart disease, for example, they made decisions, much like my friend the doctor, based less on a labored process of assembling remembered facts and more on gist—gut instinct—a shift that made reaching a conclusion both simpler and speedier.
    “If you know a great deal about a topic, you can infer rather than remember,” Reyna told me. “But, in addition, the nature of your reasoning, judgment, and decisions changes. You use gist to get to the bottom line more effectively, reducing the need to rely on memory for details.”
    In a way, it makes evolutionary sense for the brain to be set up this way. Confronted with vast savannas of stimuli, those who quickly brought all the stimuli together—odor, noise, movement—to understand the big picture would certainly have a better chance of surviving than those concentrating on tiny changes in the color of the leaves underfoot. Even in today’s world, this talent proves handy. It serves us well—and studies back this up—to know from the get-go that a salesperson, for instance, is unlikely to give us the information we really need. We know we need to get a broader view. And as we age, we get better at looking beyond the obvious, in part because of how our brains develop.
    “It makes sense as we age,” says Reyna, “to rely on the part of our memories that is best preserved, and part of that is gist.”
    Linda Fried, dean of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and a longtime expert in aging, says the abilities to see the vast canvas can foster creativity as well. We become more inclined to tie disparate threads together to make a new whole. “As you get older you can draw on objective knowledge and life experience and perhaps even intuition and they all get integrated and we can be more creative and solve complex problems that we could not solve when we were younger,” she says. “I think we even get better at recognizing those complex problems to begin with. It’s only when we are older that we have the patience and the strength and the willingness to go after the big core issues.”
    In fact, some have watched this sort of brain integration, or wisdom, with their own eyes—or at least the eyes of a sophisticated scanner. One of the most passionate of the current crop of wisdom hunters, George Bartzokis, a UCLA neuroscientist, believes that whatever we call this—judgment, expertise, wisdom, magic—it happens quite naturally as our brains move into middle age. And it may be what gives humans our edge.
    A lively, self-confident Greek who spent much of his childhood in Romanian refugee camps before coming to America, Bartzokis remembers seeing nature