With middle age come a thousand losses. The keys, how could they have vanished? Reading glasses? Where did I park the damned car? The name of the actor in that movie . . . oh, never mind.

Words slip away — even for actor and comedian Mary Walsh. Names, gone. Words, out there somewhere but not in her middle-aged brain.

“I just forget them,” says the 58-year-old. “It’s grown worse. Sitting down at the computer, thinking desperately what’s that right word, that razor’s edge word, you go through a thousand bloody words and finally, it does show up.”

But when Walsh steps before a camera or performs on stage, things are dramatically different. Everything’s there; nothing’s lost. Suddenly, she says, “I have a prodigious memory.

“My big test is writing something in the afternoon and performing it that night. Can I hold on to that? I’ve been doing okay so far, but there is this great fear.”

Memory loss in middle age is frustrating and, for some, may be a portent of a final, terrible decline.

“Of course, the great fear is of not being there, of not meaning anything,” says Walsh, who finishes a run in Love, Loss, and What I Wore at the Panasonic Theatre on Aug. 7 (the show continues until October). “The whole thing being over and all the desperate searching and tearing around not meaning anything. That’s why there’s a great fear of losing your competence — it’s the great fear of disappearing.”

The mental deterioration of middle age is real, though for most people it’s minor. People in their 40s, 50s and early 60s process information and respond more slowly; their brains are more vulnerable to distraction, as Rotman Research Institute scientist Cheryl Grady has shown in MRI studies comparing younger and older brains. By some estimates, the brain shrinks two per cent per decade.

But even these subtle losses can be unsettling. It’s disturbing when you find yourself putting the coffee pot in the refrigerator. Many older employees worry about competing with younger, quicker-thinking colleagues. Or that their cognitive missteps are signs of pathology.

Yet there’s evidence that despite these declines, the brain can remain strong and even improve its performance well through the middle years. After all, middle-aged people — the same ones who can’t remember 20 seconds later the name of someone they’ve just met at a party — lead think tanks, memorize Shakespeare and are CEOS of multinationals.

Leading researchers in the middle-aged brain are middle-aged themselves.

For many people, middle age brings more confidence, more skill at assessing things quickly, and as neuroscientists are beginning to show, an adaptability in the way the brain functions..

Advances in imaging technology mean researchers can now get a better picture of what’s going on in the aging brain, and it turns out there isn’t the large-scale neuron death that we once thought was inevitable.

“I’m still in that happy place where things are easier than when I was younger and everything terrified me,” Walsh says. “I’m more settled in my self and know myself a little better than I used to and everything seemed like the end of the world. I hung around that place for a long time.

“The 50s are nothing to the challenges of youth. Well, my youth.”

Barbara Strauch writes in her new book, The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain, that “despite some bad habits, (the brain) is at its peak in those years and stays there longer than any of us ever dared hope.”

Strauch, who is health and medical science editor at The New York Times, expanded on this during a phone interview with the Star. “This modern, middle-aged brain is really, really good,” says Strauch, 58. “Whole episodes of the day may disappear, yet I don’t feel there’s any problem, domestic or professional, I could not take a really good try at solving.”

Some of the strongest evidence for the resilience of the middle-aged brain comes from University of Washington psychologists (and married couple) Sherry Willis and K. Warner Schaie and their pioneering studies in adult cognition. Over five decades, some 6,000 have taken part in their Seattle Longitudinal Study; the current group ranges in age from 22 to 101. The researchers follow their subjects’ cognitive performance at seven-year intervals.

They found that in four out of six tests, people in middle age perform at a higher level than people in their 20s. They scored better in vocabulary (identifying synonyms), verbal memory (of a list of words), spatial orientation (identifying an object that’s been rotated) and inductive reasoning (seeing patterns in a series of numbers).

“A life span perspective of cognitive development suggests that midlife, the age interval of the 40s through the early 60s, is a period of maximum performance on some of the more complex, higher order mental abilities, such as inductive reasoning, spatial orientation and vocabulary,” Willis and Schaie write in Life in the Middle.

But there are differences between the two genders. Men reach their peak performance in those three abilities in their 50s, while women get there in their early 60s.

“Contrary to stereotypical views of intelligence and the naïve theories of many educated laypersons,” the authors continue, “young adulthood is not the developmental period of peak cognitive function for many of the higher order cognitive abilities.”

(So how is it that Walsh and others of her generation fumble about for the right word and the missing name while researchers say this age group is at the top of their abilities in vocabulary and language use? Well, as we’ll explain later, word retrieval — which the tests don’t measure — can be a problem for the middle-aged.)

The declines Willis and her colleagues measured in middle-aged people were in perceptual speed — how fast you push a button when an image comes up — and math computation.

But Willis notes that the loss is not so much a loss in mathematical ability but in timed speed.

Willis was not surprised at these findings. She’s seen every generation she’s studied improve in cognitive ability over the generation before it. “At the age of 40 you’re performing better than your grandmother at the same age,” she says. The reasons? Higher levels of education, better health and increased longevity.

She notes that education, career and life experience all contribute to higher brain function, and often cognitive peaks aren’t reached until the middle years. Experience, judgment and, dare we say, wisdom, are tremendous tools that help the middle-aged brain overcome memory loss and diminishing speed.

Another American researcher, Art Kramer, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Illinois, found in his research on air traffic controllers that experience is a boon. He turned to Canada to study controllers whose average age was about 60. (In the United States, retirement for air traffic controllers is mandatory at 56, though there are exemptions for those of exceptional ability.)

Crafting a series of videogames of increasing difficulty, he compared older controllers’ performance against that of those in their 30s in a study published last year in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. The younger ones had demonstrably better memories and faster reaction times, but the older ones used experience to compensate for age related deficiencies.

“The older controllers did just as well on four simulations, and tended to do better with more complex situations,” Kramer says. They also gave fewer commands while achieving the same results. “The older controllers were employing a wealth of knowledge accumulated over years of work.”

This illustrates what’s called “crystallized” intelligence, which relies on acquired knowledge. That’s why middle-aged people, by and large, have superior ability in vocabulary and language —these are skills acquired over a lifetime of use and well into old age. In contrast, something called “fluid” intelligence declines precipitously with age. It’s the ability to think abstractly, to solve problems you’ve never tackled before. “It’s just pure logic,” says Fergus Craik, senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of Toronto’s Baycrest centre and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Memory.

“In terms of professions and whether a person is holding up, this reflects a distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence,” says Craik. “People whose ability depends on experience, wisdom and judgment — medicine, law, writing, teaching — keep improving. Philosophers, historians keep accruing knowledge and do good work. If your work requires concentrated pure logic, like mathematics, your best work is likely in your 20s. Real breakthroughs in mathematics are probably done by younger people.”

With that in mind, it may be that Mary Walsh’s memory as she prepares for a show is strong simply because of years of acting experience.

Denise Park, a leading researcher and author on the aging mind, has always been curious about actors and memory.

Park, who is director of the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas, suggests that actors learn to engage more neural circuitry while memorizing their lines — including their emotions and interacting with other performers — “so there are more ways to get to a memory.”

The married 56-year-old has two daughters who are in their 20s. He is attentive to his mother, Tryphosa, 90, who had a stroke seven years ago which has had the effect of accelerating her dementia, especially the loss of short-term memory. She’s now a resident at Baycrest.

Jacob says he’s part of the sandwich generation, pulled in many directions.

Because of his mother’s infirmity, he is concerned about his own memory. His daughters tease him about his memory lapses, mostly about names. His memory used to be prodigious: licence plates and phone numbers from decades ago in India, where he was born, were embedded.

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He’s interested in brain science — and brain fitness — and has taken courses to improve his memory and creative thinking. “Of course, I don’t remember the name of the course,” he says in the Cineplex offices on Yonge St. A few moments later it comes to him. “Integrated Thinking,” he says. “That’s a perfect example. Twenty years ago, I would have remembered it instantly.”

Jacob is trying to recommend a novel he recently read and found moving, about a Harvard psychology professor who is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. He remembers the title, Still Alice, but not the name of the author, Lisa Genova.

It’s a common failing in the middle years and in most cases, researchers agree, part of normal aging. But why do some words, especially proper names and book and movie titles, get stuck on the tip of the tongue?

Deborah Burke, a psychology professor at Pomona College in California, has studied the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (researchers call it TOT) for three decades.

“The increase in frequency starts in your 30s,” says Burke. “It’s an area of cognition extremely vulnerable to normal aging. People have tremendous expertise and wisdom and they can’t remember the name of a flower in their garden.”

The problem, she explains, is one of retrieval. To begin with, words are not stored in one cerebral storage unit.

“People think there’s a little place in the brain, one location where everything you know about say, the actress Halle Berry is stored,” Burke observes. “We know that’s not true. The information is stored all over the cortex. You can access memory of her face, what movies she’s been in, what kind of person she is, but it doesn’t mean you can access her name.”

What we can’t get at is the sound of her name, which is stored in a different place than the other information about her. As we age the connections between the different areas of the brain where these things are stored weakens.

Experts aren’t sure why that weakening occurs, but it may be related to atrophy of the brain’s grey matter. “The more shrinkage there is in the areas that deal with retrieval and sound, the greater number of tips of the tongue. Nobody’s done the work on the white matter that connects one part of the cortex to another, and that’s clearly going to be important in predicting these kinds of cognitive impairments.”

One more thing about names: why do we forget them so quickly? “Names are arbitrary,” says Burke. In themselves, they don’t have a lot of meaning. If it’s someone we don’t know well, we lose the use of the name. If there’s someone named Carpenter who is a baker, we’re more likely to remember his occupation.

“There are all kinds of associations — oh, this guy has to get up at 4 a.m., I wonder if he makes bread or pastry. Memory research is very clear. The more associations you can form between concepts, the better you can learn them.”

If, at book club, you can’t remember the plot of the book you all read and talked about in February, sympathetic friends may say, “Oh, in middle age you’ve got a lot on your mind, your circuits are simply overloaded.”

But researchers suggest that that’s an unsatisfactory explanation.

“It’s true that our brains have to jettison something or we’d explode,” Strauch writes in the Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain. “Still, you’d think the basic outline of a book you’re enjoying would stay put.”

She suggests at least part of the problem is distraction. It’s commonly observed that middle-aged adults are easily distractible — and often find it hard to focus on one task.

Research conducted by Rotman scientist Cheryl Grady gives credence to that perception. She and her team were the first to use magnetic resonance imaging to study middle-aged adults engaged in memory tasks. Most tests are on the young or very old; it’s more difficult to get busy people in their middle years into brain research labs.

Grady found that when asked to recall words or pictures they’d just been shown, activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain used to concentrate) increased for young adults, while use of a part of the brain called the default network — the daydreamy, thinking-about-yourself part of the brain, decreased.

By contrast, while they were supposed to be concentrating on remembering, middle-aged adults tended to drift away, using the prefrontal area somewhat less and the default network more. “This network is used when people are just lying there in the scanner, thinking whatever they were thinking, the mind wandering — recipes, clothes at the dry cleaners,” Grady says. “Our results suggest that middle-aged adults tend to do this more than younger people.

“I see it in myself, more often, sitting at a talk, these internal thoughts intruding more often,” continues Grady, 56. “You’re trying to focus out there in the world and then you find you thinking about the grocery list.”

In earlier research using PET scans to measure blood flow to regions of the brain as they become engaged, Grady and her colleagues showed that older adults may use both hemispheres of the frontal lobe when retrieving information they’ve just learned, while young adults use just one side.

It’s not clear what that finding really tells us about the older brain. Is it compensatory adaptation, showing the brain searching for alternative memory pathways, or a brain simply not functioning as efficiently as it used to?

“They need to be attended to because they are risk factors for dementia later in life.” That means exercise — studies show with more exercise there’s a reduced risk of dementia — and a Mediterranean-style diet, one rich in fresh fruit and vegetables, fish, olive oil and whole grains, and low in saturated fats and red meat.

Exercise increases blood flow to the brain and causes secretion of a nerve growth factor. But Park says that while exercise is good for your well-being, it is not going to give you a big boost in memory performance. “There are no easy fixes.”

Her prescription: stay engaged in life and connected. She’s researching the effectiveness of this strategy. “Go to the theatre. Take a course. Learn to play the piano. Learn a language. It’s going to enrich your life a lot more.

“You can’t lose with something that’s fun and potentially helpful.”