The Unfailing Mind

0ne domain of aging takes precedence over every other for those who feel some commitment to keep growing-and notably for the Ulysseans. This is the kingdom of the mind, the "seat of consciousness" (Concise Oxford Dictionary) which arises from, but is an entity different from, the human brain, the most remarkable phenomenon in the known universe. In spite of the seemingly fantastic development of computers, the brain vastly outstrips the most sophisticated and elegant of these scientific wonders.

Stanley Burnshaw, who writes brilliantly about the possible role of the brain functions in language, thinking and creativity, describes the human brain as

... probably the most complicated six inches on earth: the supposedly ten billion cells in the cortex, tens of thousands of nerve cells in the spinal cord, with millions of receptor fibres converging upon them-the center of the retina of each human eye, for example with nearly a half-million sensitive cells, each connected with a single nerve fiber.

In the enigma of memory alone, Burnshaw goes on:

Millions of neurons are involved. Since this is the working effect of a trace, can we wonder that experts regard the profusion of interconnections among the cells as beyond human power of imagining-at least ten billion neurons, each receiving connec'tions from perhaps 100 others and connecting it to still 100 more? The transmission of a "wavefront" may sweep over 100,000 neurons in a single second (it can operate not only on nearby cells but also on distant parts of the cortex); the entire wavefront can advance through as many as 1,000,000 neurons in a second.* (*Most current estimates of the number of neurons actually estimate them as 15 billion.)

And Burnshaw quotes the striking image of the British physiologist, Sir Charles Sherrington, who compares the human brain to "an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles (the nerve impulses) weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of sub-pattems."

It is this wonderful instrument that an older adult is actually worrying about when he or she frets about Failure of Powers. "Brain" and "mind" are very formidable terms and images in human society. And this is manifested in our modem folk culture. Thus, in our time, everything is "stupid": in a hundred cases where what "he" or "she" has done bears no relationship to the mind or brain, they are still "stupid." Thus, you may do something demonstrably selfish or rude or rash-no matter: it is such a stupid action. We are living in a Cognitive Age.

Little wonder that when older adults think of Failure of Powers-and they are likely to think of it privately a great deal-the first concern that nags at them is the possible decline of cognitive capability. This concern takes the form of three typical questions: "Will I suffer continuous brain cell loss and disfunctionalizing brain damage?" "Will my mental capacity steadily decline in comparison with younger, more productive and creative adults?" "Will I be able to continue to learn efficiently?"

In short, can older adults create and produce as they once did in the early years and the so-called "prime years---and even better?" "And even better": these are the daring words that seemingly no one among the gerontologists and sympathetic adult educators will pronounce-yet in many cases they can be true; in many are already true. We will return to this neglected hypothesis later in this chapter in the discussion of "intelligence" and its "testing."

On the subject of physical loss and mental performance, everyone knows that there are severe strokes, either global or selective in their effects, that can temporarily or permanently interfere with the full efficiency of the brain. Likewise, cerebral illnesses of various kinds can also produce senile decay: certain of these can appear at early middle age-although they are rare. Elderly patients who have been institutionalized because of psychoses of the senium are notoriously much inferior in their capacity to perform on so-called intelligence tests than are healthy older adults, who of course form the vast majority.

No one knows how many people in the later years secretly dread the thought of senility. At any rate, the word is used both pejoratively and abusively as an epithet to deride or demean the old-as, of course, (4young" is used to deflate youth. The commonest private analysis of politicians who in their late years make various apparent blunders or failures in policy is that they are, after all, senile. If a woman makes her third marriage at age 80 her relatives may well conclude that "she is a senile old fool." These are attributions rather than proven conditions. True senility is all too evident when one sees it: the wonderful instrument of the brain running blank with a few sounds like the TV set after the last show; body and brain ultimately comatose, to match the everaccommodating folk language: "They say he's just a vegetable." He is not, as the late Bishop Austin Pardue was at pains to point out, just a vegetable; he is still a soul. Even if one does not believe that, he is still someone to be respected and perhaps cherished.* (*In Bede's History of the Church in England, there is a reference to the extended loving care given to an old abbess until her death from global paralysis by the younger nuns around her.)

No one wants to become senile even if it is the price tag of a very extended life. But the number of the truly senile is comparatively small; even the number of the immobilized aged in institutions is only something like 2 to 4 percent of the whole population past 70. Carl Eisdorfer's recent estimate (1975) is that in the 90s as many as 80 percent of aged adults are still free of senility. * (*G. J. Alexander in a recent paper (Johnston, 198 1) speaks of the "alarming frequency" of misapplications of the label of "senility," and from three recent studies estimates that fewer than 5 percent of adults older than 65 manifest true senile dementia (Cohen, 1977; National Institute of Aging, 1978; President's Commission on Mental Health, 1978).)

The concern of many later adults is the effect of the aging of the brain on continuing mental productivity and creativity. The path of anxiety runs somewhat like this: The brain is extremely sensitive to lack of oxygen and quickly atrophies and dies without it; it is the bloodstream that supplies the oxygen and nourishes the brain; interference with the bloodstream reduces the flow of oxygen to the brain; narrowing of the passage in the blood vessels is a common phenomenon of aging. Therefore, the process of aging must bring impaired mental efficiency and productivity with it. Anxious older people, and naturally most often those who have learned to prize their mind, are likely to take this simple sequence on its face value without investigating the whole context.

Medical and geriatric scientists, indispensable though they are, suffer from the same occupational hazards as, say, psychoanalysts in that they become preoccupied with pathological or abnormal states. When attention is turned to the great army of healthy or reasonably healthy individuals, some important facts emerge. James Birren in an admirable essay on the psychopathology of aging summarizes the studies done on healthy older men at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington as clearly demonstrating that "reduction in cerebral flow and metabolic rate are not necessary concomitants of growing older. In general, men above the age of sixty-five who were judged to be healthy, or free from significant somatic disease, had blood flows and cerebral metabolic rates approximately equivalent to those of young men." (My italics.)

In 1961 R. W. Kleemeier reported in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association on an intensive study of 13 elderly men (the youngest was 65) tested on four occasions over 12 years, using the Wechsler-Bellevue test of adult intelligence. He found a decline in test scores over the period, but the slope of decline did not seem to be related to age. Kleemeier was struck by the effects of ill health rather than aging upon the performance of his test subjects. Since it may seem at first glance difficult to separate the two, this is how Kleemier put it: "There is no evidence for age change in intelligence in the senium, and the changes which are found are better related to the physical state of health of the organism."

In fact, it is an heroic exercise trying to discern the role of cerebral physical functioning in so-called mental performance, if only because of the host of environmental factors involved. This is now becoming dramatically evident in changing attitudes to what the fearsome word C(senility" really means. There are reputable scientists who contend that senility, when it occurs, comes usually not from physical/cerebral disease but from psychological sources. Simone de Beauvoir, who usually takes a melancholy pleasure in recording the sad decline into old age and death, finds herself able to report a French geriatric scientist, Bastide, as writing in Sociologie des maladies mentales: "It may be asked whether senility is a consequence of aging or whether on the contrary it is not rather an artificial product of a society that rejects the aged."

Further evidence exists in the marked difference in the degree of recovery between adults who are laid low by a massive stroke and in effect'abandoned by physicians and family, and those who from the time of the onset are given the constant therapy of communication, encirclement, encouragement, and companionship. Some extraordinary recoveries ensue: for example, this was true of my mother.

In a fine chapter in his book, Don't Give Up on an Aging Parent (1975), Lawrence Galton cills senility 'a wastebasket diagnosis ... too often no diagnosis at all, but, rather, an easy disposal category." Galton lists a small catalogue of physical conditions, including hardening of the arteries, that contribute to seeming senility, which are treatable and controllable, and in many cases curable. Galton remarks:

Galton discusses at length the contributions of "attitude therapy" in returning aged human beings from alleged "senility" to active, meaningful fife. He describes the brilliant work of Karl A. Menninger and Howard V. Williams in restoring to health numbers of patients once classified as suffering "senile dementia." He quotes a superb statement by Menninger: "I apologize for this abominable term. It is what we called the state of utter despair and demoralization some of our old people reached as they lost their faculty for readaptation and coping. We know now that the condition is not properly called a "dementia."

An important development in the past decade is the rich use of the arts in later-life environments to help prevent senility among adults 70 and much older and to draw back those perceived to be not truly senile but pseudo-senile. Everyone in the later years will be assailed by certam deficits and threats that are inalienable from the aging process. Mindless euphoria about aging does nothing to improve the situation: it worsens it, and in some cases increases its elements of pathos. Alzheimer's disease, for example, is a reality that affects a substantial number of older (as well as younger) adults, and must be coped with. The brain ages, and Birren reminds us that the brains of some distinguished men whose competence was universally accepted through their active phases until the period just before death, have been shown to contain large amounts of senile plaques, indicators of brain disease. If so, this merely testifies further to the stamina and the mysterious virtuosity of the human brain.

Even in dramatic cases of severe cerebral injury, the marvelous brain is still able on occasion to employ, as it were, reserve circuits and operations that confound the experts. Many readers of this book will have known cases where the physicians have decreed that So-and-So "will not walk again"-but he or she has walked again, not merely be cause of the wonderful courage of the patient, but because of mysterious and unforeseen powers ' in the organism. The physicians were not usually inexpert; sometimes they were among the finest in the world. There simply exist in the anatomy and physiology of the brain and nervous system of the body hidden forces and channels of recuperation still undeciphered by medical science.* (*A close friend of mine, who had suffered terrible head- injuries and undergone massive operations, heard the ultimate verdict: "We are sorry to tell you that you will not be able to walk again, and you will have to expect a considerable amount of pain during your life." He recounted this to me, a year after the verdict, at a party, limping across the broadloom of a large hotel room to give me the details. Some pain intermittently appears.)

Where physical and psychological loss occurs among older adults-loss notably of some swiftness of reaction or response-the powerful factor of compensation enters in. Where some damage to brain functioning occurs through aging, the process is usually a lengthy one. There is time to make use of the wide repertory of adjustments and solutions that men and women have usually developed in their work life and personal living. In addition, few of us-none of us?---ever deliver the full potentialities of our body and mind, of our self. Most of the time, when we fancy that we are highly integrated and strongly motivated, we deceive ourselves. It takes the stimulus of threat or danger to spur us to reach into the repertory of our skills and strategies to live at a new level of creativity.

Robert de Ropp, enlarging the discussion to include the whole of the inner self, remarks that "within the psyche of man are secret rooms, vast chambers full of treasures with windows looking out on eternity and infinity. Man does not enter these rooms, or does so only rarely. They are locked. He has lost the key. He lives habitually in the lowest, dreariest, darkest part of his inner habitation."

Yet, although many older adults do not use their talents and experience well, most develop some or all of the life strategies Adlai Stevenson described in discussing what a man knows at 50 that he did not know at 20: "The knowledge he has acquired with age is not a knowledge of formulas, or forms of words, but of people, places, actions-a knowledge gained by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love-the human experience and emotions of this earth and of one's self and other men." Add to these, neuroses mastered, obsessive anxieties controlled or overcome, terrible sorrows transcended, the nightmare of debt survived, certain expectations and disappointments in love, marriage, and careers encountered, and the silent company of many secret fears endured. In many of these cases, failure has been aborted or transformed, problems unlocked, and resilient strategies acquired.

From all these experiences many older adults have acquired two major strategies that serve them well in encounters between the physically aging brain and the needs of learning and living.

First: they keep the mind active, growing, life-loving, problem-solving: as close a guarantee as one can get-barring the cosmic disasters that can befall any of us at any age-that a man or woman can inhabit the kingdom of the mind with rich pleasure and creativity to the end of life. Second: they accept as a rule of life that older adults possess in the human brain, even when it has suffered some deficits, a magnificent instrument that at any phase of their existence could serve them better than they permit. And they accept as generally true the statement by the noted gerontologist Wilma Donahue, "Cerebral function is the most dependable servant that can be called upon over a long span of years.

Many adults would feel that Donahue's statement neglects the supposed significant decline of the memory faculties in later adulthood. However, here again is an area of adult mental capability that swarms with myths.' It is true that a few reports of systematic research into memory retention, using structured materials with both young and old, indicate somewhat less efficiency in memory performance by some "old" adults as against some "young" subjects, taking the same tests.

The question, however, that researchers ought to be addressing (and do not) is whether memory powers in the active later adults are sufficient for the many learning, producing, and creative tasks that can fill the later years with rich achievement. If the nature, activities, and performance of the brain are still shrouded in mystery, our knowledge of memory as a function is likewise deeply mysterious.

However, the folklore is always glad to supply the myth. At a recent public lecture, one questioner (she was perhaps 65 or 70) asked: "Why is it that we can't remember names as we get older?" This is what might be called the myth-as-reftige. In this case a personal condition is universalized because the general myth of Decline of Powers indicates that it must be so.

In fact, it is not proven that capacity to remember fails because of age. So complex is the arena in which memory performs, and so complex are the life environments, motivations, and individual differences of the performers, that in both old and young functional memory deficiencies of every kind turn up.

Here in the sphere of memory function, the global tendency of the myth-makers again appears: "the young," "the old." From time to time I ask a room full of older adults, age 50 to 80: "How many have the experience of starting out from one end of an apartment or house to get something, only to find that you've forgotten what you sought for at the other end?" Every hand goes up. And when I ask the same question of classes filled with young graduate students, every hand goes up! It's a small but important symbol of the folly of categoiizing "young" versus "old" functions-in this case, memory.

Another of the myths of memory is that, as you enter the late years, you will remember early events in your life, but can't remember events and needs of the current week. So far as the seeker-adults are concerned, this is pure nonsense. Aside from certain brain pathologies that can affect memory, the most likely explanation for this condition among aged men and women where it exists is that they withdraw to that early sector of their lives where they happen to feel needed, respected. and loved, and at home. The withdrawal is that of the whole being, not just of the memory.

We are learning more and more of the awesome intricacy and compensatory powers of the brain/mind functions. It cannot be stressed enough that what matters in memory performance is whether the mind has sufficient power, not whether there are decrements in some portions of structured tests. Is there memory power enough in this man or woman, 50-plus and through the late years, to write the novel, take a degree, learn a language (always supposing the person has the aptitude!), invent new organizations or objects, hold a public office, travel in a well-organized way, lead spiritual seekers, and so on? The people I call Ulysseans are part of the rich evidence that it is indeed so.

Older adults who virtually immobilize themselves at the mere thought of Failure of Powers specifically affecting their physical brain have not only lost the key to treasure chambers-they have thrown it away. Most adults are quite able physically or with compensatory skills to take on the tasks of continuing mental growth and learning, but the will to learn may be gone.

And what of those powerftil twin motivators of learning: curiosity and the sense of wonder?

The American psychologist William James, who by 1900 had be come a giant figure as the founder of the North American school of pragmatism, and who had brilliant and provocative opinions on all too many topics, was at least on home territory when he asserted categorically in his massive Principles of Psychology (1893) that:

Twelve years later Sir William Osler, in the course of a farewell address at Johns Hopkins University, caused an international uproar by his half-jesting references to the unproductivity of men over 40 and the possible advantages of chloroforming men at 60. (Osler was himself age 55 and heading for yet another creative phase of his career, at Oxford.) Osler did not deny that "occasionally there is a sexagenarian whose mind, as Cicero remarks, stands out of reach of the body's decay." And he went on to recommend that, at the least, all men over 60 as they felt "the silver cord loosening" should do as the Athenian philosopher Hermippus did, "who cut himself clear from all companions of his own age and betook himself to the company of young men, mingling with their games and studies, and so lived to the age of 153." Osler deduced from this that "only those who live with the young can maintain a fresh outlook on the new problems of the world."

. An enormous and hostile uproar ensued from editorials, cartoons, letters to the press, and a flood of letters to Osler. There were even some threats! Osler handled the situation with his usual high good humor and intrepidity but the notoriety followed him for years, and he suffered somewhat because of his enormous previous popularity. Mrs. Osler, who had a sense of humor, remarked shortly afterward to a Johns Hopkins friend whom she and Osler met as they walked in Baltimore on Sunday, "I am escorting the shattered idol home from church."

However, for all his fame and authority, Osler was not a specialist in the science of the functions of the mind, as William James was. A single speech, for all its notoriety, has nothing like the effect of a massive text; nor did Osler have his disciples scattered across the United States as professors and practitioners of the relatively new field of psychology, as James did.

The devastating answering cannonade to James and Osler by Edward L. Thorndike and associates of Columbia University, published in 1928 as the now-celebrated book, Adult Learning, must have been one of the longest-delayed counterattacks in the history of controversy. In the mid-1920s Thorndike was age 50, and his attention had been caught again and fascinated by William James's statement, which he used as the text for his attack.

Thorndike and his colleagues examined a large number of the many small, obscure studies done on adult learning during the period from 1900 to 1926. One issue that had attracted research attention was the ability of adults to improve in simple sensori-motor abilities. The trials were varied and curious: improved accuracy in tossing shot into a glass; learning not to blink when an empty object was struck; keeping balls going in the air; tapping a telegraph key at maximal speed. All adults participating improved steadily and at rates that were in a number of instances on a swiftly climbing curve. The data, however, were of young adults still in their 20s. Other tests had measured adult ability to improve in forming simple habits, in learning more elaborate systems of habits, in memory (for example, remembering series of nonsense syllables), and in complex abilities. In all cases, practice, if it did not make perfect, at least led to marked improvement. That partly confirms the point Wilma Donahue makes so insistently: we must not simply sit back and relegate adults of any age group to some category of non-leamers; we must bring them into the practice field where old skills and habits that have gone rusty can be made to shine again and new ones learned.

The Thomdike group next decided to test adult ability to learn a new hierarchy of habits by getting eight people who had always written with their right hand to try writing with their left. 2 The ages of the volunteers were 22, 28, 28, 33, 34, 41, 42, and 52. Thorndike remarks:

When one changes the hand in writing, not only do none of his old habits of movement fit the new demand; they are distorted in a complicated way. Nevertheless, the mere general control given by knowledge of the desired appearance and by vision enables the adult learner to counteract tendencies to write in mirror fashion, and to establish rather quickly a new hierarchy of habits.

And he concludes that:

Thorndike was struck by the motivation displayed by his eight adults-yet, as he says, the motivation was surely less than that of some adult compelled to learn to write with the other hand because of accident. And is not the economic motive a powerful factor, he asks, in the case of the great numbers of adult men and women who are required by industrial changeovers to learn new skills? He speculates also on the motivation of sheer pleasure, as in learning new games.

The zest with which Thomdike and his associates attacked the question of adult capability to learn is apparent in their search for the right test content for what they cited as "learning a systematic logical subject. 113 Esperanto, the artificial language designed as a means of international communication, seemed to the investigators to have the virtue of presenting to the would-be learner a consistent, logical, intellectual system that could be said to be largely representative of the intellectual efforts required in the learning of various foreign languages, sciences, mathematics, and social sciences.

The test groups are particularly interesting because they were formed of people with almost identical scores on a standard "intelligence" test and were of three age categories: a group of 18, aged 20-25; a second of nine, aged 26-34; and a third group of 21, aged 35-plus. The youngest was 20, the oldest 57. All were university students, the older ones presumably senior people from the teaching profession taking graduate degrees.

In global returns, the 20-25-year group gained 31.5. The 26-34-year group gained 26.3. The 35-plus group gained 24.7. However, Thomdike adds that "the superiority of the younger adults is due almost entirely to their greater gain in the oral directions test. In the other three tests, there was little or no difference." (The "other three" were vocabulary, printed directions, and paragraph reading.)

Thomdike raised a highly controversial point in concluding his descriptions of this experiment. In a separate experiment, this time using pupils nine to 18 years of age from "a good private school" who had twice as much class study time as the adult group aged 35-plus, and theoretically with much more home study time, the school group gained scarcely more than half that of the 35-plus adults. Slower still were the children aged nine to 11.

Actually, David Ausubel of the University of Illinois argues in a cogently reasoned paper (1968) that the "widespread cultural belief that children learn languages more readily than adults do ... is highly vulnerable. " Ausubel states that whereas children have unequaled powers as mimics in language learning, "their cognitive immaturity and lack of certain intellectual skills preclude many approaches that are feasible for older age groups."

A fascinating section of the Thomdike studies is devoted not merely to whether adults can continue to learn and learn well but whether they can unlearn. This involved not only familiar skills but attitudes, prejudices, and antipathies. Thorridike tried to probe into such questions as when the fear of snakes, of thunder, or of blood was first aroused, and at what age, if at all, it was overcome; at what age certain prejudices arose regarding race, religion, and political affairs, and when these prejudices were put aside, if at all. His questionnaire, although primitive, would be a marvelous exercise for any reader of this book who, at long last, will school himself to sit down and really analyze how his prejudices and fears were aroused, and how they were solved or~ healed, if they ever were. This is the learning of unlearning. Not surprisingly, Thorndike and associates were unable to report conclusive quantitative results, one way or the other, on attitude change.

Along with this, Thorndike examined a number of more familiar things: how late can people learn to dance, swim, and skate, for example? ("Age is evidently not an insuperable barrier, learning to swim and dance occurring at all ages to 50.") Thorndike's study of attitudes was based on a sample of 99 people, all with a college education or its equivalent. Thirty-nine of these were age 40 or older. The qualitative summation of replies established certain general principles repeated by subsequent investigators in subsequent years. Thus: age inhibits the learning of "things of the mind" less than it influences motor skills; and if adults in their middle and later years find it difficult to learn or even to begin to learn something outside their usual life and routine, it is (to quote Thorndike): "in part due to a sensitiveness to ridicule, adverse comment, and undesired attention, so that if it were customary for mature and old people to learn to swim and ride bicycles and speak German, the difficulty might diminish."

Thorndike was convinced, when his comprehensive review of his own studies and those of others was finished, that James's assertion 35 years previously was grotesquely wrong. "Age in itself," he asserted in his conclusions, "is a minor factor in either success or failure. Capacity, interest, energy, and time are the essentials."

In fact, Thorndike became obsessed with two factors he considered crucial to getting adults to learn, unlearn, relearn: first, the will to learn. In a splendid throwback to the James dictum, Thorndike writes: "By the age of twenty-five most persons have, within certain limitations, learned a great part of what they wish to learn." (My italics.) And second, he rates as crucial the opportunity to learn under conditions that maximize the potentialities of the individual.

Adult Learning although, of course, a pioneer study, is a kind of Universal Declaration of Adult Rights to Learn. Thorndike calls for a society in which there will be a redistribution of the formal hours of learning experiences--so that these might be spread into and throughout adult life.* (*In Thorndike's day, libraries, galleries, and classes were often closed just when millions of adults were free to learn in these places! Can we be complacent about our own progress?) He notes how usually inadequate both content and teaching strategies are for adult learners. He cites the need for the availability of counseling for adults-the mature counseling by peers for those who hesitate on the brink of learning, or may drop their learning adventure because of discouragement. He urges a more sensible approach to the "dropout" from adult classes-perhaps the adult happens to know what he needs and does not need, and perhaps there is a message for the instructor and the institution. He notes compassionately the many pressures that converge on adult learners. He stresses that wonder-James's "disinterested curiosity"-is perfectly available throughout adulthood. And Thorndike deplores people who apply to adults tests validated and standardized for child and school use.

In "The Age of the IQ" or 'the Cognitive Age," performance on intelligence tests would seem to be an obvious diagnostic instrument to find out whether adult mental abilities hold up with advancing age.

The intelligence-test approach is so clean and definite. It lends itself beautifully to curves on a graph; and its potential efficiency lends it an unmistakable charm for the North American system. There is, however, a slight problem-what is "intelligence"?

Is it so straightforward a thing as "the ability to solve problems"? So anatomical and baffling a thing as "a function of the cerebral cortex"? Is it a number of things-a plurality of intelligences as developed by Thurstone and Guilford? Is it a product of nature or nurture? And how does it relate to wisdom? Where is the Wisdom Quotient?

In the early days of testing, just after 1900 when Binet devised his tests for atypical children, it was widely accepted that intelligence was a genetic factor, fixed or predetermined at birth (so-called "innate cognitive intelligence"), relatively fixed at age 16, and readily assessable by standardized tests.4 From this general position, together with careless teaching and learning and slipshod communications, arose what one might call the cash-and-carry concept of the IQ (codified or indexed by dividing the subject's Mental Age, or MA, by his chronological age, or CA, and multiplying by 100).

The so-called "intelligence test" was administered either individually or as a group process. The IQ was determined, and then unfortunately extrapolated from the whole life of the person being tested, usually a child or early adolescent, attached to his records for various future directions in educational choices or for the opinions of teachers and, far too often, of others. In "good" situations it usually formed part of a cluster of judgments. For example, achievement tests, "interests" tests, school performance, or in the case of suspected neurotic students and others, such tests for abnormality as the Rorschach Inkblot tests, and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory were variously used. But the IQ retained its aura for better and ' too often, for worse. It is interesting to speculate on what effect the knowledge of a supposed "IQ" (often derived in slipshod testing and bandied about in slipshod talking) has had on educational motivations'in later adult life.

Compared to the primitive conception of intelligence as a fixed inheritance from the genetic system, some much more attractive definitions of "intelligence" have been advanced within the past 20 years. R. B. Cattell and D. 0. Hebb described two kinds of intelligence, not one. In Hebb's concept, Intelligence A is found in the genetic potentiality or basic qualities of the individual's central nervous system; Intelligence B, however, is mainly the Tesult of experience, learning, and the interplay of environment with the self Cattell's concepts are of "fluid" and "crystallized" intelligence; like Hebb's, they have had wide influence.

The psychologist H. J. Butcher suggests an interesting verification of these views of intelligence in the following comment:

David Wechsler's definition of intelligence is comprehensive and illuminating: "Intelligence is the aggregate or global capacity to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with one's environment." However, the Wechsler definition raises a host of new problems in its adverbs: What is "purposefully"? Who judges "effectively"? and so on.

jean Piaget has suggested that the nature and functioning of intelligence change quite radically from one age of a person to another. He suggests that it is impossible to place under a single convenient label such different entities or functions as the formal intelligence that adults typically use, the concrete intelligence of mid-childhood, and the sensori-motor intelligence of infants and very young children.

There is a fearftil simplicity and arbitrariness in the idea that mental capacity can be plotted on a curve and that ability to learn win follow the curve across the life journey. Folk knowledge, which for centuries, and long before the rise of psychology, thought it could speedily recognize the "dullard" and the "wit," probably rarely pursued the classification into the late years. Dullness became camouflaged by the myriad disguises of old age conventions. Thorndike believed that a dull young man would certainly be a dull old man; and that a bright old man was certainly brighter than an average young man.* (*Even here, dullness could often be the result of lack of opportunity. Generations of men and women, ignorant by necessity, cry out to us.)

Reports of performance by adult people at various age levels are now normally given, not simply as composite scores on tests, but rather as performances on various sectors of whatever "intelligence" test is used.. Thus, typical tests examine verbal competence as seen in strength of vocabulary, skill in handling problems designed to test abstract and practical reasoning, and rote memory. Later adults hold up well in the sections of the tests requiring competence in vocabulary, in information, and in conceptualizing ideas. They typically show declines in subtests dealing with rote memory, digit symbol arrangement, and picture arrangement; they naturally show a decline in psychomotor skills. These are, remember, general summations. One of the most essential things to recall in reporting all adult testing is that there are numerous older adults who surpass younger in certain and in all categories; and that there are greater disparities in individual scores among a given age group, say 60-65, than between the ages of 60 and 40.

David Wechsler made a brilliant effort to design a mental abilities test especially for adults, and which would be standardized for each adult age group (instead of against children and youths~-the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. His studies convinced him that there is a progressive decline in intellectual ability as the years pass. In Chapter 9 of his interesting study, The Measurement and Appraisal of Adult Intelligence, Wechsler argues that on all subtests of the WAIS the decline is found, and he states categorically in summation:

Wechsler is a formidable scholar in the fields of adult testing and learning. He assembles and presents the results of his research with power; nor is it possible to argue that he had an axe to grind. He devised the WAIS, not to prove that adult mental capacity declines in pure curves, but simply to determine what the picture is, and also to provide a far juster measurement of "intelligence" than had previously been possible with child-oriented tests inherited from Binet. ,

Nonetheless, there are enormous cracks running through Wechsler's rock of finality. The convolutions through which his arguments go in attempting to arrive at a clearly acceptable definition of "adult intelligence" are themselves evidence of this. In fact, he fails. "Whatever it is that the tests measure" is a remarkably obscure statement of the enigmatic central domain of "intellectual ability," which, however, by an easy bridge hardly noticed perhaps by either the writer or the reader becomes the centre of a summation statement of dazzling certainty.

Perhaps the most impressive evidence that could be brought forward of the continuing power of operation of the human mind would be its intimately observed ability over considerable lengths of time to find creative solutions to problems or challenges produced from within the domain of its ongoing interests. And this is virtually untestable by the ingenious tests so far devised by psychologists of learning-brief, usually closely timed tests, with, in effect, "canned" exercises which it is hoped will display the varying competences of younger and older adults. The mature mind at its best is not engaged in once-for-all enterprises, even though it is true that conventional or routine living does present its own version of closely timed trial test situations, day by day. For example, how does the driver of a large automobile most rapidly and successfully make his way through the glut of traffic separating him from the city boundary and his downtown committee meeting? But this is a far cry from the solution of abstract problems for which one may have to assemble one's forces time and again, after perhaps successive failures.

James Birren, in The Psychology of Aging, notes that tests of intelligence to a great extent measure achievement or stored information, and goes on to define the essential quality in the performance of intelligence that the tests fail to measure directly as "inventive concept formation" or "inventive conceptualization." Birren is referring to "the more labile that is, fleeting qualities displayed by individuals who are able to integrate simultaneously available, but previously disparate that is, diverse, or essentially different , facts into some new synthesis." (My italics.)

The difficulty of testing and plotting wisdom on a grid has already been mentioned. One indirect approach to this is the struggle to determine whether people have become more or less rigid in their attitudes with the advancing years. Testers seeking to determine this have employed such devices as trying to find out how far different age groups agree with clich6s, how far they seem to cling to settled habits as against trying out new approaches, and so on.

Some studies in the past 20 years in Great Britain and the United States claim that rigidity, inflexibility, and dogmatism increase after, say, age 50 or 55. However, the control problems are overwhelming. In probing for rigidity in attitudes and opinions, the line is very thin between middle-aged stability or thoughtful conservatism, for example, and rigidity. The probing exercise may be too brief, too impersonal, and too judgmental without the real data for judgment. The subject's apparent drawing-back and drawing-in may be symptoms of deep anxieties that were as acute at 30 as at 60. Surely the best device for studying the onset and progress of rigidity in attitudes and opinions would be longitudinal case studies-biography supplies some of these, but one would need many hundreds more.

A valuable study at Wayne State University conducted by Paul Cameron had investigators interview three generations: Wayne State University students, their parents, and their grandparents:

And Cameron also cites the study of Clarence and Sylvia Sherwood on the supposed political conservatism of elder adults, noting that the older people studied in the survey were actually more liberal than their offspring. In any event, he goes on to point out that "many old persons develop conservative streaks because of what society has taken away from them-status, work, social opportunities, privacy. If fewer things were taken from them, they would feel less threatened, less need to cling to whatever is left." (Reported in Psychology Today, December, 1971.)

Within the testing domain itself, a large number of important studies refute Wechsler's position that a downward curve is the normal direction of adult mental abilities. Irving Lorge was struck by the extent to which the intelligence tests were dependent upon the level of education of the adult. (Older adults earlier in this century had had notably less schooling than the young adults they were often pitted against in intelligence testing, and this is in general still true.) Besides, Lorge disliked the rigid and (he thought) unfair controls that closely timed testing imposed upon people in their middle years and older. What was the special virtue of the frozen time limits, other than that the tests were devised in a modem society especially obsessed with technology, socalled efficiency, and the clock?

Lorge had not been Thomdike's disciple for nothing. He took three adult groups, aged 20-25, 27-37, and 40-70, and tried to match the people in them as carefully as possible, person to person. In initial runs he turned up a declining curve on efficiency~ working under rigid time limits. He took this and computed a handicap, including corrections for slowness, for time away from school and consequent loss of learning habits, and for lack of motivation. Lorge's conclusion was that if the same individuals could be followed in longitudinal studies, there would be no decline in the curves of tested mental capacity.

Lorge might well have also cited the role that arguing with seemingly arbitrary or even puerile test questions plays in the slower responses of intelligent older adults.

Support for Lorge's main thesis came from a study by E. E. Ghiselli and associates in which they worked with a group of 1,400 adults aged 20-65. Ghiselli used only well-educated people, and his testing situations, as in Lorge's case, excluded speed as a parameter.. Ghiselli found that his older adults held up as well as the younger. The Fels Institute tested 72 women and 59 men over a period of about 17 years, using the Otis Mental Ability Test,as the instrument. During that period the average level of the IQ calculated for the group remained almost unchanged. There were many individual changes in the scores: as many up as down.

The great need, of course, was for more such studies that followed the same adults over a period of many years, and in testing them pitted their performance at 20 or 30 against their performance 20 or 30 years later: that is, longitudinal studies. This would remove the educational inequalities and reduce certain control problems of trying to match personalities-an almost insuperable task.

Longitudinal studies are not as impossible as they at first seem. Testing of adults goes all the way back to World War One and in addition, devoted researchers like Nancy Bayley and others reported below set up programs deliberately planned to retest the same adults at periodic intervals. Bayley decided in 1933 to do a longitudinal study of the same 74 subjects from babyhood into and through adulthood; she found after 40 years that the 54 subjects who remained in the project were showing little change from their performances at 18. Bayley's study still falls short of the Ulyssean boundaries, but the returns so far. do not support the "declining curve" theories.

The most important report of recent years on adult ability to retain learning powers is that of Jarvik, Eisdorfer, and Blum, Intellectual Functioning in Adults (1973). In this anthology of studies, Samuel Granick and Alfred S. Friedman note how research

And L. F. Jarvik, in making the summation review of dozens of longitudinal studies, remarks that, while psychomotor skins "relentlessly decline" beginning even between the ages of 16 and 36, "the stability of intellectual abilities emerges once more." (Jarvik's italics.) For example, in R. Schoenfeldt's longitudinal study of Iowa subjects, those "entering the seventh decade at the time of their last testing, had maintained their relative standings on mean total Alpha scores for 42 years." (My italics.) This was true even into the late years: Jarvik notes that "Eisdorfer and Wilkie, and Rhudick and Gordon, whose subjects were followed from the seventh to the eighth decades, were also impressed by their failure to find rapid declines in these later years."

It is true that the same studies found that good health and good education were powerful factors in maintenance of these abilities at the full. Jarvik is able to quote from research at the New York State Psychiatric Institute to the effect that "if illness does not intervene, cognitive ability is the rule and can be maintained into the ninth decade."

Thus, in the most persuasive of all.testing approaches-longitudinal studies-strong evidence exists that adult "mental abilities" performances hold up well, and in the case of some subjects increase, even through the very late years. Who in our time would agree with Freud's incredible statement, "Old people are no longer educable"? Freud's own productive later years gave the standing lie to this fatuity.

On the other hand, every careful observer can see that great numbers of adults in their later years do little or nothing to keep alive the fires of mental alertness and learning capacity. They confront rich potentiality only with passiveness, which is indeed a form of resistance. Or they have organized their lives as a flight from the occasional discomforts and real delights of systematically breaking into new fields. It is a truism of the adult learning world that performance is transformed by an active rather than pAssive mind-set, and by a life filled with the thrust for learning. Passivity and a turning-away from the challenges to learn are not part of the aging process per se; they are self-induced or peer-induced attitudes about the roles and purposes of older adults.

Yet not wholly. Something else happens to older adults, some of whom find themselves in the- corrals of the testers, which has little to do with aging but much to do with time. Many adults get beaten up by life. By the time they are age 50 or 60, not only have they often encountered immense personal sorrows and disappointments, but they have experienced social and psychological shocks simply as participants in a *Recent studies (1979+) by the Australian gerontologists, E. Harwood and G. F. K. Naylor, add strength to the assertion for over-all sustained powers of later learners. succession of upheavals in political and economic life, and in the sphere of customs and morals. Only unusually sensitive young adults recognize in older people the heroic achievement it has been for many of them to carry on their lives usefully and lovingly in spite of these stresses and storms.

Select from these men and women a group for testing, to see how they respond to paper-and-pencil or laboratory episodes skillfully conceived to test strength of vocabulary, stored information, conceptualization, and such psychomotor performance areas as object assembly, digit symbol, and block design. What you will obtain is "whatever it is that the tests measure." The result is not unlike a stop-action photograph in black and white of this remarkable creature Man whose life runs on like a full-color film. Remember, too, that each of these lives also is governed by what might be called an expectations threshold. Many older adults no longer expect as much of themselves as they did in their younger years. They are usually no longer as hungrily competitive, as superficial in certain inner values-nor does the folk eye of society expect them to perform as though they were younger.

By contrast, the numerous Ulysseans I have met in my life have continued to expect a great deal of themselves throughout their lives, if not in old fields, then in new. They seem to have their own measure of "adult intelligence," and so far as I can discern it, a Ulyssean would put it in about such terms as these:

"Yes, I feel certain physical losses from my earlier years. But otherwise I feel that whatever you call my mind is burning more brightly and beautifully then it ever did before. It isn't just this or that-it's the whole of myself, everything running together, not just adding sums and repeating from rote as in schooldays, but a whole complex, a constellation: perceptions, understandings, judgments, selectivity-the great feeling I have that I'm free but not chasing up and down every meadow, as I did when young. Insights, answers, and compassions keep pouring from all the experiences I've had in my life. Not that I have all the answers! Sometimes I feel that I know nothing-there's so much to explore. When I think of it, it's not just the mind-whatever that is-it's the self, my whole self, that makes me feel young, but a different "young" from my youth, in many ways just as beautiful-in some, more so."

Still, it is impossible really to speak too exactly for the Ulysseans-they come in so many different conditions and personalities. Except that common to all their attitudes are the sense of quest, an active mind and spirit, a loving pursuit of life on whatever terms, and great expectations.

And if this older adult goes on to say that he cannot turn off his mind, that day after day it remains enchanted with the variety and the mystery of life, and that it searches in dozens of ways, no matter how small because of limitations sometimes imposed by circumstances, to obtain more and more sights and views of an horizon that never ceases to expand-then, of course, you have, whether rich or poor, well or wretchedly W, the Ulyssean Adult.

[ Chapter 1 ] [ Chapter 2 ] [ Chapter 3 ] [ Chapter 4 ] [ Chapter 5 ] [ Chapter 6 ] [ Chapter 7 ] [ Chapter 8 ] [ Chapter 9 ] [ Chapter Notes ] [ Selected Bibliography ]