The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

by Norman Doidge

Mary Fasano, at age eighty-nine, earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, taught himself ancient Greek in old age to master the classics in the original. We might think, “What for? Who am I fooling? I’m at the end of the road.” But that thinking is a self-fulfilling prophecy, which hastens the mental decline of the use-it-or-lose-it brain. At ninety, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Guggenheim Museum. At seventy-eight, Benjamin Franklin invented bifocal spectacles. In studies of creativity, H. C. Lehman and Dean Keith Simonton found that while the ages thirty-five to fifty-five are the peak of creativity in most fields, people in their sixties and seventies, though they work at a slower speed, are as productive as they were in their twenties. When Pablo Casals, the cellist, was ninety-one years old, he was approached by a student who asked, “Master, why do you continue to practice?” Casals replied, “Because I am making progress.”