All the research evidence tells us that as we get older we need to use our brains more to avoid mental decline. However there are actually things that we get better at doing with our brains as we get older. One of these is pattern recognition. We are better able to notice when there is a repeating pattern of behaviour, events, incidents and we also better remember if we have previously encountered conceptual things before such as a story, news article, piece of music or we can quickly associate images with those we have seen before.
So I believe that our brains become more powerful as we get older. Maybe they are a bit like my computer - its more powerful to me now than when I bought it as it actually has more stuff stored in it. Your brain does store more stuff every day so its not surprising it can recognise patterns more easily as it has more data to work with. Any time you enc outer a new experience in life you brain tries to classify or categorise it with something that it already recognises. This is a bit like me asking my computer to find a file containing the word "happiness". The more data it has to compare with, the more likely it is to make a positive association.
When the brain is doing this work it is laying down new connections and developing new pathways. This build up your brains ability to do things, giving it greater choices of the pathways it uses. So its like a road map - if I wanted to go from A to B and only one road existed, with a slow tractor on it which I couldn't overtake I'd take a long time to get there. If I had a choice of roads I'd be able to make the journey more effectively.
You don't have to do things outrageously differently to make your brain work that little bit harder and make new connections. You could just take a different route to a familiar place, eat your lunch in a new cafe, go to the cinema instead of the pub. What are you going to do that's different today? What else will you do that's different tomorrow?
