It’s Andy here today. Ann is in OurLittleCorner explaining how ice cream can be brain food.

Frank Bruni, one of my favorite NYTimes opinion columnists, recently wrote a piece entitled “The Brain is the New Belly.”  It hit close to home.

Bruni notes that as we age (even though Bruni is only 61) we find ourselves and those around us increasingly obsessing about our mental state. The hyperbole and dark humor about our memory lapses reflect a widespread undercurrent of anxiety that our brains may be declining. Bruni contends that much of this angst is driven by a dramatic increase in media attention to the issue:

All around me I hear and see mentions of cognitive health, which, like early onset, is a term that wasn’t nearly as prevalent a decade ago. I trip across more and more articles about brain optimization. I encounter more and more ads for elixirs that promise to perpetuate my acuity and protect my precious thoughts. I’ve never been so conscious of my consciousness. I’ve never been so mindful of my mind.

I’m certainly not immune to this nagging fear of brain decline. And it’s the small things that get to me — like driving through Sonoma and remembering that I had set a pizza box on my car roof only after noticing other motorists frantically gesturing at my roof (which, by the way, happened just last week) ; or the many (many) times I’ve buckled up my bike helmet only to have to take it off again to check to see if I’d turned on its rear blinking light; or spending an entire conversation with someone I know while straining the whole time to recall the person’s name. Sound familiar?

These kinds of lapses are often referred to as “brain farts,” a term I’ve always considered to be a somewhat unsavory colloquialism. However, the topic of “brain farts” has received some serious science-based scrutiny . A good example can be found in a piece posted onVerywellmind.com entitled “What Happens During a Brain Fart” (I should point out that the article is undoubtably credible because it was “medically reviewed” by someone sporting “MD, PhD, and FAAN” after their name).

I was relieved to learn from that article that brain farts are not abnormal and, more importantly, do not necessarily indicate a declining brain — they are a normal part of how memory works. Furthermore, research has shown that common triggers for such lapses include being distracted, stressed, or bored. I don’t know about being bored, but who isn’t distracted or stressed these days? The article also points out that these mental lapses tend to become more frequent as we age — no surprise there.

It seems to me that the skyrocketing anxiety about”cognitive health” that Frank Bruni mentions would be the source of considerable stress, which in itself ironically could contribute to age-related upticks of mental lapses. If this is so, for our own mental health we need to find a way to be less anxious about our aging brain’s well being. An article in The Guardian by Hanna Devlin reports on some recent discoveries about our brain’s structure that may help in this regard.

Her article outlines the findings from a recent Cambridge study that suggest that the brain’s development is not due to a process of steady progression as is commonly assumed. Rather, the the course of our brain development can be characterized as consisting of five distinct “eras” that come about at “pivotal turning points” in our lives: Childhood (Birth to Age 9), Adolescence (Ages 9 to 32), Adulthood (Ages 32 to 66), Early Aging (Ages 66 to 83), and Late Aging (Age 83 onwards).

In that I currently am at the “pivotal turning point” of 83, I thought it would behoove me read the original research article, published in the prestigious journal Nature, to learn more about this “Late Aging” era my brain now occupies . It didn’t take me long to realize that not being a neurosurgeon (or the like) I should never have asked my 83-year-old brain to try to make sense of the research. Check out the below excerpt to see why:

… the last epoch is 83–90 years old, which ranges from late aging individuals to the maximum age included in this study. Only subgraph centrality was significantly associated with age during their period... In addition, the regularization of the LASSO had to be weakened for any predictors to survive. With the less-sparse model, subgraph centrality was the strongest predictor of age… Importantly, subgraph centrality was only significantly correlated with age in 10 regions, including the cuneus (right and left), the superior (right) and middle (left) occipital gyri, and the postcentral gyrus (right).

I actually began to look up terms like LASSO , cuneus, and occipital gyri but found the effort to be so stressful and distracting that I gave up for fear of generating a slew of new brain farts.

You must be wondering how I can claim that the Cambridge study can reduce my anxiety about my brain’s health. While I may not understand technical details of the how or why of the brain changes over time, I do find some comfort in the idea that the brain’s structure changes at “pivotal turning points” rather than through some incremental progression of development. Knowing that 83 ushers in the “late aging era” of brain development may seem a bit depressing to some, but to me knowing about this turning point in my brain’s life is more like a milestone than a millstone — it’s a milestone in the sense that I now can accept the fact that my brain will be a bit less efficient and a bit more scattered due to a natural process over which I have little or no control. And I will no longer have to consider my inevitable brain lapses as harbingers of brain doom.

Perhaps we all should relax a bit and embrace our brain’s stage of the structural development — and take some inspiration from Earl of the Pickles comic strip: