Training Your Brain
Barbara Strauch, in How to Train the Aging Brain:
Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult education, she says. Instead, continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you “bump up against people and ideas” that are different. In a history class, that might mean reading multiple viewpoints, and then prying open brain networks by reflecting on how what was learned has changed your view of the world.
Confronting people with whom you disagree will only raise your blood pressure — but absorbing, internalizing, and critiquing ideas that run orthogonal to the “well-trodden paths in [your] synapses” will keep your brain’s abilities honed.