Yikes! The younger generation says that my generation is stuck in its ways … and it seems they might be right. In response, I can buy new knitting needles, gum raisin bagels, rock back my yesteryears, or I can change. I say let’s leap for the latter and look again how the 50’s-something generation either gains or loses brain cells daily.

Focus on brain facts, and you’ll likely spot five realities to support those young generation rants about our ruts. Why? We fail to change, and our minds stall in deadly pit stops, whenever we …

1. View IQ as a fixed number that represents limitations – and miss more intellectual opportunities to think and act like Aristotle or Einstein than most people realize.

2. Insist we can teach through lectures and talking as if trumping the verbal approach, when multiple intelligence facts show a speech’s inability to pass on much of anything but boredom.

3. Think that hard knocks make us wiser and abandon our roles as lifelong learners - alongside experts of any age. It’s no longer true, about the hard knock thing, according to new research at the University of Leicester. Conversely, they found that adversity makes its victims more vulnerable to suggestions and lies. Oops –another rock in the bag?

4. Fail to reverse, “I can’t” expressions into, “I can” opportunities through increased serotonin and decreased cortisol for new adventures.

5. See ourselves as having arrived rather than still en route. From the brain’s perspective, that false vision, leads you to fall back on comfortable storage places in basal ganglia regions with promote, old shoe tactics. Your foot ware may have been fashionable in another era, but has long since ceased to move much of anything forward. When we operate more from the brain’s basal ganglia, than from its working memory – we fail to mix in newer ideas or to wear new shoes that fit the current generation’s facts and discoveries at their fingertips.

More importantly? How can we jumpstart our brains – so that they perform better than a bag of rocks? How can we reboot pulsating mental engines for change and adventure to replace one rut today, and avoid living the dreaded words, “too old to change.”

Now there’s another brain boomer blog that will be fun to write soon! Any ideas that could kick off that topic?