Yesterday, I saw Stephen Frears’, The Queen, starring Helen Mirren and Michael Sheen, and was struck by the movie’s illustration of the brain’s inability to adapt. I was reminded how our familiar and comfortable routines, can rewire the brain to resist changes when we need them most. This Oscar quality story showed the Queen as a Hebbian thinker, a state which reshapes the human brain for narrow outputs and slows down a person’s ability to gain insights to solve current problems. In other words, what you do daily shapes how your brain operates for or against you.

Physical and psychological changes take place in the brain because of narrow focus and a lack of external stimuli, and these changes make it harder for people to embrace change – even innovations that bring improvements or add well-being….

Back to the movie, where I saw Hebbianism shape one moment in history, while we watched metronome patterns of habit prevent the Queen from coping in a key moment that nearly toppled her monarchy. Scene after scene showed the royals gilded cage of traditions, alongside Tony Blair’s attempt and often fail to modernize ancient institutions. Hebbian thinkers fight innovation at all costs, because, unlike non-Hebbian brains, they rewire daily to cling to traditions and familiar habits.

The Queen’s keen intelligence, over time, reduced into Hebbian habits that trapped an entire household into inaction in response to Diana’s death. This movie showed us why change is resisted by so many Hebbian holdouts in the boomer crowd today.

Have we denied ourselves use of our multiple intelligences simply because we have rewired our brains to resist them. Hebbian brains will shake off apathy and block cutting edge answers when we need them most.

Tony Blair, played by Michael Sheen, played the quintessential change agent that showed us Hebbian’s opposite. He mixed intelligence with emotion and handled the tragedy like we hoped a monarchy could have done. Where Windsor Castle locked into Hebbian routines, he caught the waves of grief and shock and rode it with subjects, offering them comfort and help along the way.

It often takes tragedy the size of Diana’s accident to shake the Hebbian reverie to the surface, and even then, only an awareness can open our eyes. The days that followed showed hundreds of snapshots of Diana’s tragedy in a Paris tunnel and the Royal family’s tragedy in a Hebbian tunnel.

People locked in that narrow, dark place tend to act as if all was well, and to ignore warning signs of danger. For days, the Royals offered no statement, refused to fly a flag at half-staff, and escaped to Balmoral Castle in Scotland, where Prince Philip took the boys hunting.

Blair, finally convinced the Royals to look beyond their Hebbian traps, and when they did they saw what the Queen had been running from in the first place. People loved Lady Di more than her, and she’d lost the mental abilities to use intrapersonal intelligence that give emotional tools to cope. It’s true that Elizabeth II had no choice in her birthright. It’s also true that she can prevent the Hebbian limitations that role created in her entire household. What do you think?

Can Royalty adapt to a world that left behind notions of Hebbian kings and queens? In one moving scene, the queen stands eye to eye with a 14-point buck in the Balmoral countryside, and you sense the reflective capabilities of this queen. When she hears hunters approach – she shoos the buck away, a metaphor for her pushing people around her into protective places, when change threatens the Hebbian lifestyle she defends.

Like the Queen, we have no choice in gene pools we are born into. We can choose though, to embrace change, by doing things differently at times. The opposite of Hebbian habits is to rewire our brains daily for change because of what we do, who we contact, or how we focus on new interests. It’s never too late for royalty, politicians, or the rest of us. New research shows your brain rewires nightly while you sleep, based on what you did during the day. Any changes for your schedule today?

If you could do something to keep your brain healthy into your senior years- and ward off mental health problems - what would that be? Watch this amazing interactive display of a brain’s MRIs over time and see for yourself all the power in older brains – power that is activated by what you do.

Dementia’s on the rise in aging populations according to recent research in the Public Library of Science. With more people living well into their nineties, comes a sharp rise in mental incapacitation in later years. Sadly, that longer life expectancy means dementia will become much more common, as things stand now.

Not surprisingly, this 10 year UK study found that an 80 year old person who is mentally healthy, holds no guarantee to die without mental limitations. In fact the 12,000 participants, all over 65 … showed a 58% chance of developing cognitive impairment or dementia at ages above 95. Compare that with people who passed on between the ages of 65 and 69 and who had a 6% chance of dying with dementia.

Gender and education alter the odds too, but not as you may think. This UK study showed women as more likely than men, to develop dementia. Interestingly, a higher level of education was associated with only a slightly lower risk of dementia in much older adults.

Two findings interested me especially because of the hope in this study tucked into doable suggestions that could help prevent dementia at every age….

Firstly, researchers recommended that people use more preventative measures to delay the onset of dementia, since these will “yield enormous benefits.”

While they admitted that it’s difficult to prove that all preventative measures will work, and they even warn us that aging populations should be prepared for large numbers of elderly patients with dementia, they still saw benefits for those who use their minds far later in life.

Secondly, the study affirmed that education - or tactics people use daily to improve their lives – seem to prevent decline in mental functioning, later in life when dementia odds increase.

The takeaway for baby boomers, as I see it is simply…

Use your brain more….

Play with brain teasers such as Sudoku … or take up new interests like Brain Age… which uses different parts of the human brain to lower your DS brain age daily. There are endless options.

Garden, swim, or listen to a good orchestra to maintain a healthy brain through activity in your later years. It’s just that people rarely start new habits in their 90’s but those who start now will likely continue then. What’s your mind-bending plan?

Do you create like Einstein did daily, or criticize like his eighth grade teacher - who called him a bonehead? Or do you create blogs into network magazines, like John Evans’ Syntagma, which moves at the cusp, and not without criticism from a few?

The human brain, at peak performance is hardwired to handle risk and criticism with innovative responses that critics only envy, but rarely reach. According to Danah Zohar’s research, the brain wires for peak performance simply based on what we do with a day.

It starts with curiosity - where you look at a problem - with a possibility in mind, that could solve it. Then, innovators ask the mind-bending question, ‘What if…?”

Google looked at its innovative search technologies, which connect millions of people around the world with information every day, and spotted a problem. Competitors were catching up. Their question, ”What if …? led them to purchase YouTube.

Many said it couldn’t work and others said it shouldn’t. What was Google’s response? The eight year old company and its Stanford Ph.D. leaders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, took their top web property behind closed doors and created their solution. They included a band of people who were mentally wired for innovation, and excluded distractions from nay sayers. And when they stepped out again, Google announced its purchase of YouTube for 1.65 Billion in stock.

Know any boomers taking risks lately, for the purpose of creating something new or improved? How about you? When experiences fuel new choices the brain revs up to leapfrog with the next generation. It makes me sad to see so many intelligent mid-lifers lagging behind lately as critics.

In the meantime, and without many years of experience, Google leaders simply gathered brainpower for change, through a circle of intelligent thinkers. Only eight years old, Google’s targeted advertising program offers businesses of all types a way to measure results, while sustaining a wider web experience for all users. Some of the smartest people in the world work at their headquarters in Silicon Valley and in offices across the Americas, Europe and Asia.

The risk involved adding another winning element before others bought it. Around only since February 2005, YouTube adds a cutting edge consumer media company to Google, where people can view and share original videos worldwide across the internet.

With YouTube’s reputation to easily upload and share video clips through websites, blogs, and e-mail, and Google’s gift for search technologies, they both increased their investment. YouTube currently sends out over 100 million video views daily with 65,000 new videos uploaded each day. Through its own innovation, it quickly become the leading destination on the Internet for video entertainment.

Critics are now asking, … But can Google sustain this creative edge? What do you think? It will likely mean more innovation in how Google organizes its 9000 employees. Critics say they cannot continue to sustain their organized chaos approaches with this new addition. But then that’s a critic’s job – to complain. Google’s job seems more rewarding to me … they continue to expect their engineers to create daily, even while others are gunning for them.

Do you spend at least 20% of your day creating something new, as Google engineers are encouraged and expected to develop their own ideas? Start with the question… “What if… and your brain will do the rest. It’s already hardwired for peak performance - whenever you draw on its creative parts as Google just did when it bought YouTube.

No question - nay sayers will complain that they need more money to create like Google…. Using resources you already possess, do you see any possibilities for something new in your day?

Victim or adventurer – which way is yours? The human brain is capable of casualty or quest - in even the most ordinary day, and what you do decides how the plasticity in your brain wires for or against you.

One boomer I know took photographs last week of a Porsche Racing Event, and plans to submit these for fun and profit. He’s looking forward to seeing several people he knows from the race, flashed across the media … in response to BBC’s invited perspective to publish more of what folks think can happen as they age.

Adventure for this retiree, is woven into the art and science any day can bring because he’s leaving home with wonder and expectation in mind. He admits he’s not much of a photographer, and yet equipped with a new camera, he’s off to capture news he feels proud to submit. His muse might lead Gerry to chat with project leaders, sip hot coffee near the site, research a new addition to digital pictures, or jot down captivating quips to go with digital images he snaps of cars on the fly.

Another boomer I know described a day like this… “I got up late, looked out at the rain, thought about two friends who didn’t call back last week, and decided to stay inside. He watched TV, ate too many carbs and slugged up his brain until it seemed to all of us, as if the song Worms, was written to describe his mournful state. Have you ever lived these words as this man wired his brain through victim choices…?

“Nobody loves me, everybody hates me,
Think I’ll just go eat worms.
Big fat juicy ones, Eensie weensy teensy ones,
Watch how they wiggle and squirm.”

Adventurers look more to inner motivation … while victims, on the other hand, see themselves as more vulnerable than the rest of us, and live their day around that belief. That’s pretty much how the brain rewires through what a person does in a day.

People alive to adventure inspire the rest of us to see similar visions of hope. Like lighthouses they flash…beam … flash … beam … beyond life’s choppier waters, so emotional problems look like mere challenges to call them deeper.

Any adventure for you today? The human challenge is simply to make career choices that count, and the brain’s work is to steer those choices in.