In University Hall’s conference room and in similar venues across the country, older adults can find the kind of positive, interactive environment that encourages brain development. There are about 400 distinct lifelong learning programs in the United States, including more than 100 OLLIs at colleges and universities nationwide that were seeded by grants from philanthropist Bernard Osher. The Berkeley OLLI offers 15–20 courses each fall, winter, and spring, led by faculty and other experts, on everything from photography, Shakespeare, and petropolitics, to “Parallel Universes in Science, Myth, and Art” and “The Greening of the Bay Area.” Director Susan Hoffman says, “We encourage OLLI members to start study groups, writing circles, interest area groups. Everyone is encouraged to volunteer and help build the program.”

Mental tune-up:
If your neurons are prone to the occasional misfire, it may be time to clean the points and plugs. The Osher Lifeling Learning Institute at Berkeley offers mental tune-ups to adults age 50 and above, in the form of lectures and courses. You can't ever be too smart.

Deborah Lichtman is one such volunteer who was attracted by the potential for intellectual stimulation and a sense of community. Initially interested in taking a class or two, she quickly became more involved because she found the program “really vital and exciting.”

Lichtman currently serves on the institute’s curriculum committee and was active in the “Wartime, Our Times” story project. A collaboration between the OLLIs at Berkeley and San Francisco State, KALW radio, and journalism students at Phillip and Sala Burton Academic High School in San Francisco, the project put young students in touch with older people who had experienced war. Journalists, technicians, and a creative writing instructor trained the students to conduct, record, and edit interviews. The resulting documentary will air on Memorial Day.

This is not your traditional adult education. It’s innovative, flexible, engaged. OLLI has partnerships with a number of local organizations, including the Aurora Theatre Company in downtown Berkeley. Students attend performances and then have a chance to talk with the director, writer, or an actor. Last winter, members of a writing class and a singing class gave a joint performance at a local jazz club, Anna’s Jazz Island. A course on digital culture, taught at the Pacific Film Archive on the Berkeley campus, included a mix of PFA members, students from OLLI, and Cal undergraduates.

Programs such as OLLI are attempting to define a new way of aging that is community based and proactive. The baby boomers’ population bulge and increased life expectancy will soon combine to produce a surge in the number of Americans over 65, from 36.8 million in 2005 to an estimated 86.7 million in 2050. As a result, brain health is quickly becoming more than a matter of personal jitters; it is an imperative of public policy, essential to lessening the coming burden of an aging population on our health care system.

Lifelong learning institutes must continue to adapt their offerings to reflect new research in neuroscience. But there’s also another challenge: Diamond and her colleagues found that although they could strengthen neuronal growth in rats by enriching their environment with toys and sociability with other rats, when the subject rats were also held, they lived as long as 900 days rather than their previous 600, and their brains continued to change. To the list of factors contributing to brain health, then, Diamond adds love. “And why,” she asks, “would you want to live without love?”

Dorothy Wall is author of Encounters with the Invisible: Unseen Illness, Controversy, and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and coauthor of Finding Your Writer’s Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction.

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