Your Brain on Novelty: Why Retirement Needs New Beginnings

Something keeps consistently coming up in my conversations with those who were clearly thriving. It was not what I expected. I expected to hear about how they found ways to deploy their hard-earned expertise, about former skills finding new contexts and about the satisfaction of being valued for what they know. But often that was not the case. There was something surprising that I uncovered. The people who were most engaged had often stepped into a completely new domain, where they had no prior experience and were now a beginner. In most cases they were not a reluctant beginners, they had chosen the unfamiliar on purpose.

The brain appears to respond to novelty in ways that are different from familiar, well-practiced activity. The neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki at NYU has shown that learning new skills produces structural changes in the hippocampus, the region most associated with memory and most vulnerable to age-related decline. The changes to the brain that she identified are physical. New dendrites form and synaptic connections multiply. Studies indicate that when the brain is presented with something new to learn, it responds by expanding its connections. This alone should be a good reason for you to try new things in your retirement.

This is distinct from staying mentally active in the conventional sense. Crossword puzzles make you better at crossword puzzles. Reading in a field you already know reinforces existing pathways without building new ones. What the research consistently finds is that actual novelty, learning something structurally different from what you already know, in a domain that requires building new cognitive architecture from scratch, is the input the aging brain needs most and receives least often. The people who are alive at eighty with the most cognitive reserve are generally not the ones who kept doing what they had always done. They are disproportionately the ones who kept learning things they did not yet know how to do.