John Steffen

Impulse buy alert! It was such an impulse that I can’t even recall what actually prompted it. I’m interested in brain health, lifelong learning, and rock ’n roll, so there’s a prompt in there somewhere. I’m certainly getting forgetful in my old age.

Here’s the gist of the book; a psych professor named Gary Marcus takes a sabbatical to learn to play guitar, testing on himself the notion that it’s way more difficult to learn technical stuff late in life. When I say late in life, I’m talking about maybe forty years of age.

Awesome book. What a cool guy.

I’m forty five and I’m worried about my brain. I can tell it’s struggling, which is a bad thing, because I’m already not very smart. Logic problems that used to be easy, aren’t. Things I used to remember, I don’t.

But I’ve also made progress. I feel like I can relate disparate sets of knowledge better than I’ve ever been able to. From an emotional standpoint, I feel like I’m more open-minded and thoughtful than ever.

But is it too late? Am I past my “critical period” of learning? Am I destined to be a dumb guy who sits around all day watching TV? Should I just get used to people shaking their heads in disgust when I spew profanities towards them after they tell me something that doesn’t comply with my world view?

I hope not. Marcus gives me hope, and I’m starting to take action. Here’s what he says about “critical periods” as they relate to language:

The more people have actually studied critical periods, the shakier the data have become. Although adults rarely achieve the same level of fluency that children do, the scientific research suggests that differences typically pertain more to accent than to grammar. Meanwhile, contrary to popular belief, there’s no magical window that slams shut the moment puberty begins. In fact, in recent years scientists have identified a number of people who have managed to learn second languages with near-native fluency, even though they only started as adults. (Kindle loc 84)

Note, “near-native fluency” is really, really hard.

Studies do abound that show how much more efficient it is to learn complex stuff at a young age, but is age a factor? Is it the only factor?

If kids outshine adults, it’s probably not because they are quicker to learn but simply because they are more persistent; the same drive that can lead them to watch the same episode of a TV show five days in a row without any signs of losing interest can lead a child who aspires to play an instrument to practice the same riff over and over again. (Kindle loc 1433)

Aha, so now we are getting to the heart of the matter. The more I look into it, the more evident how flimsy it is to use the excuse of “I’m old” for being stupid. In fact, at some point people will respond to my “I’m old” comments with, “Nope, you’re just lazy and close-minded with no drive.”

That will hurt, but it won’t crush me. In fact, it may push me to try and build more gray matter. That’s what it’s all about – increasing your gray matter by learning new stuff. Your physical, emotional, and intellectual selves all act the same way, use it and it gets stronger, and better, and faster. It may not even matter what that use is, be it learning music or otherwise.

People develop more gray matter when they develop skill in music, for example, but gray matter has also been shown to increase as people learn to juggle or learn to type. (Kindle loc 519)

There is a lot of rich stuff in this book about your brain. It’s a great mix of Marcus’ personal experience matched up with scientific studies. Marcus does some wonderful work here and I’ll eventually read a few of his other books.

The psychological parts of this book are very rewarding. That’s not all though. I haven’t even touched on the musical aspects yet, which are just as rewarding. This book has re-invigorated my respect for music and makes me want to learn more about it. I won’t go to the length of picking up an electric guitar and trying to learn some chords, but I am going to start paying more attention to things. I just want to be able to at least entertain the thought of thinking about music like Marcus began to after learning to play guitar:

I also understood the music I heard vastly better than when I’d begun the project. I could pick out bass lines, recognize different drumming patterns, and tell what techniques different guitarists used. I had developed a sense of arrangement and how different songs were put together. (Kindle loc 2882)

I don’t know for sure how I’m going to get there. The problem is, time. There’s not much of it. Being able to take a one year sabbatical would be nice.

In the interim, I’m trying to integrate things that improve my cognitive well-being into my everyday life. This blog is a good example from a couple of angles. The setup and administration of it is unfamiliar territory, requiring research and application of new skills/knowledge. Additionally, writing is outside of my comfort my zone, and anything outside of the comfort zone is a cognitive bonanza. On another front, I’m changing my running style from a heel-strike to a forefoot-strike. It requires a ton of concentration to retrain an important mind-body connection which has been in place for thirty plus years. It’s like learning a new skill. Plus there’s a lot of support for the cognitive benefits of regular exercise.

These items really don’t take any incremental time, but may not be adequate. At some point, I need to learn another language, take another vacation to a foreign country, and/or add a new sport to the mix (XT50 is actually helping already I think). This stuff can’t wait until retirement, for sure.

Well, that puts a lot on my plate. That’s gotta be good for my brain.

My rocky relationship with the Catholic Church started when I was a kid and had to attend catechism classes on Tuesday nights, which caused me to miss Happy Days. The sex abuse scandal really had me questioning things and now I find myself a askew with the prioritization on matters of sex and relationships (same-sex marriage, contraception, abortion).

Things were most amicable in college, probably because of Fr. Hesburgh. People who dislike or disrespect him are probably either hard line, far right Catholics, or anti-religious as a matter of course. Rick Santorum displays a general disgust with the job Catholic universities have been doing and probably blames Fr. Hesburgh for pushing an agenda that contributed to an overall cultural corrosion. This would be bad, when you consider all the good Fr. Hesburgh accomplished in his life.

Gail gave me this book back in 1990. In fact, she got it autographed (pictured). I’ve been hauling it around between apartments and houses for 22 years now without cracking it open, but was prompted to read it when a high school buddy asked me a few weeks ago, “Why did Catholics vote for Obama?”

If you believe the stats, most polls peg the percent of Catholics who voted for Obama in 2008 at around 54%. My buddy’s theory, I think, was that it should have been much lower.

There’s a continuum of Catholic values that you can slap on the political spectrum. On the left you have things like helping the poor, expanding human rights, and world peace. On the right you have things like protecting the unborn, outlawing same-sex marriage, and controlling embryonic stem cell research. In general, it appears that Catholics weight the things on the left a little more than the things on the right, barely.

Enough of the politics for now, let’s get to Fr. Ted.

Early on you start getting a sense for his feelings on charity, race relations, and world peace, his big three hot buttons. Here’s a telling comment:

Father Bill, who was in his late forties at the time, told me something that has stayed with me, and I pass it on now. He never worried about being conned, he told me. If a panhandler asked for a dollar or something to eat, he always gave it to him because it was better to give the buck or the sandwich to someone who didn’t need it than withhold something from someone who did. (pg 41)

This folksy charm belies a high-achiever; a person who spoke five languages and eventually gathered 150 honorary degrees; a person who had the ear of presidents, world leaders, and corporate moguls and who used these connections to advance his view of Catholic values.

Here’s him talking to JFK:

On occasion I took him to task for what I considered at the time his reluctance to commit the federal government to an all-out fight against racial discrimination, particularly in the Deep South. I thought he was too cautious in leading the country on civil rights because of the perceived political liabilities inherent in such a battle. (pg 104)

Here’s him relating conversations with Ike:

… On another occasion, I heard him say, “Every dollar spent for armaments comes out of the hide of some hungry child or some underdeveloped nation.” I used to quote that line in my own speeches and most people thought that statement came from a pope or a peace activist, but I had it straight from Dwight D. Eisenhower. (pg 105)

Fr. Hesburgh practiced what he preached on these things. He was on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from it’s inception in 1957 through 1972. Those were important years for civil rights. In fact, to hear Fr. Hesburgh tell it, one of the most important Civil Rights documents was inked on Notre Dame soil. In 1959, the final report for the commission’s first two years was due and the team was overworked and frustrated with the American judiciary system. They ended up working on the report (and fishing, and drinking) at Notre Dame’s northern Wisconsin summer camp. Here are the results:

When we met with President Eisenhower in September, he said he could not understand how a commission with three Democrats who were all southerners, and two Republicans and an independent who were all Northerners, could possibly vote six-to-zero on eleven recommendations and five-to-one on the other. I told Ike that he had not appointed just Republicans and Democrats or Northerners and Southerners, he had appointed six fishermen.

Fr. Hesburgh was also the Vatican’s delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1956 through 1970. Wow, consider all the things that happened during these years and how influential a Catholic priest was. It’s kind of startling when you think about it.

He made Notre Dame co-educational in 1972. Shortly after that, Roe vs Wade passed, disallowing restrictions on abortion. This goes without mention in the book really, except for a short discussion he had about abortion with Jimmy Carter in 1976.

I think his agenda would falter today, it was a different time. I’m not saying it would be unpopular, but I think there would be more of a push from the right on religious values, which didn’t seem to have much momentum in his day.

The sex abuse scandal diminished the standing of almost all Catholic leaders. In retrospect, all of the good Fr. Hesburgh did had the backdrop of a rampantly corrupt church hierarchy that didn’t do enough to stop priests from abusing young people. A church hierarchy, by the way, that he was constantly at odds with. What if he’d been born 25 years later and these issues of world peace and racism had not tugged at him? Would he have focused his efforts on stopping the abuse? Or would it have not mattered?

I don’t know.

He retired when I was a sophomore in 1987. He is Notre Dame, the primary architect of the university we have today. Here’s an official summary of his life by the university.

He’s 94 years old now and understandably not involved in the day-to-day at the university. I think he would have been out in front of the President Obama graduation speech. I bet it would have gone off without all of the hullabaloo. At times the university and its community, especially the athletic department, seem to forget about the values he instilled. Fr. Ted had to rein in one of our most famous coaches, Frank Leahy (87–11–9, five national championships), because “he was running what amounted to an autonomous fiefdom.” I wonder what he would say about our sports program today.