MIDDLE age begins around 40 and ends somewhere around 65. It is a period marked by existential crises, empty nests and lost keys. But Barbara Strauch – herself middle-aged – is not convinced it is so bad. In The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain, she proceeds to unravel such myths about those middle years.
Strauch revisits the source of our wrong-headed thinking. For example, “empty nest syndrome” is based on flimsy research involving a mere 16 subjects, all of whom had married in their teens, had few or no friends and had no interests outside the home. No wonder they were…
