Gene Cohen likes to tell a story about his parents-in-law, Howard and Gisele Miller, when the couple came to visit Gene and his wife Wendy in Washington, D. C.

One day, they decided to tour the National Gallery of Art. After leaving the museum, they took the subway toward their dinner destination, the home of their daughter and Gene.

On emerging from the subway, however, Howard and Gisele were confronted by a fierce surprise snowstorm. They could not have walked, in any case, since it was too far, so they had planned to take a taxi.

But continued efforts to flag a taxi failed, and cell phones were not yet in common use. For the moment, these 70-somethings were at a loss. However, Howard soon noticed a pizza parlor nearby.

A sudden brain storm impelled him toward that store where he and his wife ordered a large pizza to go. It would be delivered to the home of their daughter.

And then he added the following request. With the pizza, would the delivery man deliver them as well? And that’s what happened.

Through that clever stratagem, they found transportation in the midst of a swirling snowstorm and arrived at their destination on time.

Gene Cohen is an M.D. researcher into the human brain, with a special focus on creativity. He ranks as an expert on the subject and is known for his work with older people and the arts.

For him, his father-in-law’s sudden inspiration serves as an example of the brain’s ongoing ability to be creative. He sees the incident as a fine example of “thinking outside the box.”

More significantly, he thinks of this brainwork as typical of people in later life. In his view, this activity deserves the term “senior moment,” instead of the slips of memory to which that phrase is usually applied.

I also like the Cohen story because it describes the kind of inspiration that anyone could experience. You don’t have to be highly educated to have hit upon the pizza/home delivery solution.

Cohen connects this creativity of older people to a discovery made in the last quarter of the twentieth century. That is the era when researchers made a discovery that ─ as scientific discoveries so often do ─ reversed previous scientific dogma.

Until that time, everyone saw human brain cells as impossible to produce in later life. In fact, it was universally believed that, at age three, one had all the brain cells that one would ever have.

As a person got older, the assumption was, he or she lost neurons by the billions. And it was impossible to form new neurons, according to the then prevailing view.

Even those great pioneers Freud and Piaget were convinced that creativity was the province of young people. If you wanted to do anything groundbreaking, you had better not wait.

Thus aging was seen as inevitably bringing mental decline, the gradual inability to think creatively.

Dr. Cohen has already dubbed the twenty-first as “the century of the mind.” That is because he believes in a forthcoming explosion of what he calls “brain fitness.”

Taking advantage of the newly realized possibilities of the brain, you can now exercise its newly recognized abilities. Of course, this presumes that one’s mental faculties are in good condition.

I often observe friends and acquaintances as they demonstrate remarkable creativity in their later years. Despite physical obstacles, they continue to produce inventive and insightful work.

I think of two friends, Dan and Paul, both considerably older than I, who impress me with the quality of their daily scholarship. They happen to be members of the academic community, but reading and writing are by no means the only examples of creative activity in daily living.

Closer to home, my planning of secret birthday parties shows creativity, at least according to my wife for whom these parties have been designed.  I have never thought of myself as a social organizer, but she thinks that the parties are one sign of an essentially creative approach to human interaction.

Eighteen years ago, when flying home from a vacation, she and I brainstormed about what we could do to enhance the welfare of our neighborhood. Our final resolution was to publish a newsletter that would report on neighborhood doings.

Since that time, The Howl has appeared several times each year and has drawn much appreciation from its readers. With its stories, photos, and reports drawn from neighbors, it can claim some recognition as another form of late-life creativity.

Cohen and his allies are right: we all have creative powers lurking in us that, given favorable conditions, can burst forth in surprising ways. So long as we are blessed with at least some soundness of mind and body, we give up on our own creativity only at our own peril.

Richard Griffin