Brain Rules for Aging Well. John Medina
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You can’t live forever, at least not yet
10.
Never retire, and be sure to reminisce
I PRESENT IN THE pages of this book everything you need to know about why you are aging. And I am going to use brain science to show how you can make life a surprisingly fulfilling experience—at least for your brain—in the years you have left. We begin with a group of seventy-year-old men in the capable hands of famed Harvard researcher Ellen Langer.
Lively—almost childlike—the seventy-year-old men skipped out of a monastery one fine morning. They’d just spent five days living in the old building, under observation by Langer. Now the men were leaving for home—smiling, happy, active, laughing. It was the fall of 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan’s administration, and the men had the same sunny abandonment associated with our fortieth president—who, coincidentally, was exactly their age. But these seniors, as part of Langer’s research project, had just been through a time warp. Their brains had spent the past workweek not in 1981, but in 1959. The monastery was filled with songs like “Mack the Knife” and “The Battle of New Orleans.” On the black-and-white TV, the Boston Celtics beat the Minneapolis Lakers in the finals (yes, Minneapolis Lakers) and Johnny Unitas played for the Baltimore Colts. Issues of Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post lay about. Ruth Handler had persuaded Mattel to create a thin, full-figured doll named after Ruth’s daughter, Barbie, and then market it to little girls who had yet to undergo puberty. President Eisenhower had just signed into law the Hawaii Admission Act, creating the fiftieth state.
That walk down memory lane was the reason the men were so happy as they left the monastery. Waiting for the bus to take them home, a few entered into a spontaneous game of touch football—an activity most had not done for decades.
You might not have recognized these men 120 hours previously. They were shuffling, with poor vision, hearing, and memory; some of the men required canes to walk into the monastery. A few could not carry their suitcases up to their rooms. Langer and her team had poked and prodded the men’s bodies and assessed their brains. These baseline tests proved one thing: before entering the monastery, the men were stereotypically old, as if ordered from Central Casting under the request “Eight infirm seniors, please.”
But they didn’t stay infirm. At the end of their stay, they underwent the same tests. Reading about the quantifiable change took my breath away. Even a casual visual inspection of these seniors revealed that something dramatic had happened, as the New York Times reported. Their posture was more robust. Their hands gripped more tightly. They handled objects with greater dexterity. They moved more easily (touch football, for heaven’s sake!). Their hearing had sharpened. Same with their vision. Yes, vision. A sampling of their conversation would have told you something in their brains had dramatically improved too, and this impression would be proved by a second round of IQ and memory tests. In honor of its extraordinary finding, the experiment has been christened the “counterclockwise study.”
The book you have in your hands is all about what happened to the men during those five days. And what will happen to you, statistically speaking, if you follow the advice in these pages. Such optimism is rare for me. I’m a grumpy neuroscientist. That means every scientific sentence in this book describes something published in the peer-reviewed literature, often replicated many times. (See www.brainrules.net/references.) I specialize in the genetics of psychiatric disorders. But if you think aging is all about debilitation, you may want to spend some quality time with another point of view, like Langer’s. Or the one in this book.
Brain Rules for Aging Well describes not only how the brain ages but also how you can reduce the corrosive effects of aging. This field of inquiry is called geroscience.
As you peruse these pages, you’ll discover what geroscientists already know. You’ll learn how to improve your memory, why you should hang on to your friends for dear life—literally—and why you should go dancing with them as often as possible. You’ll discover why reading a book several hours a day can actually add years to your life. You’ll find that learning a new language may be the best thing for your mind, especially if you’re worried about dementia. And that regularly engaging in friendly arguments with people who disagree with you is like taking a daily brain vitamin. You’ll also learn why certain video games can actually improve your ability to solve problems.
Along the way, we’ll dispel a few myths. Forget the double-your-order-if-you-call-now Elixir of the Fountain of Youth—there is no such thing. When it comes to causes of aging, wear and tear is less detrimental than a failure to repair. And it is not inevitable that your mind will power down as the years pass. If you follow the advice in this book, your brain can remain plastic, ready to study, ready to explore, and ready to learn at any age.
We’ll also discover there are benefits to aging, with dividends paid not just to your head but to your heart. Your ability to notice the glass is half-full actually increases the older you get, and stress levels decline. That’s why you should never listen to anyone who tells you old age is automatically filled with grumpy people. If you do it right, old age can be some of the happiest years of your life.
Four sections
Brain Rules for Aging Well is organized into four sections. First up, the social, or feeling, brain, exploring topics such as relationships, happiness, and gullibility to illustrate how our emotions change with age. Next, the thinking brain, explaining how various cognitive gadgets change with time. (“Gadgets” is my way of describing complex, interconnected brain regions with multiple functions.) Some actually improve, by the way. The third section is all about your body: how certain kinds of exercise, diets, and sleep can slow the decline of aging.
Each of these chapters is sprinkled with practical advice, explaining not only how certain interventions can improve performance but also what is known about the brain science behind each intervention.
The final section is about the future. Your future. It’s filled with topics as joyful as retirement and as inevitable as death. I’ll connect the previous chapters into a plan for maintaining your brain health. And you’ll want to pay attention to all of them. The reason for this is nicely explained by the Amazon River. Or, rather, nicely explained by Sir David Attenborough’s insights into the Amazon River.
A mighty river
As a youngster, I would watch the extraordinary TV documentaries narrated by this famed naturalist, and he disabused me of more errors about the natural world than I care to admit. One error had to do with the Amazon River.
I used to think the origin of the world’s thickest river was a single burbling spring that somehow magically swelled in size as it flowed across the land. You know, like most rivers. I felt dismay when Attenborough pronounced that the Amazon had no such singularity. Like most rivers. Wading through a tiny stream in his Living Planet series, he intoned: “This is one of the many streams that can claim to be a source of the biggest river on earth—the Amazon!” And later: “The many sources of the Amazon began as numberless rivulets on the eastern flanks of the Andes.” How disappointing! There was no single-origin story for 20 percent of the world’s freshwater. There were many smaller sources, each making an e pluribus unum contribution to a final, massive outflow.
It’s a pattern we’ll encounter again and again. Take the memory chapter. Science shows that many factors contribute to keeping your massive memory streams flowing strong. Staying stress-free plays a role. So do regular aerobic exercise and how many books you read last week and how much pain you are currently experiencing and whether you get a good night’s sleep. These factors serve as rivulets, each making a contribution to the larger Amazonian ability to recall things.
We now know that keeping the brain working well into old age involves creating lifestyles that act like streams high in the Andes. To