The Art of Manliness - #583： How to Stay Mentally Sharp and Fulfilled as You Age

00:00:00.000 manliness podcast. Everyone gets old, but not everyone experiences old age the same way. Some

00:00:13.920 folks spend the last few decades of their life sick, sad, and stagnating while others stay sharp

00:00:18.080 and find great satisfaction in the twilight years of life. My guest today is a neuroscientist who's

00:00:22.340 dug into the research on what individuals can do to increase their chances of achieving the latter

00:00:26.300 outcome instead of the former. His name is Daniel Levedon, and today we discuss his latest book,

00:00:30.320 Successful Aging, Neuroscience Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives. We begin our conversation

00:00:35.020 discussing the societal narratives that we have about old age that don't always hold true. We

00:00:38.740 then dig into the fact that while the brain slows in some ways with age, it's sharper in other ways.

00:00:43.000 Daniel shares the personality trait that's the biggest predictor of successful elderhood and

00:00:46.820 the recognizable yet surprising reason the idea that memory declines with age is overblown. We

00:00:51.440 also talk about what really works for preserving your memory and keeping your mind agile and keen,

00:00:55.100 and no, it's not doing puzzles and brain games. We end our show discussing the question of whether

00:00:59.100 people get happier or sadder as they age. After the show's over, check out our show notes at

00:01:02.960 aom.is slash successful aging. All right, Daniel Leviton, welcome to the show.

00:01:21.920 Thank you, Brett.

00:01:22.400 So you are a neuroscientist and a cognitive psychologist who has written books about

00:01:27.500 thinking clearly. That book was An Organized Mind, The Organized Mind, fantastic book,

00:01:31.600 and also how music affects our brain. And you got a new book out called Successful Aging,

00:01:37.060 a neuroscientist explores the power and potential of our lives. So what kick-started your research

00:01:41.580 and writing about getting older and how it affects the brain and everything else about our lives?

00:01:46.060 Yeah, it's maybe not an obvious transition from the other books, right? But as I've gotten older

00:01:51.400 myself, I couldn't help but notice that some people tend to age better than others. Why would

00:01:59.120 that be? I have colleagues who are in their 90s who are still as sharp as ever. Others in their mid-60s

00:02:05.400 who have slowed down so much they can't do their work. There are clearly some individual differences

00:02:11.500 there. And as a neuroscientist and a cognitive scientist who studies individual differences,

00:02:16.780 I find this intriguing. I really wanted to be able to give advice to my parents who are 85 and 87 and

00:02:25.260 still doing well about how they could remain that way. And selfishly, I wanted to know what I could do

00:02:32.600 to stay as engaged and energetic as they are as I get older. And so I looked all around for books

00:02:40.560 about this and I couldn't find any. So as with my other books, I basically wrote the book that

00:02:46.020 I wanted to read.

00:02:47.940 And I think that's true. One thing I've noticed as I've gotten older is you look for books as you're

00:02:53.120 in your 30s, your 40s about how do I transition to mid-life? And there's nothing really there.

00:02:59.580 There's a lot of stuff on kids or teenagers, but sometimes that latter half of life gets

00:03:05.000 overlooked on providing guidance.

00:03:07.280 Right. And so, you know, I wasn't thinking, well, I need to fill a hole in the library or in the

00:03:13.160 bookstore, but I wanted to read that book.

00:03:16.400 So let's start off with misconceptions that people have about aging. Or maybe they're not

00:03:20.800 misconceptions because, as you said, there's differences on how people age. So sometimes we

00:03:25.960 see ways one person ages and think, well, that's just how all people age. So what are some of the

00:03:30.820 common things that we think about or associate with aging and cognitive performance and just

00:03:35.300 overall vitality in life?

00:03:37.180 Well, we do have some biases in our culture, a kind of ageism. And the biases, the way memory works

00:03:43.420 is that if you're going into an experience with a bias, you tend to notice all of the things that

00:03:50.280 confirm that. We call it confirmation bias. So if you already think that old people are decrepit 0.99

00:03:56.020 and declining and you see a few of them, those are the ones you notice and register. And you don't

00:04:02.420 notice all the exceptions to that. And in fact, in my experience, there are more oldsters who are doing 1.00

00:04:08.260 well than are not doing well. And just to continue the thought, I feel I'm noticing, I'm certainly not

00:04:16.260 the first to notice it, but I'm noticing it more acutely that oldsters have become marginalized.

00:04:22.460 I saw it in my own life. My grandfather was forced into early retirement, and as was my father.

00:04:29.980 And I'm on some committees, some academic committees for hiring in Germany for the Max Planck Institute

00:04:36.960 there. And Germany still has mandatory retirement at age 67. So I would call that a form of ageism.

00:04:47.500 The societal narrative is that old people need to get out of the way and make room for youngsters. 0.99

00:04:54.380 And so one misconception is that old age is a time of decline and debilitation,

00:05:01.520 sadness and irrelevance. It is for some, but for many, it's the best parts of their lives.

00:05:07.960 And for those who get to interact with them.

00:05:11.140 And we'll talk about how some of the benefits of aging that you get as you get older, that you

00:05:16.920 don't have when you're younger. And I think it's that idea of this societal narrative. I've noticed

00:05:21.780 that I feel like our ideas of what old people are, are still like, they're stuck in like the 1920s or

00:05:28.080 30s, right? When like, you look at old pictures of like a grandpa who was, you know, 55, and they

00:05:33.420 looked really, really old because they're probably working in the fields. Healthcare wasn't that

00:05:38.740 great. I remember this movie, there's like this woman, she was 60 and she's a grandma and she's

00:05:43.200 wearing this brooch and she like walked all decrepitly. But like 60, because he thinks of

00:05:47.900 advanced in healthcare, like you can be like you're 40 when you're 60.

00:05:51.840 60 is the new 40 and hey, 80 is the new 60.

00:05:56.180 Right. So that means our, so what has happened is our narrative hasn't caught up to the reality

00:06:00.880 of aging in the 21st century.

00:06:03.540 Right. I think that's right.

00:06:04.600 So let's talk about, so you're a neuroscientist, so you look at the brain and how it changes.

00:06:09.160 And we all know that the brain undergoes rapid changes physiologically in childhood. And then

00:06:15.460 in the teenage years, it's sort of like a rewiring. And I think people tend to think,

00:06:18.980 well, after you're done, you know, after you're 20, your brain's kind of set in stone. What you got

00:06:23.360 is what you got. But you highlight research that our brain continues to physically change as we get

00:06:29.160 older. So what's, what's going on there as we hit our forties, fifties, and sixties with our brain?

00:06:33.760 Well, so the brain is constantly rewiring itself at any age. It's true that thinking becomes slower

00:06:42.020 with every decade after 40 and parts of the brain shrink. Thinking becomes slower for a number of

00:06:49.320 reasons. One is we enter a process of demyelination. Myelin is a fatty sheath that coats neurons and acts

00:06:58.080 as an insulator. And by an analogy to an electrical circuit, you know, if the, if the insulation on the

00:07:05.920 wiring in your house gets frayed or, or degraded, you could have sparks and then the electricity isn't

00:07:12.840 all going to where you want it to go. It's some of it's being lost and can cause damage. And that's

00:07:20.680 what happens in brains. The myelin begins to decay. That's some of the slowing, but not all of it.

00:07:26.780 There are a number of reasons, but the good news here is that a variety of compensatory mechanisms

00:07:33.360 kick in even as the slowing occurs. Now, one form of rewiring is the ability to see patterns in the

00:07:42.200 world that is improved among oldsters. And that's true, whether it's the social world or the perceptual 1.00

00:07:51.000 world. So my view and, and, you know, growing community of people who share the view is that

00:07:56.360 we do become more intelligent in the way that we're using the word as we age, because we're acquiring

00:08:02.340 more information. We're having more experiences. We learn from teachers, books, friends, newspapers,

00:08:09.160 interactions with the world, social encounters, and that adds to our intellect.

00:08:14.200 So it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong. This is how I'm understanding. In some ways,

00:08:18.980 yes, we slow down as we get older, but in some ways we speed up because of that accumulation of

00:08:23.640 what we can, I mean, we call mental models, right? You're able to see patterns more readily in the

00:08:28.260 environment because you've had so much experience. So you can make a decision faster just based on

00:08:33.560 just recognizing a pattern as opposed to say a younger person who hasn't had that experience.

00:08:38.540 They have to spend a lot of time spinning wheels to figure out on the fly what to do.

00:08:42.400 Yeah. I always say, if you've got some sort of a growth and you get an x-ray and you want to know

00:08:50.820 whether it's cancerous or not, you want a 70-year-old radiologist, not a 30-year-old radiologist.

00:08:56.680 You want somebody who's seen thousands of these things. That's pattern matching.

00:09:01.200 Yeah. So that's a case for keeping on older employees or employee, maybe having them in their

00:09:07.000 60s, 70s, 80s continue to work because they can bring so much accumulated knowledge

00:09:11.580 to the field.

00:09:14.280 They can. And they also bring knowledge of social interactions and the kinds of mistakes that have

00:09:22.100 been made before.

00:09:24.020 And that's why, I mean, you see, it's sort of this pattern recognition. You see, that's

00:09:27.060 what judges do. And a lot of judges can continue doing their job into their 90s and do it very well.

00:09:33.720 You're right. And I had the opportunity to spend time with the federal judge, Jack Weinstein,

00:09:40.360 who's 98 years old and handles a full caseload. And in fact, he's so sharp and so good at discerning

00:09:47.700 patterns in behavior and in court documents that other federal judges in his district often hand him

00:09:54.680 the most difficult cases. He's that good. And we see it in good police detectives and FBI agents and

00:10:02.420 profilers who are able to detect patterns that elude the rest of us. And that's based on experience.

00:10:09.400 So thinking slows in some ways when we age, but sharpens in other ways, and the brain continues

00:10:14.960 to rewire itself even as we age. Why is it then that it seems like many older people struggle with

00:10:19.980 adopting new technology?

00:10:21.980 I think older people have difficulty with new technology just because for neural reasons and

00:10:29.960 for psychological reasons, as we get older, we become a bit more conservative. I don't mean that

00:10:37.060 in a political sense necessarily, but you could broadly characterize the lifespan as consisting of

00:10:46.520 different chunks, where as a child, you're trying to acquire the information that will allow you to

00:10:54.300 become somewhat self-sufficient, to go to the bathroom yourself, to read, to entertain yourself,

00:11:00.700 to make friends and choose your friends. In early young adulthood, our 20s and 30s,

00:11:07.060 we're seeking out, maybe starting in the teen years, we're acquiring information for a different

00:11:14.420 purpose. We want to understand what we like and what we don't like. What kind of person am I?

00:11:19.180 Am I somebody who likes to do this? And so we try a lot of different things, some of us more than

00:11:24.960 others, but the time of exploration is the late teens and 20s. Then come the 40s, most of us settle down

00:11:33.980 a bit and work to build up our careers, possibly build up a nest egg, a family. And by the time we

00:11:40.620 hit 60 or so, we're less interested in exploration and in finding out what things we might like. We

00:11:48.460 already know what we like. We come more interested in spending our time doing the things we already know

00:11:55.440 we like. And so this whole mindset means we're less likely to try new restaurants or want to make new

00:12:05.460 friends, explore new places. That's not a positive brain health perspective. And I argue in the book

00:12:14.880 that we have to fight against that kind of complacency. And the connection to technology is,

00:12:20.740 for a lot of older people, it's just, why does this have to change? I liked the old system.

00:12:25.600 I was used to it. Why do I have to learn this new thing? And the icing on the cake is that with all of

00:12:34.480 this as a feature of old age going back centuries, we've really seen a tipping point or a sea change

00:12:44.780 in the rapidity of technology. If you were 80 years old, a hundred years ago, so let's say 1920,

00:12:53.860 you were seeing for the first time things like women getting the vote, automobiles, airplanes,

00:13:02.260 telephones, radio. That was a lot of new technology in your lifetime, but it came along rather slowly.

00:13:11.060 Now there's new operating systems and cell phones become obsolete and the OSs they run on become

00:13:18.940 obsolete. So I'm thinking about my parents who, you know, every couple of years, the landscape

00:13:25.960 completely changes. That's a very rapid landscape of cell phones and websites and, you know, computer

00:13:33.140 stuff. That's a very rapid change, comparatively speaking.

00:13:38.560 Right. So, but some older people do still manage to be open to learning new things and not sort of

00:13:47.120 just go into their, like, what the stuff they're comfortable with. And you talk about it at the

00:13:50.220 beginning of the book that the research shows our personality plays a big role in whether we age

00:13:55.280 successfully. And personality is, I mean, sometimes associated with temperament. So it's like

00:13:59.840 openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and then what's the other one?

00:14:05.220 Neuroticism.

00:14:06.600 Yeah. And extroversion.

00:14:09.440 So, I mean, what personality traits of those are associated with successful aging?

00:14:14.020 Well, two in particular, and one of them dominates everything else. And it's a cluster of

00:14:18.860 traits that has to do with conscientiousness. It turns out that the biggest predictor of how well

00:14:26.120 you'll age, I mean, apart from whether you were in a war or got hit in the head or things like that,

00:14:33.120 the biggest predictor is conscientiousness and a cluster of traits surrounding that. Because,

00:14:40.100 look, conscientious people go to the doctor when they're sick. They have a doctor. They know who to

00:14:45.940 call. And when the doctor gives them medication, they actually follow the instructions and they take

00:14:51.200 it. They do what the doctor tells them. Conscientious people tend to not spend all their

00:14:57.540 money. So they have a nest egg for when something bad goes happen. They've built up a retirement fund.

00:15:03.380 And you're born with a genetic predisposition towards conscientiousness. You can change. I mean,

00:15:10.200 the entire field of psychotherapy is based on the idea that you can change. You can change your

00:15:16.400 personality at any age. Now, there are certainly a number of quacks in the field, but there are some 1.00

00:15:22.440 very good and serious psychotherapists who really do help people. And you can become more conscientious

00:15:31.440 even at the age of 60 or 70. In fact, getting a disease like diabetes often causes people to become

00:15:38.580 more conscientious. They realize they have to or they'll die. And what about, isn't openness another

00:15:44.460 personality trait? Yeah, that's an important one. And that gets back to what we were just talking

00:15:49.680 about a moment ago. We do become complacent and we close down. We tend to close down our social worlds

00:15:57.200 as we age. We don't want to make new friends. We want to spend time with our old friends.

00:16:02.600 Part of this has to do with something that Laura Karstensen, a great aging psychologist,

00:16:08.980 discovered, which is that we tend to allocate our time based on how much of it we think we have left.

00:16:16.740 And 60, 65, 70, 75, these are milestones. And even if we have a good chance of living to 100 now,

00:16:25.960 there's a different sense that your time might be limited than when you're 20 or 30.

00:16:31.900 And you don't want to spend it on things that might not pan out. You don't want to go to spend an

00:16:37.260 evening in a restaurant that you might not like, or with a person you might not enjoy, or worse,

00:16:43.120 somebody who'll make you feel bad about yourself. But the research says that although that's a

00:16:48.900 tendency, we have to fight against it. We have to rage against it and try new things. That's a key

00:16:56.020 to mental health, being open to new experiences. All right. So that sounds like, the takeaway from

00:17:01.600 this, I think, is, okay, if you want to have a successful elderly part of your life,

00:17:07.760 if you're not very conscientious now, start getting conscientious. So start saving for retirement,

00:17:11.960 take care of your health now, exercise, eat right, because that'll benefit you as you get older. Your

00:17:17.360 80-year-old self will thank your 40-year-old self. And also, as you get older, you have to

00:17:23.080 consciously fight that tendency for you to close yourself off to new experiences and just

00:17:28.000 always look for ways to experience new and novel things. So another thing that people associate

00:17:32.560 with old age is their memory going away or faltering. Do we really become more forgetful

00:17:38.520 as we get older? Well, certainly some people do suffer memory loss, and it can be debilitating.

00:17:46.600 Of course, this is a hallmark of Alzheimer's, but there is new research that shows this has all been

00:17:51.580 overblown and oversold. That is that, yes, memory decline does occur, but it's not as bad as we make

00:17:59.220 it out to be. I'm in a job where I get to deal with 17 and 18 and 19 and 20-year-olds all the time.

00:18:06.640 I'm a college professor. And I can't tell you the number of times that 20-year-olds, 20-somethings,

00:18:13.040 have showed up at the wrong classroom, even eight weeks into the semester, or showed up at the wrong

00:18:19.780 time, or forgotten about an exam, or held up their hand and I call them two seconds later and they

00:18:25.940 forget what they were going to ask. And 70-year-olds have these kinds of memory lapses too.

00:18:32.460 You go to a closet, you don't remember why you went there, you walk into the kitchen,

00:18:37.200 you knew you had a reason, but you don't know why you're there, you retrace your steps, you forget a

00:18:41.900 name, you show up at an appointment at a wrong time. The difference is the narratives,

00:18:48.400 the stories we tell ourselves. The 20-year-old says, oh, geez, I must have drank too much last

00:18:55.740 night, or man, I got to get more than five hours of sleep, or I got too many balls in the air.

00:19:02.180 The 70-year-old says, oh my God, I've got Alzheimer's, this is the end. But it's the same

00:19:07.400 behavior. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show.

00:19:13.740 No, when you said that, I do that now with like, just little pains in your body. Like when you're

00:19:18.940 like 15 or 20, you're like, oh, I might've just tweaked it, doing whatever. But now I'm like, oh my

00:19:23.820 gosh, this could be cancer. Like, this is it. I'm having a heart attack.

00:19:31.860 Right. Brett, you sound like a catastrophizer.

00:19:35.300 Yeah. Well, yeah, I got to work on the neuroticism of my personality.

00:19:39.180 Well, and yet a certain amount of neuroticism drives conscientiousness. So if you go to the

00:19:46.560 doctor and they catch that cancer in time, you've just won the race. That was good. But I guess if

00:19:53.460 you go to the doctor six times a week, that might be on the far side of neuroticism.

00:19:59.020 I don't do that. I just go to Dr. Google and look things up, which my pediatrician,

00:20:04.860 my doctor probably doesn't appreciate. So yeah, memory, so it's not as bad as we think,

00:20:09.160 but what can we do to stem memory loss as we get older? Because it does happen a bit,

00:20:14.460 but not as bad as we think we do. So are there things like proactively we can do to

00:20:17.800 keep our memory sharp as we get older?

00:20:20.280 Yeah. I should say that there's been a lot of talk about brain training games,

00:20:26.780 computer games, doing crossword puzzles, Sudoku. But in fact, there's virtually no evidence that

00:20:33.400 those things work. If you do crossword puzzles, you simply get better at doing crossword puzzles.

00:20:39.780 Now, there is a small amount of evidence that doing crosswords or other word games

00:20:45.880 help keep your word fluency going. But again, the evidence is thin. In fact, Lumosity, one of the big

00:20:55.300 purveyors of brain training games, lost a case with the Federal Trade Commission and had to pay a huge fine.

00:21:02.200 So there have been a lot of lawsuits over false claims here. There's big money to be made.

00:21:09.200 Everybody wants a quick fix. Buy a $10 app for your phone and improve your memory. Take ginkgo 0.99

00:21:16.440 and or ginseng. No, no evidence. Now, to be fair, as a scientist, the fact that there's no evidence

00:21:24.120 doesn't mean they don't work. It just means we don't have any evidence they do, and you can decide

00:21:30.260 accordingly for yourself. But the things that we do have evidence for are two things, and we've sort

00:21:36.800 of brushed up against one of them. One way to keep your memory better is to keep your social circles

00:21:42.880 active and interact with new people. The reason for that is that interacting with others is about the

00:21:50.520 most complex human activity we can do. It's more complex than brain surgery, than being a rocket

00:21:56.960 scientist, than solving Sudoku or crossword puzzles, interacting in a meaningful way with real live

00:22:03.960 people, not necessarily over the phone or Skype. Sorry, technology. That's demanding, and that keeps the

00:22:12.020 brain active. And the second thing that keeps the brain active is physical movement, not necessarily

00:22:20.380 exercise, which is the imprisoned corollary of movement, but physical movement, stretching,

00:22:27.420 resistance training, walking, especially in nature, in natural landscapes that are perceptually and

00:22:35.160 physically novel and to a degree a little bit challenging.

00:22:39.900 So yeah, we can dig deeper into those two things, the benefits of social relationship

00:22:44.540 and exercise. Going back to our common narrative of getting older, we typically think as you get

00:22:50.820 older, you get lonelier because maybe you've narrowed down the number of friends you have,

00:22:56.160 or maybe your friends or family members are dying. I remember my grandfather, he lived to be 101.

00:23:01.720 And it was sad. As he got older, I remember he told my mother, he's like, all my friends are dead.

00:23:06.840 And it was really sad. I mean, he had family nearby, but it was that it was really sad for

00:23:11.800 him. So what can older people do to prevent that from happening where they get to the point where 0.78

00:23:18.320 they have no friends? Well, that is a hazard. I met with George Schultz, the former Secretary of

00:23:25.300 State, not long ago. He's 99 now. And he was complaining of the same thing. Most of his friends

00:23:32.720 are dead. Certainly his close friends are dead. I met him about 35 years ago through, I was working

00:23:39.380 for one of his close friends, Edmund Littlefield. And when he lost Ed and other people who were close

00:23:47.700 to him, it caused a downturn. Fortunately, he maintains an active social life. After his wife died,

00:23:56.060 he happened to marry a younger woman who has a circle of friends who were younger than he. And

00:24:01.880 older women have been known to marry younger men. But it's not just that. It's going to church or to 0.93

00:24:11.280 civic groups or volunteering with the Red Cross or at a hospital or with Head Start,

00:24:17.280 putting yourself in situations where you are meeting new people.

00:24:20.620 And you highlight there's movements within different cities or communities where they're

00:24:26.720 actually finding ways to get older people to interact with younger people. So there's, I mean,

00:24:32.080 there's instances where there's like co-living. So you have like 20-year-olds living with older people

00:24:37.200 in a sort of community. And it helps the old people because they have people to talk to and interact

00:24:42.360 with and they're new and young. And the younger people benefit from that because they get to hang out

00:24:47.420 these old people who have all this vast experience of life.

00:24:50.880 Well, thank you for reminding me of that. And I love this. So in some cities where there are

00:24:55.400 universities and colleges, and this happened out of necessity, dorm rooms got crowded and the

00:25:01.700 university didn't have space. So living communities have popped up where college students live with

00:25:07.840 older adults and everybody loves it. I think in a number of cases, the college students went into it

00:25:13.680 thinking it would be depressing, but they love it. They love the warmth, the love they get from the

00:25:19.500 older people. It helps them to reevaluate what old age means. The older people are having companions

00:25:26.460 who are full of energy and optimism and are learning new things. So these age-mixed living groups are one.

00:25:35.240 Some communities have started intergenerational choirs where young people and old teachers sing together,

00:25:41.360 which is a great bonding activity. When I was a student, you're asking me why I wrote the book.

00:25:49.360 I had a number of extraordinary and just plain dumb lucky experiences where my entire life I found myself

00:25:58.320 interacting with people who were in their 80s and 90s. It just happened that way. When I was a kid,

00:26:05.480 I grew up in a small rural Northern California town, unincorporated town, mostly agricultural and

00:26:13.180 ranchers. And we had a post office that was built as part of the Pony Express. And the U.S. Postal Service

00:26:22.980 had named an older woman to be the postmaster, which was kind of a highfalutin title because there was

00:26:29.280 really only one employee in this small post office, but every post office has to have a postmaster. Her name

00:26:35.920 was Eleanor Dickinson and she was 75 when I was a kid. And when I was eight, she'd have me over to her house

00:26:43.840 for cookies and milk and we chatted and I just loved her stories. And she was a naturalist. She taught me about

00:26:52.640 the bugs and the creatures in her garden. And I had a kind of repeat of this when I was an older

00:26:59.460 student in college. One of my favorite professors was John Robinson Pierce, who was a science fiction

00:27:07.180 writer and a great scientist who had launched the first telecommunications satellite in the early

00:27:15.540 1960s, Telstar. And when I met him, he was 80. He was in his fourth career as a

00:27:22.640 professor at Stanford. And he would have people over to dinner parties of all ages, students,

00:27:29.280 older colleagues, middle-aged colleagues. And there was no agenda for the dinner parties. Usually it

00:27:35.200 was just to talk and get to know each other. It was a great thing. And this is another society of

00:27:40.320 interacting with new and different people is another reason why older people might want to try

00:27:44.200 to stay on the job as long as they can, not retire at 60 just because they could. That's absolutely true.

00:27:49.960 I could imagine some people who are in stressful jobs or jobs they hate wanting to change jobs

00:27:56.880 and facing ageism, not being able to find a new job. Sure. But if you look at work in the broadest

00:28:03.900 possible way, retirement really does signal decline statistically in an awful lot of people.

00:28:11.240 Your social circles shrink. You're no longer feeling valued. And so immersing yourself in charitable

00:28:17.480 organizations, political causes, religious organizations, even a book club or doing something

00:28:25.240 that keeps you engaged with a meaningful activity to which you can contribute. That's very, very important.

00:28:32.220 Now, it takes all forms. My wife's grandparents had eight children and I think 60 grandchildren

00:28:43.380 and another 35 great-grandchildren. And it was meaningful for them to do family things. Grandma

00:28:52.600 was writing out birthday cards several times a week just to keep up with that. And they were very

00:28:59.140 thoughtful birthday cards. She kept up with what everybody was doing. That was meaningful to her.

00:29:04.660 I don't presume to tell anybody what's meaningful to them, but it kept her and grandpa alive well

00:29:10.340 into old age, late 80s. So interacting with your social environment, keeping an active social life

00:29:16.000 can not only just stave off things like loneliness and depression that often happen when you don't

00:29:20.400 have a social circle, but as you said, it also keeps your mind sharp, improves memory. So do it for

00:29:26.420 those reasons as well. Then you mentioned another thing that one of the best things we can do to keep

00:29:30.960 our memory sharp and our mind sharp as we get older is exercise. But you said it's not like getting on

00:29:36.520 the treadmill and walking and while you're watching law and order special victims unit. It is, it's

00:29:43.100 interacting out in nature and nature is again, I think the commonality between nature and social

00:29:48.740 relationships is nature is complex. Yeah. And this gets to, this is something that we've only recently

00:29:55.740 begun to appreciate in the neuroscience community. My take on this idea is that the body and the brain

00:30:03.500 co-evolved over many millennia and not just humans, but all mammals and reptiles and fish, any mobile

00:30:13.680 creature had to explore its environment in order to find food, find safety and find a mate. And our brains

00:30:22.740 were basically built for that. And everything got added on in evolutionary fits and starts to support

00:30:31.600 geolocation and geo-navigation. And if we don't do that, if we stop moving around and exploring the

00:30:39.520 environment, those parts of our brain atrophy quickly and they support things that are important

00:30:46.140 for other purposes like memory and, and problem solving. So exercise is good. There's nothing bad about

00:30:55.640 it. In fact, it can be quite helpful for heart health and for oxygenating the blood and, and hence the

00:31:02.640 brain. But if you're focusing mostly on brain health, getting out into the world, into complex natural

00:31:10.440 environments and moving around in them is really important, especially natural trails where anything

00:31:18.240 could happen where there are twigs in your way and roots to trip over and rocks and boulders. And,

00:31:24.940 you know, sure walking around central park or, um, golden gate park on a well paved path is safer and,

00:31:32.720 and a good thing, but even better is to get out, you know, where a bird or a creature might run across

00:31:38.780 your path and take you by surprise. That's what's mentally activating.

00:31:44.840 Sounds like orienteering would be a great hobby to take up.

00:31:47.300 Absolutely.

00:31:48.200 And this, this idea of, uh, of movement and, and navigating being associated with memory,

00:31:52.820 we've had a guest on who wrote a book about that topic, about our navigation's influence on our

00:31:57.380 brain. And one of the sort of the interesting research that's coming out lately is how the

00:32:01.260 reliance on GPS may, it's not definitive yet, but may have detrimental effects on memory as you get

00:32:08.240 older because you rely on the GPS to navigate instead of using your navigational brain. And because

00:32:13.420 your navigational part of your brain's associated with memory, your memory ability sort of atrophies

00:32:18.500 more quickly.

00:32:20.620 Yeah. It's, it's an interesting idea and, you know, science takes a long time. And so we don't have

00:32:27.660 data yet on this. And of course, a lot of things that make intuitive sense didn't pan out,

00:32:32.940 but from what we know about evolution and the way the brain is structured and wired,

00:32:38.000 GPS enables or promotes a kind of complacency where you don't have to build a mental map.

00:32:44.160 And that can't be good because the hippocampus is the seat of memory. At least it's where memories

00:32:50.620 are stored and processed and indexed, if not where they actually reside. And we've known this for 60

00:32:56.600 years. And the hippocampus is essential for memory. If it's damaged, you stop forming new memories.

00:33:02.560 It can become difficult to retrieve old ones. Amnesia typically occurs from some insult to the

00:33:09.600 hippocampus. And the hippocampus evolved for place memory, for navigation. It didn't evolve

00:33:18.220 necessarily for remembering things like the Pledge of Allegiance or Rime of the Ancient Mariner or lyrics

00:33:26.300 to your favorite song. It evolved to help you navigate and find places and remember where the well and the

00:33:32.060 fruit trees are. And the way it's built functionally, anatomically, is that if you're not navigating or

00:33:39.660 using it for that, the other things can fall by the wayside. So maybe one thing possibly is use your

00:33:46.780 GPS less. It won't hurt, but maybe use that less. So I do that every now and then. I'll just not use

00:33:53.160 my GPS just to get around town for that reason. Plus, it's just more fun to have to figure out how to

00:33:58.080 get somewhere on the fly. Well, I think purely from a safety standpoint, as somebody who lives in

00:34:04.100 California where earthquakes are a threat and with people who live in Florida and other hurricane

00:34:11.100 places, at some point the GPS system could go down and you may need to leave. That's happened. In fact,

00:34:18.340 we had a little glitch here in Los Angeles a couple of days ago where the GPS went down for 20 minutes

00:34:23.860 and I had to get across town. Now, I, like many people, often use it if I'm in a hurry

00:34:30.620 because I want to find the fastest route. It is important to know the general lay of your community,

00:34:39.540 the general routes out and main thoroughfares and some alternate routes in case those thoroughfares

00:34:46.800 are clogged, not just for brain health, although it is good for that, but, you know, for the emergency

00:34:54.420 preparedness. If, if the system goes down and someday it will, you need to be able to navigate.

00:35:00.520 So the last thing I'd like to talk about, about our aging brain and how it changes as we get older

00:35:05.120 is our emotions. And again, going to this narrative that we have of what aging looks like, when we think

00:35:10.140 of emotions in older people, we think of the, you know, the old person with the sour face, who's

00:35:15.520 crotchety and angry and yelling, get off my yard. And, but your research highlights that actually 0.74

00:35:21.120 older people are some of the happiest people out there. They are. Yeah. What's going on there?

00:35:26.700 And, and, and not every older person, there are some crotchety, grouchy, cantankerous old people, 1.00

00:35:33.580 but statistically older adults are happier. In fact, across 60 different countries, six zero different

00:35:40.040 countries, the peak age of happiness occurs around 82. Wow. Some of it is that positivity, positivity

00:35:47.980 bias. Old people tend to encode and remember more positive experiences. And some of it is really 1.00

00:35:57.100 an appreciation that, you know, if you've made it to old age, things have worked out for you.

00:36:03.580 Even if you didn't like yourself when you were younger, or you were self-conscious that other people

00:36:09.240 didn't like you, the most part, you made it. You, you, you're okay. Uh, you know, might've wanted to

00:36:16.980 be a different person, but this person worked out all right. And whatever accomplishments you've had,

00:36:22.460 you can appreciate most of us, although gratitude is something we can all work on. And that also helps,

00:36:29.180 but we, we do have a kind of neural, a neuro emotional mechanism that kicks in where we

00:36:35.900 appreciate things more. We appreciate things more. We experience more gratitude. And some of that gets

00:36:40.760 back to, some of that gets back to Laura Carstensen's idea that with a limited amount of time, 0.98

00:36:47.300 you stop and you smell the roses. You, you want to just sit and enjoy what you have and appreciate it.

00:36:55.860 You're not fighting the treadmill. You're not constantly trying to climb the ladder. You're allowing

00:37:02.520 yourself to appreciate what you have rather than what you don't. And what's interesting about that

00:37:06.980 research about emotions over the life cycle is that it, it kind of bottoms out at age 50. I guess

00:37:12.680 that's the point in your life where like, you've probably reached where you are and you're going

00:37:16.360 to be in your career likely. And so you kind of have that, you're like, okay, this is it. But then

00:37:20.760 after a while, as you get older, you're like, well, it's actually pretty good. I've done pretty well for

00:37:24.840 myself. Well, Daniel, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about

00:37:28.880 the book and your work? Ah, danielleviton.org, D-A-N-I-E-L-L-E-V, like Victor, I-T, like Tango,

00:37:40.320 I-N, like November, all run together, danielleviton.org. And the book should be available wherever books

00:37:47.200 are sold. Well, Daniel Leviton, thanks so much for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Brett.

00:37:51.780 My guest here is Daniel Leviton. He's the author of the book, Successful Aging. It's available on

00:37:56.020 amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his work and his book

00:38:00.020 at his website, danielleviton.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash Successful Aging,

00:38:06.080 where you can find links to resources, read all deeper into this topic.

00:38:15.860 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Check out our website at

00:38:19.320 artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles

00:38:22.840 riveting over the years about pretty much anything. And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free

00:38:25.620 episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com,

00:38:29.800 sign up, use code MANLESS for a free month trial. Once you're signed up, download the Stitcher app

00:38:33.580 on Android or iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you

00:38:37.600 haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts

00:38:41.400 or Stitcher, whatever podcast player you use. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please

00:38:45.400 consider sharing the show with a friend or family member. He would think we get something out of it.

00:38:48.720 Helps out a lot. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay.

00:38:52.380 Reminding you not only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - February 10, 2020

#583： How to Stay Mentally Sharp and Fulfilled as You Age

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript