#583： How to Stay Mentally Sharp and Fulfilled as You Age
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Summary
Everyone gets old, but not everyone experiences old age the same way. Some folks spend the last few decades of their life sick, sad, and stagnating, while others stay sharp and find great satisfaction in the twilight years of life. My guest today is a neuroscientist who s dug into the research on what individuals can do to increase their chances of achieving the latter outcome, instead of the former. His name is Daniel Levenson, and today we discuss his latest book, Successful Aging: Neuroscience Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives.
Transcript
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manliness podcast. Everyone gets old, but not everyone experiences old age the same way. Some
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folks spend the last few decades of their life sick, sad, and stagnating while others stay sharp
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and find great satisfaction in the twilight years of life. My guest today is a neuroscientist who's
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dug into the research on what individuals can do to increase their chances of achieving the latter
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outcome instead of the former. His name is Daniel Levedon, and today we discuss his latest book,
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Successful Aging, Neuroscience Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives. We begin our conversation
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discussing the societal narratives that we have about old age that don't always hold true. We
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then dig into the fact that while the brain slows in some ways with age, it's sharper in other ways.
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Daniel shares the personality trait that's the biggest predictor of successful elderhood and
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the recognizable yet surprising reason the idea that memory declines with age is overblown. We
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also talk about what really works for preserving your memory and keeping your mind agile and keen,
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and no, it's not doing puzzles and brain games. We end our show discussing the question of whether
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people get happier or sadder as they age. After the show's over, check out our show notes at
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aom.is slash successful aging. All right, Daniel Leviton, welcome to the show.
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So you are a neuroscientist and a cognitive psychologist who has written books about
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thinking clearly. That book was An Organized Mind, The Organized Mind, fantastic book,
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and also how music affects our brain. And you got a new book out called Successful Aging,
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a neuroscientist explores the power and potential of our lives. So what kick-started your research
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and writing about getting older and how it affects the brain and everything else about our lives?
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Yeah, it's maybe not an obvious transition from the other books, right? But as I've gotten older
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myself, I couldn't help but notice that some people tend to age better than others. Why would
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that be? I have colleagues who are in their 90s who are still as sharp as ever. Others in their mid-60s
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who have slowed down so much they can't do their work. There are clearly some individual differences
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there. And as a neuroscientist and a cognitive scientist who studies individual differences,
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I find this intriguing. I really wanted to be able to give advice to my parents who are 85 and 87 and
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still doing well about how they could remain that way. And selfishly, I wanted to know what I could do
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to stay as engaged and energetic as they are as I get older. And so I looked all around for books
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about this and I couldn't find any. So as with my other books, I basically wrote the book that
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And I think that's true. One thing I've noticed as I've gotten older is you look for books as you're
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in your 30s, your 40s about how do I transition to mid-life? And there's nothing really there.
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There's a lot of stuff on kids or teenagers, but sometimes that latter half of life gets
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Right. And so, you know, I wasn't thinking, well, I need to fill a hole in the library or in the
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So let's start off with misconceptions that people have about aging. Or maybe they're not
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misconceptions because, as you said, there's differences on how people age. So sometimes we
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see ways one person ages and think, well, that's just how all people age. So what are some of the
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common things that we think about or associate with aging and cognitive performance and just
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Well, we do have some biases in our culture, a kind of ageism. And the biases, the way memory works
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is that if you're going into an experience with a bias, you tend to notice all of the things that
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confirm that. We call it confirmation bias. So if you already think that old people are decrepit
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and declining and you see a few of them, those are the ones you notice and register. And you don't
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notice all the exceptions to that. And in fact, in my experience, there are more oldsters who are doing
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well than are not doing well. And just to continue the thought, I feel I'm noticing, I'm certainly not
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the first to notice it, but I'm noticing it more acutely that oldsters have become marginalized.
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I saw it in my own life. My grandfather was forced into early retirement, and as was my father.
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And I'm on some committees, some academic committees for hiring in Germany for the Max Planck Institute
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there. And Germany still has mandatory retirement at age 67. So I would call that a form of ageism.
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The societal narrative is that old people need to get out of the way and make room for youngsters.
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And so one misconception is that old age is a time of decline and debilitation,
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sadness and irrelevance. It is for some, but for many, it's the best parts of their lives.
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And we'll talk about how some of the benefits of aging that you get as you get older, that you
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don't have when you're younger. And I think it's that idea of this societal narrative. I've noticed
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that I feel like our ideas of what old people are, are still like, they're stuck in like the 1920s or
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30s, right? When like, you look at old pictures of like a grandpa who was, you know, 55, and they
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looked really, really old because they're probably working in the fields. Healthcare wasn't that
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great. I remember this movie, there's like this woman, she was 60 and she's a grandma and she's
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wearing this brooch and she like walked all decrepitly. But like 60, because he thinks of
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advanced in healthcare, like you can be like you're 40 when you're 60.
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Right. So that means our, so what has happened is our narrative hasn't caught up to the reality
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So let's talk about, so you're a neuroscientist, so you look at the brain and how it changes.
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And we all know that the brain undergoes rapid changes physiologically in childhood. And then
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in the teenage years, it's sort of like a rewiring. And I think people tend to think,
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well, after you're done, you know, after you're 20, your brain's kind of set in stone. What you got
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is what you got. But you highlight research that our brain continues to physically change as we get
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older. So what's, what's going on there as we hit our forties, fifties, and sixties with our brain?
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Well, so the brain is constantly rewiring itself at any age. It's true that thinking becomes slower
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with every decade after 40 and parts of the brain shrink. Thinking becomes slower for a number of
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reasons. One is we enter a process of demyelination. Myelin is a fatty sheath that coats neurons and acts
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as an insulator. And by an analogy to an electrical circuit, you know, if the, if the insulation on the
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wiring in your house gets frayed or, or degraded, you could have sparks and then the electricity isn't
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all going to where you want it to go. It's some of it's being lost and can cause damage. And that's
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what happens in brains. The myelin begins to decay. That's some of the slowing, but not all of it.
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There are a number of reasons, but the good news here is that a variety of compensatory mechanisms
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kick in even as the slowing occurs. Now, one form of rewiring is the ability to see patterns in the
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world that is improved among oldsters. And that's true, whether it's the social world or the perceptual
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world. So my view and, and, you know, growing community of people who share the view is that
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we do become more intelligent in the way that we're using the word as we age, because we're acquiring
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more information. We're having more experiences. We learn from teachers, books, friends, newspapers,
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interactions with the world, social encounters, and that adds to our intellect.
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So it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong. This is how I'm understanding. In some ways,
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yes, we slow down as we get older, but in some ways we speed up because of that accumulation of
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what we can, I mean, we call mental models, right? You're able to see patterns more readily in the
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environment because you've had so much experience. So you can make a decision faster just based on
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just recognizing a pattern as opposed to say a younger person who hasn't had that experience.
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They have to spend a lot of time spinning wheels to figure out on the fly what to do.
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Yeah. I always say, if you've got some sort of a growth and you get an x-ray and you want to know
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whether it's cancerous or not, you want a 70-year-old radiologist, not a 30-year-old radiologist.
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You want somebody who's seen thousands of these things. That's pattern matching.
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Yeah. So that's a case for keeping on older employees or employee, maybe having them in their
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60s, 70s, 80s continue to work because they can bring so much accumulated knowledge
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They can. And they also bring knowledge of social interactions and the kinds of mistakes that have
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And that's why, I mean, you see, it's sort of this pattern recognition. You see, that's
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what judges do. And a lot of judges can continue doing their job into their 90s and do it very well.
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You're right. And I had the opportunity to spend time with the federal judge, Jack Weinstein,
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who's 98 years old and handles a full caseload. And in fact, he's so sharp and so good at discerning
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patterns in behavior and in court documents that other federal judges in his district often hand him
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the most difficult cases. He's that good. And we see it in good police detectives and FBI agents and
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profilers who are able to detect patterns that elude the rest of us. And that's based on experience.
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So thinking slows in some ways when we age, but sharpens in other ways, and the brain continues
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to rewire itself even as we age. Why is it then that it seems like many older people struggle with
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I think older people have difficulty with new technology just because for neural reasons and
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for psychological reasons, as we get older, we become a bit more conservative. I don't mean that
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in a political sense necessarily, but you could broadly characterize the lifespan as consisting of
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different chunks, where as a child, you're trying to acquire the information that will allow you to
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become somewhat self-sufficient, to go to the bathroom yourself, to read, to entertain yourself,
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to make friends and choose your friends. In early young adulthood, our 20s and 30s,
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we're seeking out, maybe starting in the teen years, we're acquiring information for a different
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purpose. We want to understand what we like and what we don't like. What kind of person am I?
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Am I somebody who likes to do this? And so we try a lot of different things, some of us more than
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others, but the time of exploration is the late teens and 20s. Then come the 40s, most of us settle down
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a bit and work to build up our careers, possibly build up a nest egg, a family. And by the time we
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hit 60 or so, we're less interested in exploration and in finding out what things we might like. We
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already know what we like. We come more interested in spending our time doing the things we already know
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we like. And so this whole mindset means we're less likely to try new restaurants or want to make new
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friends, explore new places. That's not a positive brain health perspective. And I argue in the book
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that we have to fight against that kind of complacency. And the connection to technology is,
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for a lot of older people, it's just, why does this have to change? I liked the old system.
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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
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this as a feature of old age going back centuries, we've really seen a tipping point or a sea change
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in the rapidity of technology. If you were 80 years old, a hundred years ago, so let's say 1920,
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you were seeing for the first time things like women getting the vote, automobiles, airplanes,
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telephones, radio. That was a lot of new technology in your lifetime, but it came along rather slowly.
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Now there's new operating systems and cell phones become obsolete and the OSs they run on become
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obsolete. So I'm thinking about my parents who, you know, every couple of years, the landscape
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completely changes. That's a very rapid landscape of cell phones and websites and, you know, computer
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stuff. That's a very rapid change, comparatively speaking.
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Right. So, but some older people do still manage to be open to learning new things and not sort of
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just go into their, like, what the stuff they're comfortable with. And you talk about it at the
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beginning of the book that the research shows our personality plays a big role in whether we age
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successfully. And personality is, I mean, sometimes associated with temperament. So it's like
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openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and then what's the other one?
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So, I mean, what personality traits of those are associated with successful aging?
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Well, two in particular, and one of them dominates everything else. And it's a cluster of
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traits that has to do with conscientiousness. It turns out that the biggest predictor of how well
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you'll age, I mean, apart from whether you were in a war or got hit in the head or things like that,
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the biggest predictor is conscientiousness and a cluster of traits surrounding that. Because,
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look, conscientious people go to the doctor when they're sick. They have a doctor. They know who to
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call. And when the doctor gives them medication, they actually follow the instructions and they take
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it. They do what the doctor tells them. Conscientious people tend to not spend all their
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money. So they have a nest egg for when something bad goes happen. They've built up a retirement fund.
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And you're born with a genetic predisposition towards conscientiousness. You can change. I mean,
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the entire field of psychotherapy is based on the idea that you can change. You can change your
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personality at any age. Now, there are certainly a number of quacks in the field, but there are some
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very good and serious psychotherapists who really do help people. And you can become more conscientious
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even at the age of 60 or 70. In fact, getting a disease like diabetes often causes people to become
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more conscientious. They realize they have to or they'll die. And what about, isn't openness another
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personality trait? Yeah, that's an important one. And that gets back to what we were just talking
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about a moment ago. We do become complacent and we close down. We tend to close down our social worlds
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as we age. We don't want to make new friends. We want to spend time with our old friends.
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Part of this has to do with something that Laura Karstensen, a great aging psychologist,
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discovered, which is that we tend to allocate our time based on how much of it we think we have left.
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And 60, 65, 70, 75, these are milestones. And even if we have a good chance of living to 100 now,
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there's a different sense that your time might be limited than when you're 20 or 30.
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And you don't want to spend it on things that might not pan out. You don't want to go to spend an
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evening in a restaurant that you might not like, or with a person you might not enjoy, or worse,
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somebody who'll make you feel bad about yourself. But the research says that although that's a
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tendency, we have to fight against it. We have to rage against it and try new things. That's a key
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to mental health, being open to new experiences. All right. So that sounds like, the takeaway from
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this, I think, is, okay, if you want to have a successful elderly part of your life,
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if you're not very conscientious now, start getting conscientious. So start saving for retirement,
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take care of your health now, exercise, eat right, because that'll benefit you as you get older. Your
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80-year-old self will thank your 40-year-old self. And also, as you get older, you have to
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consciously fight that tendency for you to close yourself off to new experiences and just
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always look for ways to experience new and novel things. So another thing that people associate
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with old age is their memory going away or faltering. Do we really become more forgetful
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as we get older? Well, certainly some people do suffer memory loss, and it can be debilitating.
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Of course, this is a hallmark of Alzheimer's, but there is new research that shows this has all been
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overblown and oversold. That is that, yes, memory decline does occur, but it's not as bad as we make
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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.
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I'm a college professor. And I can't tell you the number of times that 20-year-olds, 20-somethings,
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have showed up at the wrong classroom, even eight weeks into the semester, or showed up at the wrong
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time, or forgotten about an exam, or held up their hand and I call them two seconds later and they
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forget what they were going to ask. And 70-year-olds have these kinds of memory lapses too.
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You go to a closet, you don't remember why you went there, you walk into the kitchen,
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you knew you had a reason, but you don't know why you're there, you retrace your steps, you forget a
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name, you show up at an appointment at a wrong time. The difference is the narratives,
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the stories we tell ourselves. The 20-year-old says, oh, geez, I must have drank too much last
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night, or man, I got to get more than five hours of sleep, or I got too many balls in the air.
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The 70-year-old says, oh my God, I've got Alzheimer's, this is the end. But it's the same
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behavior. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show.
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No, when you said that, I do that now with like, just little pains in your body. Like when you're
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like 15 or 20, you're like, oh, I might've just tweaked it, doing whatever. But now I'm like, oh my
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gosh, this could be cancer. Like, this is it. I'm having a heart attack.
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Yeah. Well, yeah, I got to work on the neuroticism of my personality.
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Well, and yet a certain amount of neuroticism drives conscientiousness. So if you go to the
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doctor and they catch that cancer in time, you've just won the race. That was good. But I guess if
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you go to the doctor six times a week, that might be on the far side of neuroticism.
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I don't do that. I just go to Dr. Google and look things up, which my pediatrician,
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my doctor probably doesn't appreciate. So yeah, memory, so it's not as bad as we think,
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but what can we do to stem memory loss as we get older? Because it does happen a bit,
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but not as bad as we think we do. So are there things like proactively we can do to
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Yeah. I should say that there's been a lot of talk about brain training games,
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computer games, doing crossword puzzles, Sudoku. But in fact, there's virtually no evidence that
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those things work. If you do crossword puzzles, you simply get better at doing crossword puzzles.
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Now, there is a small amount of evidence that doing crosswords or other word games
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help keep your word fluency going. But again, the evidence is thin. In fact, Lumosity, one of the big
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purveyors of brain training games, lost a case with the Federal Trade Commission and had to pay a huge fine.
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So there have been a lot of lawsuits over false claims here. There's big money to be made.
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Everybody wants a quick fix. Buy a $10 app for your phone and improve your memory. Take ginkgo
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and or ginseng. No, no evidence. Now, to be fair, as a scientist, the fact that there's no evidence
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doesn't mean they don't work. It just means we don't have any evidence they do, and you can decide
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accordingly for yourself. But the things that we do have evidence for are two things, and we've sort
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of brushed up against one of them. One way to keep your memory better is to keep your social circles
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active and interact with new people. The reason for that is that interacting with others is about the
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most complex human activity we can do. It's more complex than brain surgery, than being a rocket
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scientist, than solving Sudoku or crossword puzzles, interacting in a meaningful way with real live
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people, not necessarily over the phone or Skype. Sorry, technology. That's demanding, and that keeps the
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brain active. And the second thing that keeps the brain active is physical movement, not necessarily
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exercise, which is the imprisoned corollary of movement, but physical movement, stretching,
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resistance training, walking, especially in nature, in natural landscapes that are perceptually and
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physically novel and to a degree a little bit challenging.
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So yeah, we can dig deeper into those two things, the benefits of social relationship
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and exercise. Going back to our common narrative of getting older, we typically think as you get
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older, you get lonelier because maybe you've narrowed down the number of friends you have,
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or maybe your friends or family members are dying. I remember my grandfather, he lived to be 101.
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And it was sad. As he got older, I remember he told my mother, he's like, all my friends are dead.
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And it was really sad. I mean, he had family nearby, but it was that it was really sad for
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him. So what can older people do to prevent that from happening where they get to the point where
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they have no friends? Well, that is a hazard. I met with George Schultz, the former Secretary of
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State, not long ago. He's 99 now. And he was complaining of the same thing. Most of his friends
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are dead. Certainly his close friends are dead. I met him about 35 years ago through, I was working
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for one of his close friends, Edmund Littlefield. And when he lost Ed and other people who were close
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to him, it caused a downturn. Fortunately, he maintains an active social life. After his wife died,
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he happened to marry a younger woman who has a circle of friends who were younger than he. And
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older women have been known to marry younger men. But it's not just that. It's going to church or to
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civic groups or volunteering with the Red Cross or at a hospital or with Head Start,
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putting yourself in situations where you are meeting new people.
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And you highlight there's movements within different cities or communities where they're
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actually finding ways to get older people to interact with younger people. So there's, I mean,
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there's instances where there's like co-living. So you have like 20-year-olds living with older people
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in a sort of community. And it helps the old people because they have people to talk to and interact
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with and they're new and young. And the younger people benefit from that because they get to hang out
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these old people who have all this vast experience of life.
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Well, thank you for reminding me of that. And I love this. So in some cities where there are
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universities and colleges, and this happened out of necessity, dorm rooms got crowded and the
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university didn't have space. So living communities have popped up where college students live with
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older adults and everybody loves it. I think in a number of cases, the college students went into it
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thinking it would be depressing, but they love it. They love the warmth, the love they get from the
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older people. It helps them to reevaluate what old age means. The older people are having companions
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who are full of energy and optimism and are learning new things. So these age-mixed living groups are one.
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Some communities have started intergenerational choirs where young people and old teachers sing together,
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which is a great bonding activity. When I was a student, you're asking me why I wrote the book.
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I had a number of extraordinary and just plain dumb lucky experiences where my entire life I found myself
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interacting with people who were in their 80s and 90s. It just happened that way. When I was a kid,
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I grew up in a small rural Northern California town, unincorporated town, mostly agricultural and
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ranchers. And we had a post office that was built as part of the Pony Express. And the U.S. Postal Service
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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.
00:31:48.200
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
00:32:20.620
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
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,
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
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,
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
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00:38:22.840
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00:38:52.380
Reminding you not only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.