Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives

by Daniel J. Levitin

The Healthy practices of the COACH principle are partly responsible for people with increased health spans: Curiosity, Openness, Associations, Conscientiousness, and Healthy practices. The people I’ve encountered who are still contributing to society, to arts and science, to their communities, and to their families are doing all five of these. Some examples of Healthy practices: My mother has been a vegetarian for thirty-five years. George Shultz has a Pilates instructor and works out regularly. Conscientiousness helps us to follow through on the things we start, to actually get a Pilates trainer and to show up. Openness to experience allowed my mother to immerse herself in the world of theater at age seventy-eight, and George Shultz to go against decades of Republican Party platform about climate change and recreational drug use. How about Associations? My mother and George Shultz both reached out to, and engaged with, others to help them achieve their visions. Their collaborations are sometimes maddening and frustrating, but they are also mentally challenging and, ultimately, fulfilling. Curiosity fueled the intellectual desire to do all these new things.