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

by Daniel J. Levitin

Optimism predicts longevity. But too much optimism can lead to bad health outcomes.

Although optimism is a crucial part of disease recovery, tissue repair, and so on, it needs to be tempered with realism and conscientiousness.

Aspiring to a healthier lifestyle may thus lead to personality change—an increase in self-control, methodicalness, and conscientiousness.

Role models show us we can step outside of who we are. We look at them and see the kinds of changes we want to make, the kinds of lives we want to lead—we see that what might have remained a dusty and dark secret aspiration is possible. They help us realize that we can become our own autobiographers—we can alter the story of our lives for better or worse. But one person’s inspiring role model might just be annoying to another person.

staying healthy, engaged, and active in one’s later years, for—as Jane Fonda described it to me—aging gracefully.

Julia “Hurricane” Hawkins is a native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and a retired schoolteacher. She is a devoted gardener with an affection for bonsai trees. Hawkins took up competitive athletics for the first time at age seventy-five. She competed as a cyclist in the National Senior Games, winning bronze and gold medals. Twenty-five years later, she branched out, taking up running at age one hundred. Hawkins again competed in the National Senior Games at age 101, establishing the record for women one hundred and older in the hundred-yard dash at 39.62 seconds. She also competed in the fifty-yard dash against other runners as “young” as ninety, finishing in 18.31 seconds.

“Keep in good shape, try not to be overweight, get good sleep, and keep ex...

“There is a fine line of pushing yourself and wearing yourself out. You don’t want to overdo it. You just w...

“I don’t feel 101. I feel about 60 or 70. You are not going to be perfect at 101...

“I just like the feeling of being independent and doing something a little different and testing myself, trying to get better.”

In June 2019, at age 103, she won gold medals in the 50 and 100 meter races.

Testing oneself and trying to get better are themes that run through the inspira...

The Netflix series Grace and Frankie, in its fifth season airing in 2019, stars Jane Fonda, eighty-two, and Lily Tomlin, eighty. Tomlin’s character, Frankie Bergstein, is a textbook case of someone with great openness—she smokes marijuana regularly, is a painter, and once hired a building contractor who lived in the woods behind a neighbor’s house. Fonda’s character, Grace Hanson, is set in her ways, emotionally cold, and conservative. In the second season, they start their own business, something that is completely new for the hippie-socialist Frankie, and in season four Grace starts dating a younger man, played by Peter Gallagher. What draws so many people to the show is the message that you can change in later life, you can try new things, and you can have fun doing it.

“What Lily and I hear very often,” Fonda says, “is ‘It makes us feel less afraid of getting older. It makes us feel hopeful.’ . .

One of the things that Lily and I are proud of—and want to continue with—is showing that you may be old, you may be in your third act, but you can still be vital and sexual and funny . . . that life isn’t over.”

Trying something new later in life, like competitive sports, business enterprises, or artistic endeavors, can dramatically increase both your quality of life and how long you live. Openness and curiosity correlate highly with good health and long life. People who are curious are more apt to challenge themselves intellectually and socially and reap the rewards of the mental calisthenics that result. They are also more likely to be interested and engaged, which makes them more fun to be around, and interacting with others socially is a good way to stay mentally agile and alert.

Conscientiousness

Perhaps the most important traits to foster and develop throughout the life span are those in Factor III, Conscientiousness. Conscientious people are more likely to have a doctor and to go see one when they’re sick. They’re more likely to get regular medical checkups and to re...

lower childhood conscientiousness predicts greater obesity, physiological dysregulation, and worse lipid profiles in adulthood.

To become more conscientious, one must change underlying cognitive processes such as self-regulation (controlling impulsive behaviors) and self-monitoring (noticing which circumstances lead to successful self-regulation and which circumstances sabotage self-regulation).

Charles Koch, CEO of one of the largest companies in the world, says: “I’d rather hire someone who is conscientious, curious, and honest than someone who is highly intelligent but lacks those qualities. Runaway intelligence without conscientiousness, curiosity and honesty, I learned, can lead to dismal outcomes.”

a third metric, CQ, the curiosity quotient, and it predicts life success as well as, and often better than, IQ or EQ.

it’s helpful to distinguish healthy conscientiousness from extreme rigidity or compulsion.

Openness

Steve Jobs, also famous for his openness, pursued an untested treatment for his pancreatic cancer, and that openness—rather than a reliance on scientifically validated medical treatments—killed him.

Fortunately, our traits and personalities are malleable, like the brain itself. We can change. We can learn from our experiences.

our past behavior does not necessarily determine our future behavior. Even models we learn about through the media can help us to make aspirational changes.

smile, think positive thoughts, and try new things. If you’re not feeling good, act as if you are. A cheerful, positive, optimistic outlook—even if it starts out fake—can end up becoming real.

Compassion

One tangible thing that we can all do to avoid misjudging others is to exercise compassion, to allow for the possibility that you might be wrong in attributing a trait to someone’s behavior. Indeed, this is the core principle at the heart of both social psychology and the teachings of the Dalai Lama. “Compassion is the key to happiness,” he says. “We are a social species and our happiness is defined by our relationship with others.”

He tries to avoid feeling anger, suspicion, and distrust and instead practices patience, tolerance, and compassion.

I never considered myself as something special. If I consider myself to [be] something different from you, like, ‘I am Buddhist’ or even more [with haughty voice] ‘I am His Holiness the Dalai Lama’ or even if I consider that ‘I am a Nobel laureate,’ then actually you create yourself as a prisoner. I forget these things—I simply consider I am one of seven billion human beings.

Buddhism, like most of the world’s religions, teaches you how to change your personality. You may feel that your personality is fixed, inflexible, and was determined in childhood, but science has shown otherwise.

The compassionate attitude and outlook are also related to experiencing less stress. You can choose not to be stressy—or learn how—and this can save your life.

Exposure to high levels of glucocorticoids can be particularly detrimental for the aging hippocampus and is associated with decrements in learning and memory. Among the things that psychotherapy is best at, stress reduction is one of the most important things you can do for your overall health.

Too much stress reduction, like too much optimism, may cause you to ignore important health issues or to become unmotivated to work or seek social contact. Moderate amounts of stress impel us to do things—to exercise, eat well, and nurture our mental health by making friends and spending time with them.

Is a Good Personality S...

Curiosity, Openness, Associations (as in sociability), Conscientiousness, and Healthy practices are the five lifestyle choices that have the ...

Our very conception of ourselves and who we are is dependent on a continuous thread, a mental narrative of the experiences we’ve had and the people we’ve encountered. Without memory, you don’t know if you’re someone who likes chocolate or not, if clowns amuse or terrify you; you don’t know who your friends are or whether you have the skill to prepare chocolate pots de crème for ten people who are going to arrive at your apartment in an hour.

Only some things that you experience get stored in memory.

From a neurocognitive standpoint, wisdom is the ability to see patterns where others don’t see them, to extract generalized common points from prior experience and use those to make predictions about what is likely to happen next. Oldsters aren’t as fast, perhaps, at mental calculations and retrieving names, but they are much better and faster at seeing the big picture. And that comes down to decades of generalization and abstraction.

Our memory systems form a hierarchy. At the highest level are explicit memory and implicit memory. They contain what they sound like—explicit memory contains your conscious recollections of experiences and facts; implicit memory contains things that you know without your being aware of knowing them.

implicit memory is knowing how to perform a complex sequence of actions, such as touch-typing or playing a memorized song on the piano.

Even more implicit is conditioning, such as salivating when you open a jar of pickles, or showing aversion to the smell of a food that previously made you sick—you may not be conscious of this, but your body remembers.

Explicit memory comes in two broad types, reflecting two different neurological systems.

Autobiographical memory is perhaps the system that is most closely associated with your sense of self, of who you are and what experiences shaped you. The autobiographical memory system informs your life choices in important ways. Without it, you wouldn’t know if you are capable of hiking for two hours, if you can eat food with peanuts in it, or whether or not you’re married.

The brain mixes up—confabulates—what it really knows with what it infers, and doesn’t often make a meaningful distinction between the two. When we age, we begin to confabulate more, as our brains slow down and the millions of memories we hold begin to compete with one another for primacy in our recollection, creating an information bottleneck. We all have, etched in our minds as true, things that never happened, or are combinations of separate things that did.

The key to remembering things is to get involved in them actively. Passively learning something, such as listening in a lecture, is a sure way to forget it. Actively using information, generating and regenerating it, engages more areas of the brain than merely listening, and this is a sure way to remember it. Many older adults complain of not being able to remember the names of people they’re introduced to at parties. Generating the information, being active with it, simply means using the person’s name just as you hear it. “Nice to meet you, Tom.” “Have you read any good books lately, Tom?” “Oh, you’re from Grand Forks, Tom. I’ve never been there.” This can boost your memory by 50 percent with very little effort.

For short-term memory problems, training our attentional networks helps us to focus on what is going on right now and to store with clarity and increased precision the most important things we are thinking and sensing. This can be done by slowing down and practicing mindfulness; trying to mono-task instead of multitasking; and trying to follow the Zen master’s advice of be here now.

programming “appointments” into their cloud-based calendar. They programmed an appointment for each time they needed to take a pill, see a doctor, or fill out a health status report. They’d program little things like “Take a shower” or “Get dressed for grandkids coming over.” They might enter “Call doctor fifteen minutes from now,” which gave them time to sit and reflect on what they wanted to talk about.