How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel | Huberman Lab

Good learning happens through making mistakes.

Just seeing something many times doesn't mean you'll remember it well.

You've seen the Apple logo so many times.

Of course you know all the features.

But then when you quiz people and test them and I do this in my class People aren't sure is the bite on the left or the right hand side.

Is there a stem or a leaf?

The best way to remember something is to, again, failures.

I'll have you draw it without looking at it and you struggle and wait, is it on the left or right?

Is it a stem or a leaf?

And you're starting to question all of these things.

Then when you look at the logo again, you're going to engage in better learning than if you hadn't done that errorful kind of trial beforehand.

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

My guest today is Dr. Alan Costell.

Dr. Alan Costell is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He is one of the world's foremost experts on human memory and cognitive aging.

Today we discuss what determines if we remember something like a name or an event or how to do something, and we discuss how to improve our ability to remember information of all kinds at any age.

We also discuss how, anytime we plan or imagine something about our future, we are always building that on memories of our past and what that means for our ability to come up with new ideas and plans for our lives.

And we discuss how our memory changes across the lifespan and why some people retain exceptional cognitive abilities well into their 80s and 90s, and even beyond.

And what any of us can do to improve our chances of maintaining or even getting better at memory as we age.

Indeed, while most people assume that memory decline is an inevitable consequence of getting older, Dr Castell explains research that tells us the story is far more nuanced and more optimistic.

In fact, we cover one of the more powerful and perhaps surprising influences on our rate of cognitive aging, which is your beliefs about aging itself.

And finally, we discuss so-called super agers, which is the name given to older adults whose memory performance rivals that of people decades younger.

He explains which super ager protocols are accessible to anyone and how they can be incorporated into everyday life to benefit our mental and our physical health.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.

And now for my discussion with Dr. Alan Castell.

Dr. Alan Castell, welcome.

Thank you.

Nice to be here.

You're going to tell us how to build up and keep our memory.

But let's start by asking, what is memory?

Or rather, how do you conceptualize memory?

From...

The standpoint of we move through life, we experience things let's call it passively or we try to remember certain things.

What determines what information we hold on to, how long, and so on?

It's a great question.

And memory is really a mental representation of the past.

And by its very nature, it's reconstructive.

It's never always accurate.

And I think that's why it's so mysterious and fascinating that you and I can see the same event and then remember it differently a week or a day later.

And it starts kind of almost at the sensory level.

And sometimes our mind plays tricks on us.

And that's how I got interested in this field that how can I think I know something and yet not know it as well as I do?

And this is something that's called metacognition, our awareness of our own cognition.

And as a personal anecdote, when I was in fifth or sixth grade I had one line in the play The Wizard of Oz.

It's a line I practiced again and again.

Listen, everyone, there's a cyclone on the way.

Hurry and get into the cellar.

And, of course, on opening night, listen everyone.

There's a seller on the way.

Hurry and get into the cyclone.

And I was thinking, how did I manage that?

Having memorized this line, most of the audience probably didn't even notice.

But that to me was an early exposure to memory is not always kind of a function of what you do with the information.

And then in high school I had another exposure to memory where I just memorized a lot of things and that got me pretty far in algebra and chemistry.

In fact, I almost memorized the entire periodic table.

But this was using mnemonics, you know, little rhymes or songs.

And I realized in my first year of college that I really didn't have a strong understanding of chemistry, even though I could use all these terms.

And thankfully I took an introductory psychology class and I realized people studied learning and memory and kind of false memories and why memory can and cannot be accurate.

And I was hooked.

I found that so fascinating.

And I still do today.

I'm both impressed and intrigued to ask more about memorization of the periodic table.

First question is about mnemonics and ways that we try and batch and learn information by pairing it to other things.

Trying to remember a room full of people's names and you know you could pair the first letter of their name with a fruit or what you know.

People do these things.

To me, that seems like a very inefficient way to learn, because you're adding more information that you need to store away.

So the first question is, is that the best way to learn large batches of information?

I think it's almost a workaround.

And that's the first kind of problem people say is I can't remember names.

And by their nature, names used to be descriptive of person's occupation.

Someone's a baker, we call them Mr. Baker. but that's of course evolved with time.

And names.

I tell people, if you can't remember someone's name, that's probably a natural forgetting, but you remember if you had an interesting conversation or you remember if you can trust them.

That's probably more important.

So then, to engage our kind of knowledge base so that we can remember names, we need to make this arbitrary link.

And so I tell people my last name is Pastel, Castel.

You know, Castel rhymes with pastel and my grandfather used pastels, let's say.

And so people can then make this link.

But like you say, that's effortful.

It takes time.

It takes time away from kind of the essence of something else we could talk about.

And it also leads to these kind of predictable memory errors.

So people say, oh, I remember his name was Pastel. when in fact it's Castell.

So I think we have to almost trick our memory into remembering things that might be somewhat arbitrary and that becomes more pronounced as we get older.

There's more Davids, there's more Andrews, and it's just more interference.

And so to get around that, we have to use deliberate practice, retrieval practice, use the name several times.

But I tell my students, whose names I often forget, that I'll still remember topics we've talked about or how they felt about something.

And I think that's more important than sometimes just remembering a name, to remember chemistry or some other subject that involves nomenclature, not everyday terms unless you're a chemist but to really understand the deeper mechanics of that thing and remember that.

What are some better tools?

I want to say and i'm not a memory researcher that it might be helpful to think in terms of verbs, not labels, so rather than thinking about a particular element just in terms of its name, but think about how it interacts with something else, or how it gives or receives a charge in certain conditions.

Absolutely.

I think that's what you're looking for is deeper learning, deeper semantic learning.

And this has been referred to as levels of processing.

So I was working at a very low level of processing when I'm making up happy Henry for hydrogen and helium.

But if you can start to visualize things or interact with them, and that's why we want to have chemistry labs or places where I found chemistry very abstract.

I think that's why...

I didn't really engage with it, but I found psychology to be something that we were interacting with every day.

I was making these memory errors.

I saw my parents and grandparents remembering and forgetting things.

I thought, how does that happen?

The brain is so complex that I don't think we'll ever completely understand why this memory error might happen.

But I think this awareness is really important.

And a lot of good learning happens through making mistakes.

I play piano and I struggle, but I know when I make a mistake, I'm gonna have to work on this.

And I see that with my children, you learn a lot by making these mistakes.

I think that illustrates also how our memory works, that just seeing something many times doesn't mean you'll remember it well.

And this is a classic demonstration that you've seen a penny many times and you don't remember all the features on the penny.

I've updated that to the Apple logo.

You've seen the Apple logo so many times.

Of course you know all the features.

But then when you quiz people and test them and I do this in my class people aren't sure is the bite on the left or the right hand side.

Is there a stem or a leaf?

But if you make people draw it while they're looking at it, they're going to remember it better.

While they're looking at the actual- While they're looking at it, or if they actually the best way to remember something is to again failures.

I'll have you draw it without looking at it and you struggle and you wait.

Is it on the left or right?

Is it a stem or a leaf?

And you're starting to question all of these things.

Then when you look at the logo again, you're gonna engage in better learning than if you hadn't done that errorful kind of trial beforehand.

Even if you don't redraw it correctly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So this sort of thing is in an academic setting, we don't want failure.

We want people to do well, but I think this sort of retrieval failure with some corrective feedback is really beneficial.

And that's kind of how you learn through life.

You make mistakes and then you correct them.

But if you're constantly just doing it the right way, you're not really noticing these features.

We've tried to extend this to other domains.

It's called habituation.

You stop noticing things around you, like where the nearest fire extinguisher is, let's say.

And I guarantee hopefully there's one somewhere nearby and you've probably walked by it many times, but you stop noticing it.

And it's only until you'll need it, you'll realize, wait, where is it?

And so we've done this study where you have to.

Instead of me telling you where it is, you have to get up and find it.

And so now you're engaging with the environment.

You're going to go look for it and be like, gosh, it's been there the whole time.

I've walked by it so many times.

I've never noticed it.

And I think that's the difference between seeing something and noticing it.

So someone who studies vision, we know a lot of information reaches the retina, but then how much of it reaches our kind of more conscious level?

And not all of it does.

And I think that's what makes psychology interesting.

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Yeah, the big revelation for me when learning about neuroplasticity and it was such an obvious one once I heard it was that if you can perform a mental or physical task, there's no reason for your brain to change.

You clearly already have the circuit.

It's the gap between desired performance and current performance that actually triggers the opportunity for plasticity.

Yeah.

Those can be uncomfortable positions where it's like, I don't know this.

Am I going to be able to learn it?

I think that's this metacognitive aspect of When are you aware of that?

And a lot of learning now is unsupervised learning.

It's not that you're going in classrooms and teachers are telling you what to do.

You want to learn a new instrument, You might do a lot of it on YouTube.

You're going to try and figure it out.

You want to learn a new language.

You want to learn how to communicate with people.

There's going to be a lot of trial and error.

I think the best learners are the ones who persist, who are curious, because that's how you're going to get a lot of feedback, asking not just lots of questions, but the right questions.

Yeah, and I think the frustration and agitation do believe that's the release of catecholamines epinephrine norepinephrine, and those change the milieu around synapses and let them change.

All the things that we want to avoid are the things that actually allow us to learn.

It could be that people that are very good at learning and have this willingness to embrace so-called beginner's mind, like you know, like okay, they're excellent in one domain and they're perfectly happy to be a raw beginner in a different domain.

I always wonder if they experience agitation the same way that anyone else would, but that they don't have the same relationship to it.

Like, oh, here's that autonomic arousal again, and here it is.

And maybe they don't conceptualize it as frustration.

So, in terms of getting better at learning and remembering things, have you, or any other laboratories, parsed people's framework around it?

I know there's a vast literature around growth mindset, but I'm thinking more in terms of how people think about their own levels of frustration.

Because if you go, oh, like here I am frustrated again, awesome, let's go.

Now's the opportunity versus like, I'm terrible at this.

I know I should push through.

I just wonder whether or not mindset can actually make a difference.

I think it can.

I think our goals can play a big role.

A lot of the learning we do is sometimes learning to take a test, or learning something because it'll be on a test.

But as we get through life we realize if you're interested in birdwatching or music or skateboarding.

A lot of this is going to be observational learning.

It's going to be talking to other people.

So I think it comes down to the curiosity which is almost closing this knowledge gap, where here I am, but I wanna be here.

How can I get from here to here?

And some of it is there's a strong motivation there.

And that's something we've started to study with older adults as well, because we know memory declines happen with age, but not all things change equally.

And in fact, there are certain memory systems that might actually remain stable or even improve.

And I think some of the keys here are curiosity, being interested in listening to a podcast talking to someone else closing that knowledge gap and then kind of extending that and going further.

And I sometimes find there's topics that I'm not so interested in.

But then there's some that I will almost become obsessive about that.

It's like I'm gonna watch that YouTube video and the next one, and the next one, and then it's 45 minutes later.

And I think that that can be a waste of time in some ways, but it shows that our brain is craving this information.

And that's something that I'm really curious about how that will change as we get older.

And some of our research suggests that as we get older, we're more selective about what we focus on.

And I think that can be beneficial.

So maybe you don't waste as much time on trying to learn everything, but you're more focused on the things you want to learn about.

Do we know that it's important to continue to seek out new information as we get older in order to maintain our memory?

Or is it sufficient to just make some effort to remember the past, what we need to do to get through our day?

You know, I think this gets down to this question.

People think I really should be striving to to keep my memory.

Everyone wants to keep their memory.

Sure, that makes sense.

But how hard should people push to learn new information as opposed to maintaining what they've got?

Yeah, it's a great question.

I think it's a little bit of both and you want to have that sort of balance.

So if you play piano, my father in his 80s and 90s still plays piano.

I don't think he's learning new pieces, but he's strengthening the pieces he knows, and that keeps him sharp.

On the other hand, being exposed to new things.

If you're traveling, if you're talking to different people, that can be really important for things like even neurogenesis.

You want to develop new brain cells, which we know doesn't just stop as we reach a certain age.

So it's probably a bit of both.

And people ask me, what's the best thing to keep my brain sharp?

Is it crossword puzzles?

And that's interesting because I think as we get older, our actual verbal knowledge is maintained, if not improved.

So in a way, you're strengthening a strength and I think that can be beneficial, but probably the other things to do are do new things, go outside and appreciate the birds, or talk to someone who has a different perspective, or you go to a different restaurant even.

All of these things I find as I get older.

I have a lot of routines, but it's when I start to violate these routines, take a different way to work or try something different at a restaurant, I can almost feel like wow, that was a different experience today.

I did something else.

I think both are really important.

We do get set in our ways.

That's a real thing.

Yeah.

You know, habits can be healthy and we can talk more about that because those routines you know.

I drove this way and I didn't get into a car accident.

Or I even noticed my students in my classes after the first couple of weeks.

They all sit in the same seats.

I'm always like, why is that?

And it's like, well, I didn't get attacked by a snake here, so it's safe.

Maybe evolutionarily it makes sense.

But I'll sometimes halfway through the quarter say okay, I want everyone to get up and switch sides and sit somewhere else.

And students are like, this is terrible.

Like I have to move.

But there's some benefits to having a different perspective, both physically and possibly mentally, that you're gonna then remember things differently.

And I know if I've taken a class in a different classroom every year, I can almost revisit each of those rooms and try and recall what I learned.

But if you learn all in the same spot, there's a lot of interference.

So I think there can be benefits to changing our habits, but it can be uncomfortable, especially at first.

I went to a lot of scientific meetings early in my career and I would change seats after every break.

It was the only way I could stay awake through all the talks.

Some talks would naturally keep me awake and some just wouldn't.

I mean, they don't tell you this, but there are a lot of great talks at meetings, and they're often a lot of boring ones too.

And you feel obligated to stay.

Later in my career, I gave myself permission to get up and take a walk.

But you know.

So I do think that one learns differently, even if you just change the novelty of seat position.

Yeah.

And I think that's a great example of as you've gotten older and more experienced.

First of all, you give yourself the leeway like hey, I can get up if this isn't working for me or I want to see something else.

But I've also learned, I learn better if I sit over here and then over here and then over here.

And you know that's.

Those are some principles of memory that I think.

When you have this metacognitive insight, you can use it effectively.

And I've learned, and I've seen my children learn, sometimes through mistakes, or sometimes this works better for me.

And I think that's fascinating that we can do that.

It is interesting that almost everybody has an experience of saying like a gaffe, like saying something stupid or getting the wrong answer publicly.

And the shame and the arousal that comes with that means A we're never going to forget the right answer.

But we tend to remember the experience of embarrassment more.

Then it sort of swamps the information somehow.

And it just raises this question for me is is there a slight to severe emotional tag on every memory we have?

I think part of our brain, like the amygdala, that's involved in processing emotions is very active and is maintained throughout age.

It's other parts of the brain tend to decline.

So I think you're right that there can be an emotional attachment to a lot of our memories.

Some of them are bittersweet.

Some of them are things we go back to for comfort.

Sometimes we even change them a little bit so they fit the way we might have thought they happened.

I think that happens at large.

Sure.

And that's part of our emotional tuning, like what makes us feel good.

Some memories we don't want to revisit some, you know, PTSD.

There's a lot of research on how we can try and help people.

So I think memory can be tuned that way and a lot of it can have an emotional valence.

And those are usually the memories that we cherish.

They're the ones that we, might be afraid of.

I still remember, even though I'm not sure I remember it accurately, this Wizard of Oz.

And now when my daughter was in Wizard of Oz, I was like, oh, this is such a great play.

So I was thinking positively about it, even though at that time.

Of getting the line wrong.

What do you think happened there?

You know, I was probably just distracted.

You know, you do a lot of these dress rehearsals.

I'm not.

Clearly I'm not an actor, but you do a lot of these rehearsing and you don't see the audience.

You don't appreciate what's going on, especially when you're young.

You know, all of a sudden like oh, there's all these people watching me and I know what I'm supposed to say.

But I kind of

I'm not convinced most people even remembered it.

I'm not even sure my parents were there.

So I think we then think of it as a very strong emotional memory, but it guides us.

And to me that's a lasting memory in a sense, because it kind of forced me to think how does memory really work?

I thought I knew how it worked.

And I see a lot of people, you know, studying in ways that aren't always as effective.

You know, we know some of the work, this is colleagues at UCLA have studied desirable difficulties.

How can you make learning kind of uncomfortable, but that you'll remember things better.

And it goes against a lot of our intuitions.

A lot of teachers will want to say, how can we make learning easier?

And I think that's probably the first problem is you don't want it to be easy.

You want it to be not a struggle but a challenge, so that you can appreciate just how difficult it is.

So I learned nothing else from that.

Wizard of Oz is now.

When I do a presentation or talk to other people, I love to see the room I'm gonna be working in, or maybe a scientific presentation.

Maybe you've done this too.

The night before, you're like, oh, this is the auditorium.

It probably raises your arousal level, but it makes you feel more comfortable than the day of.

I don't have a photographic memory.

I wish I did, or maybe I wish I didn't.

But a long time ago, I decided I was in a really cool circumstance.

I was on a picnic.

It was my first girlfriend.

And I remember thinking like, gosh, she's so beautiful.

I'm just going to take a picture.

We were just sitting at this park that's up in the hills behind where I used to live.

And I just went, and I decided, okay, like I remember the picture.

Now, of course, in my mind now, it's blurry.

Like, I don't remember specific details, but I remember more or less.

I think I remember that the angle was that.

And then, like a year and a half ago, I was in Manhattan, I was in an Uber and I just was like maybe I could just do that for like a trivial street scene.

So I was just like look, there was one of those scaffolds for construction and I just decided, you know, just do that.

And there was a guy walking by, and I'm like, I wonder if I'll remember it.

And I still remember it.

Now, the question I have is, do I actually remember the content of what I saw?

Mm-hmm, besides just their crude, you know the scaffold, the guy in one case, you know my girlfriend, we were sitting on this nice big lawn above.

There's just this lake there.

It's a beautiful spot in Palo Alto.

It's still there.

Or is what's stamped in my decision to do that and the conscious collection of it?

These weren't big emotionally salient events.

The difference between these visual memories and other visual memories is that the emotional load wasn't that high, but I made the decision to do it.

It was like, it was coming from me.

So I'm not just trying to remember, like, like we also went to, it was her senior, my junior prom.

Like, I don't, I remember a few things from that prom, but I can't remember.

I don't have a visual picture of the prom, but the prom was also a lot more emotionally important, you know laden, than anything I just described.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, it's a fascinating question because I think selection is the important thing here.

That you're making a conscious decision like this is a special moment.

Can I just take a picture of it?

And the work on visual memory is interesting.

We are very visual people.

But the research on photographic memory does show that even people who have very strong visual memory will make memory errors.

So it's not that it's exactly photographic, but their visual memory is exceptional.

I think what's interesting here and this is something I think is important is the selection process that you're choosing.

This is a special moment.

I'm going to timestamp it and remember it.

You're not doing anything special other than realizing a lot is going on.

Now there's probably some emotional valence there versus taking this random picture in New York City.

It would be interesting to test your memory later, because we know sometimes we think we remember something well and in fact we misremember things or details.

Hopefully you know you got the right girlfriend, of course, but maybe the hill looks a little bit different.

Or sometimes people are like, of course it was spring because we went to the prom.

But it's like, no, actually, now that, you know, it was a different season entirely.

That was fall.

I'm confusing it with the other picnic I took.

But I think that's important, especially as we get older, that there are some memories.

These days, we have our phones for everything.

So you probably couldn't then, but you could have pulled out your phone and actually taken a picture.

And you see a lot of people offloading information now.

I'm not going to remember this.

I'll take a picture.

There is some research showing that that act of deciding to take the picture actually improves your own memory.

For the event.

Interesting.

Now it can also make your memory worse because you're realizing I wanna, I'm taking this photo, so I don't need to remember it later.

And so you could see it going both ways.

But that selection process is important.

So sometimes you're choosing, this is mundane.

I'm going to offload it and take a picture.

Or this is a special moment, I wanna take this picture and I see it.

When I take pictures of my family, this is a special moment, I wanna take this photo.

But there are times where I'm like, I don't have my camera.

I don't wanna interfere.

This is gonna be like an internal memory that I can take.

And hopefully it lasts forever.

I tell myself that my mindset at the time was this is a special moment.

I never want to forget this.

I hope I never forget it.

Well, you know, memory is reconstructive.

And I think you know, the more you retrieve it and go back there, the more you'll have this feeling of remembering it.

And our brain does a lot of interesting things in terms of, you know, reconstructing the past.

Also has a similar brain signature as imagining the future, which in some ways makes sense.

We shouldn't have separate parts of the brain for thinking about the past and thinking about the future.

But that can kind of then predict why you might misremember something, why your imagination has to be based surely, on the experiences you've had already.

Or if I say, what would it be like to go to Mars?

Well, you've never been to Mars, but you've seen movies in the past about it.

So if I said imagine a space alien, you and I, being similar age, are probably going to think of the ET version of one.

Whereas someone who's younger than us might have a very different kind of representation of that.

It's interesting to think of memory as kind of a reconstruction of the past, but also imagining the future involves our past experiences.

Never thought about it that way.

It's the perfect time, I think, to raised the quote that a former guest on this podcast put on social media the other day.

They weren't his words, but Morgan Housel, who did a really wonderful episode on the psychology of money.

And I really love his first book, but also his second book, The Art of Spending Money, he put out.

He said it's a Russian quote the past is more unpredictable than the future.

Goodness, that raises questions about eyewitness testimony, spousal arguments.

You know I occasionally will get an email.

My wife and I are My husband and I are debating and I have a rule.

I don't get into spousal debates or arguments of any kind.

So do we remember things the way they happened or do we confabulate?

Do we muck it all up?

I don't think we muck it all up and I don't think we do it intentionally either.

But as a result of all the information we have in our memory, we're constantly interpreting the future and our current state.

And you spoke a little bit about eyewitness memory.

I think that's a really good example of that where something horrible might've happened.

And like your experience, where you think you're taking a picture and you're gonna remember everything

And it feels like you will.

I can remember the shirt.

I can remember the smell.

I can remember the weather.

And sometimes that can be accurate.

But a lot of research shows that sometimes we misremember these things.

And some of these classic cases.

Unfortunately, now that there's DNA evidence, you can determine that maybe they got the wrong person.

And when that happens, you wanna look back and say, how could that happen?

And some of it comes down to faulty eyewitness identification.

And these are not cases where people are lying or intentionally changing things, but they'll identify someone.

They'll say, that's the person.

And, as a result of identifying that person in a lineup, that person then replaces what they actually saw.

So our memory can be contaminated just like any form of evidence could be contaminated.

And then, when you replay it again, you're replaying the person you identified, not the person you actually saw.

Wow.

So it's almost like we, as we become more familiar with this person that we identified, quote unquote, our knowledge about them, facial features, et cetera, is elaborated in our brain.

And we superimpose that on the... actual experience.

Yeah.

And this is, you know, one of the most famous cases Ronald Cotton case where really horrible event happened.

And the woman made a point of trying to remember her attacker.

So it wasn't just she got a quick glance, but she had a long interaction with him and you know a traumatic event and she said, if I survive this, I wanna remember his face so I can identify him later.

So this is like the perfect situation where your memory should be sharp.

And it was cross-race identification, which we know is not as reliable as identifying someone of your own race.

And when she saw a lineup she identified, she took her time and said this feels like it's a multiple choice test.

And I studied hard for it.

She took her time and she identified the person.

And she thought in her mind, this is the person who was inches from my throat.

And she identified him and he had an alibi that didn't stand up.

And he was then found guilty.

And it was only decades later that DNA evidence exonerated him and she felt horrible.

She felt like and there's a lot of reasons why this could happen, whether leading questions or how the identification process was conducted but she was trying to do what she felt was her job and take someone who she thought was guilty off the street.

And later they got to meet in fact, and she could apologize to him, she felt terrible.

And so this is one case study and I wouldn't draw any conclusions, but it had a lot of the principles that we've talked about.

Where you feel like you're taking a photo, It's a cross-race identification where your confidence might be high for a good reason, but accuracy might not be.

And then this kind of changing of the face, whereas once you identify that face, that's what you start to remember.

And so I think there's a lot of interesting memory principles at play here.

How does the legal system deal with this kind of thing?

I mean, nowadays there's so many more cameras and phones which can track location.

I like to think those things have improved the courtroom scenarios, that it's harder for people to make genuine mistakes.

Yeah, I think it's.

You know, memory should be treated as one source of evidence, just like DNA, just like any sort of evidence, but also we need to be aware that it can be contaminated, just like any other source of evidence as well.

So we can't just say, oh, DNA evidence is perfect.

Well, it can also be contaminated in predictable ways.

And I think, coming back to this idea of metacognition, most people feel like they have a pretty good understanding of how memory works, but it's not always accurate.

And sometimes confidence, high confidence doesn't necessarily mean high accuracy.

I think part of the reason we're fooled is usually the more you see something, the better you'll remember it, just like the Apple logo.

But that's not always the case.

And there's predictable reasons why the more you see something, the more you might stop attending to the features or you don't need to use it.

And so that is a more kind of predictable memory principle.

But we don't have this, you know, always accurate metacognitive insight.

And I think that's interesting.

I think that's both concerning you know, in the eyewitness memory case, but it's also important for learning.

How can we be kind of effective and maximize our learning?

I have a question about what I want to call medium-term memory.

I don't even know if that's a real term.

Short-term memory working memory.

Listeners of this podcast may or may not be familiar, but working memory is like keeping a phone number online in your head, or a string of numbers until you need it and then, kind of, You may or may not remember it long-term.

Long-term memory, obviously, long-term memory.

But there's this thing that I do.

Today is a bit of a confessional.

So when I check into hotels I – always look at the map of how to get out in a fire, because one staying at a hotel in san francisco for a donor event, the alarm went off in the middle of the night.

Everyone, of course, stuck their head out to look to see if anyone was leaving and everyone like we're not leaving, and then they called everyone's room.

It was an actual fire, which taught me like when the alarm goes, go right, but And it was pretty confusing.

Yeah.

Wide hallways.

Wasn't clear.

Exit sign was not to like the actual stairwell.

It was, you know, it's not a good situation, but of course got out fine.

But from now on, before I go to sleep, I go and I look at where you are here.

I look for the exit.

I occasionally walk the hall.

I don't want to be in this situation again, especially in a high rise.

I just do not want to be in a situation where I can't get out of a building that's on fire.

I figure it takes like five minutes.

People laugh at me and I do this, but I make a mental map.

Okay, so let's assume it's smoky.

I do this thing.

Okay, I would... Which is the closer...

I would go right, then left, right, then left, then right.

Okay, so I drill it in my head.

Good, then I go to sleep.

I never remember the maps, but it's not working memory.

It's not short-term memory.

I couldn't tell you for the life of me what the last hotel map looked like in my head.

Pat, you are here, red dot.

It had doors, it had exits, so it had these component parts.

But what term memory is that?

And thank goodness I don't remember, because it's going to change every time I'm in a different hotel.

So what are the mechanisms that allow for selective forgetting that's healthy?

And also, is medium term memory an actual thing?

Well, I think, when you're saying medium term, that's your everyday basic memory function, where you're like I need to remember things, but I don't think I need to remember them that long, but I really need to remember them today or tonight.

And it makes me sleep better at night.

And I've had a similar experience.

I was staying in a hotel with my family and the fire alarm went off.

And we're like, what do we do?

Well, we know we don't take the elevator.

That's what you're always told.

And I don't think I looked at the map, but I looked down the hall and I swear, when I looked down the hall I saw smoke.

And so I'm like, let's not go that way.

So we went down the other way, we rushed down the stairs, we got outside and the kids were pretty traumatic.

And actually, one of our children was like eight stories ahead of us going down the stairs.

But what's interesting is I thought I saw smoke and that's maybe I didn't have my glasses on, but that's my mind playing tricks on me.

So maybe that was my concern.

But I think that this everyday memory is really relevant.

And when you're studying that map you're making notes of like okay, it's close by, it's down the hall.

I have to go down here.

And that can be very informative and useful for survival.

And there's some research saying that that's basically what our brain is tuned towards is surviving.

You know, where am I going to eat?

How am I going to sleep?

So when you say everyday memory, I think that's probably the most important thing.

And part of that memory formation is also then forgetting it and updating it.

It's as simple as you need to know your hotel room number when you're staying there.

But if I ask you your hotel room number a week later, it's gone.

But that's good in a way, because you're going to have other numbers to remember and other hotel room numbers to remember.

So there's benefits of forgetting.

So I think that's an interesting insight.

You're doing some processing to remember something, but then you need to update it and forget it.

And it's the same thing.

I think the best thing you can do in that case is studying.

The map is one thing, but some people aren't great with maps.

And where am I in the hotel?

Is doing that active learning of actually walking the halls of like?

Well, I go down here and there's the elevator, so I can't go there.

Oh, there are the stairs, I'll remember that.

And then you can kind of encode it.

So that sort of active learning is like us with the fire extinguisher.

We made people get up and find it instead of telling people where it was.

And I'm always.

When you're on a flight, they'll always say there's six emergency exits on this plane.

And then I think they do the wrong thing.

They tell you where they are.

I think the best thing would be to say, you know, there's six emergency exits on this plane.

Not gonna tell you where they are.

Well, I'm not gonna say not where they are, but go find them.

And I noticed maybe it's just myself being anxious.

As soon as they say that I'm looking behind me, I'm making sure I know where they all are.

Whereas most people are like, oh, they pointed here, here, and here.

And I'll even say, sometimes the nearest one is behind you.

And I'm like, well, I want to see where it is behind me.

And so I think that sort of act of learning, whether you call it everyday memory, is really important.

And I think when we talk about memory, people are like, I can't remember names.

I'm like, that's kind of a common thing.

But if you need to sometimes remember like, what medication are you taking or how did you react the last time you saw this person, and those sorts, I think it's really important to be in tune with what you're calling this kind of everyday average memory.

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Thank you for that.

And I'm going to use that as weaponry when I get teased for walking the fire exits.

But it was in part because the first time people were asking, hey, do you know if we should leave?

Do you know which way to go?

And I realized, OK, next time it might as well be me.

I'll be the guy that knows which way to go.

Certainly for myself.

And then I can tell other people which way to go.

Nobody else here knows where to go.

And most likely they're not going to know the next time.

I do the thing on the plane too.

I think okay, I actually read the thing of how to take it out because I figured well, I've experienced how, under conditions of very high arousal, you just default to what almost feel like whatever was trained, whatever reflexes you have.

I mean, I had a scuba diving accident years ago and I don't like to say you know came close to the end, but it was an air failure and it was a whole mess.

And you just default to, yeah, we had to do the whole share air thing.

It was a precarious situation to begin with.

And you just default to these routines.

Actually, recently I watch what I think is a spectacular documentary about Dean Potter, who was a he was a free solo climber, a predecessor to to Alex Honnold.

He was kind of the guy to beat and Honnold passed him up pretty early.

But and he got into wingsuiting and base jumping and the whole thing.

And there was this.

There's a scene where And so be warned if you watch this amazing four-part series there's a scene where people are doing base jumping in Yosemite, are advocating for it being legal in Yosemite.

It's illegal.

And so there are a bunch of spectators there and they were doing this big demonstration.

Jump who was a very, very seasoned base jumper.

She didn't want to use her own gear because they were confiscating people's gear at the bottom.

So she borrowed someone else's gear and she jumps and she's used to pulling from a leg.

A leg pull, I guess it is.

And you just see her the whole way down, the whole way down.

And she's got a parachute on.

And just, you know, not to give it away, but I guess, you know, gave it away that she dies.

But the whole way down, you can see her just doing this routine movement.

Yeah.

And she put on a different pack.

She knew that it was a different pole location.

So, under conditions of very high arousal, even highly highly trained people, for that condition they just default to whatever it is that they're used to doing.

And if you don't know what to do, you default to not knowing what to do.

If you know what to do, you default to what you think you need to do in one situation.

And I've had that experience scuba diving.

It's very clear from this documentary.

And I think we're all a little naive in thinking that, Oh no, like when the alarm goes and everything is crazy, like I'm going to sort through this in a regimented way like, or I'll be so keyed up I'll have to figure it out.

This is not quite the case.

The brain seems to not work that way.

Yeah, I think we discover that in these extreme situations, but also even kind of in some simple situations, there's a really concerning thing that happens that people will leave children infants, in the back of their car unattended and these infants will die.

On hot days.

And when you look at these investigations, the reason this happens is these are very responsible, very intelligent parents who will put their child in the car and then get in the car.

And then you just get in this mode of I'm going to work, I'm going to do my job.

And you're in this routine, the baby falls asleep, you drive to work, you go upstairs, you do it.

And then you get this phone call of like, where's your infant?

Or why haven't they been dropped off?

And you're thinking, what are you talking about?

Whoa.

Exactly.

I'm sure many people listening to this are like, there's no way.

There's no way.

Well, I think there's like, there's no way that could happen to me.

This must be some person who's super distracted or has this.

Sadly, it happens too often to people, you know, All sorts of people.

And I think that's part of the issues.

Like you were saying, she's going to grab the strap where it normally is.

You drive to work a hundred times this way, but it's this one day where it was your turn to take the infant to daycare.

And you just get into this mode, this habit, this routine.

And now we have to have our car talking to us.

Some cars will even say, have you checked the backseat for an infant?

And it's like, gosh, have we come to that level where, we need to be reminded of these things.

So I think that's where, you know, you're right, it becomes lethal.

That you know.

Sometimes it's talked about in terms of prospective memory, remembering to do something in the future.

We think of memories usually as remembering to do something from the past, right?

But a lot of it is, you know, what do you have to do today?

Are you meeting this person?

We offload this to our phones and get reminders.

But we're prone to forgetting, and especially under you're talking about high arousal.

This person's falling, but it's even as simple as when you're in the car.

And you're probably aware.

When you're in the car, you start mind-wandering, you're thinking of a million other things and all of a sudden you've arrived somewhere or you missed your turn.

So our brain kind of takes over in ways that we might not be sure about.

Yeah, one of the things that spooks me about scuba diving and I love scuba diving is I got my PADI certification because it's a bit more involved.

But it worries me that you actually don't have to update and if you do, not very often.

It's been, gosh, it's been four or more, five years since I went scuba diving last time.

But I've got my card, I have my gear.

And if somebody wants to go scuba diving tomorrow, I can do it legally.

There's a lot involved, like you need to brush up.

And so you know I mean here in the United States we have all this.

Like you know, people can sue each other.

There are all these legal protections, but there's still a lot of ways in which we can do damage to ourselves or others just by virtue of the fact that we don't have to brush up on driving skills.

It's kind of a shock to me that we don't have more problems related to forgetting.

It's true.

I think, the more you think about it, it's amazing how much we do remember, especially under some circumstances.

But I agree that a lot of this scuba diving too, because you're underwater with buoyancy, you have to figure things out.

And I got certified too when I was 20.

I wouldn't trust myself to do it again.

I'd want to probably take the entire course again.

But when you're 30 maybe you feel confident and especially drivers like new drivers.

You give very little training to younger And then you're like you're on your own.

I've seen it with my children learning to drive.

I also realize I'm not as good a driver as I thought I was.

I'm certainly passing on some habits that I probably should be more aware of.

And they're more rule-based.

They're aware of how to do things.

But I have this feeling like this wisdom.

Well, you don't need to do that.

Or, you know, that's the rule, but I do it this way.

So I think you're right.

I think revisiting these things more often and being more cognizant probably would make us safer.

On the lighter side.

Many people who are concerned about their memory as they age will ask about forgetting.

I want to know why, as people get older, they tell the same stories over and over again, same jokes over and over again.

Have they forgotten that they've said the joke, or are they just doing it for their own entertainment?

Or I don't know, like, what is this about?

Like, I feel like someone needs to do that study.

Like, why do people tell the same stories as they get older?

Well, I think there's a lot of reasons.

And you know, a lot of memories do change with age and some forms of memory, like source memory, tends to decline with age.

You can't remember where you saw the headline or who you told the joke to.

And sometimes I'll even say, have I told you this before?

But sometimes it's just such a good joke or such a good memory.

I'm like, I don't really care because I'm going to tell it to you again because I'm enjoying this.

And my kids will be like, yeah, we've heard that so many times.

I'm like, yeah, but it's so good.

So it's probably a little bit of both, but I think there's also some nostalgia.

Like we do share family histories this way.

And I think you know, when families get together for Thanksgiving, there's this rehashing of.

Do you remember when this happened?

It's like, yeah, we tell that story every time.

A lot of our histories used to be oral histories, where you know we're telling stories and reminding people and it's how we determine what foods were safe.

But yeah, I can see it's certainly frustrating.

I think we think, gosh, I'm talking to this older person.

They're telling me the same thing again and you're nodding.

But I take a certain amount of enjoyment from it.

There's a nostalgia.

There's also a feeling of familiarity.

And so probably it's a collection of things.

But you do see more pathological aging that people will completely forget.

They'll say the same things.

They'll ask, what's for dinner again?

Five minutes later, what's for dinner again?

What's for dinner again?

And that's where it's probably more concerning.

But it is an interesting thing to note that as we get older we might engage in that sort of behavior.

What is the consensus now on Alzheimer's and memory loss generally?

Meaning?

Is it inevitable that people lose some amount of memory, and conditions like Alzheimer's are just a more rapid downward trajectory, and we could talk about super agers, these people that seem to maintain cognition well better than their, their peers anyway?

Are there people who, just you know, are sharp till the day they take their last breath, and that last breath comes in their 90s or even past 100.

I think just the diversity that accompanies aging is really interesting.

You could look at a hundred year old who's doing really well, and a 60 year old who's not doing so well.

So we can't just use kind of biological age as the marker.

And as a psychologist, of course I'm interested in psychological aspects And there's an old study on nuns who.

It's interesting to see how you can test different people, but nuns are very committed to their profession.

And you found that these nuns, how they age, some of them, certainly when they passed away, their brains had these kind of hallmark signs of dementia plaques and tangles.

But behaviorally they were still high functioning.

So it's really interesting that the hardware shows what we see as dementia and specifically Alzheimer's disease, but their behavior was that of a fairly healthy cognitive person.

So something else has to be going on, and it could be some people say it's having a sense of purpose could be having social connections.

We know that's incredibly important.

I think we do have a certain amount of control over it.

And some of it might be based on physical exercise and sleep.

So I know things you've talked about before.

And some of it is having kind of a positive attitude about aging.

That if you feel like you, you know, some people say, well, it's all genetic.

So what do I have to do?

If you go on a walk.

Some really good research shows that walking three or four times a week can enhance hippocampal function, the part of the brain that's very involved in declarative memory.

And that part of the brain, having turned 50 recently, tends to decline by about 1 to 2 a year in terms of volume.

So this is kind of physical shrinkage of the brain.

But in the walking group, the group that was randomly assigned to walk three, four times a week for 40 minutes, compared to a stretching group who's still engaging in exercise but not cardiovascular exercise.

The walking group, their hippocampus actually increased in volume by 1%.

You're changing the brain, but you're also changing the behavior.

Their memory was much better a year later.

I think if you saw a doctor and said, I'm having some memory problems, what can I do?

Most people are looking for a pill, or Sometimes it's eat this or do that, but I think physical exercise can be so important.

And it probably the mechanism.

We don't know exactly, but it probably trickles down to things like improvements in sleep as well.

If you're getting exercise, maybe earlier in the day, you're gonna have better mood, you're gonna sleep better.

We know a lot of memory formation happens when you're sleeping.

We know as we get older, our sleep quality tends to decline, even if our quantity tends to increase.

So I think, just knowing that there are some things we can do, I'm using physical exercise as the example, and it doesn't have to be the extreme version Walking, dancing.

A lot of people enjoy being outside.

That can be incredibly important to offset some of the things we do know can lead to dementia.

Was the walking vigorous?

You know, in this group, I think.

It's really 30 to 40 minutes and there's nothing special certainly, about walking, but it's something where you can randomly assign people to either walk or engage in stretching.

So if you're biking, if you're swimming, if you're dancing, any of these things can be beneficial.

But here it's.

You know you can randomly assign people to walk and it should be at a rate where you're.

There's research showing that the people who walk slightly faster actually live longer.

You're not sure exactly.

There's a reverse causality there.

Could certainly be that.

A lot of this research.

It's tough to do aging research because it's hard to randomly assign people to certain conditions.

Right.

As a psychologist, knowing that you have a little bit of control over the process is important.

And I think most people, when they talk about aging, they're so worried about dementia and Alzheimer's disease as a specific form, but balance is even more important, I think.

And most people aren't even aware of their balance.

So one in four people over the age of 65 will experience a fall.

And that fall can be very detrimental.

You can break your hip, your collarbone.

Often you know you're getting up at night.

More frequently you trip over a carpet or a rug.

And you know if you're in bed, if recovering from these falls, you're not walking.

You know your hippocampus is shrinking.

If you ask people, how's your balance?

Most people are like, well, it's fine.

I haven't had a fall.

But there's a very simple test we could do it now if you wanted where you just stand up and see if you can balance on one leg for at least 10 seconds.

And I have you know, when I do presentations, I do this ideally 30 40 minutes into the presentation.

We shouldn't be sitting for so long.

And most people do pretty well.

It's a younger group and sometimes it's older adults I'm speaking to.

And you can tell, you know, I'm like, make sure you have something you wanna hold on to.

And you can tell that balance changes considerably with age.

And then I say, okay, now try doing it with your eyes closed.

I actually usually don't do this with my older adult group, because then you see the younger people start to tip.

We get a lot of cues from our visual environment for balance.

The older people tip. everyone, you'll see the younger people start to take it.

That's why it's even more surprising.

It's like a field sobriety test.

It very much is.

But it's again from this metacognitive standpoint where you think your balance is fine because you haven't had a fall, but you could be close to falling at any given point.

And so you know, the cerebellum, the almost very primitive part of the brain, is involved in a lot of this.

What's interesting with balance is it's very trainable.

And so you know there's parts of balance that involve visual inner ear.

But if you engage in some training and it can be as simple as standing on one leg or doing yoga or Tai Chi you can improve your balance considerably within a month or two.

And so I think, when I talk to older adults who you know sometimes are even middle-aged, worried about their memory, I think balance is often overlooked, and it's something that's trainable.

So I've started to do it a little bit and I've noticed changes in my balance, sometimes good.

I also noticed that I don't sleep well, my balance isn't as good.

And I think that's probably the most important thing to be on the lookout for, because these things are related.

If you lose your balance and you have a fall, you're not gonna be engaging in physical exercise.

Your memory is gonna decline.

Yeah, the old skiers and the old surfers look to be in pretty awesome shape.

There are a million confounds there.

The sunlight, the social connection, the water, the cold.

You know, I mean, there are a bunch of things.

Obviously, it's not just the skiing or the surfing, but there are certain sports where you look at the people and you say okay, they're not the biggest and strongest, nor are they the ones with the most endurance, but on balance they seem strong, their posture looks good.

Yeah. they seem relatively happy.

Who knows?

Right.

I'm intrigued by the fact that I look at a lot of these videos of superagers and athletes in their 70s 80s 90s, who are doing remarkably well.

It's very rare to see a video of athletes or non-athletes past 80 where they're breathing through their nose with their mouth shut.

Almost always.

You see, Now I'm not saying it's causal, but there does seem to be a shift in the way that people breathe as they get older.

Just look at some of the, I forget his name now, he's a television personality.

He's been around a long, he's in his hundreds and he's been on YouTube and news programs recently.

But at rest it's like a mouth open breathing pattern.

You kind of wonder whether or not they're getting enough oxygen to their brain.

And I do think that the shift in how we breathe, spontaneous movement, these things all go together.

And I do think each component part needs to be looked at individually.

So okay, so it's the movement, it's the exercise, the novelty, the social connection, but ultimately there's a lot of other things going on.

Like, we know, older people just don't, they don't move spontaneously very much.

We had twyla tharp in here, the you know world famous choreographer, and she's in her somewhere in her 80s.

You know she can deadlift twice her body weight.

Works out at 5 a.m. every morning for two hours.

She boxed for a while.

But actual boxing, because she's Twyla.

She's got a lot of spirit.

But She doesn't sit like I'm sitting, like kind of lazing back.

She's fully active and she's moving.

She's nasal breathing unless she's speaking.

Her nervous system is turned on.

I notice that and I go, God willing, I'll be like that.

But I notice with each passing year I take a few more opportunities to lean against things as opposed to standing up, not leaning against them.

I'm starting to resemble... the Bulldogs I've owned.

There's an opportunity to lie down, they lie down.

If there's opportunity, you know, sleep.

And I don't know that that's good.

Maybe we need to nudge ourselves to be a little more active than we're comfortable.

I think the insight is so important to be like.

I notice I'm doing more of this or I'm looking a lot like this and I'm surprised.

Things starting like posture or even breathing.

And I think you know I'm not an expert in this area, but just getting more oxygen to the brain is so important.

And I think that's probably the mechanism, you know, for physical exercise.

You're getting more oxygen to your brain, which really...

As you get older, it's harder to do that.

And so exercise might be kind of the mechanism that does that.

And maybe with the advances, we're gonna find other ways to do that.

But I think that insight is really important.

And it's also, we have age-based stereotypes of what happens.

Like oh, as you get older, Let's say, my knee hurts and some people are like oh well, you're just getting older.

Well, my other knee is the same age and it feels fine.

So something's going on.

Maybe there's some trauma, there's something, but it does give you this feeling like hey, there's something I can do.

Or maybe you know I'm a firm believer like in physical therapy, like a lot of the exercises we do.

You know, If you keep doing the same thing, that's great, but then you lose a lot of the other muscle mass.

I think exercise, even walking, people will say it's really like a controlled form of losing your balance and regaining it.

And losing your balance and regaining it.

And so you add that into hiking, which has unpredictable surfaces, and all these muscles that you're not using too often now have to be engaged.

And so I think that coming back to like challenging yourself can be very important, putting yourself in uncomfortable positions.

I mean, it's great to be on this podcast, but-

There's a time where I'm like, I'm not sure I want to do this, right?

Like, you know, how do you get that?

You're feeling that way now?

No, now I feel fine.

But I think, as we put ourselves in these uncomfortable positions and I remember, you know, when I first started teaching, you know like gosh 300 people you know this is an uncomfortable situation

One of my mentors said, you know what? there's only one thing you need to do and that's breathe.

Because you start to forget that that is the most primitive thing to get oxygen to your brain, that then you can do what you probably can do quite well.

And that's a psychological oversight where we just kind of start.

I don't know if it's just mouth breathing, but as we get older or there's more stress, we stop being aware of the things that can really help us.

Yeah.

I noticed, with each passing year I get a little more difficult with myself about the little things you know, just like.

So i try, to this day i would have to push myself to take the stairs a little bit faster than i want to.

I i don't take escalators unless there's no stairs available.

Um, when i travel i really i find out.

But i have to Push, you know I have to.

I mean, perhaps you know, collateral advantage of doing this podcast is I say things like that and now I don't want to get spotted in an airport on an escalator.

The other day.

I normally train at a home gym, but I was in a commercial gym and I was listening to music on my phone and this kid came up to me and he tabs.

He goes.

I thought you don't use your phone when you work out.

I'm busted.

Sometimes I listen to things.

I'm not texting and sending messages.

And he's like, okay.

I have to be careful what I say.

But it's nice.

It actually has a forcing function.

And I think that as we get older, there are a lot of things where we're not being observed.

We know we should do them, but then we don't do them.

And I think the injury... thing is, and the pain thing is a big one.

You know, I hear this all the time.

You know like yeah, I would exercise more, but I got this shoulder thing, I got this thing.

And I think that's why there's so much excitement about these peptides and it's still very unclear, you know what's gonna be useful or not.

Actually there's a study out of Helen Blau's lab at Stanford on mice and humans where they found an inhibitor of the molecule that inhibits cartilage regeneration.

They knock out this inhibitor or they have a drug kind of analog that can do this in humans and they observe regeneration of knee cartilage.

I'm sure this is going to be sourced to pharma.

That's going to be the path, because that's the typical path for labs at Stanford if they have a discovery like that.

But how cool would that be?

Yeah.

Right now, knock on wood, I have like no joint issues, but how cool would that be?

Because I think a lot of people just think, well, the body wears out.

Yeah.

You know, the hip wears out, the knee wears out.

And so when they have that pain, they don't think they could overcome it by movement.

They assume, well, you know, the chassis is kind of going and then, you know.

Well, a lot of this comes down to habits and some of it is motivation, right?

It's hard to get motivated to go to the gym.

And as you get older, more aches and pains, it's harder to get up, it's easier to sit down.

But I think, knowing you have some control over it, that a lot of especially in midlife people have back pain.

It's probably the most common thing and it's probably from sitting.

You know we work a lot and especially in midlife there's some interesting.

You know it's not always a linear decline with age.

And in fact there's some interesting work on.

You know, happiness being more curvilinear, midlife is actually some of the lowest levels of happiness and life satisfaction.

Really?

Like our age?

Yeah.

Really?

So I hope in some ways that can make well.

In some ways it can make yeah well, it can make you feel good because it you know a lot of people who might not feel great at 40 or 50 if you said well, actually that's the lowest point in the graph and it can actually get better with age.

Mm-hmm.

The title of my book.

Mm-hmm.

But it makes you realize that as we get older, there are more aches and pains.

And yet why are older adults, some of them who are fairly healthy and active, are doing really well?

Whereas kind of when you're younger and your body's in decent shape, We're doing things like sitting, we're working a lot, we're stressed, we're not handling our emotions as well as we could.

And so I think that's why aging is an interesting thing, that we think when we're young that's the best times in our lives.

It actually might be some of the most confusing times.

Are you happier at 50 than you were at 40?

I think I am.

I think I'm more content.

But when I was at 20 or 30, I could do whatever I want.

I could scuba dive.

I could play basketball.

I'd bounce back from an injury a week later.

But were you happier?

Was your internal landscape more peaceful or more happy?

Absolutely not.

And I actually see it in a lot of undergraduates who are like, it's a confusing time.

You're trying to figure out what you want to do.

You're in a different place.

You have different partners.

And yet we say, we almost romanticize that college is the best time in your life.

Oh my God, no.

Yeah.

I'll say, even though I am very happy, 40 was rough.

My 40th birthday, I was like, this is rough.

And coming up in sciences, I loved doing it, loved the experience, but it was very stressful.

Wasting money for your lab.

A postdoc is a very uncertain time a lot of uncertainty, a lot of stress.

And now, I mean, I have stressors, but I...

I view them differently.

I feel completely differently about stress in general.

I mean I do a lot of things, but I don't think teen years certainly not for me or twenties or thirties are the best years of your life.

I can attest.

It didn't suck, but it was rough.

I mean, there's fun parts to it and there's a lot of novelty, and you did things then that you probably wouldn't do now.

But I think when we talk about aging, we're talking about how negative it can be and all these things that can happen physically.

But a lot of the older adults I talk to and I've interviewed for my book are saying actually 60 or 70 was probably the best time in my life.

Nice.

Yeah, and that makes me feel I mean it's a select group who I'm talking to, but it's not like it's the best time in terms of my aches and pains or, you know sure, I wish I was 40 for some reasons, but those times can be very challenging and stressful.

So from a psychological standpoint, It's interesting to look at these kind of nonlinear dynamics.

It's not a linear decline.

It's not that happiness just gets better with age.

There can be this midlife dip.

I'm not a clinical psychologist.

Some people call this midlife.

Well, of course, there's a conflict at midlife.

Well, there's really conflicts at every stage.

Some of Erickson's work on.

So every decade there's a conflict and it's how you resolve.

It, allows you to kind of move on to the next stage of life.

And I think you know, sometimes we don't think about midlife as much as well.

This is what happens when you're young and this is what happens when you're old.

And it's probably how you deal with what happens in the middle, which allows you to age well.

So when I talk about aging most of the older adults I talk to, I'm not educating them on how to age well.

They're there and they're doing it.

It's often middle-aged people who are like, well, I have older parents.

Most people, when they're 20 or 30, they're not thinking what's my life gonna be like when I'm 70 or 80?

Yeah, even now that's hard for me to conceptualize.

Sure, yeah.

I just try and do the best I can to take care of myself every day so that maybe I'll hit.

Hopefully I'll hit 60 70, feeling great.

I actually feel better physically now than I did in my 40s and 30s, but i was working so much then.

You know a lot of people.

I'm not boasting, it's actually probably should be more of a point of shame.

I don't know that i recommend it for most people.

I mean, i worked non-stop and i don't know that i'd wish that on anyone.

I think a little more balance would have been healthy.

Now i work a lot, but i definitely take time to, to meditate, to pray, spend time with people in my life.

Like I really try and savor things a bit more.

The problem with academic science, as you know, is there's always a deadline or revision or something.

There's always something.

So once you realize, there's always something.

I think in a lot of professions people are very driven early.

They have to prove themselves.

You're trying to survive, make money, make a name for yourself, and that puts a lot of stress on you.

And as you get further along you might realize maybe it's not worth it, or maybe I need to backtrack, or maybe there's more important things.

It really does come down to balance.

And John Wooden, the UCLA basketball coach, I got to interview him.

He was in his 90s.

And he said, it really comes down to two things.

And I thought, oh, this is great.

Coach Wooden is going to tell me the two things.

And he thought of himself as a teacher, not just a coach.

So he did that.

You know, a very effective thing.

He had me guess those two things, the two most important words in the english language is how he said it, and here i am a student again and i'm thinking gosh, he's a coach, so i don't know.

Success teamwork, what is it?

And he said you know, the most important thing is love, be around the people you love, do the things you love.

He lost his wife well before he passed away.

He wouldn't sleep on her side of the bed.

He would write her a letter every month.

He had report cards from his grandchildren on the wall right next to letters from presidents.

So he was really surrounded by a great community, former players calling.

His former players were by his bedside when he passed away.

And then the second most important word is something I think a lot of people struggle with.

We're talking about his balance and it's partly physical balance.

He did have a fall. like we were talking about.

And it's interesting because he had a life alert that he could press around his neck.

And this is why I think technology is great.

Maybe there's ways we can prevent falls.

But he fell in the middle of the night and he broke his collarbone and his wrist.

And he had this life alert button, but he didn't press it.

Because of pride?

Exactly.

He didn't want to bother anyone.

That's a Y chromosome.

Yeah.

But you give people all this technology and then you realize there's a psychological part to it as well.

He waited until the morning, his caretaker arrived, rushed him to the hospital.

Thankfully he survived, but that's pride, guilt, shame, didn't want to bother someone.

So that's the physical balance.

And then I think the mental balance, as he said, like you were saying, is he was a very driven person, very successful with his coaching, but it meant a lot of time traveling a lot of time away from his family, not focusing on the things that he found incredibly important.

And as he got older, he felt like he could achieve more balance, spend more time doing the things he wanted, be around the people he wanted.

I think that's a struggle for a lot of people.

We get really into something and we forget about it.

We're having a conversation.

It's hard to stand up.

You get focused on things.

But as you get older maybe you're a little bit better at finding that balance and finding that peace.

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Yeah, the notion of having to prove to oneself or even to others that one can do something, that's a hallmark of being younger.

I suppose some people escape that.

But I think most people struggle with that social comparison thing.

And it can be very useful as a lever.

It can generate a lot of hard work, great work through competition, um even competitions in one's own head.

But you know, eventually you realize like you're the only one in this fight.

You know and uh, i don't know i i, this podcast has a very um broad audience in terms of age ranges.

It's interesting the younger crowd, let's just say 35 and younger, tend to have questions about how to pick direction, what direction to go.

The older crowd generally is asking about things related to keeping their memory, their health.

And these days asking a lot of questions about whether they should revise their notions of what age, appropriate physical ability or mental ability should be.

I think that's a big shift out there right now, because 20 years ago it was assumed people would hit 70 or 80 and start to slow down.

Now people are like, well, if I feel great at 50, maybe I could feel great at 60.

If I could feel great at 60, maybe I could feel great at 90.

The possibility feels real.

And I'm not talking about living longer.

I actually don't consider myself a longevity person.

Sometimes I'll get lumped there.

It's like I've never actually focused on that.

Yes, I think it's great to live as long as you can at a vibrant life.

But-

What do you think about the messaging that we could go longer or could make more of our time?

Do you think it's net positive or do you think that's creating a pressure for people to not live into the reality that hey, they're like 70 and maybe – slowing down and maybe telling those stories two or three times?

Maybe they're supposed to shed wisdom and not supposed to be jogging around the block.

Yeah, it's so interesting to see these age-related differences, but also to see how that's shifting.

And we're certainly living longer, for the most part, if you look at our history.

And there's a variety of reasons for that.

But you want to make sure those years that we're adding are healthy ones, because the longer you live, the greater the chance of developing dementia.

I think from a psychological perspective it's interesting, because if you ask someone, how old do you feel?

That's very different than your biological age.

Let's say you didn't have access to your birth certificate.

Your parents actually said, sorry, we can't actually remember how old you are.

How would you figure that out?

We're actually not your parents.

Yeah, surprise.

I'm sure they're my parents.

Yeah, that's an interesting question.

And this is known as subjective age.

And there's a physical feeling, there's also this mental feeling.

So how do we assign that?

And actually after the age of 40, most people feel about 20% younger than their actual age.

And so I don't know if it's deceptive, but if you're 70, we just turned 50 and I'm like wow, that sounds old.

Because I feel about 40, 40 seemed more recent, but yeah, I can see some things.

But as you get further along, it's like, gosh, I'm in this age group.

Am I supposed to do this now or behave like that?

My parents are different than I was.

And so I think it's interesting.

It's also interesting that that subjective age is a better predictor of how long you'll live than your biological age.

Fascinating.

Yeah.

So, you know, you go to the doctor and you're told like, so give me how old are you?

Well that all of a sudden it's like well, I guess I should behave like a 75 year old or an 80 year old.

The doctor is not gonna say, how old do you feel?

And in some ways, people do feel their age.

I certainly feel my age when I have an injury or when I'm like, I'm tired.

Or why am I getting up at five in the morning now when I can't get back to sleep?

But there's some times where it's like, no, I feel young.

And I'm not saying I'm running marathons, but I know, when I coach my son's baseball team, I feel young.

I mean, I feel old in some ways, but I'm like, oh, I remember how much fun this can be.

And it's nice to be around kids.

And, you know, when I'm on a college campus, I'm like, this is nice to be around younger people.

And I'm learning a lot from younger groups and I'm seeing how they're confused in different ways.

Yeah.

I think there's a lot of age-related stereotypes that are sometimes accurate, but we don't need to necessarily subscribe to them at all times.

And in some ways you can have also and this is partly the motivation for my book mentors for aging.

And I think when I ask my class, who are some people that you really look up to, who've aged well or successful aging?

A lot of it comes down to like a grandparent or a parent or an aunt or an uncle.

And that's really interesting because you share, like some genetic overlap with them, but the stories, the reasons are really impressive.

And not that they're running marathons, but like oh, we have this recipe, or every holiday they do this, or they're still walking and doing this.

And sometimes it's a public figure.

But having these role models is really important.

And oftentimes it is apparent.

So probably my favorite podcast that I watched recently, yours was with your father, right?

Because you can see this dynamic and you can see, like gosh, this is an older person and this is the younger version, but they're different in so many ways.

And kind of, you know, some people can retire and some people clearly can't.

And so I don't think there's any secret to successful aging like you have to do this or that, but there's certainly some people and I've seen in my family who can't retire.

They have a career shift.

I saw my dad go from being a theoretical physics professor to being an editor of a literary arts journal.

And it's like such a shift.

But I think it revived him and allowed him to kind of like you've gone from being a professor to kind of more public outreach.

And that keeps people going.

And that can happen again at 60 or 70.

And so I hope there's certainly age discrimination.

You're not going to hire a 70-year-old to run your IT department.

But I think there are things that older adults can and want to do that will kind of lead to this sense of purpose, which is really important as you get older.

Do you map out your future?

Do you have like a three or a five-year plan?

I find that academics tend to operate on the three to five-year plan because grants generally are somewhere between three and five years.

That's pretty much all we can reasonably predict about where we're going to go with our ideas.

We update as we discover things and um and so on, but do you ever recall having a plan currently?

Do you plan like, where you're going?

This is just really yeah, i knew it.

But as a yeah, as a template for people to ask themselves the same question, i don't think i was ever sat down and said listen, you want to focus on day to day, but you got to have a plan and the plan should be put the horizon at three years or five years.

It just I sort of defaulted to that because of academics.

Yeah.

And it's very hard for me to think past five years.

I think people often will say in business to the plan you have.

And I think plans are important because they can motivate you.

And you know, when I first got this job at UCLA, I was thrilled to leave the cold weather of Toronto and live on the West Coast.

But I also said, you know, If it doesn't work out, let's see in three to five years.

I don't think I had this specific plan of I have to do this, but I also had a plan like hey, I'd love to write a book that is accessible and can kind of capture the lessons I've learned.

I didn't put a timeline on that, but when I first met my wife I told her I was really interested in doing this and she was very encouraging.

And 10 years later, that book finally comes out.

So I think when you articulate plans, there's definitely research saying that you can realize them, And when other people are thinking that's something you can or should do, I think it's beneficial.

But yeah, in the academic world there can be pressures to get grants and publish.

But I think that can also hamper some creative outputs.

I don't have a plan of like in three to five years I need to do this and this, and it sure would be nice to get another grant, but maybe if you don't have a grant, you can have a little more freedom and flexibility.

I'm really interested in how you know it's a concern now with AI how people are subjected to a lot of information and a lot of this can be used for scams and fraud.

And so I'm interested in how older adults can be kind of you know, aware of these scams that can take you know, can be devastating, and how we can make kind of the world better for older adults and when i say older, it's like you know, we're not that far away from you know why.

Why can that self-driving car be so appealing to a younger person but not an older person?

And if we can make, you know, technology more accessible to older people, it can certainly help.

And I think there's simple ways to do it.

Some, it starts with attitudes that, you know, how do I engage with this?

Will it work?

Will I break it?

Whereas younger people will, just they get a new iPhone and they don't.

There's no instruction manual.

They're just playing around with it.

So I'm interested in that.

I don't think that has like a publication aspect.

I'm going to get out of it.

And maybe there's a grant, maybe there's consulting, but I think it's having a broader kind of approach might be beneficial.

So these are more abstract goals and hopefully some of them can be realized, but it's not as tied to.

Like you know, when I was younger yeah, I wanted to get tenure at UCLA, right.

I was happy to have children and have a house where we could be centrally located without a long commute.

So I think those were the practical goals.

But I think as I get older, I feel fortunate that I've achieved some of these goals that make my life more comfortable.

But there's still things out there that I'm like, are we really ever going to know how memory works?

Maybe, maybe not, but maybe we can make things easier to use.

Or, now that we know memory sort of works this way, maybe we can make this technology geared to help us in some meaningful way.

Well, a comment and then a question.

My comment is, if anyone needs self-driving cars, it's older folks.

Right.

I mean, if you look at the accident data, look at the visual data.

I mean, there are people who are...

I don't want to say legally blind, but their peripheral vision is really lousy and they're driving, and most of driving is peripheral vision.

So you know, for everybody's sake, but of course very young people with new licenses, they're all you know.

It's not a you know linear distribution of accidents by age.

It's a U-shaped function.

But the other is nested in my question about whether you set goals is the question of whether setting goals helps us stay alive.

You know i i covered before some of the data on these super agers, more of the neurosciences anterior mid cingulate cortex, which seems to maintain or increase volume as super agers right age and they hold on to their memory etc.

And what we understand of that structure.

It's involved in pushing into friction, pushing oneself to do something that's hard or not desirable for oneself.

It seems to come up on more and more episodes of the podcast.

And I think I teach neuroanatomy to medical students.

When I started teaching neuroanatomy, we didn't know what the anterior mid-singulate cortex does, but my colleague Joe Parvizzi probed it with electrodes in humans and every single one they got stimulated.

They'd say, feels like a big storm is coming.

There's a challenge.

I want to lean into it.

They would kind of come up in their chair.

They, you know, they're not, I mean, they're in a halo.

They're getting the surgery.

So, but they would get physically and mentally activated.

Like I'm going to, I'm going to, I can take this.

I can do this.

And it's very clear that that's the brain structure that grows.

And so.

I feel like going after a goal, having goals, something to look forward to.

I wonder whether or not this is the basic, evolutionarily you know, hardwired circuitry, for if you're striving, it means you're trying to get someplace.

If you're trying to get someplace, there's a concept of a future.

If there's a concept of a future, well then you plan to be there or you want to leave something behind, but that it might activate literally this kind of will to live, And I don't want to sound mystical here, but kind of at a cellular level.

Because when people don't have plans, then there's really no.

I mean, you could just enjoy the smell of the roses, but that becomes a bit of a closed loop.

I don't know many people, maybe monks or something who are really tapped into something, that just that they just want to live in the bliss of the moment constantly.

A lot of life is about what comes next and trying to make that thing happen.

I mean, it's so interesting to look at cellular and then anterior cingulate and then super agers and then sense of purpose.

If you look at all those different levels and then What we look at in a Western culture too is very different than some cultures that age much better than Western cultures.

Maybe there's lessons to be learned there, because a lot of it is like you're saying, goal setting and motivation.

But the goal is not just to live forever, it's to make the most of these moments, have this sense of purpose.

And a lot of older adults do want to have this connection to younger people or connection to a hobby or an interest.

And it's not as professionally driven as it is in kind of midlife.

And I think the super ages is really interesting, because I've read about that and I've seen this and these are not people who said I want to live forever and I'm going to.

That's not their goal.

And a lot of them are not people who are like, I went to the gym four times a week.

They built into their, it's the same with Blue Zones.

It's built into their daily life of they eat well, because that's the food that they enjoy and that they can find.

They exercise not from going to the gym, but from, having to walk uphill or on uneven surfaces.

So I think I don't wanna say it's an American focus on goals and motivation and biohacking and longevity, but if you can build this into your daily life, it's so much easier right.

And then it just becomes, you know, I saw my father bike to work every day.

In fact, he wouldn't even call it work because he didn't wanna make it think like it was work.

And I don't know why I bike to work too in Los Angeles, which is probably not the best thing to do, but I've been able to set up my life that I bike two miles uphill to work and then two miles downhill.

It's probably, sometimes it's the best time of my day.

Sometimes it's when the best ideas come to me.

I also have to be vigilant, you know?

Yeah, I just think the only thing, you know, I do wear a helmet.

I only met you today, but I feel like something's coming out where I'm thinking, just, I just... having lived in LA a while, it's just doors, cars opening.

That's just the simple- You know, other cities too, right?

In Toronto, it's even worse, you know?

But I think with the super agers, it's also resilience.

And these are people.

When you look at their lives, sometimes you know they've had, you know, easier lives and that can be beneficial in some ways.

You know wealth and health, but often there's a lot of resilience.

You know, you've bounced back.

You saw this during COVID.

We at first thought COVID is gonna be terrible for older people, right?

Because they're gonna be socially isolated.

They don't know how to use technology.

And there's certainly reasons why older adults could be more vulnerable.

But what we found, at least at the psychological level we did some of this research older adults were much more resilient than younger adults.

I think we've learned.

Younger adults went through a lot of difficult times being socially isolated, being through probably their first major crisis, kind of situation where they can't behave the way they're normally doing it.

And the older adults were the ones who were like eh, I've lived through X, Y and Z wars, financial meltdowns, changes in family structure, deaths of close people.

And older adults seem to show a lot more resilience here.

And when I've interviewed people for this book, it's sometimes the most interesting.

People live through the Holocaust who are like I appreciate every day.

I think the best advice I got from one person was like when you're going up or downstairs, think I'm going up or down stairs.

They're very present, right?

They know if I'm mind wandering or doing something else, something can happen.

So maybe I shouldn't be mind wandering on my bike ride.

I should be like that's my, But you're considerably younger and clearly you're mentally aware to be able to use that time.

I have a friend, he was actually a guest on this podcast.

His name is Ryan Suave.

He's a trauma therapist.

He also treats addiction in a number of people.

He said, occasionally he'll get a patient who was suicidal or tried to attempt suicide, or who attempted suicide, excuse me because of a breakup in high school or in their 20s.

You know he said at first when he would get these people coming through his clinic he would think, like listen, you want to sit this person down and just say look like you got your whole life ahead of you.

You're going to have other opportunities.

There are other fish in the sea.

But he quickly came to realize that to these, what you know by all arguments are still kind of like kids, young adults.

To them, it feels like a loss of the entire future because they haven't had that future yet.

And when he started approaching it through that lens he was able to be more effective clinically.

To just really acknowledge like yeah, it really feels like the whole world is coming to an end.

They just don't have the perspective of having it, had some relationship challenges and found someone else.

And so it really feels like their whole life is over because their whole life is up to that point.

It's interesting to think, you know, and I remember thinking like, oh yeah, that makes total sense when you say it.

I mean obviously not the suicidality you know.

One hopes that wouldn't be where people would go with a breakup.

But as we get older yeah, we can integrate over.

You know oh, I've been had my ups, I've had my downs.

You know I'm still here.

I'm hard to kill, you know, as I sometimes tell myself, I go.

I've had some ups and downs and I'm taking, you know, some heat.

I just go, okay, well, I know one thing is I'm hard to kill.

Yeah.

And that's resilience.

Exactly.

And then you go, OK, cool.

What did I learn?

I'm just going to apply the same principles here again.

And then 10 years later, you go, I'm still here.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just too bad.

I mean, in some ways you have to go through those struggles to realize that oh, I'm still here, or in retrospect it was bad.

But now I'm onto something else.

Or in some cases, it's the best parts of life.

This I don't understand, and maybe this is more memory disruption than it is accurate experience.

Whatever that is,

But I feel like our emotional selves integrate in the way that we compare, like things really really sucked at a moment, which makes the moments afterwards that just don't suck a little bit so much better.

Yeah.

There's some adaptation or habituation or whatever.

And then you look back and you're like things are so good because things don't completely suck, which is a very different perspective than I need things to be.

So you know I need a bunch of stuff.

It's maybe it's just the absence of suck and you can really savor that.

No, I think there's a memory component to that as well.

And some people have studied this, looking at what's called the positivity bias that as you get older, you're more likely to focus on positive things, positive information, positive events.

But when you're younger, you're more likely to focus on negative things.

And that might be for survival.

It might not benefit your mental health.

But, as you say, these are big events that happen when you're 20, 25 and you're like this is horrible.

How am I ever gonna get through this?

Well, people do.

Look at all these 70 80-year-olds who've gone through breakups and horrible things that have happened.

Financial losses.

And you hear about people in the tech and business world.

They're like went from so high to so low and then back again.

And you just go, oh, most people would just be devastated.

And they're like, well, this is the rhythm.

Yeah.

And it's tough.

But I think as we get older we might focus more on the positive things to enhance our mood.

And maybe that's what leads to this kind of uptick in happiness as we get older.

It's not just rose colored glasses, but it's also saying I'm gonna focus on the things that are positive, or be around the people that make me feel good.

I've also heard a lot of older adults will say as I get older, I just don't have time for that anymore.

I don't want to focus on these negative things or talking to people who bring me down.

But when we're young we're all around different people and might complain about things, and maybe that's beneficial.

So you can see the bad things and rise above that.

But again, it's interesting to see these non-linear changes.

And I think there is definitely a memory.

And getting back to that, why do older adults tell the same stories several times?

Well, sometimes it's a negative story like I had to walk this far to school but it usually has a positive spin to it.

And so maybe we do this is because we have this positivity bias or we want to relay this positive information, kind of to wash out some of the negative things that probably happened.

Some of the happier older adults I spent time with in South Florida lived through some of the worst times in Eastern Europe, let's say.

And I'm like, how is this possible?

And it's you know.

Their brain changes in ways that might make them look like they're not as sharp as they used to be.

But they're telling jokes.

They're less inhibited.

I learned some of the dirtiest jokes from these individuals.

And I think that these people are really interesting to talk to.

And you know I love teaching at UCLA and being around students, but it's very different than talking to older adults.

And every once in a while, we have the senior scholars program that allows older adults to take these undergraduate classes.

And to me, that's probably the most enriching thing.

I teach a class on the psychology of aging and here in the classroom, there's four older adults.

I mean, this is a case study.

And this year, several of them were therapists.

I'm like this is you know they had a lot of information to share, but they're even told in the part of it is that they're not supposed to ask questions.

And I thought that's so strange.

And in my class I want them.

You know, I assume if they're in astronomy or art history they could be asking tons of questions, but I think this is such a great way to have this kind of intergenerational component.

And a lot of the students.

You know, I tell the students I have two tests, but I don't have a final exam.

And I tell them the final exam is the test of life.

I know it sounds a little, you know, kind of corny or hokey, but I'm like everything you've learned about aging you're hopefully going to use in the future.

Your parents might not be relevant when you're 20 and you're not thinking about it, but it was the older adults in the class that they often said were I like to think I'm a good professor, but they learned the most from these older adults.

And so I think having more of this intergenerational interaction is really important.

And in different cultures, that's built into the community.

In the Western culture, not so much.

I mean, some people grow up with their grandparents in the same household.

I didn't, but the times I did have with my grandparents were very informative.

And you share genetic overlap with these individuals, yet they also have wisdom and knowledge.

Some of it is dated, I think that can be very beneficial being around older adults.

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There's a really cool course at Stanford Medical School that I sat in on years ago about neural regeneration, which was a topic of study for my lab for a while.

And they had a young person that year it was a guy in his 20s who had a spinal cord injury came in, talked about his spinal cord injury, talked about what life was like for him before and after, how he's thinking about things.

And then on a separate lecture, there was a older individual who also had a spinal cord injury and it was striking to see the divergence in attitude.

You could look at this as tragic or redeeming, depending on how you think about these things.

But the older gentleman was saying that, you know, he had this injury.

He knows he's never going to walk again, but he's like you know, he's lived a lot of life and he's done a lot of things, and you know, and here he is.

And so he's going to focus on what he can do, focus on what he can do.

And he actually noted, this was some years ago, that he wasn't that much worse off compared to his peers unless he let himself become a pessimist.

So if he was an optimist then he actually was still doing better than a lot of his walking able peers.

Whereas the younger gentleman was talking about how, you know, there's just so many things in the, in the horizon that he hasn't done, that he really wanted to do, that he doesn't have access to, which is really heartbreaking to hear.

It was a very honest discussion.

And this was, of course, mainly focused on the biology and limitations of biology to try and overcome regeneration.

But they brought these people in because they really wanted to highlight the differences in terms of patient need and I thought, you know, this comes to mind now in this conversation, I think if you accrue enough experiences, good and bad, we kind of bucket list life.

We're like, okay, you know, I did this and I did that.

And maybe I would have liked more of that, but I can't do that anymore.

And, you know, I definitely didn't want more of that.

You know, we can kind of bucket list life.

And I never had a bucket list. growing up, it would have been very useful.

Like sit down and at any age, I guess, and just write out what are the things you absolutely don't want to leave this life not having done and try and make those happen.

Because God forbid, if you have one of these injuries or you, stroke out and die or have a heart attack, not to sound morbid, but then, you know, you've done the things.

And I think that's the real tragedy of when people are limited early on.

And I don't know what became of the younger guy.

Hopefully he figured it out because I know lot of people because of that work that um are blind or paralyzed um, who live very enriched lives with families and all that.

But it's curious, it's like uh, i didn't think we'd get to like the meaning of life here purpose, purpose in life but we should probably plan and and carry out on those plans and not just live by default.

Wait until we're older and then try and figure out how we can go longer with a little less pain and a few more memories.

I mean it's an interesting case study when you compare those two individuals and then say you know, what do you want to get out of life?

And it's kind of a big picture question.

But a lot of older adults will say they have pretty good life satisfaction.

You know, happiness, life satisfaction could be similar and related.

And again, it's the midlife people who seem to be lacking.

And I don't know if we're at that stage, but I feel like maybe I'm on the uptick.

I don't know if I have a bucket list, but I certainly would like to do more things like hey, I really enjoyed that trip to Sedona Arizona.

I'd like to do that again.

Sedona's amazing.

I just went for the first time.

Yeah.

My girlfriend and I went out there and we were like, this place is awesome.

It's so beautiful.

The air feels so good.

The light is amazing.

And I definitely go back.

My son and I climbed up rocks that we- Oh, you're a climber.

Well, I'm not a climber.

I climbed then, but we went there five years ago when he was too young to do that.

He wanted to go back.

And I was like, these are the sorts of moments I really enjoy.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be Sedona.

You can go up the coast here in California and get it.

So I feel like those are the moments that I'm like I'm not sure whether it has to be in Costa Rica or Matador Beach.

But I feel like those are the moments that I really enjoy.

You know, before it was like, yeah, I want to fly an airplane.

That would be really cool.

But I have friends who fly airplanes and I'm like, you know, I have a family now.

I don't need to fly an airplane anymore.

I think we look at these, maybe I shouldn't be riding my bike either in LA, but...

I think we start to look at what really captures you and matters.

And some of it are even some simple hobbies, like we were talking about drawing earlier.

Something I wouldn't have time for when I was 20 or 30.

I could be spending that time programming computer, writing something, and now those are very important moments and times that I enjoy.

Having a sense of purpose, I think sharing information.

A lot of older adults will say it's really nice to be a mentor.

They don't want to go back and go through the grunt work of their job, but they'd love to share experiences or be an educator.

And you see big benefits for older adults who volunteer.

Again, it's correlational, but older adults who are engaged in some sort of generativity, like influencing the next generation, feel very connected and useful.

And that's something some older adults will say is like I'm retired but I still feel like I'm useful.

I think you know certainly, how can we, you know, that'll be us, god willing, one day, that we'll be older and be like what are we supposed to do now?

Maybe that's what grandkids are about.

Perhaps yeah, because then you can be really useful to.

Yeah, almost everyone in a family has some unique skill set they can contribute.

Yeah, like my stepdad is.

He's a really impressive carpenter and with tools and he built my niece's dollhouses when she was younger.

Like if there's something to fix like he's the man you know or something to build his tool.

Shed is insane.

It's incredible.

I think grandchildren, I mean, it's family.

People will often say, when they're, you know, close to their end of life, what were the most important things?

And they'll say, you know, family rituals.

So there's Thanksgiving or Passover when everyone got together and got to doing something.

And so those are kind of some very important memories.

And I think you realize you can also influence the next generation in a meaningful way.

I think some research again it's correlational shows that people who spend five hours a week with their grandchildren have improved memory.

So that seems.

We don't know if it's causal, but it's interesting that those who spend more than 20 hours a week don't show this benefit.

In fact, might show the opposite.

They're exhausted.

They're exhausted or they're in an unfortunate situation where they're forced into childcare.

There's a single parent or someone's incarcerated.

So it's interesting to get that insight that yes, being around younger people or doing some meaningful interaction, whether it's mentoring, whether it's grandchildren can be, and I think it's bidirectional.

You know, the children learn from it.

I hadn't spent a lot of time with my grandparents, but I have very vivid memories of one grandfather showing me how you can clean a penny in Coca-Cola.

That's like science.

And it was like, that's crazy.

Should I be drinking this?

There's all sorts of questions I had.

And so I think that sort of interaction can be very useful for the grandparent and the grandchild.

I think about what really enriches one's life in addition to deliberately trying to build memories.

The decision to not fly planes but maybe to get out to Sedona or Matador or Big Sur Or something like that.

Yosemite.

I'm putting in a strong vote for Yosemite.

You want to have an amazing experience in life?

It's very low cost.

If you can get yourself to Yosemite, drive up to the high country and hike Clouds Rest.

It's the best thing you'll ever do.

That's on my bucket list.

But get there early because you'll be coming down in the dark if you don't.

And bring water because there's no water along the way.

Amazing place.

I'm putting a big plug for national parks because I love Yosemite.

The discussion you had with Wooden, You said the two takeaways that he offered were love and balance.

And then ironically, he got harmed and eventually died from a fall because his pride got in the way.

Was there anything else in that conversation that didn't get into your book or that it's just maybe was more subtle that you think about.

If not, no big deal.

I mean, first of all, it wasn't the fall that led to his death.

He had a fall.

He didn't press his leg.

He was resilient.

He bounced back.

And eventually, I think nearly 99 is when he passed away.

So several years after the fall.

That was such an inspiring interview.

And I remember when I first got my job at UCLA.

Growing up in Canada, I'll admit the reason I knew UCLA was the basketball team, the football team.

I remember watching the Rose Bowl.

Okay.

Many people throughout the world think that UCLA is a basketball team.

I'm not sure that they know that there's a school there.

But I also thought, gosh, place sure looks nice in the winter.

And so I was thankful to be connected to Coach Wooden, who actually used to lecture in a leadership class once a year.

And he was very interested in serving as a coach, but also as a teacher.

So I think this sort of generativity.

He was so kind and thoughtful and then you come into his.

You know it's a two bedroom condo in Encino.

This is not how a famous basketball coach would live now.

And he had no problem with that.

He wasn't interested in wealth or anything like that.

I think partly he didn't have and led a very fulfilling life in the absence of that.

Whereas now you see in professional sports and all the wealth can lead to all sorts of problems.

But so I was impressed with that and just all the you know the pride he had and sharing the love and balance quote I thought was helpful.

And I tried to distill it in the book to capture not just what Wooden said but others, that what I call the ABCs of successful aging.

It's kind of an easier way to, And A is an attitude having a positive attitude about what can happen as you get older.

And actually more recent research shows that those who have a positive attitude live longer.

They're less likely to develop dementia.

And so it's probably maybe less stress, better behavior.

But more recent research shows that if you have a more negative attitude overall of what can happen as you get older, but a more positive attitude about what you can do your own personal kind of agency over the process, that leads to kind of a longer life.

That's that friction again.

It's the friction, it's the balance.

There's something about that.

You don't want things too easy, you don't want them too hard, like landscape too easy or too hard.

Again and again.

I've just been tracking during our conversation it's the delta.

It's the difference between where you're at versus where you'd like to be.

Not letting that turn you into a cynic or a curmudgeon, but feeling that friction.

We can't just kick our feet up all the time.

Right.

I think if you notice look, bad things can happen as you get older.

But I'm going to have to rise above it by doing these things.

That's the adapt. component.

So, you know, attitudes, but also adapting because a lot of, you're not going to have an easy time.

And a lot of the older adults I've talked to said, you know, had to adapt to changes, whether it's physical, whether it's mental.

So I think, you know, They may call A adapt and also attitude is very psychological.

And then B is balance, which is what we talked about already.

You know, I don't think it's the super ages are not extremists.

They're not like running marathons and eating, you know, only blueberries.

It's usually something like, yeah, I just do this or that and it works out.

That suggests some sort of genetic component.

I think there is a genetic component, but I also think it's not the extreme.

It's not like you need four cups of coffee today to prevent dementia.

It's probably having some level of balance and some genetic component.

And then C is often overlooked from a psychological standpoint is connection.

And that's also what Wooden was emphasizing, be around the people you love, do the things you love.

Social connection.

I think we learned during COVID.

All of a sudden, people are like oh my gosh, I can't be around people or I can see them on Zoom, but it's different.

All of a sudden it hits home that social connection is important.

Now it's different for different people, how they want to engage in it.

But I think that's often lost sadly because of technology.

You can have tons of Facebook friends, but how many friends could you call up once a week to ask how their day is or their week is gone is probably limited.

And as we get older, our social circle tends to shrink.

People move away, people pass away.

But some research shows the quality of those fewer relationships can actually be improved.

And I think that's again an interesting kind of nonlinear change, that when we're young we know lots of people and we're interacting a lot in a social way.

But as we get older, it's those more meaningful kind of relationships that are important.

Yeah.

The connection piece comes up again and again.

I think it, you know, as we talk about all this, like it must be kind of daunting for people in their 20s and 30s now, because there's like all this stuff that you can do to make yourself better that frankly, what we weren't aware of back when.

It's like, oh, I like running, so I ran.

I wanted to get stronger, so I lifted weights.

I wanted to phd in neuroscience, so i did it like i just sort of followed my interest.

There wasn't this idea that you could like fundamentally transform how long you were going to live or how great you were going to feel at a given age.

But so i kind of wonder if it's both good and bad.

Um, i don't want to undercut the idea that we can strive for those things, but I also don't want to promote the idea that we should all be thinking about what it's going to be like when we're 70.

I mean, the unit of life being the day, I think, is true in the circadian sense.

Our biology resets every 24 hours, having recently pulled the first all-nighter in a while to finish some book edits.

Last-minute little nip-tuck stuff with.

With my producer and friend Rob, we legitimately pushed through.

It was like, it's midnight.

Okay, we'll go to two.

And then at two it's like I get, then we're like it looks like we're going through and been a while.

It was fun to just be able, you know, as much as I talk about the benefits of sleep.

Yeah.

I was like, that was cool.

Like, haven't done that in a while.

Still got it.

It hurt the next day.

We get a nap.

Next day you sleep a little longer.

Like, you know, you're not gonna, did I shorten my life?

I don't know.

I feel like I got, I'll remember that.

You'll remember it and you're contributing to something that you think is important.

This is a book.

This is something that you want to make sure it's accurate and thoughtful.

I think when you work hard at something, it does make you feel good.

You're probably getting a lot of neurotransmitter reward mechanism kicking in.

Yeah, it was so much fun.

This is why I always say the occasional late night out or all nighter, as long as it's for the right reasons.

I wish that for people occasional.

As you can tell, I'm really intrigued by this idea that there's something about pushing ourselves And, as Wooden pointed out, there's also something about coming off the gas, being able to lean back and forth into those things.

Like life is an oscillation.

It's a circadian oscillation.

And then it's like this push, push, push, and then being able to come off the gas.

It's an art.

It's not a science.

There's science there, but it's not trivial.

And it actually raises this question for me.

You're an interesting guy.

You're young, in my opinion, but I'm 50 also.

So you study memory.

But you seem to have a genuine interest in care for the older generation.

Like, how are we going to take care of them in the AI age?

How are we going to take care of them?

Is that something that's always been intrinsic to you?

Like, I don't want this to sound glib, you know, but what's the obsession with... older folks.

It's cool.

It's very nurturing, but it's not typical.

You know, most people aren't thinking about the older generation.

It's natural for us as a species to think about the younger generation, right?

We just have a what I think is a healthy reflex to like how can we make things better for kids that are coming up?

Young people make it better.

But you're unique in this way.

You study memory in the age cohort that has arguably some of the worst memory.

I think it's maybe growing up around a lot of older adults.

Again, I grew up in Canada partly, but also in Florida.

And I was around a lot of very interesting older people, kind of in their prime of their retirement life, who'd spend a lot of time with me, and I have aging parents.

I've seen that.

So I don't know if it's also like a respect for older adults, but it's also.

I mean, maybe it's I don't wanna say egocentric, but in a good way.

If we're lucky, we're going to be there one day.

You're making the discoveries that you will yourself benefit from.

I hope so.

And I think it's an investment.

You know we invest a lot in our children and that's, you know, incredibly important and to be nurturing parents and, you know, have government that can help, you know, with education.

But I think we look the other way.

Once people are well, you're on social security or you're retired.

And I think culturally there's other cultures that treat older adults with more respect.

And so I don't know what the reason is.

And you know, I teach a class on aging at UCLA.

It's a popular class, but it's not as popular as the class on relationships or you know things that I think younger people would be interested in.

But oftentimes, after students take it, they say I never thought I'd be interested in aging, but now that I think about it it's really interesting to see how my parents age.

And I'm like well, give yourself 30 or 40 years and I hope you'll remember something from this class.

And I think maybe that's my early exposure made me think this is really kind of an interesting thing that happens.

And I remember with my grandparents.

Forget, get my name confused with my brother's name, but they could remember the price of bananas, right.

So how are they remembering this very detailed information, versus forgetting things that are presumably important?

I think it comes down to focus.

It comes down to the era you grew up in.

I don't see it as very different than older adults, are not different than younger adults in that they're like that's the old and this is the new, but it's this progressive change.

And in some ways I can see in my own children, I think, what are they gonna be like when they're 80?

What habits are gonna stay with them and what things might change?

And I think in some ways there's a lot of things that you could see it kind of as a seed that just gets more pronounced as we get older, but also that we're better at regulating emotions and doing things that when we're young we're not so good at.

And we often think of like, how can we make older people better by making them look younger?

And in fact I sometimes think gosh, how could we instill some of that, not just the wisdom, but make younger people feel like older people in some ways, kind of from a psychological standpoint?

You know better at regulating emotions, less likely to take risks.

You know, it's the whole like, you know, if I knew then what I know now.

It's interesting that Wooden said the two most important things.

Words in life are love and balance.

I have a friend who's a psychologist and he said you know, the two most dangerous words in the English language are if and only, and especially when they're next to each other.

And it's interesting to watch my mind.

I'm just going to like, if only this, if only that, it's like we can default there and it's.

Yeah.

It's dreadfully useless and maybe even destructive.

So I encourage myself to watch out for the if only thinking.

It's maybe even dead.

We've run a lot of simulations in our brain, like what if I did this?

Or what if I didn't do that?

Or what if I met this person?

Or what if I took this job?

And I think at some point when you're young maybe that's helpful, like trying to figure out what would work out best.

But as you're older, it's like, well, these things have happened and I've learned from them.

And yeah, I think it's really interesting to think of that as what if?

What if this happened?

And you can get yourself into a lot of trouble thinking, what if that happens?

And the world can be an incredibly dreary place when you think of it that way.

But it's also amazing to see.

And maybe that's why I'm interested in older adults.

It's like look these people 70 80, 90 I'm not just looking at the 90-year-olds who are doing incredible things.

I'm looking at the 90-year-olds who are perhaps at peace with themselves, feel comfortable talking about things that they want to talk about.

I enjoyed your father's podcast partly because I'm like here's a guy who's not afraid of saying some things.

I appreciate that you said that.

Maybe it's not always what people would expect.

No.

He has an irreverence to him.

I mean, he's very polite and believes in etiquette, but he doesn't let people constrain him.

Yeah.

And I just found that a lot of these podcasts have a lot of science in them, but he had a lot of things that made me think gosh, that's interesting.

Could we test that?

Is that really how...

Curiosity.

One of our more recent studies has shown that as we get older, memory does decline in many ways.

But older adults can remember prices, let's say.

That makes sense.

So the bananas being $2.99.

But as soon as we say bananas are $18.49, that just doesn't make sense.

And older adults quickly forget that.

And that's something we were talking about, that the benefit of forgetting things that just don't fit your schemas, that just don't make sense.

With younger adults.

A lot of undergraduates will be like.

I highlighted 80 of the textbook.

Why did I get a C on the exam?

It's this inability to kind of selectively focus on what's important.

And I've seen that even in myself.

Like you know, when I was younger, I'd be taking notes on everything.

But by your fourth year you realize, you know what.

Let me sit back and look for the overarching themes that connect things.

And that's almost how I did well in psychology is I'm like, okay, some of these findings make sense.

And so I can remember it that way, but some of them are counterintuitive.

And a lot of this.

Like people aren't always rational, this Kahneman and Tversky, all these biases people have.

Well, that's fascinating.

So I just remember it that way, the things that made sense and the things that didn't make sense.

And that's kind of how you can organize things.

I think that can be kind of a useful principle as you get older is knowing what to overlook and kind of knowing what to focus on.

And so older adults, even though they'll say my memory is not as sharp as it used to be.

As long as you can remember the things that are kind of critical, that's what's important.

And so in the study on curiosity, we found that older adults tend to remember the things that they're most curious about.

But they're also really good at forgetting the things that they just didn't care about in the first place.

Sounds great.

Yeah.

Honestly, it sounds great.

Right.

Yeah.

I can't wait.

Right.

Because I want to learn more about certain things, remember certain people and certain things.

But there's a lot of stuff that rolls through my phone or through my email.

Yeah.

Luckily, not through my daily experience, but that I don't want to think about that stuff.

And it captures your attention.

And all of a sudden you're like, where did the last 10 minutes go?

I've been reading about this.

Now I'm remembering this useless thing.

So I think, if you can prune these things and as you get older, maybe you realize I've even realized that gosh, I forget this.

I need to focus more.

It's not just conscious focus, but it's like, I'm interested in this.

Let's put more resources and time and energy into that.

It takes me longer to learn a piano piece than my daughter.

You play piano.

I try, but I see my daughter picking these things up so quickly and I'm like I know I'm not going to be like that, but I can be more selective about what I try and learn what's in my wheelhouse and what's just beyond it.

Developmental plasticity is amazing, right?

It's amazing.

I don't know how old she is, but I know she's younger than you.

Yeah, she's young two daughters and a son and I see them all excelling, like my older daughter is like wow, her cognitive skills are probably beyond mine in terms of speed of processing.

She might even be a better driver than I am.

You know, she's good at planning things.

My daughter playing piano.

It's like, gosh, if I could have those skills now, how I would practice more.

My son will hurt himself in baseball.

And I'm like, oh, he's out for three weeks.

Three days later, he's pitching again.

And so those are things where it's like, yes, aging sucks in some ways.

I'll be upfront about it.

But I think you appreciate those things as you get 40, 50, 60.

It's like, yeah, it's hard to recover from injuries.

It takes you maybe longer to learn something.

But the things you really do care about.

You can use all this kind of knowledge and wisdom and metacognition to focus on kind of what matters the most.

So it's almost as if, as we are able to do less with less pain, or just do less, attitude starts to become more and more important.

That's what i'm hearing, but i don't want to lead the witness.

Yeah, i think that's definitely the perspective and you know this is built on some developmental theories of social, you know, social learning, but also selective optimization with compensation.

You know that As you get older, maybe you're not going to be doing all these things and scuba diving and hiking, but you'll be like.

You know that one hike I really enjoy.

I want to be able to do it once a week.

And so you're still doing the things you like, but you're not doing kind of the wide range of them.

And another related theory is, you know, socio-emotional selectivity theory.

Laura Karstensen at Stanford says Another perspective, saying that as we get older, kind of our mindset shifts, that we don't have as much time to live.

So we want to focus on the things that are important.

Whereas when you're young, it's very abstract to say save for retirement or what are you going to do when you're 60?

It's like, what am I going to do next week, right?

But her work has shown that when you give people different time perspectives, they make different choices.

So if you unfortunately tell someone who's younger that they only have five to 10 years left to live, they're going to make choices very much like older adults do.

So I don't know if it's conscious that we're thinking these things, but as you get older maybe you realize I want to focus on the things that matter the most.

Maybe I won't worry so much about the things that I used to worry about all the time.

And that can be kind of a healthy way to approach life.

This might sound a little mystical, but I've always wondered if, barring accident or injury, whether people have some unconscious knowledge about how long they're going to live.

I grew up near Steve Jobs.

He used to come into the skateboard shop that I worked to get roller blade wheels and things like that.

And he was around.

He didn't have security.

When I was a postdoc, you'd still see him walking through downtown Palo Alto in the evenings.

My dad and I would walk about once a week.

We'd take a walk together and see Steve.

He passed away, I think, in 2015 or something like that.

Does that sound about right?

Yeah.

In any case, he was thinning out then.

He was going through his various treatments.

But, you know, if you listen to his biography with Walter Isaacson, written by Walter Isaacson.

I mean, it was very clear that he had a mission.

He was on it.

That life was.

You had to maximize on your life, that you couldn't compromise.

And okay, that led to some kind of high friction personality traits in him too.

But I don't think anyone would argue that And that he didn't do something super impressive in what he built that transformed the world.

I mean, most everyone listening to this has an Apple product in their vicinity, as I say this.

Right.

And it almost seemed like he had some deeper knowledge.

He wasn't going to live that long.

And when I think about like the 27 Club of, you know, amazing artists dying or.

27 and just like it's almost like there's a life energy that's either packed into a shorter period of time, a medium amount of time or a longer time.

Now, of course accidents, injuries and things can happen to, But I wonder like, if we have a sense based on our parents, our grandparents, our life, notion of like I'm going to be around a while.

Because it really seemed to benefit him to have this attitude about life.

Like you get one life, you have to live it on your terms.

You don't want to compromise your soul and your heart and you just go for it.

And then there are these people that sort of live life as if it's going to go on forever.

And for them, it seems to go on a long time and it seems to be kind of a lower, slower arc.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, right?

It's impossible to compare.

Yeah.

Except you know to compare that objectively, to say OK, one live shorter, pack more, and one live longer.

Maybe it didn't have as intense a life.

Do you think there there could be something in our biology that we have some awareness based on our genetic fingerprint?

That you know I've probably got about?

I think about my dad and mom.

They're doing well in their 80s, but I probably have about 90 100 years if I take care of myself.

So I'm gonna live that way.

Yeah, it's an interesting conjecture.

And in some ways we probably do know like our lifespan is about this.

But you're right, accidents can happen, things can happen.

And I've seen from my own family, I can take the average age of my mother and father.

Sadly, my mother passed away when she was young.

My father's still alive.

So I think I have this perspective of life can be short.

And when people are like I'm 50 but I haven't done this, this and this part of me is like I'm 50 and I've made it this far.

I'm pretty happy with things.

But of course, your perspective could be different.

I don't know, in the case of these high performing individuals, maybe they lead every day like it could be their last and they want to stay up all night and transform the world.

I think a lot of the super ages are probably not doing that.

They're probably like getting good rest, having some routines and habits.

They're more chill.

They're more chill, but maybe it's not intentional.

It's like, I just don't wanna ruin tomorrow by not sleeping a lot tonight.

So a lot of people say, what's the secret to successful aging?

And I think the secret is not to look for one thing, probably.

We've talked a lot about exercise, sleep, And a lot of people say it's moderation.

It doesn't mean don't drink coffee or drink seven cups a day.

It's like, if you want a cup of coffee, have one.

But as you can realize, maybe you don't want it every day.

Get, you know, eight hours of sleep.

Well, not every night.

Clearly, pulling an all-nighter might have been a benefit for you and even a good investment.

I don't want to do it again for a very long time.

Then you've probably learned from that.

You're like, I don't want to be editing books late at night once a week, right?

But once every few years, especially if it might pay off.

That's part of the.

You know the deal I've made with myself.

And the friendship I'm realizing as you say this.

The fact that someone else was there is what kept me out of like you know, swearing like this sucks, or whatever.

It's fun.

It reminds me of being in graduate school.

We used to run physiology experiments all night or imaging experiments all night.

And you get pretty loopy somewhere between 3 and 5 a.m.

And you just acknowledge like, oh, here we go again, like mild psychosis.

Because you are a little bit psychotic and in a sleep deprived state.

And you make it through and you're like, hey, we did that.

That was fun.

Maybe that's why people say college is the best time, because you're going through a lot of things like that.

Staying up late, working hard, struggling through this, trying to figure out that.

But there's a social component you're doing with other people.

Even when I think like the Steve Jobs thing, or even when I talk to older adults, they're like I like this part of my work life when it was a challenge and we had to travel here and do that.

It was exciting.

They wouldn't say it was relaxing and it's not something they wanna revisit.

And it's interesting if you ask people, what age would you want to go back to?

Not a lot of people will say 20 or 15.

It's usually kind of closer to midlife, which is interesting, because maybe everything's kind of firing on all cylinders then.

Your cognition is still pretty good, your family's still around, you have your job, you're reinforced by a lot of things, but it's not going back to this age when you're 20, 25.

Any experiments that your laboratory is doing, now that you can even just tell us about the design of the experiment, if not the results?

Yeah.

Well, we've done some work on curiosity, and I think that's something that, from a lifespan perspective, is interesting.

We've been measuring different types of curiosity.

One is known as state curiosity and one is known as trait curiosity.

And trait curiosity is just in general, are you a curious person?

Do you kind of get into things and have trouble if you don't learn the answer, which I think a lot of people can have?

But as you get older that tends to decline with age, which I thought was kind of perplexing because a lot of curious people

But we've found that levels of state curiosity when I give you some interesting bit of information but I don't give you the answer, if it's something you care about that actually increases with age, your level of curiosity and learning.

We think this is interesting because it probably guides our memory.

As we get older, we're going to remember the things we care about.

And, if you're curious, especially so, and there's probably some neurochemical pathway that is still engaged, even though we know all sorts of things, kind of decline with age.

So that's one.

And we've been testing it with trivia questions, things we have experimental control over.

But I think it has implications for lifelong learning that if you're really interested in hiking or birdwatching or skateboarding, that might still percolate when you're 70 or 80, which I think is really interesting.

And the other thing we're looking at is kind of the flip side of the curiosity, which could be a double-edged sword, is that I mentioned scams and fraud right.

It's almost like opening Pandora's box.

As soon as someone calls you with an offer that's too good to be true, or limited time or something, it's that thing you always wanted and now it's at this price or worse.

We kidnapped your granddaughter and you need to pay this amount of money and she doesn't want you to call mom and dad and all of a sudden you hear her voice on the line and she's saying please help me.

All of a sudden you're wiring the money.

People are running those scams.

People are running, and that's an old one.

That was when younger people are posting things on Facebook and all of a sudden, their voice is captured and now their voice is played to a grandparent who's like oh my gosh, I need to help this person, my loved one.

And it's preying on you know socio-emotional selectivity theory that we focus on family and feelings and emotions, and older adults get caught by this.

And AI has just made this even worse.

Because you're going to get phone.

You could get a phone call from Steve Jobs that sounds just like Steve Jobs right now, even though you know he's not around.

And so we're looking at how, as we get older, are we able to distinguish between kind of this fake information and what's real.

And it's not just older adults who are prone to this.

It's younger people too, who are in a rush, might not be paying attention to something more likely to get identity theft.

Whereas older adults, they have more money they have more to lose.

And so I think that's on the more practical side of being able to identify how you know scams and fraud target people.

But there's a psychological component you know emotions again that might engage older adults more so, whereas younger people are more interested in oh, my loan is going to be forgiven if I give some information great.

So it's kind of using psychological mechanisms in a very nefarious way.

So I'm interested in how we can try and kind of prevent that.

And I feel like there's a lot of amateur psychologists out there who are engaged in this kind of form of fraud.

So that's another area of interest in trying to design experiments but also look at more practical implications.

It's cool.

You have a lot of care for the older generation.

You're a protector.

That's really great.

We've had a lot of discussions on this podcast about youth and everybody, every age.

But I don't recall a conversation with anyone, much less a scientist, who's interested in protecting older folks.

Yeah.

I know you thought about and maybe you can tell us what this wisdom thing is about.

Right.

I mean, it's like I feel like I'm not trying to be facetious here when I say you know, there seems to be a kind of transformation of of advice from just advice to wisdom after somebody dies.

Right.

It's like, when they're still around, it sounds like advice and they die and it's like And I'm not trying to make light of it, but it does seem like we look at knowledge from people that have passed away as different.

Like I haven't read much about wooden.

I like basketball, but I like track enough that i read um, you know uh, the book about bowerman, the coach up at oregon, like the men of oregon is a really.

He was another one of these amazing coaches that was much more of a mentor and teacher.

He made all his runners get um jobs outside of school, while in school and running for for this incredible track team yeah, and he would place them in, uh you, not always manual labor jobs, but he made sure that they understood that the town that they were running in was much more than a university.

He was like, took the time to do this stuff, right?

And he was a hard-nosed guy.

But I often wonder as I read these things, like, oh, when he was alive, was everyone revering him?

Because as soon as you die, you're like a thing.

You're right.

It puts you in a different place.

The one advantage of dying, your words move from advice to wisdom.

What is that?

I think Wooden got a lot of play for his wisdom.

He retired at an earlier age than most people do.

He didn't need to.

I don't think he made as much money as coaches do now.

But I think you're right.

It's interesting how knowledge goes into wisdom.

I think even when I was thinking of my own interest in wisdom and aging, I had an older math teacher who also was my basketball coach.

I think he was formative when I think of why.

And he was older and he said listen, you're not gonna be starting this year if you don't put the time in to your calculus class, that you're putting the time into basketball.

And he was very clear about that.

And I was like, he said, you have tremendous potential in calculus.

He didn't say anything about basketball, but he's kind of saying like, you need to work harder.

The motivation is there.

I've had older rabbis who've given me advice.

You know, growing up that I, you know, not even being religious then still resonates with me.

And so I think, even at the practical level, the wisdom.

Sometimes it's nice to hear it from the horse's mouth.

You can read this cute little quote or something and that's reasonable.

And then I think wisdom also has a very practical kind of application.

So Sully Sullenberger, the pilot, the plane I don't know if you've seen the movie, but if you remember.

The history is that a plane takes off from New York City and both engines go out, and he's over New York City and he has to engage in an emergency landing.

So who do you want?

Do you want a younger pilot who has faster reaction times, better memory?

Or do you want an older pilot who has more experience flying, but has never landed a plane on water?

And we know how the story ends, thankfully.

But most people would probably, as I asked my class this.

This is like the dilemma where is the wisdom, where is the knowledge?

If you're the faster pilot, maybe you turn around and land at an airport, that makes more sense.

But Sully eventually decided that he had to make this water landing.

And he said the reason he knew he could pull this off is he used to fly gliders.

And he said the principles are the same but it's gonna be a very different physics and weight management.

But he said he felt like he'd made a number of investments over the years of kind of boosting his knowledge so that he could make one enormous withdrawal, basically landing this plane on the Hudson River, which is an amazing feat.

That's wild.

Yeah.

And so I think that's a dramatic Hollywood and there's a movie about it as well.

But I think it's a nice illustration of you can accumulate all this knowledge, not just so you apply what you've learned.

You're having to transform that knowledge and say now I'm going to apply it in this one emergency situation.

So maybe that's the difference between knowledge, which is like I know so much, and then wisdom of like how to carry it out or when it's appropriate.

It does help when the coaches have played, right?

Like Steve Kerr.

But some of the best coaches are the ones who are the worst.

You know, Tommy Lasorda, you know all these people are like they struggled and they've seen it and now they're gonna go into coaching.

And maybe that's the same with older adults.

Again these two older adults who took my class, who were therapists.

It's like if you see a therapist, would you wanna see a 20 year old, or would you wanna see a 50 or 60 year old?

It just seems like there's gonna be a difference in what they bring to the table.

Nowadays I think a lot of people are going to say chat GPT, which I've found great use of AI in the self-testing thing.

Not looking for knowledge, but having chat GPT generate a self-test.

Test me on my knowledge of something.

Awesome because, as we were talking about before we went on mic, self-testing is one of the best ways to learn information, realize?

Ah, I got that wrong.

I didn't know that.

And that's the delta.

That's the difference between where you're at and where you want to be, as opposed to just reciting things or highlighting things or writing them down, although I do that also.

But I know a lot of people are going to the Internet for answers.

And, on the one hand, we could say well, those answers are the synthesis of a lot of wise people, potentially

But you could say, like I would like, the integrated advice of Mahatma Gandhi.

You know Jane Goodall and you know whoever and for this particular situation, you know and make it wise.

I don't know what it would say.

I want you to do that prompt.

It's a great question.

I've tried.

You know I'm not of the era that my children are in terms of using AI, but I'd love to be like answer this like an 80 year old would.

How would you present it differently if you were older versus younger?

Because a lot of it is just so much more information than I'm like, wow, that's great.

Can you summarize?

I don't use it often, but sometimes I'm like, can you summarize this?

Sometimes it misses things and sometimes it's good.

But yeah, it's really fascinating how... how that sort of synthesis can be so transforming.

And you know, even my son's like, why do I have to learn this when I can just ask AI now?

And it used to be when I was a kid.

Why do I have to learn this when I can just look it up in an encyclopedia, right?

The information is always going to be there, but it's like how you're going to use it in an informed way.

I always say could you imagine if the next president said I don't know our foreign policy with Mexico, but I could look it up?

I was like well, you want to know a little bit about the foreign policy, like friend or foe or something.

You have to have some basic level.

And where would you look it up?

Do you have aides that you trust?

Do you have sources that you trust?

I don't think you need to know all of these details, but you need to know kind of some general knowledge.

And usually that comes from learning all the details.

Like you've learned all these details in neuroscience 20 years ago, that you've probably forgotten, but it informs how you interpret neuroscience findings today.

Admittedly, like such a nerd, I have this textbook.

There's a really great new textbook.

I didn't plan to plug this, but my colleague Lee Chin Lo wrote a principles of neurobiology textbook that's not as beefy as the principles of neuroscience, one that is out of Columbia.

But I'm a West Coast guy, so I like Lee Chin's book.

And recently I just started reading it.

I started flipping through it, reading it front to back.

And of course I recognize every line, right?

Because this is the area I've spent all these years in.

But I had not thought about a lot of it.

I'm thinking about it a little differently and maybe I'm lying to myself, but...

I tell myself like there's some enrichment in this.

I don't know what it is.

I'm not just brushing out.

There's something that's going to come of this.

Yeah.

I know it.

But maybe I'm just defaulting to the thing that's easiest.

And maybe I should be, you know looking, maybe I should be learning Latin or something like that instead.

It's almost like nostalgia.

You're going back to, you remember learning this.

It's also.

Yeah, it's beautiful.

It's more fun because now you're like, I haven't.

Thought about this in a while, but now I can connect it to the other things I've been thinking about.

So it's like going back to a language you're familiar with or a city you're familiar with.

The big question is are we deluding ourselves into thinking that the brain somehow gets better as we age?

Like, is this a story we were telling ourselves so that we can, you know, hold on to more?

Obviously, if we do the right things which you described in your book and today, you know, get a bit more, maybe a lot more, meaning and experience.

Or keeping with the ericsson, you know stages of development where there's a you know core conflict at every stage of life.

You know development doesn't stop when we become young adults.

Neuroplasticity continues throughout the lifespan.

Maybe and i certainly prefer this answer maybe our brains get better in certain ways that afford us access to life experience, internal feelings of wellbeing and peace and things that are outsized in comparison to what we can experience when we're young.

I like that.

And maybe we do get better in certain ways as we age.

I like that perspective too, of course, but maybe it's hard to say what's better or what's worse.

It's like, this is a qualitative difference.

And if your expectation of old age is quite low and you realize wait, it doesn't have to be like that, or I'm not gonna run as fast as I used to, or maybe I won't be scuba diving, but hey, it can actually be very meaningful.

It might encourage you to engage in behaviors that'll allow you to get there and be there in a mobile way, a way that you'll enjoy it.

Yeah, so maybe instead of striving to be a super-ager, we should strive to be super-content.

Something like that.

I don't know.

I think there's a quote people say, like, you know, aging is better than the alternative.

Is youth lost on the young, though?

We're going to fire back and forth cliches here.

I definitely feel like there's times where I'm like, wow.

Maybe I shouldn't call the book Better With Age because let's revise that.

Because of your son's shoulder.

Well, you know just all sorts of things you can do when you're younger and you don't even appreciate it.

You don't even think twice like, wow, it hurt yesterday, but it doesn't hurt today.

It's like, oh, that's months for me.

Yeah, but the social stuff is so stressful.

It can be, but I'm not sure at that time it's relative to what.

And you know, I think you know there's a lot of challenges with younger people today and you know, going through COVID and so on, but I've also seen kind of a more focus on mental health.

Like I've seen, you know, with my daughters, they're like, I'm gonna go for a walk.

I was 17, I wasn't just going for a walk.

I was like walking to get somewhere or running to get something.

But now there's this awareness of like, maybe I'll take care of myself.

Maybe I'll listen to that podcast while I'm walking.

It's like, wow, that seems like very wise.

And so I'm impressed and I hope that those sorts of habits, as you develop them earlier, can stay with you and maybe buffer in this midlife where it's, like I, always have to be busy.

I can't stop and think about, And I think maybe that's why my interest, or even obsession with aging is to be like wow, there's this group of people that seem to be doing pretty well.

And I really enjoy being around them.

How can I be like them?

And oh, it so happens they're older adults.

But if you went to a country and you're like this group of people are really cool and interesting and kind of quirky, maybe I'll live here.

And to me, that might be what older age can be.

And sure, they're sometimes frail and have to rely on other people, but that's not always such a bad thing if you have the right structure in place.

You're doing important work and I'm grateful that you would come here today and share your knowledge, your wisdom, with us.

Your book, I didn't know you were going to give me a book today, Better With Age.

I'm going to read it, The Psychology of Successful Aging.

I'm going to encourage you to write more books, because clearly you've gathered more knowledge since then.

It's a rare find that somebody is doing really interesting science and their work is immediately applicable, and that it taps into a segment of our population that exists everywhere in the world but that frankly, doesn't get quite as much attention research attention as other areas.

I know there's a big interest in longevity.

There's a big interest in aging and preserving what we have.

But in addition to studying all those things, you clearly study other aspects of what's unique and great about people you know 50, dare I say, and above and what we can all learn because if we're lucky enough to live into those decades

We're all going to be benefiting from this knowledge.

So thanks for coming here today.

Let's do it again as more comes off the mill from your lab.

Thank you.

Thanks for getting the word out.

It's really wonderful to hear kind of how to digest this and gives me new ideas of what we can pursue as we think about this.

Great.

It's been a pleasure.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Alan Costell.

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[The Science of Memory: How We Learn, Forget, and Age Well]-[How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel]

📋 Summary

Introduction: The Reconstructive Nature of Memory

The Value of "Desirable Difficulties"

Moving Beyond Labels to Deeper Processing

Memory and Aging: The Optimistic Reality

The Role of Resilience and Purpose

Conclusion: The Art of Living Well

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Science of Memory: How We Learn, Forget, and Age Well]-[How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel]

📋 Summary

Introduction: The Reconstructive Nature of Memory

The Value of "Desirable Difficulties"

Moving Beyond Labels to Deeper Processing

Memory and Aging: The Optimistic Reality

The Role of Resilience and Purpose

Conclusion: The Art of Living Well

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

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ListenLeap Brings You Into Real Context Learning