The Element (27 page)

Dr. Henry Lodge, coauthor of
Younger Next Year
, makes the point sharply. “It turns out,” he says, “that 70% of American aging is not real aging. It’s just decay. It’s rot from the stuff that we do. All the lifestyle diseases . . . the diabetes, the obesity, the heart disease, much of the Alzheimer’s, lots of the cancers, and almost all of the osteoporosis, those are all decay. Nature doesn’t have that in store for any of us. We go out and buy it off the rack.”

The people at
realage.com
have pulled together a set of metrics designed to calculate your “real age” as opposed to your chronological age. It takes into consideration a wide range of factors regarding lifestyle, genetics, and medical history. What’s fascinating about this is that their work suggests that it’s actually possible to make yourself younger by making better choices.

One way to improve your real age is to take better care of yourself physically, through exercise and nutrition. I know this, because I live in California, where everyone seems to have stock in Lycra, and dairy products have the same health status as cigarettes. I try my best to live healthily, too. I aim to do sit-ups every day and to avoid dessert. But it’s not only about working out and eating in.

One of the fundamental precepts of the Element is that we need to reconnect with ourselves and to see ourselves holistically. One of the greatest obstacles to being in our Element is the belief that our minds somehow exist independently of our bodies, like tenants in an apartment, or that our bodies are really just a form of transport for our heads. The evidence of research, and of common sense, is not only that our physical health affects our intellectual and emotional vitality, but that our attitudes can affect our physical well-being. But equally important is the work you do to keep your mind young. Laughter has a huge impact on aging. So does intellectual curiosity. Meditation can also provide significant benefits to the physical body.

The answer to the question, Is it too late for me to find the Element? is simple: No, of course not. Even in the cases where the physical degradations that come with age make certain achievements impossible, the Element is still within reach. I’ll never get that speed-skating gold, but if the sport meant that much to me (it doesn’t), I could find a way to gain access to that tribe, perhaps using the skills I already have and those I could acquire to make a meaningful contribution to that world.

What this really comes down to is our capacity to continue to develop our creativity and intelligence as we enter new stages in our lives. Obviously, it happens in dramatic ways when we’re very young. The infant brain is tremendously active and enormously plastic. It is a ferment of potential. It has somewhere near one hundred billion neurons, and it can make a nearly infinite variety of possible connections, building what scientists call “neural pathways” out of what we encounter in the world. Our brains are preprogrammed to some degree by our genetics, but our experiences deeply affect how we evolve as individuals and how our brains develop.

Consider, for instance, how we learn language. Learning to speak is one of the most miraculous achievements in a child’s life. It happens for most of us within our first few years. No one teaches language to us—certainly not our parents. They couldn’t possibly do that because spoken language is too complex, too subtle, and too full of variations for anyone to teach it formally to a child. Of course, parents and others guide and correct young children as they learn to speak and they may encourage and applaud them. But babies don’t learn to speak by instruction. They learn by imitation and inference. We are all born with a deep, instinctive capacity for language, which is activated almost as soon as we draw breath.

Babies instinctively recognize meanings and intentions in the sounds and tones they hear from other humans around them. Babies born into households with dogs as pets will respond to the noises and growls that dogs make. However, they don’t confuse these sounds with human language. Most children don’t opt for barking as a way of communicating—with the possible exception of the terrible twos and a couple of years in late adolescence.

There doesn’t seem to be any obvious limit to our capacity for languages. Children born into multilingual households are likely to learn each of these languages. They don’t reach a point of saturation and say, “Please keep my grandmother out of here. I can’t handle another dialect.” Young children tend to learn all the languages to which they are exposed and to slip effortlessly between them. I recall meeting three school-age brothers a few years ago. Their mother was French, their father was American, and they lived in Costa Rica. They were fluent in French, English, and Spanish as well as an amalgam they created from the three that they used exclusively when speaking with each other.

On the other hand, if you are born into a monolingual household, the odds are that you won’t seek out other languages to learn, at least until you need to choose one in middle school. Learning a new language at that point is a much more difficult thing to do because you’ve already paved a large number of neural pathways with regard to language (in other words, you’ve made a huge number of yes/no decisions about what to call a particular item, how to form sentences, and even how to shape your mouth when speaking). Trying to speak a foreign language for the first time in your thirties is even tougher.

The neuroscientist Susan Greenfield illustrates the amazing plasticity of the young brain in a cautionary tale of a six-year-old boy in Italy, who was blind in one eye. The cause of his blindness was a mystery. As far as the ophthalmologists could tell, his eye was perfectly normal. They eventually discovered that when he was a baby, he had been treated for a minor infection. The treatment included having the eye bandaged for two weeks. This would have made little difference to the eye of an adult. But in a young baby, the development of the eye-to-brain neural circuits is a delicate and critical process. Because the neurons serving the bandaged eye were not being used during this crucial period of development, they were treated by the brain as though they weren’t there at all. “Sadly,” said Greenfield, “the bandaging of the eye was misinterpreted by the brain as a clear indication that the boy would not be using the eye for the rest of his life.” The result was that he was permanently blinded in that eye.

Young brains are in a constant process of evolution and change, and extremely reactive to their environment. During early stages of development, our brains go through a process that cognitive scientists call “neural pruning.” Essentially, this involves trimming away neural pathways that we determine at an unconscious level to have little long-term value to us. This pruning is of course different for every individual, but it is a tremendously necessary part of development. It serves the same function in our brains as pruning does to a tree—it gets rid of the unnecessary branches to allow for continued growth and increased overall strength. It shuts down pathways that we’ll never use again in order to make room for the expansion of pathways that we will use regularly. As a result, the enormous natural capacities with which we are all born become shaped and molded, expanded or limited, through a constant process of interaction between internal biological processes and our actual experiences in the world.

The best news in all of this is that the physical development of the brain is not a straightforward, one-way linear process. Our brains don’t stop developing when we get our first set of car keys (though the insurance companies would like to suggest as much). Harvard neurobiologist Gerald Fischbach has performed extensive research in brain cell counting and has determined that we retain the overwhelming majority of our brain cells throughout our lives. The average brain contains more neurons than it could possibly use in a lifetime, even given our increased life expectancies.

In addition, research indicates that, as long as we keep using our brains in an active way, we continue to build neural pathways as we get older. This gives us not only the ongoing potential for creative thought, but also an additional incentive for continuing to stretch ourselves. There is strong evidence to suggest that the creative functions of our brain stay strong deep into our lives: we can recover and renew many of our latent aptitudes by deliberately exercising them. Just as physical exercise can revitalize our muscles, mental exercise can revitalize our creative capabilities. There’s extensive research going on now regarding neurogenesis, the creation of new brain cells in adult humans. It’s becoming clear that, contrary to what we believed for more than a century, the brain continues to generate new cells, and certain mental techniques (such as meditation) can even accelerate this.

We can admire the remarkable work done by people like Georgia O’Keeffe, Albert Einstein, Paul Newman, and I. M. Pei late in their lives, but we should not consider this work remarkable
because
they did it late in life. These people were simply high achievers who kept their brains sharp so they could continue to be high achievers. That they accomplished what they did at advanced ages should not surprise us nearly as much as it often does.

I mentioned earlier that it’s unlikely that a centenarian will take the lead in
Swan Lake
. It’s not impossible, just unlikely. The reason, of course, is that, at least until medical science takes several leaps forward, some of our capacities
do
deteriorate with age, especially physical athleticism. There’s not much point in denying this, though some of us try desperately to do so, to the point of embarrassing ourselves in public.

However, this isn’t true of all of our capacities. Like a good wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano, some of them actually improve over time. There seem to be seasons of possibility in all of our lives, and they vary according to what we’re doing. It’s widely accepted that our abilities in mathematics, for example, tend to grow and peak in our twenties and thirties. I don’t mean the ability to work out the food bill or to calculate the odds of your team winning the Super Bowl. I’m speaking about the kind of higher math done by world-class mathematicians, the Terence Taos of the world. Most math geniuses have done their most original work by the time the rest of us have signed up for our first mortgages—which is something we probably wouldn’t do if we were better at math. The same is true of learning the technical skills of playing a musical instrument.

But in other ways and in other areas, maturity can be a genuine advantage, especially, for example, in the arts. Many writers, poets, painters, and composers have produced their greatest work as their insights and sensitivities deepened with age. One can say the same about disciplines as diverse as law, cooking, teaching, and landscape design. In fact, in any discipline where experience plays a significant role, age is an asset rather than a liability.

It follows, then, that “too late” arrives at various times, depending on where your search for the Element takes you. If it’s toward internationally competitive gymnastics, it might be too late by the time you’re fifteen. If it’s toward developing a new style of fusion cuisine, “too late” might never come. For most of us, we’re not even close to “too late.”

One of the results of seeing our lives as linear and unidirectional is that it leads to a culture (true of most Western cultures, in fact) of segregating people by age. We send the very young to nursery schools and kindergartens as a group. We educate teenagers in batches. We move the elderly into retirement homes. There are some good reasons for all of this. After all, as Gail Sheehy noted decades ago, there are predictable passages in our lives, and it makes some sense to create environments where people can experience those passages in an optimal way.

However, there are also good reasons to challenge the routines of what really amounts to age discrimination. An inspiring example is a unique educational program in the Jenks school district of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The state of Oklahoma has a nationally acclaimed early-years reading program, providing reading classes for three- to five-year-olds throughout the state. The Jenks district offers a unique version of the program. This came about when the owner of another institution in Jenks—one across the street from one of the elementary schools—approached the superintendent of schools. He’d heard about the reading program and wondered if his institution could offer some help. The superintendent responded positively to the idea and, after clearing some bureaucratic hurdles, welcomed the other institution’s help.

The other institution is the Grace Living Center, a retirement home.

Over the next few months, the district established a preschool and kindergarten classroom in the very heart of Grace Living Center. Surrounded by clear glass walls (with a gap at the top to allow the sounds of the children to filter out), the classroom sits in the foyer of the main building. The children and their teachers go to school there every day as though it were any other classroom. Because it’s in the foyer, the residents walk past it at least three times a day to get to their meals.

As soon as the class opened, many of the residents stopped to look through the glass walls at what was going on. The teachers told them that the children were learning to read. One by one, several residents asked if they could help. The teachers were glad to have the assistance, and they quickly set up a program called Book Buddies. The program pairs a member of the retirement home with one of the children. The adults listen to the children read, and they read to them.

The program has had some remarkable results. One is that the majority of the children at the Grace Living Center are outperforming other children in the district on the state’s standardized reading tests. More than 70 percent are leaving the program at age five reading at third-grade level or higher. But the children are learning much more than how to read. As they sit with their book buddies, the kids have rich conversations with the adults about a wide variety of subjects, and especially about the elders’ memories of their childhoods growing up in Oklahoma. The children ask things about how big iPods were when the adults were growing up, and the adults explain that their lives really weren’t like the lives that kids have now. This leads to stories about how they lived and played seventy, eighty, or even ninety years ago. The children are getting a wonderfully textured social history of their home-towns from people who have seen the town evolve over the decades. Parents are so pleased with this extracurricular benefit that a lottery is now required because the demand for the sixty available desks is so strong.