John Medina: “Brain Rules for Aging Well” @ Talks at Google (Transcript)

So I have to speak three dialects of brain science.

I have to be at home in the behavioral world, and in the cellular world, and my home base, which is on the helix, the world of biochemistry and neurobiology.

So on the basis of some of that experience, I’m going to divide this introduction to the book, “Brain Rules for Aging Well,” into three parts.

Part one, I’ll talk to you a little bit about the origin of the book. And then I can’t do the whole thing. So what I thought I would do is that I would talk about the first chapter, which is the “Importance of Friendships,” part three in the last chapter, of “The Power of Reminiscing.”

And if there’s any time left at all, I’ll give a few comments about the middle of the chapter. We’ll have a hard stop, certainly, at 2 o’clock. And I’ll try and finish a little before then so that there is some time for Q&A; on the microphones. OK.

So this book is all about human behavior, as most of my books are, which means it’s a discussion about nature and nurture, and for all ages, as I hope to show. But I’d like to give you an example of how nature and nurture work together in this subject, and so illustrate the beginnings of the book.

What I have here is a list of lyrics. In their day, they were the number one song of their time. I’m going to tell you the lyrics. I’m not going to sing them. You’d see why I went into the molecular sciences if I tried to sing. I did marry a musician. If you recognize the melody, though, I want you to slip up your hand, if you don’t mind.

Everybody else, I would like you to look at the person who just slipped up their hand and assess their relative age. OK? Ready?

Here’s the first one:

“If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed, now. It’s just a sprinkling for the May Queen. Yes, there are two paths you can go by. But in the long run –”

What is that song?

AUDIENCE: “Stairway to Heaven”?

JOHN MEDINA: “Stairway to Heaven,” 1971 album, 1975 was the single release. OK.

Lyric number two:

“A traffic jam when you’re already late, a no smoking sign on you cigarette break. It’s like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife. It’s like meeting the man of your dreams and then meeting his beautiful wife.”

Alanis Morissette off the album, “Jagged Little Pill,” 1991, very good.

Lyric number three:

“We break up. You call me. I love you. Ooh, we called it off again last night. But ooh, this time I’m telling you, I’m telling you, we are never, ever, ever —

AUDIENCE: Getting back together.

JOHN MEDINA: “–getting back together.” Yes, indeed, Taylor Swift, 2012, for the 3/4 of you that did not raise your hand. This is an example of nature and nurture.

And here’s how that works and what we’re going to be talking about today, which is the general sciences. Nature, you may have heard some of these songs in your tweens. Certainly, they were well-established and they sold lots of copy in their time. What year you were a teen depended upon when you were born. I can’t think of anything more nature than that.

But there’s a nurture component too. You didn’t all hear the same songs as a teenager. Some of you were 18 in 1971 when “Stairway to Heaven” was hitting the airwaves. Some of you were 18 in 1991 when Alanis Morissette was entering the airwaves. And some of you were 18 in 2012 when Taylor Swift was busy making her mark. Even when in a single country like this, the cultures are different.

So we have nature when you we’re born, and nurture, the cultural impact on your life. And all of a sudden, we have the book. There it is in a nutshell, nature and nurture and aging.

Now, there were two origins about this book. My task was to write a book about aging brains and still keep nature and nurture in sight. There was both a relational origin and a quantitative origin.

The relational, I think, could be described by talking about Tom Hanks. That informed the audience I wish to try to address as I was writing the book. But the quantitative origins were percentages, the relative contributions of nature and nurture to the whole process of aging, which is actually something you can measure.

So we’re going to do Tom Hanks first. And then we’ll do the quantitative. And then we’ll do the first chapter, the last chapter, and then we’ll be done. OK.

So Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks and I are the same age. And so as you might expect, I would be writing for Tom Hanks in his — I’m 61 years old. Tom Hanks is late 50s, early 60s incarnation, for sure. And part of the audience is for this because we’re asking questions about what you can do, given that your brain, the cognitive components of brain processing is changing and so on. So that would make some sense.

What might not be too obvious, though, was the fact that I also wrote this book for 24-year-olds and 30-year-olds. And there’s a very specific reason why I bracketed that age group. It’s a younger audience. This is because of the evolutionary considerations of our past history, which was inspired by a quote from Thomas Hobbes.

How many of you remember Thomas Hobbes great cave man quote, cave person quote?

“The natural state of man was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

For hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of years, depending upon where you put Homo erectus these days, most of us died before our 30th birthday. We didn’t have a 40th birthday. We didn’t have a 50th birthday. There was no such thing as grandparents. For millions of years, hundreds of thousands of years, it was all over by 30.

And Darwin agrees with Thomas Hobbes, shows up lots of different ways. Most of the metabolic processes that make you functional have peaked by age 30. And then there’s a slow decline after that. Many of us think of selective pressure on our bodies peaking at 30. That’s enough to give you kids, and then have your kids give kids. And then you’ll become irrelevant. And if you’re going to live longer than that, it’s going to be genetic free fall.

So if we agree with Tom Hobbes that the hard world of Darwin is there, average age selective pressure on fitness is only going to occur for us to about here. “Before the Upper Paleolithic, early humans really did die young, most before their 30th birthday.” That’s an anthropologist out of Michigan.

But you have many metabolic processes which start their failures here. The brain peaks even earlier. I’m going to show that in just a second. But that simply means there’s genetic free fall.

Past the age of 24 to 30, if I’m going to write a book about human aging, I’m not going to be addressing 65-year-olds and expect to capture all of our evolutionary history. I need to write to 30-year-olds, because after 30, you’re already aging. You’re already declining. And your brains peak — we’re going to show this by a series of Wechsler approximations — peaked at age 24.

So congratulations for most of you in this room. It’s all over. Mostly by age 24, if you take a look at the standard Wechsler scores — and it took actually quite a while to go. Here’s the reference for it.

What we’re going to do is we’re going to take a look at — what you’ll see is that peak cognitive talents, it’s kind of asynchronous. There are some that peak early. There are some that peak late. But the vast majority of them peak. Your brain peaks at very specific windows, depending on how you feel about Wechsler psychometric assays.

Here’s the year the peak is achieved from 0 to 60. And the type of cognitive abilities, short-term memory word pairs, that peaked at 13. OK?

Similarity profiles, which is a form of pattern matching, peaks at age 40. Your vocabulary peaks at age 50. And say goodbye to everything else, because everything else is in the middle.

Digital symbol and encoding, long-term visual processing, picture completion, block design, object assembly, digital spans, backward spatial, long-term memory, faces, reverse list, and about 1,000 more that I can put, average them, it’s 23.96. That’s when you peak. And everything else declines. And the median is actually quite close to this.

So even though it’s asynchronous, there really is a cluster right around there. So there’s a research question. If I’m going to write for an audience of 65-year-olds, but I really could be writing for an audience of 24-year-olds, is there such a thing as a cognitive 401(k) for the mind? Should you be starting to do some things now when you are earlier, investing now, that will pay dividends later when you do get to 65 and you actually can feel the effects of accumulative long-term erosion that actually began at 24 or 25?

I will call that mostly a research idea because the real question is we don’t know. But another way of thinking about aging would be to think of it not in terms of AARP land, but in terms of when you’re just busy getting rid of your student loans. So most metabolic processes fail here. Your cognitive decline fails there.

Investing in age-friendly behavior is here. Does that make sense? And think of the idea as a cognitive 401(k) for these ages, such that by the time your post-30, there are some things you really want to be doing if you really want to keep your mind fresh and lively up to what we think is the genetic maximum of anywhere between 115 and 122 years.

That means my audience for this book wasn’t just Tom Hanks in his 60s. It’s also Tom Hanks in his 20s and his 30s. So that’s my audience. OK?

Second origin, I told you there was a quantitative origin. This is a quantitative relationship between nature and nurture. To understand some numbers, though, I have to define a few terms for you. You’ve heard the term longevity. That acts as a formal definition in my world.

Longevity simply means the amount of time you could spend on the planet if the conditions were perfect. OK? How much time is probably genetic in origin, mostly genetic? How much time do you have if the conditions are perfect? You don’t break a leg. You don’t get into a war. It’s perfect. OK? 115 and 122 years is what we think it is.

That’s different from the concept of lifespan. Lifespan is the number of years you can survive on the planet, given that conditions are hardly perfect. OK? You might be in a war. You might be in the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater for a million years. The lifespan for most of us was right around age 30, as I said.

And it really didn’t start accelerating much until the turn of the last century in the United States where you could actually increase your lifespan to between 39 and 40 years of age. And now, it’s double that. It’s almost 80 years of age.

But heading towards the idea of how can you make your lifespan equal your longevity and how can you transit through that and keep your brain healthy and hale, being as how you could live to 115 to 222 if you did certain things, well, that’s actually been quantitatively assessed.

Here’s is a quote from the book.

“All told, anywhere between 25% and 33% of the variance in life expectancy” — there’s your life expectancy– “can be explained by how well you chose your parents.”

So there’s a strong genetic component to how long you’re going to live. But only strong in the sense if you think that between 25% and 33% is strong, because the rest of it is not nature at all. The rest of it that guy. The rest of it’s nurture. So this much is going to be up to your helix. This much is going to be up to your lifestyle.

What do we know about this that could transform a lifespan, which really isn’t geared from selective pressure much beyond 24 to 30 and make it last an additional 70 years, being as how that’s what most of your life is going to be?

Well, there’s the book. We know 10 things. There are 10 things well-subscribed and anchored in the peer-reviewed literature that can change this number to the affirmative and increase your lifespan so that lifespan and longevity begin to approach something of parity. I’m not going to go through all of them. I can’t.

But the rest of the book is about that. There are 10 of them: relationships, gratitude, mindfulness, learning, video games — yep, I just said videos games — Alzheimer’s, diet, sleep, lifespan, and retirement. We’re going to go through relationships. And we’re going to go through, and finally get into retirement.

So if you’re taking notes, I advise you not to, because as you can see, I speak nearly at the speed of light. But that’s OK.

So I’ll tell you where I am at any one part of the lecture. We’re going to talk about the first chapter. Something that’s going to sound really squishy at first, but actually isn’t very squishy at all, and has something very powerful to say to people that are still in the process of navigating their social relationships.

Here is the first rule. We’ve got 10 of them to go by. We’re going to get to that guy. Be a friend to others, and let others be a friend to you.

I’m going to start with a negative illustration of this principle. If I say the word — boy, am I going to show my age. How many of you remember “Dear Abby?” Does anybody remember “Dear Abby” from way back when? About half of you.

OK, for those of you who did not raise your hand, “Dear Abby” was an advice columnist from way back when. And she had a monozygotic twin, Ann Landers, who also was an advice columnist. And they hated each other’s guts for most of their lives. Yet they both wrote.

And Abby wrote a book about some of her favorite letters of all time. Here, I’ve got a great illustration of the friend you do not want to be. This is not something that’s going to get you to your 115 year maximum.

“Dear Abby, I’m an Italian man, aged 34. I am of medium build and am told that I am good-looking. I drive a sightseeing bus by day, so I speak a little English. I am single and would like to correspond with an American woman between the ages of 30 and 65. She doesn’t have to be beautiful. But I want one who has a steady income and owns a late-model American automobile. If you know of a woman who would like to correspond with me, please ask her to send a picture of the automobile.” Love, Vito. Yeah?

Not particularly socially competent. More to the experience of the elderly, this is an anecdote I actually have in the book. It’s on the subject of loneliness when we start out with the relational chapter.

A journalist was interviewing a woman — this is a quote from the book.

“A journalist was interviewing a woman named Molly Holderness on her 103rd birthday. ‘Tell us, Mrs. Holderness, what you think is the best thing about being 103? the journalist asked. Mrs. Holderness looked the journalist straight in the eye. Her response was quick and good-humored. ‘No peer pressure,’ she said simply.”

The reason why I lead with that anecdote is something that actually was a little heartbreaking in going through as I — I’ve known, certainly, about the molecules that have been invested in my career for almost 35, 40 years now.

But when I was writing this book, I would go visit assisted living facilities, what used to be called nursing homes and whatnot. And I would ask people about how they felt about growing old. They’re 75. They’re 80, 85 years old. And almost universally, and maybe it was just that this is hardly — it’s not a randomized blinded anything. They used one word and they said it all the time. They felt like increasingly they were invisible. People stopped touching them. When they talk to them, they would talk to them like children. And they would raise the amplitude of their voices if they could not hear. Except they were invisible.

In the literature, about 40% of American seniors feel that way. And we are only in the beginning stages of understanding how toxic those feelings are to the brain. It hurts somatic tissue. And it hurts neural cells. Loneliness could even increase the probability of death. And if you’re in the real throes of it where you’re starting to get what we call F33.1 depressions or anxiety disorders, you’ve got some issues.

There are some physiological effects of loneliness that are worth going through. It erodes cognitive function, increased memory dysfunction. And perceptual speed decreases is what you measure in the laboratory. It erodes immune function. If you’re lonely, increased risk for viral infections. You have a greater risk for cancer. It will also elevate your stress hormone levels. You have an increased risk for hypertension, increased risk for stroke, increased risk for heart disease.

And here’s the biggie. Probability of death is 45% if you feel invisible than for seniors that are socially active.

Why does loneliness do that to seniors? We actually think we know why. And there are two concepts you would need to understand in order for us to understand it.

One of them is that you need to know that your body can undergo systemic inflammation. It’s low-level inflammation. It’s just like the inflammation you get when you get cut, but you can get it throughout your body. And your body does not like it.

And I’ll show you how much it doesn’t like it because the brain doesn’t like it. You probably know neurons. About 10% of the brain is filled with neurons. And in order for a neuron to work well, it needs to be insulated. OK? Just like the plastic on a copper wire needs to be insulated.

If a neuron is insulated, it’s insulated with something we call white matter. So it looks white under the observing conditions that we make. If a neuron is insulated with white matter, it can click along. A signal can be propagated at about 100 meters per second. But if you remove myelin sheathing — that’s what that white matter is called.

If you remove the myelin now, the signal can only propagate at about 1 meter per second, and it’s usually scattered and diffused. You do not want your insulation gone. But that’s exactly what systemic inflammation does. It attacks white matter in the brain, hobbles cognitive function simply because you feel invisible.

Looks like this. In fact, you can think of it as kind of a four-stage process, because it actually repeats itself. Because when you feel chronically lonely and invisible, does that make you more gregarious or less? What do you think?

Do you think that makes you want to go, hello world it’s so good to see you. And then no one sees you. And so you collapse.

Step one, chronic loneliness is experienced. Yep, I’m chronically lonely. This is such a big deal that the systemic inflammation that’s going to occur gives you the same numbers as if you were smoking two packs a day regularly or if you were morbidly obese. So loneliness-induced systemic inflammation is at comparable levels to people who smoke or who are morbidly obese.

Step three, inflammation damage is white matter into the brain. That’s for sure what it does. And that leads to increased withdrawing behavior. And the cycle just repeats itself. So it’s not a small thing to say that having friends and being able to be socially competent is an extraordinarily vital — I would say precarious thing — for an elderly brain.

And if elderly brains feel shut in and your mom and your dad feels like nobody is visiting them, and they get systemic inflammation, you can hobble their ability to think. And if you socialize them — I’ll show you how we measure socialization — you can reverse all that bad stuff I just said, hence, the rule, socialization and brain function. OK.

How we measure socialization, we measure these what are called social integration scores. And the measurement is actually simple and straightforward. What you’ll do is that you’ll look at marital status. We look at volunteer activities, frequency of contact with family, frequency of contact with neighbors. And then we assign you a poorly-integrated or highly-integrated score. And you’re somewhere around there.

So when we take a look at people that are socially-integrated versus not, and we’re looking at their brain function, here’s what we find, chiefly. There is both a positive and a negative component to this. But the higher your social integration score here, the better your brain resists the cognitive effects of aging and buffers against the effects of loneliness. OK?

The more friends you have, the more you can buffer against all that bad stuff for the more highly-integrated you are. Like I said, there’s both a negative and a positive to this.

Memory decline occurs at twice the rate for seniors that score here than seniors that score here, measured over a 12-year period. Socially-isolated seniors’ global memory scores — memory is a multifaceted gadget, so you have to kind of think of gross domestic product, but you can get at it.

A global memory score falls at twice the rate. So socializing effects of memory, one of the things you can do is that for people that are becoming increasingly isolated socially, they begin to forget things at about twice the rate of an interactive senior. So that’s the negative part.

There’s a positive component to this too. Global cognitive decline, which is a measure of processing speed and executive function and a whole range of really good things, global cognitive decline, which occurs naturally when you age, is 70% less, 70% — seven zero — less if you score in the highly-integrated range than if you score in the poorly-integrated range.

So if that’s the negative effects, the positive effects are going to be something like this. A high-socialization score versus a low-socialization score, a 70% reduction in the rate of general global cognitive decline compared to low.

We even have some neuroanatomy we can work with this. We now know what it does once you stop the demyelination of the brain. We’ll get it nice and insulated. You also actually promote growth if you are regularly interacting with people.

So here’s a quote from the journal “Nature.” This is Chelsea Wald’s quote.

“Researchers suspect that the cognitively demanding act of socializing can actually build up the brain, like exercising builds up muscle. This ‘brain reserve’ may then act as a buffer against functional loss, even in the face of conditions as Alzheimer’s disease.”

Here’s what we think is going on with the brain in particular. The frontal lobe, particularly the prefrontal lobe, you see gray matter volume increases the more socialized you have somebody. That’s involved in decision-making, attentional states, executive function, which is a measure of impulse control and cognitive control.

People who have good executive function are often really terrific at math. OK? So the ability to understand that the loneliness can actually change your math score is probably where that data goes. And I’m not making that up.

Amygdala, volume doubles involved in the motion generation and emotional memory. So your ability actually to feel things, except at something besides being invisible, is something that’s available. And then something in the entorhinal cortex, the entorhinal cortex is — how many you’ve heard the hippocampus before? Have you heard of that before? OK.

You can think of the entorhinal cortex as kind of the gateway into the hippocampus, because it’s involved in memory. And that gray matter volume also increases the more you socialize. It’s involved in memory formation and storage. And so I have a piece of advice for you, the first of two in this lecture.

Number one, become socially competent — at age 24, because the erosion has already started at 25. Cultivate friendships. Learn how to become a friend. Then have lots of them and sustain them over a long period of time.

Number two, cultivate family ties. It’s actually a much more predictive of social interactions, mostly because you’re stuck with your family. So if you have problems with your family, one of the best things you can start doing is start repairing your relationships now, because it’s already declining and you’re going to depend on them later.

And finally, if you’ve got elderly loved ones, do the same thing for them as recommendations number one, become a friend, and recommendation number two, repair your family life.

So I have some pieces of advice that’s probably anchored fairly well in the peer-reviewed literature. After age 24 learn to cultivate and maintain an active base of friends. Interact with them often. 24 is not too early to start. Neither is 65.

Recommendation number two, actively cultivate, maintain, and repair familial relationships. 24 is not too early to start. Neither is 65.

And then finally, recommendation number three, for your elderly loved ones, make sure they follow recommendation number one and recommendation number two, not for any other reason, if, well, than self-survival.

But the more you do that for others, the more you will help yourself. Let’s go to the last part of the book.

The last chapter, “The Power of Reminiscing,” and then if we have some time, we’ll go towards the middle. This is unusual, I think, because a lot of people are not familiar with Ellen Langer’s great work. But here’s the brain rule. I’m going to focus on the last sentence of this brain rule.

In retirement, never retire and be sure to reminisce. It doesn’t mean you can’t leave your job. It just means that you have to keep your brain active for a long, long time. So the more you can get it active now and you’re engaged in a brain-active job as your profession, the better off you’re going to be if you continue that even when you start collecting pensions or whatever, withdrawing from your 401(k), looks like to you.

We’re going to focus on this one. We’re going to focus on retirement, though. We’re going to focus on the be sure to reminisce.

Now, what I mean by reminiscence, actually, can be fairly well-defined. But I’ll give a subjective example. Does anybody know who that is? Some of you are probably familiar. If you’ve ever gone to a grocery store and been by baby food products, you already know who this is. She’s Anna Turner Cook. This is her — when she was six months old.

This is Anna Turner Cook. It’s the original Gerber baby at 87. And I heard some “aws” in there. That is a dopamine lollipop. And you are beginning to react to the idea of reminiscing.

OK, for those of you who raised your hands when you knew what the lyrics to “Stairway to Heaven,” folks, who’s that? Don’t look familiar at all? There’s going to be a whole bunch of people here that are just not going to get this. But about half of you will.

You have seen these people before. You’ve seen these people before if you were eight years old back in the ’60s because this is the gang from Eddie Haskell, Beaver, and Wally from an old television show called, “Leave it to Beaver,” only this is now they were all eight and 10 and five and six years old back then. And now they’re not.

So if you have any pattern matching here at all and you have a reminiscence bump at it and you reacted to those or react to whatever the “Leave it to Beavers” are in your life, we actually can measure that reaction. And we have found some extraordinary things. And I want to tell you about Ellen Langer’s work to talk about it.

We begin with a puzzling headline. What’s interesting about this – this is from the “New York Times.” This was published this year. And in it in May, “Reliving Communist Past Helps East German Dementia Patients.” OK. Most of you probably did not read this scintillating article. What in the world does that mean?

And is there any brain science underneath that? Dementia is certainly going to be reactive to that. Well, there is an ability to explain this. And I’m going to show you the person who can explain it the best. Her name is Ellen Langer. She is the first woman to be tenured in psychology at Harvard. She’s still there. And she’s very famous for doing something called the counter-clockwise experiment. It’s a very famous experiment in my world.

Counter-Clockwise Experiment

And I want to talk to you about the counter-clockwise experiment in a little bit. But it won’t make much sense unless we first talk about some background information that led Ellen to design the experiment the way she did. She looked at the effects of nostalgia. She looked at that dopamine lollipop you gave yourselves when you saw the Gerber baby, if you did. And she also looked at something that we call retrieval bias.

So the ability to look at power of reminiscence and retrieval bias gives us our counter-clockwise experiment. So let’s unpack each of those, first nostalgia and then retrieval bias. I’m going to say something surprising. I used the word “weird” in the title of this talk. Nostalgia is good for you. We used to not think that.

And if you take the American value and let’s push them all forward. Let’s do some new things. And I’ve been in research land virtually, like I say, three or four decades now. I’m used to loving the new and hating the old, that’s for sure. We used to think that dwelling on the past was universally bad. But it turns out that that’s not right, that a regular dose of healthy nostalgia actually does extraordinary things for the brain. And I want to show it to you.

First of all, there’s the psychometric evidence. When people reminisce, three things happen that you can measure.

First, their social connectedness scores go up. It’s that stuff we were talking about when we’re looking at highly-integrated versus low-integrated.

Number two, eudaimonic well-being scores go up. This is a sense of — the closest I can give to you is the idea of fulfillment. So if you love what you do here at Google, you are fulfilled by your job. If you love what you do outside and somewhere else, usually, it measures by the absence of depression, absence of anxiety disorders.

But well-being, your feeling of well-being goes up with more reminiscence. And you have a greater frequency of positive memories. The more you reminisce, the more positive memories you start percolating up in your brain and the more positive you become, no kidding.

So the idea that nostalgia could actually be forward-thinking, can actually do something to you, expose you to a nostalgic experience, there’s an objective psychometric assessment. There’s also subjective one. Social connectedness scores go up. Eudaimonic well-being increases. That’s that sense of fulfillment. And greater frequency of positive memories — you’re looking on the sunny side. You have an optimism bias towards recalled experience. That’s terrific.

We also now know that most people that regularly dig into their nostalgia, that regularly dig into the things that were the “Leave it to Beaver” or the Gerber baby, whatever that is to your world, certain perspectives change that you can also measure.

Number one, your death-related anxiety decreases. The more nostalgic you become, the less you are afraid of death.

Number two, feelings of intimacy increase with the people that are around you, your family and your friends. Feelings of feeling close to them do.

And number three, this is the most extraordinary of all. You have a greater tolerance for outsiders. You get a greater tolerance for outsiders the more you reflect on your own experience, especially when there are perceived social differences, which is the fracture that usually hits most of this country.

So subjective behavioral assessments are strong. Death-related anxiety decreases. Intimacy increases, feeling emotionally closer to loved ones. And a greater tolerance of outsiders, especially ones with perceived social differences.

So it’s a big old thing to say that there is a power of nostalgia. It’s one that Ellen Langer could take in spades when she’s designing her counter-clockwise experiment.

We also know that there are neurophysiological changes that you can measure the more you have nostalgic experiences, the more you regularly traffic in nostalgia. And the reason why that we know about this, every time you have a nostalgia experience, your brain gives you a little bit of dopamine. And this is really good when you’re 65 because your dopamine levels are naturally decreasing.

That naturally is going to happen to everybody in this room unless you keep that kite blowing up, unless you keep it upward, dopamine levels are going to continue to go down. You want as much dopamine as you can get. Dopamine is your reward center. When you feel good about something, you’re getting dopamine.

Dopamine is also involved in motor control. Kill off the substantia nigra and other areas that are involved in dopaminergic responses and you’ll get a Parkinson’s disease. The Parkinson’s disease is the absence of a dopamine spark. So it’s involved in motor control. It’s also involved in learning, when you feel like you’re learning better.

So what you want is as much dopamine as you can get. What happens when you become nostalgic is that your body gets warmer, and the dopaminergic system is stimulated in two specific areas. This is a mid-sagittal section through the brain. You cut it like it’s a bagel. And what you’re going to see in green here — it’s only about 80,000, 90,000 neurons. The dopaminergic system is actually pretty small.

But we’re going to focus on two specific areas right here, that whenever you get a nostalgic spike, these things light as if it were the 4th of July. So you get an exposure to a nostalgic experience. The nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental areas light up as if it were the 4th of July.

And the more nostalgia you get, the more dopamine you pump into the system. So nostalgia was the first great pier that Ellen Langer was using to design her counter-clockwise.

Now, to the next one. Retrieval bias was the other great pier that she utilized in creating the counter-clockwise experiment. Put simply, retrieval bias is that memory retrieval across your lifespan is uneven. We call one a reminiscence bump. You retrieve events that occurred at some ages better than others.

Do you know what your best age at retrieval is? Ages 24 to 30. If you’re 80 years old and I measure the number of memories that you both get right and even the sequence of it right, you spike at that magic age, at the place where the system appears to have been optimized. It’s less in your 30s and 40s, and you get a little spike when it’s coming up.

Most of you will age out of culture before you age out of brain. But give you an idea of how that can actually work — and I’ll show you the graph in a second — how many of you remember that phone numbers used to have alphabets associated? In fact, there were an alphanumeric proposition for a long time. Remember that?

You might remember that since we’re keeping music is our theme here, there were some phone numbers that were given as pop songs that were actually the name of the pop song itself. And showing that you can age out of culture before you age out of brain, you might still remember these. Anybody remember this? “Pennsylvania 6-5,000?”

Some of you are already humming it along, like three of you. That was from the Glenn Miller Orchestra in the 1940s. How about this one? “Beachwood 4-5789.” Does anybody remember “Beachwood 4-5789?” There is one person who has raised their hand besides me in here. OK.

That’s the Marvelettes in 1962. But here is an earworm that I’ll bet some of you have, because her name is Jenny. What phone number am I describing?

AUDIENCE: “867-5309”

JOHN MEDINA: I just heard it! “867-5309.” You bet! Tommy Tutone. You have a bias for retrieval at a specific age. The reminiscence bump on average has been measured with six different inputs. I’ll show you one of them. We’ll do the music one.

But the reminiscence effect after age 80 — this has been measured with 80-year-olds — so what you’re going to see here is this. This is the percentage of memories that you recall that are both accurate in terms of the content, as well as the sequence. So there’s both an ordinal and a content component of this.

Chronological age at time of encoding, it looks like that. You peak right around here. Look at that. 24, 25, and there’s your cognitive decline that’s beginning to occur. So you can think of it as three. The first hill is the reminiscence bump. That’s what we call it. The middle-aged valley is right here. And then finally, the second hill, which are the recency effects, you can see there.

Five categories of memory have been tested, six altogether. And I’ll show you one, books, political, events, films, autobiographical events, music. In fact, they were originally couched before it got a little more rigorous. They would couch it with things like, tell me the name of a book that meant the most to you. Now, tell me when you read it.

Tell me a film you saw that meant the most to you. Tell me when you saw it.

Tell me the music that meant the most to you. And tell me when you heard it, and so on and so forth.

So you’ll see these things, books, political events, films, autobiographical memories, and music. Let’s just do the music, because we’re staying with that theme.

When did you encounter the best popular music you ever listened to? And the answer is right there, between the ages of 15 to 25. In fact, after about 25 or so, you no longer think music is any good. You know? It’s all good way back when.

And there’s a great quote. “What people regard as the music of ‘my generation'”– this is actually what peer-reviewed literature — “begins at around”– and then a book — “begins at around the time they are 14 or 15 and ends in their late 20s. A graph of their preferences can be summarized very simply. Pop music was at its best when I was around 20 and went downhill rapidly from then on.” OK.

That is retrieval bias. And retrieval bias was something because not only do you remember it better, you apparently also prefer it better, which tells me there’s going to be a dopamine tag of some kind.

So what’s going to happen is that right around the age when you are at your cognitive maximum, the best books you’ve ever read, the best music you’ve ever heard, the best political speeches — we didn’t talk about political ideologies and inputs to it — but the best films that you ever saw, and certainly, your life events.

And here’s the big thing here. Not only do you remember them. You seem to prefer that. And with that in mind, I can talk to you about Ellen Langer’s powerful counter-clockwise experiment. Here she is. And here’s a reference. It’s written up in the “New York Times” a couple years ago.

What it is, she took a bunch of old men in their 70s and 80s. Some of them were not very ambulatory. And she knew the power of reminiscence. And she knew the power of retrieval bias. She rented out a monastery a little west of Cambridge and fitted out the monastery with post-docs and graduate students and turned the monastery into 1959. Closed circuit TV, President Eisenhower is busy on there. Yeah?

You want to watch a football game? It’s good to be Johnny Unitas and the frickin’ Baltimore Colts and the Minneapolis Lakers. And food that was going to be reminiscent of what we could see in 1959. They weren’t allowed to bring any pictures except if it was them in their reminiscence bump in their 24s and 25s and 30 years old.

No mirrors were allowed. And the staff — there were certainly physicians on staff to watch this — but the staff would not let them act like they were 80. If they have problems bringing up their suitcase up the stairs because there was no elevator, tough. You open up the suitcase in the lobby, and you brought up this shirt one at a time.

Because for the next week, it’s going to be 1959. And what happened was amazing. Because, of course, she did the baselines. So she’s going to get all the motor skills and all the cognitive skills and somatic skills of what was happening. And then watch.

And the only thing I can tell you is — I want to use the word magic occurred. Or if you’ve seen the movie “Cocoon,” the cocoon occurred. Because things began to change. She noticed almost immediately that they were becoming more ambulatory. They were walking more. They were laughing more. There seemed to be more cool things that were occurring to them as in their interactions, per se.

She began to notice something that was really strange. Their fingers were lengthening. The fingers were lengthening. Their eyesight was changing. Their hearing was changing. In fact, if you measure all these with somatic means, hearing sensitivity is measured at threshold intensity of 1,000 and 6,000 Hertz was just better.

Vision, near-point vision improved, especially in the right eye, oddly enough. Manual dexterity, because they were now moving more, it seemed that they were interacting. At least they were back in 1959, so their bodies thought they were back in 1959, were beginning to stretch.

Whole body dexterity improved too. In fact, one subject threw away his cane. At the very end she gives another cognitive test and finds that there’s a 37% increase in what’s called a digital civil assay, which is a powerful cognitive gadget that can actually measure both memory and processing speed.

You guys, they changed because she took the reminiscence at the reminiscence bump. So pre/post measures after monastery experience, hearing sensitivity improves. Near-point vision improves. Manual dexterity improves. Whole body dexterity scores improved. One subject threw away his cane.

And in the “New York Times” this was mentioned. Oh, yeah, the cognition, memory, and processing speed improved, as measured by the digital civil assay.

Bruce Grierson eventually wrote about this in the “New York Times” article. And here’s what he said. Though she and her students would write up the experiment, they left out a lot of the tantalizing color, like the spontaneous touch football game that erupted between heretofore creaky seniors as they waited for the bus back to Cambridge. Just by flooding their heads with dopamine on a sustained level with a continual spike towards a retrieval bias, you’ve got a change in brain. You’ve got a change in body.

And now, this “New York Times” headline can make more sense, because what they did was a repetition of the counter-clockwise experiment. Professionals created an East German living area, quoting environments from Dresden, from the mid-1960s after the wall fell. And what they did is that the food was a Hungarian salad of the 1960s, which was sausage and bell peppers and tomatoes.

The kitchen, the dishes were washed of the original 1960s East German metal sink. Salt and pepper, vintage plastic East German shakers from an old Kaufhalle supermarket. Laundry clothes were washed with old East German Spee and Fewa laundry detergents. This is going to be smell, OK?

So we’re going to get an olfactory spike that’s coming. Clothes were ironed with mid-20th century pressing iron, so you’re going to get the feel of what it would be like if that detergent were soaked into the cloth and then you ironed it out.

And then finally, you got your magazines. And you’ve got your music. You’ve got all kinds of things. All of a sudden, I have another piece of advice for you. I told you there were two.

Here’s my second. The second piece of advice would be this. It’s another set. Harness the power of nostalgia.

Step number one, this is for your loved ones. Designate a living area as a nostalgia room for your loved one’s brain, mom, dad, grandpa, uncle, loved, beloved mentor.

Step number two, calculate your loved one’s reminiscent bump years.

And step number three, fill the nostalgia room with objects and experiences from the calculated reminiscence bump years. Make sure it is multi-sensory. The better you can get it, the more multi-sensory you can make it, the better.

And for you, in the 24 to 30-year-old, I have another piece of advice. Start collecting objects, tokens, and experiences from your own reminiscence bump years. Put them in storage to get ready to make your own frickin’ room if you want a change in memory and finger length and executive function and all the things that come by a routine, re-committing of your brain to a dopamine metabolism.

I have my own reminiscence bump, and I’ll close with this. And we want to take some questions.

Does anybody remember this guy? Do you know who that is?

AUDIENCE: Art Linkletter.

JOHN MEDINA: Yeah, I just heard of it. Who is it?

AUDIENCE: Art Linkletter.

JOHN MEDINA: Art Linkletter. For those of you who don’t know who Art Linkletter is, he lived from 1912-2010. I remember seeing this. For those who don’t know, he had a variety show in the early ’60s with the last 10 minutes. If I swear, you guys, if it had been done now, it would be probably the third most trafficked YouTube channel. That would be because he had “Kids Say the Darndest Things” last 10-minute segment.

He’d put the kids on a stool. And then he would go around and ask them interesting questions. And remember, this is live television. And I will never forget this as long as I live, because I actually saw this and asked my mom about it. I can’t show it to you because it doesn’t exist. But there is this about it.

OK, remember, this is live television, last 10-minute segment. Art asked a boy his favorite question. “Tommy, what would make you happy?”

The boy replied, “A bed of my own. That would make me happy.”

Art asked him, concerned, “Don’t you sleep in a bed?”

The boy replied, “I usually sleep with my mommy and my daddy. But when my daddy is gone, mommy sleeps with Uncle Bob and I have to sleep on the couch. And anyway, he’s not really my uncle.”

He’s going cut to commercial. Go cut to commercial. It’s funny when you look back at life. I’ve never been 61 before. I’m going to be 62 in about two months. But one of the great joys in writing this book is that there was a tremendous amount of hope and powerful things that you can do practically at any age if you want to be enjoying Art Linkletter way into your 115 to 122.

It’s probably one of the biggest reasons I wrote the book was to show that even if you’re 24 or 30 or 62 or 80, there’s a heck of a lot of things you can do out there.

Thank you very much.

AUDIENCE: I was actually curious. Rather than having a room, if one of those people were ironing their shirts with the super-old ironing —

JOHN MEDINA: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: — et cetera, et cetera, just on a daily basis, just one object, rather than a room, would it still work, or does it have to be immersion?

JOHN MEDINA: Well, if you want — I don’t know. It’s a good question to ask. I don’t know how you could titrate that. But you could put it this way that if it is true that this is working because you’re continually asking dopamine to be re-squirted into the environment and when you are aging, that dopamine levels are always going down, the more you can — it’s like puffs of air — onto a kite.

The more you can keep that kite up into the air, probably, the higher it’s going to fly. And if you don’t regularly sustain it, the dopaminergic system is no friend to you. It’s actually going down still. So it’s like you have to keep it up, which is why I ask that it be, perhaps, a room that you can regularly visit.

And because you’re smart, you’re going to get bored. So swap it out and change things and whatnot. But keep it there so that the dopamine spike can be regular and sustained.

Yes, sir?

AUDIENCE: Hi. Great talk.

JOHN MEDINA: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Just one comment and then one question about the reminiscence bump. The comment is there’s a great movie called “Goodbye Lenin” from West Germany about a family trying to basically do that East German experiment —

JOHN MEDINA: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: — with their mother.

JOHN MEDINA: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Check it out. But then the question is, especially you said at the start that people tend — used to die a lot earlier.

JOHN MEDINA: Yes, when they’re lonely, uh-huh.

AUDIENCE: So from an evolutionary, genetic point of view, what is the genetic advantage of the reminiscence bump if you’re going to be dead by the time you’re 30 anyway?

JOHN MEDINA: Oh I actually think the reminiscence bump is artifactual. All it’s showing is that the system is really aligned and pumping at ages 24 to 30, but that there’s no distinct advantage to having it at all. It’s just that that is a — I would think of it as a shadow, as an echo of something we used to have.

Because after 30, it’s genetic free fall. There’s no selective pressure. Or better to say, it’s now random. And for those of you who have really good cardiovascular grandparents, now, will also have good cardiovascular health for you. Well, that’s just totally genetic and random.

AUDIENCE: Thank you. I had a question regarding the 24-year-old peak that you mentioned. Two parts of the question. The first part is, when is the derivative the maximum? So do you have a flat plateau for a while and then really start to fall off?

JOHN MEDINA: Right.

AUDIENCE: And then the second part of that question is for, let’s say, a certain category of folks, maybe the highly-capable sort of according to the kid’s definition, is there a different peak, potentially, a key peak for them?

JOHN MEDINA: Yes, a very good question. The flat is probably around 25, 26 years of age. The peak for highly-capable kids, that is a tough one, because it was not segregated for this work that I’m aware. But I do know that there is an extraordinary piece of data that might hint at it eventually, but we’d have to go to an Alzheimer’s. Let’s do it.

If the more highly educated you are, the less likely you are to get Alzheimer’s. But when you do get Alzheimer’s, the higher educated you are, the faster your collapse is. You’ll go snap like in two years, three years as opposed to the normal 7.8 what dribbles out. So that’s about as close — that’s tangential. That’s about as close as I can get. But a great question. Thanks.

AUDIENCE: So I guess this is a follow-up question to the all counter-clockwise experiment where people were put back into their old period.

JOHN MEDINA: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Has there been any follow-up experiments on people of, like, religious orders where they maintain the same environment for many, many years of their life and how they affect aging, compared to other — more normal members of society.

JOHN MEDINA: There is. It’s nothing that would make it into a peer review that I would respect, simply because you can’t randomize the population. So they’re all going to be in one spot. And they all maybe have a particular view towards their experience. You can say this, though.

Because they’re kept well track of — are you guys familiar with the Minnesota Alzheimer’s nun experiment? Do you know about this at all? Have you heard this before? This, well, again, it’s tangential, because the answer is we don’t know. But here it is.

What they have found — and this really gives a confounder to Alzheimer’s. A whole convent in Minnesota decided to donate their brains to science because they’re dying off. There isn’t going to be anybody else coming in. And as soon as they’re all dying off would donate their brains to science to the University of Minnesota where they would do brain slices, pop open the cranial vault, and take a look and see, because they were interested in Alzheimer’s.

And even in that closed community where it is not randomized, that’s for sure — that’s a confounder here — Alzheimer’s disease, there was a woman named Marie. Marie was 94 years old when she died. And she was teaching. It was a teaching order, so Benedictine. So she was teaching at all the time and had lots of students and whatnot.

When you cracked open her brain when she was dead and looked at it, it looked like someone had taken a 12 gauge shotgun and blew it away. It was fenestrated. It had lots of those amyloid plaques. Are you familiar with amyloid plaques, neurofibrillary deposits, things that are Alzheimer’s-like. Yet she showed no signs of Alzheimer’s at all.

There is another woman, other women who had died who had what I call screaming at the walls Alzheimer’s in the tertiary portions of this. They are truly catastrophically sick and have a full-on dementia and the memory. It’s a normal 7.8 years. When you open up their brains, it looks like your brain or my brain without Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t fenestrated. There were no neurofibrillary tangles. There was no whatever.

So the closed-in populations for things like a religious order, you can get some data from. But that’s as close as it gets, otherwise.

AUDIENCE: Regarding the social relationships, two terms, social media and pets?

JOHN MEDINA: I do know pets for a certain amount of loneliness, that’s for sure. Pets are very powerful and can work really, really well. And people transfer all kinds of things to them. And so pets are — there’s even a pet therapy that can be utilized to gain. It’s not as good as a human interaction because even though pets are adaptive and there’s lots of cool things you can do, you can get more interactions with pets.

Social media has been tested. And by God, if it doesn’t work. It’s not as good as a full flesh on blood. You’re not going to get the pressure differential that the brain is so good it can even detect micro-changes in air pressure and all that other stuff. But it has been tested.

And it will actually rescue certain types of loneliness. So if they’re shut in and there’s nothing else that can be done, by golly, social media is a friend. And it has been tested.

Great question. Yes, sir?

AUDIENCE: My mom was extremely passionate about her work her entire career. She is about to retire, but doesn’t have any hobbies. Is there anything that you didn’t get a chance to put in the book in regards to retirement as to things to look out for?

JOHN MEDINA: Well, let’s see if we can address that one specifically, because if she doesn’t have any hobbies, then she has to do a full-on search for the next six months to get one.

AUDIENCE: OK.

JOHN MEDINA: In fact, to get several. But I will counsel this. If I don’t know them at all, but statistically, this will be the work of Marty Seligman. One of the best things you can do when you retire is to get out of yourself enough to begin volunteering on a regular basis.

The more you volunteer, making part of that a hobby — you know, if you read through that book, you’ll notice a constant theme. And the constant theme is continually getting out of yourself for the benefit of your brain. The more you can exercise your brain, the better it is. In fact, one of the best things that can be done that she can start doing now, and you can too — this is from Marty Seligman’s great work– they’re called “Letters of Gratitude.”

Here’s what you do. You find somebody that was a mentor to you, that meant a great deal to you. And for your mom, just draw out a list of all the people that meant something to you. And you know what you’re going to do? You’re going to write them a 300-word letter. That’s what you’re going to do.

And then if they’re in town or in the area, you’re going to take that letter and you’re going to sit there and read it to them. And try not to cry. What you will find and what Marty found was that the more you got out of yourself and your own experiences and started going back into — here’s a nostalgia bump.

Am I talking about a nostalgia bump here, sort of? You bet I am. When you start getting out of yourself and into other people, you begin to change rates of anxiety and depressive disorders. And since at great risk you are when you retire for anxiety and depressive disorders unless you get that up and running, one of the first things you can do would be what I would call the alternate name for this book.

Do you know what the alternate name for my book should be? “Quit Being So Self-Centered.”

AUDIENCE: Do we know what effect, if any, there is on the nostalgia bump and how bumpy it is, now, that in, say, the past 15 years we have so many more recordings pictures, videos, Facebook telling you, here’s the thing you posted five years ago.

JOHN MEDINA: Sure.

AUDIENCE: Do you want to post it again, that sort of stuff?

JOHN MEDINA: Good question. We don’t know. Absolutely. It’s possible that that could get fuzzed. Or it’s possible that you will begin reinserting more fake memories because you have more access points to begin. Because with retrieval bias, there’s also optimism bias, as we discussed.

And you begin remembering more of the good stuff. And so there are access points to that. Other than that we’re not sure.

Thank you guys, all very much.

Related Posts

• Transcript: Dr. Sanjay Gupta on The Checkup with Doctor Mike Podcast
• Your Body Is Begging for Vitamin D – Professor Bruce Hollis (Transcript)
• How Horse Riding Contributes to Health and Wellness
• Transcript: Neurologist Dr. Sid Warrier – Shocking Links Between Mindless Scrolling, Stress & Depression
• Transcript: Celebrity Nutritionist Ryan Fernando on Anti-Aging, Sugar Craving – Dr Pal Podcast