There has never been a better time to get old, according to neuroscientist Daniel Levitin.
Dr Levitin has explored the science on healthy living into old age in his new book, The Changing Mind: A Neuroscientist's Guide to Ageing Well.
Currently Dr Levitin is a James McGill Professor of psychology, behavioral neuroscience and music at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
"Well my view is that the societal narrative about ageing hasn't caught up with the reality of what we've seen in the last 20 to 30 years, which is that people are living longer, and they're living healthier, not just longer, but healthier as well,” he tells Jesse Mulligan.
Photo: 123RF
He says the idea that ageing brings with it diminished faculties and depression has been “exploded by the science.”
He calls this cohort of older people “oldsters” and he says there are particular advantages, mentally, to getting older.
“After the age of 60, we develop more compassion, more of a sense of gratitude and more empathy. We experience, for neuro-structural and neuro-chemical reasons, a kind of positivity bias where we tend to see the good in situations and in other people, we don't dwell on the negative.
“And we're much better at certain kinds of problem solving, particularly problems that involve other people.”
Positive personality traits make ageing a better experience, and to an extent we’re born with those, although he says people can and do change.
Conscientiousness, resilience and openness are all traits that can be leaned, he says.
“Those are all personality traits to a certain extent, we're born with predispositions towards them, but we can change.
“Certainly, the entire field of psychotherapy is based on the idea that you can change. And you know, there are other ways to get there; meditation, religion, yoga, drugs even - certain drugs can help you to become any of those things.”
One of the most common misconceptions is that older people have failing memories, he says.
“It turns out it is a myth. Although certainly we know older adults with failing memory, there's no evidence that this is what happens necessarily as a result of ageing.
“And there's no evidence that it happens to most adults. In fact, the evidence is the opposite. It appears you can sail through your 70s, 80s and 90s with no significant memory impairment most of the time.”
The evolutionary purpose of memory wasn’t to remember where your car keys are or passwords anyway, he says.
“The primary purpose of memory throughout evolution was for geo-navigation, for being able to remember where food and water sources were, to keep track of where you were in space so that if you needed to be a hasty retreat from a predator or a danger, you could do that.
“And we developed over millions of years of structure in the centre of the brain called the hippocampus, sea horse-shaped structure that is the seat of memory.
“It didn't really evolve to remember song lyrics or the call letters of your favourite radio station or phone numbers, it evolved to keep track of space.”
We get better as we get older in certain professions and occupations too, Dr Levitin says.
“Radiology, like many specialties, is enhanced by having had a lot of experience with it, surgery’s the same way - you want the surgeon who's done the operation 5000 times, not the one who's done it two or three times.
“These kinds of skills require what we call pattern matching, being able to extract commonalities among what might appear to someone non-expert as very different experiences.”
Daniel Levitin Photo: Screenshot
He says a lot of problem solving comes down to this ability to spot patterns.
“The more experiences you've had, the longer you've lived, the better your pattern matching is. So yeah, the 70-year-old radiologist is in almost every case better than the 30-year-old.”
And do older people need less sleep?
“Matthew Walker is a sleep researcher at UC Berkeley and he, among others, including Robert Stickgold, have shown that that's a myth that old people need less sleep, older adults tend to get less sleep, but they still need eight or nine hours like the rest of us.
“And you know, there are things we can do in terms of sleep hygiene that are not difficult to implement and I devote a couple of chapters of the book to that - which is how important it is.”
Diet is and it isn't important, he says.
“There is no one diet that is clearly superior to any other. I mean, it's a huge billion-dollar industry selling dietary advice in books and supplements and subscription programs.
"None of them are superior to any of the others. You probably don't want to go on the French fries and ice cream diet, but apart from that, the real secret of a healthy diet is to eat a variety of foods.”
Some fasting might also help, he says.
“Maybe skip a meal now and then if you're not really hungry, that can be good unless you've got diabetes, which is a whole different set of problems.”
Exercise is very important, he says.
"The biggest improvements in health, both brain health and body health, don't come from adding another 20 minutes to your exercise routine every week or every day.
“It's not about that, it's about making a consistent effort to just get up out of your couch or your chair and move around, move your whole body.”
Do that every day, he says.
“If you can walk in nature and natural settings, walking in natural settings, swinging your arms twisting about, that's all very helpful.”
He also has strong views on retirement - don’t is his simple message.
“What I've seen over and over again from talking to people in their 80s and 90s, talking to them in person, like the Dalai Lama or Jane Goodall or Clint Eastwood, who’s 89 years old. They just keep going.
“Their advice is go, go, go and you don't retire from something, retire to something - to charitable work, volunteer work, tutoring anything to stay active and meeting new people, as Clint Eastwood says, ‘I don't let the old man in.’”
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