Live Long, Die Short (20 page)

So, it’s no wonder Nola is a rock star of successful aging! It’s all there: the physical, intellectual, social, purpose, growing, scaring yourself, intergenerational contact—all with a smile that lights up a room. I’m reminded of pop culture rallying cries of “No fear” and “No limits.” Yes, Nola is a successful ager and I can only imagine what her brain looks like.

Masterpiece Living Pearls for Challenging Your Brain

1. Take a walk. If you do one thing for your brain, walk—or ride a bike, or swim. Do anything that gets you moving again. Whatever it is, enjoy it, and to keep doing it, walk or bike or swim with a friend. The point is, get blood flowing into the nooks and crannies of that magnificent control center called your brain. That brain you are designing and remodeling every day. Remember, start small. Very small. Miniscule. Just keep building on your successes, and if you fail just take a step back and begin succeeding again. Take a month or more to accumulate a mile of walking if necessary. There is no standard. Only you beginning and then continuing to move. There are huge gains with a small investment.
   
2. When you get back from your walk,
   learn something new
   . Be a beginner. What would you attempt if you knew you couldn’t fail? What have you always wanted to learn or attempt? Forget about becoming an expert. Forget about how long it will take to learn. Strive to be a beginner. Be fearless in learning new things, doing things a little differently, scaring yourself a little every day. Ritual is a comforting and nurturing thing, but ritual is doing things mindfully, with awareness. If we do the same things without awareness, like a robot, it is not ritual, it’s habit, and our brains are the equivalent of a bystander. Sure, continue doing those crossword puzzles, reading the paper, balancing your checkbook, but realize that it takes more to protect your brain from the ravages of time, stress, and lack of challenge. Engage your brain with new information, skills, pastimes. Learn how to order a meal in a different language; eat with the opposite hand; learn to make noise with a musical instrument or learn to play a new song on the instrument you do play; go to the grocery store a different way or go to a new grocery store. Forget about failing.
   Not
   trying new things is failure.
   
3. Realize that stress basically rots your brain. You, and only you, can shut the door on your particular brand of the Big Uneasy—stress. Joseph Campbell told us to find our bliss. That’s it. Find what gives us joy, the feeling that comes from within where there’s awareness of this moment without thought. Painting, woodworking, nature walks, reading, music, children, knitting, meditation—seek out those things that quiet your chattering, stress-mongering mind. Find this quiet place within you and make sure you go there regularly to break the spell of your stress. You must be in charge.
   

   And remember the role of moving, sleeping, social connection, and play in keeping the beast of stress at bay. Your brain will flourish. You will flourish. Those around you will feel your peace. You will live rather than endure.
   

4. Don’t seek relief in the wrong places. You do want to quiet your chattering mind, but you do not want to disengage your brain. Even in restful sleep, we dream. Our brains are processing and reprogramming and recharging. When we watch television, it is as if our brains are on autopilot, as if we’re drifting off to sleep or staring at a blank wall. Yes, we do need sleep and regular freedom from chattering mind, but seeking it in television, or drugs, or alcohol, or overeating is a dead end for our brains, and for some, a dead end for our lives.
   
5. All you need is love … and the right food. Our brains are only as good as the fuel we provide them. High-fat diets not only put us at high risk for heart disease, stroke, obesity, diabetes, and cancer, they also promote the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Brains (and everything attached to our brains) function better on a diet of vegetables, fruits, fish, and whole grains (see
   Tip Five
   ). Green, leafy vegetables are particularly a winner. The more a food has been altered for consumption (i.e., processed), the less valuable (and possibly more harmful) it is. Go fresh. Go local. If your great-grandmother never ate it, more than likely you shouldn’t either.
   
6. Let your brain play. As mentioned before, Dr. Sandra Chapman tells us about the “power of none”
   ¹²
   —basically, when you stop the chatter, your brain likes to experiment and creativity flourishes. To get an “aha moment,” Chapman says, quiet your mind. Focus on a task that makes time “fly by” and makes you feel less stressed.
   

   Brain fitness is a field exploding, and a wide variety of “brain games” are flooding the market. Which games or approaches you use is a matter of personal taste. Look for those that have you learn something new and continue to challenge you with new tasks or facts. Just getting expert at one game has limited value. In the end, we want to treat our brains like a work of art, and we are the artist.
   

It’s better to eat fries with friends, than broccoli alone.
—JOHN SPOONER

T
he Masai people of East Africa—whose “Life is change” maxim I cited earlier—have another saying: “We are not human unless we are with other humans.” As we noted earlier, for most of the time we have walked the earth, we have walked with others. We did it for survival, and somewhere along the way, this basic need to be with others seems to have been encoded in our very DNA. We thrive with others. We seek out others. Of course, this need is consistent with the principle of nature that those characteristics associated with higher rates of survival are perpetuated. Our ancestors were extremely socially connected. It was an absolute necessity, and those who did not band with others did not survive.

We all can easily observe that, for the most part, we are happier with others. Yes, our fellow humans can sometimes make us want to tear our hair out. We can annoy each other, hurt each other, be less than noble to each other, but there remains a magnetic attraction that is deeper than personal preference. When faced with a choice between being alone or with others, most of us, most of the time, choose people. Th is is, again, at the core of our human needs, of our authentic self.

Robert Wright, journalist and author who writes about evolutionary psychology, uses game theory to cut to the chase of what drives human decision making. Game theory is a tool developed in the early twentieth century to study decision making. If, Dr. Wright tells us, game theorists were to apply their tools to human evolution, and therefore to basic human choices, there would be only three simple rules in this ultimate game.

First, the object of the game should be to maximize genetic proliferation. Second, the context of the game should mirror reality in the ancestral environment, an environment roughly like a hunter-gatherer society. Third, once the optimal strategy is found, the experiment isn’t over. The final step—the payoff—is to figure out what feelings would lead human beings to pursue that strategy. Those feelings, in theory, should be part of human nature, should have evolved through generations and generations of the evolutionary game.
¹

As man was struggling to survive, with small numbers and a harsh environment, traits that led to the continuation of the species were desirable. Actually, they were more than desirable, according to Darwin—they were the traits that determined who would produce viable offspring and therefore would survive as a species. Anything that resulted in more chance for survival was passed on to offspring. Traits that hindered survival were lost with those who failed to survive. Many of those traits that did survive drive us to interact with others of our species.

Sexual attraction would, of course, be an obvious “feeling” and therefore a major component of human nature in this game. Sexual attraction, or at least opposite-gender attraction, is a major component of why we seem fascinated with others of our species. This powerful universal drive is also necessary for the propagation of our genes and therefore our survival as a species. Without this innate and, at times, all-consuming instinctual inclination to seek out the opposite sex, none of us would be here today. Probably next to the ability to seek out and find food, the instinct to procreate is preeminent. Surely, as mentioned earlier, we have come a long way, with a global population of over seven billion, but our instinctual traits change much more slowly, and so we are left with instincts that originated with our hunter-gatherer ancestors. As a species we remain drawn to the opposite gender, particularly during the years when procreation is possible, but to some extent for our entire lives.

Another successful trait for survival was the ability and inclination to be part of a group. If you were a loner, or for whatever reason were not able to assimilate into a group, your likelihood of survival (and of having offspring) was dramatically reduced.

Throughout our lives, we remain observers, joiners, and seekers of our own two-legged version of mammal. We love to watch each other in airports and on the street. We feel a deep satisfaction when we are part of a group, and deep discomfort when we are excluded. We are drawn to restaurants, sporting events, and other opportunities to be part of a group, if only on a superficial level. We adopt our schools, states, countries, and even professional sports teams in order to feel solidarity with a group. Being alone was a major threat to the survival of our ancestors, and today we, as their descendants, continue to expend large amounts of attention and energy in order to avoid being alone. This should come as no surprise if we look at our human history, since we have lived together in small groups, tribes, or villages for the vast majority of our time on earth.

However, in our frenetic, mobile, youth-oriented society, older adults are placed on the fringes of everyday life and seen as nonessential once their children are grown. To age in our society is to become more isolated: as our child-raising acquaintances move out of our lives, as our offspring move out of the house, as we retire from our work, as our neighbors move to their retirement place, and sadly, as our spouse dies. And with this isolation comes a greater risk for disease-accelerated decline.

During my time as a student at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, I was privileged to travel to the then Soviet Union as part of the curriculum. I was there specifically to observe the Soviet medical system, and I was able to visit Moscow, Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), Tbilisi in Georgia, and Saint Petersburg. During our visit in Moscow, our group toured several large apartment buildings, built during the Khrushchev years, which housed hundreds of people. These buildings had paper-thin walls, and as we walked the hallways, we could hear babies crying, televisions, conversations, music, and dogs barking. When we returned to the bus, I asked the guide how it was possible to live with such noise and lack of privacy. I remember her answer to the word. “In Russia, our winters are long and cold. To hear a human voice on the other side of the wall is comforting.” Yes, we are indeed wired that way.

In fact, the natural tendency to form social units and emotional attachment is not unique to humans. Our cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of our brain, is more highly developed than that of all other mammals. This gives us keener capabilities of memory, language, perceptual awareness, thought, and some of the more specialized motor skills. However, the area of the brain just below our cerebral cortex, the limbic or paleomammalian brain, arose, as the name suggests, early in mammals. Despite its early origins, this part of the brain persists today in all mammals. It is responsible, according to famous neuroscientist Paul MacLean, for the motivation and emotion involved in feeding, reproductive, and parental behavior, and therefore for much of our drive for social connection.
²
Even beyond this, it has been hypothesized that even our human capacity for empathy and nonverbal connection, the very basis of social connection, is centered in this area of the brain, which, again, we share with other mammals.
³
This shared capacity is just further evidence of a deep evolutionary basis for our drive for social connection and perhaps part of the explanation for why it’s possible for many of us to derive deep emotional attachment and support from our pets.