[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER: Today, we
welcome Dr. John Medina
who has actually-- we're
welcoming him back.
He has been here
in 2008 and 2010.
Welcome back, John.
And he's a professor
of bioengineering
at the University of
Washington School of Medicine.
His books include "Brain Rules,"
"Brains Rules for the Baby,"
"Brain Rules for
Aging Well," which
is the one that he's going to
talk to today, which I think
can apply to everybody
in this room.
And so yes, so let me
welcome Dr. John Medina.
[APPLAUSE]
JOHN MEDINA: Well,
it's great to be back.
I've done the last two over in
the California offices, the San
Francisco.
So I appreciate the
invitation to come back here.
And thank you for taking
part of your afternoon
to spend with a developmental
molecular biologist.
We are not known for
giving compelling speeches,
and you've just had lunch.
So the professor
perfectly understands
if you need to kind
of roll over and take
a nap while it is I'm talking.
But if you're not, we're going
to be talking about this guy.
So third one in the series,
"Brains Rules for Baby,"
"Brain Rules" was
kind of in the middle,
and then "Brain Rules
for Aging Well,"
so birth, life, and death
all at once at the same time,
and do so in about 50 minutes.
Specifically, I'm going to be
dividing this talk into three
parts, and so doing, introduce
the newest member of the trio.
The title to talk is "The
Importance of Friends,
Learning and"-- this is weird--
"Nostalgia."
And we're going to talk
about some from brain science
to behavior.
My research interests
are the genetics
of psychiatric disorders.
I spent a long time thinking
about how the brain develops
in the womb at the
level of cell and gene
and then what happens
when things screw up,
and years later, you get
a psychiatric disorder.
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?
[LAUGHTER]
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, [INAUDIBLE] 1975
was the single released.
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.
[LAUGHTER]
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.
[CHUCKLES]
[LAUGHTER]
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 makes 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 life span
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."
[LAUGHTER]
"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."
[LAUGHTER]
"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,'
[LAUGHTER]
--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 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--
[LAUGHTER]
--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--
[LAUGHTER]
--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.
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 measure 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 [PUFFS] 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 [CHUCKLES]
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.
[LAUGHS] 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.
[CHUCKLES] 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.
[LAUGHTER]
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 thew 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 it
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 yours.
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--
[LAUGHTER]
--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"--
[LAUGHTER]
--"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.
[LAUGHTER]
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.
[APPLAUSE]
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--
[PUFFS] --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.
AUDIENCE: Hm.
JOHN MEDINA: It's
just that that is a--
I would think of it as a shadow,
as an echo of something--
AUDIENCE: Oh.
JOHN MEDINA: --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: Yeah.
Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
I had a question regarding
the 24-year-old peak
that you mentioned.
JOHN MEDINA: Uh-huh.
AUDIENCE: 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--
JOHN MEDINA: Uh-huh.
AUDIENCE: 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--
AUDIENCE: Hm.
JOHN MEDINA: --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: Yep.
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--
JOHN MEDINA: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: --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 have 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 [POW] 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.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Regarding the social
relationships, two terms,
social media and pets?
JOHN MEDINA: I do know
pets for a certain amounts
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.
AUDIENCE: Mhm.
JOHN MEDINA: 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.
[LAUGHTER]
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."
[LAUGHTER]
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 [LAUGHS]
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.
[APPLAUSE]
