Super Brain (28 page)

The most crippling aspects of aging tend to involve inertia. That is, we keep doing what we’ve always done. Starting in late middle age, new things gradually fall by the wayside. Passivity overtakes us; we lose our motivation. Countless old people find themselves stranded by inertia.

Deepak recalls a couple who foundered when the wife turned fifty. She looked upon that birthday as a milestone, a new starting point. With her children ready for college and her job secure, she wanted to open new areas of life that she hadn’t been able to explore while family duties were pulling her away from some of her deepest dreams.

“My husband and I had a yearly ritual,” she says. “We took a long weekend alone and evaluated our marriage. It was quite systematic. We made a list of each element in our relationship, including sex, work, hidden agendas, and resentments. We are both very organized people, and just before I turned fifty, we rated each aspect of our marriage and discovered that we scored at least eight out of ten in each category. I felt happy and secure.”

So it came as a shock when this woman sat down one night and revealed her plans for making the marriage succeed for the next twenty years. Her husband, who was highly successful in business, turned to her and said, “I don’t want to change. Why bother? We’ll get old. I see us sitting in easy chairs waiting for the kids to call.”

Unseen by her, her husband had been succumbing to creeping inertia. His whole life centered on his work first and foremost; when retirement came, as he saw it, there was nothing left to achieve. “I’ve already done whatever I’m going to do. Why try and repeat the past? It’s hard enough to keep doing the same thing over and over.”

This couple went into counseling, but their views were too divergent. On the eve of divorce, both were disappointed yet quite content in their own choice. The wife felt free to build a new life based on new aspirations. The husband was content to rest on his laurels and look nostalgically back on the past. Each was an intelligent person with high self-esteem and a sense of confidence.

But with the passage of time, as fifty turns to sixty and then to seventy and eighty, which of them has made a better choice? The wife is building on the matrix that sustained her for her first five decades; the husband is trusting that time will take care of itself. There are no guarantees in life, but most psychologists would predict that she has a better chance for longevity and, more than that, a better chance to feel fulfilled as she ages.

Linking with Immortality

So far, we’ve covered the key aspects of the “new old age,” the rubric applied to a social movement that advocates positive aging. For two decades the image of old age has been shifting dramatically. No one expects anymore to be put on the shelf at sixty-five. A large proportion of baby boomers don’t see retirement in their future. Growing old is being pushed further off than ever. In a sense, this is the positive side effect of living in such a youth-oriented culture. No one wants to face being no longer young. The latest wave of seniors are
making positive lifestyle changes, if not quickly enough (and with not enough equality. The increase in longevity that has benefited the top half of income earners in America hasn’t extended to the bottom half, where life expectancy remains closer to seventy than to eighty, where the upper half are quickly heading).

What is the next step, then? We feel that anti-aging needs to look beyond the physical and even beyond the psychological. The best life is rooted in a vision of fulfillment, so that it’s the life one would want to extend. It’s hard to have a vision that defies aging, because for untold generations human beings have looked around, and what do they see? They see that all creatures grow old and die. But this universal observation is not in fact true. In a very real sense cells are immortal, or at least as close to immortal as living organisms can be. Can this be the clue to a new and higher vision of life?

The original blue-green algae that evolved billions of years ago are still with us. They never die but simply divide and keep dividing. This is also true of single-celled organisms like amoebae and paramecia, found in pond water. Adverse circumstances certainly kill off primitive life forms by the billions, but accidents of nature aren’t the same as natural life span. The natural life span of many cells is unlimited. Only when they gather into complex plants and animals do cells face the prospect of death. A red blood corpuscle that dies at three months, a white blood cell that dies as soon as it consumes an invading germ, a skin cell blowing away in the wind—all are living out a natural life span. But the body integrates hundreds of different life expectancies—as many life spans as there are tissue types. Even then there is tremendous leeway and flexibility. Stem cells exist even in the oldest living human, with the potential to mature into fresh new cells.

The cells in your body have retained all the mechanisms of primitive life-forms, including cell division, but they have also kept evolving. Complex creatures like mammals have added life-saving inventions that primitive organisms don’t possess, such as an
immune system. A human body faces many threats that do not trouble blue-green algae, yet each one has been met, over the course of evolution, with highly creative ways to defend, cope, and survive. The human mind took over from cellular evolution a long time ago. The single greatest benefit to longevity, for example, may have been sanitation—sewage treatment and clean water were evolutionary leaps for mankind (and the loss of them around the world, as sewage and water supplies become contaminated, poses a grave danger to hundreds of millions of people). Medicine, of course, is a major, ongoing way to extend life.

Each of us is caught between two forces that contend for our personal future, the force of evolution, which extends life longer and longer, and the force of entropy, which causes physical things to decay over time. Aging is a highly complicated form of entropy; it’s not as simple as a star using up its fuel, collapsing upon itself, and exploding in one last dramatic death throe as a nova or supernova.

The situation is so complex, in fact, that each person can choose which side, creation or destruction, to favor. Entropy isn’t destiny. There is no reason why you can’t choose to favor evolution every day. Ultimately, our true link with immortality is through evolution, which has driven creation for 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang. On some early spring day when the trees have found the courage to believe that winter is over, go outside and pluck a stem of new growth from a flowering tree or sprouting rose bush. Examine it, and you will notice that every tender shoot has a growing tip that reaches into the unknown. As vulnerable as that tender shoot may look, it is repeating the act of creation that has endured forever. This is the physical sign of life’s faith in itself.

In a very real sense, you are the growing tip of the universe. An eternity of time, longer than the life of the oldest galaxy, has conspired to arrive at this moment in one person’s existence. Where is the universe heading in the next moment? Only you can choose. You are responsible for your own growth, and yet the choice is more
than personal. The timeless has delivered itself into our hands. It awaits your decision, and wherever you go next, reality will follow. If you think we are exaggerating—or even being outlandish—consider what your cells are doing. Without their link to immortality, life can’t exist.

SUPER BRAIN SOLUTIONS
MAXIMUM LONGEVITY

Whenever a cell ages, you age. This is the biological bottom line. Yet cells are powerfully designed, over the course of evolution, to survive. They are linked to chemical processes that are literally immortal, or at least as old as the universe. Ironically, even if you do everything wrong in terms of lifestyle—chronically smoking, stuffing your body with fats and sugar, never exercising—the same brain that is implicated in your horrible choices is itself trying to stay immortal. Brain cells are like all other cells, waging a successful campaign to defeat time, and this campaign is taking place second by second, from the moment of conception in the womb.

We’ve been waxing a bit philosophical, yet there are specific ways that you can live a vision of maximum longevity. Winning the genetic lottery is rare. Various research projects have looked at specific mutations that allow some family lines of Ashkenazi Jews to live beyond one hundred—fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters all become centenarians. (Previously there had been no historical documentation of a family where more than one person in a generation lived to be a hundred.) The key seems to be that their genes make them immune to plaque buildup in their arteries, the chief cause of heart attack and stroke. At this point, however, the prospect of transferring this genetic advantage to others is remote.

In the general population, life span keeps extending in developed countries. Japanese women are the most long-lived on earth. The rising life expectancy that Americans have enjoyed every decade is well understood—improved sanitation and medical care have been critical. Childhood infectious diseases have been curbed, and most recently major improvements in emergency care for heart attacks and recovery programs for stroke have been important. The
decline in smoking has also benefited life expectancy. The last two hurdles are probably lack of exercise and obesity. In other words, as long as people take prevention seriously and make positive lifestyle changes, the physical basis for living a long time is taken care of. Only the rarest individuals will become centenarians (about 1 in 30,000), while more and more of us will live in good health into our eighties and nineties.

The standard view is that in order to make a significant advance over the present situation, we need to find a cure for cancer and Alzheimer’s. Certainly both are scourges of old age. Heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States—despite advances in treatment, medicine has still not discovered what causes it. The plaque collected in the coronary arteries may look like debris clogging a drain. However, it takes microscopic wounds or lesions in the smooth lining of a blood vessel to give tiny particles of fatty deposits a place to lodge. This process begins when we are still quite young, and although the risk factors are well known, such as high cholesterol, smoking, a sedentary lifestyle, type A behaviors, and high stress, risks are not the same as causes.

At present, longevity presents a confusing picture among genes, risk factors, and drugs, the latter being favored by the pharmaceutical companies. Older people on average take seven prescribed medications, all of which have side effects. Pills are easy to pop—and easy for the doctor to prescribe—but over the last decade, leading drug treatments for depression, heart disease, and arthritis have come under scrutiny for being less effective, or more dangerous, than they were promoted to be. If anything, the focus on drugs has lessened the public incentive to practice prevention, which has no side effects and proven benefits.

We’d like to discuss the most personalized approach to longevity, which is tuning in to your body. This requires self-awareness. On one hand, you have a lifetime of likes and dislikes, habits, beliefs, and conditioning. On the other hand, you have the wisdom
that has evolved in every cell. Anti-aging is a matter of making these two halves mesh. This is a perfect example of survival of the wisest.

THE WISDOM OF CELLS
SEVEN LESSONS IN LONGEVITY

1. Cells share and cooperate. No cell lives in isolation.

2. Cells are self-healing.

3. The life of the cell demands constant nutrition.

4. Cells are always dynamic—they die if they get stuck.

5. The balance between inner and outer worlds is always maintained.

6. Toxins and disease organisms are immediately spotted and defended against.

7. Death is an accepted part of the cell’s life cycle.

Cells became wise over billions of years of evolution; you can become just as wise by using the gifts of self-awareness, paying attention to how biology has solved some of the deepest issues that you face in everyday life.

1. Cells share and cooperate. No cell lives in isolation

You are part of the human community, and coexistence is the most natural and healthy way to live. Cells don’t struggle with this truism. They benefited enormously by coming together to form tissues and organs—your brain is the most spectacular evidence of that. But we’re all tempted to strike out on our own, driven by ego to amass more and more for ourselves, adding close family but excluding almost everyone else. (One memorable book on how to get rich looked at the lives of self-made millionaires and came to a depressing conclusion:
most were “stingy S.O.B.’s.”) Cells are not so misguided that they look out for number one.

We aren’t trying to deliver a moral lesson here. Some fascinating research has shown that social connections are mysteriously contagious. Sifting through the massive data bank of the Framingham Heart Study, which has examined risk factors related to heart attacks for thirty-two years, social scientists made a startling discovery. Obesity, one of the major risks for heart disease, spreads like a virus. In the social network of family, coworkers, and friends, simply relating to someone with a weight problem makes it more likely that you will have one. “According to the data, if one person became obese, the likelihood that his friend would follow suit increased by 57 percent. (This means that the network is far more predictive of obesity than the presence of genes associated with the condition.) If a sibling became obese, the chance that another sibling would become obese increased by 40 percent, while an obese spouse increased the likelihood that the other spouse would become obese by 37 percent.”

Using statistical methods that linked 12,067 residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, the researchers found that the viruslike behavior of obesity could also be applied to other risks like smoking or depression. If you have a friend who smokes, the likelihood that you will smoke increases, while having a friend who quits smoking increases your likelihood of making the same positive change. But the most enigmatic aspect is that you don’t have to relate to someone else directly. If your friend has a friend, unknown to you, who is obese or depressed or a smoker, your chances of acquiring those habits increases, if by a tiny margin.