The Best Years of Your Life

This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

In one of the movie versions of the Oscar Wilde novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the actor Heard Hatfield stares longingly at a painting of himself.

The picture shows a young man bursting with health and vitality.

As Dorian Gray reflects on how he is going to change with age, while his picture will stay the same, a strange wish passes through his head.

If only the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now.

For that, I would give everything.

There's nothing in the whole world I would not give.

I would give my soul for that.

In the story, Dorian Gray makes a pact with a devil.

The painting starts to age in his place.

The physical degradation of the picture isn't only about the passing years.

The picture takes on the corruption of the character's many misdeeds.

Meanwhile, Dorian Gray himself stays eternally youthful.

Oscar Wilde wrote the story in the late 19th century.

The movie came out in the middle of the 20th century.

The 21st century is not that different in its preoccupations from its predecessors.

Movies, TV shows and the fashion industry still worship at the altar of youth.

People around the world spend billions of dollars on potions and and injections and surgical interventions to keep the signs of age at bay.

Clickbait ads on many websites show you what the youthful stars of yesteryears look like today.

The message couldn't be clearer.

Aging is a terrible thing.

Growing old is a horror show.

This week on Hidden Brain, astonishing new research about aging that could change the way everyone thinks about life

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If you're short, you don't know what it feels like to be tall.

If you're white, you won't know what it's like to be black.

Lots of aspects of identity are like this.

They are fixed.

But there is one form of identity that is certain to change with time.

Young people today will become old people tomorrow.

But while growing old is inevitable, it comes with so much psychological and cultural baggage that lots of us avoid thinking about it.

In popular culture, getting old means getting kicked out.

Lots of elderly people discover that aging makes them invisible to others.

At Stanford University, psychologist Laura Karstenson has focused her attention on the topic of aging.

She has discovered some astonishing things.

Laura Karstenson, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thank you.

Pleasure to be with you.

Laura, I want to take you back to 1974 when you were 21 years old.

Like many young people on the cusp of adulthood, you didn't give much thought to aging.

What would you say your priorities were at this time of your life?

My priorities were dating, exploring, and thinking about future jobs and possibilities and where I would live and what I was going to do the next day, the next week, the next year.

I thought a lot about my future.

I didn't think at all about aging.

Your life changed very dramatically one night that year.

I understand that you and some friends were going to a concert.

Tell me what happened, Laura.

Yeah, I worked as a waitress in a restaurant, and a bunch of us after closing decided we would go to a concert.

It was about an hour outside of town, and we, you know, divided up into cars, drove out, and we went to this concert.

At the end of the evening, we said, well, let's go back and play some pool.

So we divided up again into different cars and started to head back to town.

I happened to get in the car with a man I hardly knew who was very drunk And I caught on to that pretty quickly and asked him to stop.

I remember putting my hand out on the dashboard as he was going ever faster, and that was the last thing I remembered before waking up in a ditch on the side of the road.

He drove off the road and rolled down an embankment.

The car turned two or three times over,

and I broke about 20 plus bones, but my left leg was injured most badly.

My femur cracked in half, and I had many other fractures through the knee and the ankle.

And I cracked ribs.

I had concussion, lots of facial lacerations, lots and lots of injuries.

I'm assuming there were a bunch of surgeries that must have followed this and sort of very intense hospitalization here.

Yes.

For the first couple of weeks, they couldn't do surgery because I had been injured so badly they couldn't give me anesthesia.

So those were the toughest two weeks.

And

then they began a surgery, but mostly they just kept my leg

hanging in the air.

It's that cartoonish image, you know, you have of someone laying in a hospital bed and the leg is being held upwards, and that would keep it somewhat straight.

Was there a period in this window, Laura, where people were afraid that you might not make it?

I mean, it sounds like this was a very, very serious crash and the injuries were really serious.

Yes.

Certainly there was the expectation that I may not make it.

I remember at a point during that time, I wished I wouldn't make it.

In hindsight, I remember thinking there are things worse than dying.

But I kept sort of becoming unconscious, but then coming out of it again in those early days and, you know, eventually started to heal.

I'm wondering if your priorities changed around this time.

You know, you talked about how your priorities at age 21 were the priorities of anyone who was age 21.

You're thinking about what's happening next week, next weekend.

You're maybe thinking about your dating life.

You're thinking about your career.

How did that worldview change as a result of the crash?

I, like many people who have these near-death experiences, completely changed how I thought about life.

And

suddenly, life was something I didn't take for granted anymore.

And life wasn't to be lived for fun and entertainment and exploration.

I, for the first time, really saw how valuable time was.

Laura's social world changed too.

A large circle of acquaintances was replaced by a bright spotlight on a small group of family and close friends.

And for that, I felt incredible gratitude to be surrounded by people who really cared about me.

And my parents came to visit, my siblings came to visit, my dad came every day.

And I don't know what I would have done

without that connection to the outside world and without the knowledge that I was embedded in a group of people who cared.

Tell me about your recovery.

I understand that you were in the hospital for several months as you were recovering from these injuries.

The way I remember this, it was about a month and a half before I thought about much of anything other than my injuries and

how badly I had been been hurt.

But then I started to kind of wake up, if you will, and I started to get bored.

It's

when you lay flat on your back with your leg up in the air, strung up in the air, there's just so much you can do

day to day.

And I got really bored.

Laura's father, who was a professor, offered her a way out of her boredom.

He had always wanted me to go to college.

I had not gone to college up to that point.

I was 21 in this accident.

And he suggested when I complained about being bored that maybe I should take a course.

And I was kind of resistant to it.

And he said, really, just name a course.

And he would go tape the lectures and bring them to me.

So I took introductory psychology as a hospital patient, laying flat on my back back with my leg tied in the air.

Wait, so your dad actually sat in the psychology classes and recorded them and brought you back the cassettes to listen to?

My dad was a saint.

Yes.

My dad was a biophysicist, by the way.

And when he first asked me what I wanted to take, I was like saying, well, not physics.

And he said, no, anything, anything.

And so, yes, he went to every lecture of introductory psychology with a tape recorder and tape recorded the lectures and brought them to me in the hospital.

Wow.

Yeah.

So while you were in the hospital, the nurses assigned you a task, which was also in some ways perhaps a psychology workshop of talking with some of the elderly patients who were in the same ward as you.

Why did they ask you to do that, Laura?

Well, I had gotten to know the nurses.

You know, again, you're with the same people day after day.

And so we had begun to talk a little bit, and I complained to them about being bored.

And they said, we've got an assignment for you.

There are a lot of older women who come into the orthopedic ward, and we're going to put them in this room with you.

I was on a four-bed ward,

and

your job is to talk to them and keep them alert so they don't get confused and so on.

So we're giving you that job.

So two things happened.

One, I'm taking introductory psychology.

And the second one is I've now been assigned to talk to older women.

Now, I can't tell whether this was a psychological intervention to help you or a psychological intervention to help the people you were talking with, but perhaps it was both at the same time.

Well, really, this was about helping me.

They were trying to give me a gift of a job.

Is there anything you glean from your time spent, from the time you spent with these elderly patients in the ward?

So many things.

I learned so much from this experience about aging.

For one, their lives were so different from one another.

And their personalities and their outlooks on life were so different from one another

that to the extent that I had stereotypes about what older people were like, they went quite far in challenging those stereotypes.

One woman that I shared a room with was a matriarch of her family, and these young kids would come in and sit on the bed and talk to her.

There were other women who were really

sad, really in a tough situation.

I remember one woman in the hospital room who had to sell her home in order to pay the hospital bill before they would discharge her.

And so she had to be transferred to a nursing home instead of back to her own home.

And it was all for financial reasons.

There was another woman who just kind of laid in her bed and stared at the ceiling all day.

And, you know, the physicians would come in, they'd surround my bed, they'd be trying to do all sorts of things to help rehabilitate me, get me better, thinking about my future.

And then they would just wave to her on the way out the door, say, hey, Sadie, you know, and just keep going.

They didn't pay much attention to her at all.

There was another insight I had from spending so much time with these older women who were also spending all their days in bed, being cared for by other people.

And that insight was just how much we had in common.

So I was 21, and these women were, you know, in their 70s and 80s, and probably 90s.

But we were all dependent on other people for everything, from, you know, being fed to staying clean to having any social interaction.

I mean, everything we were dependent on.

So suddenly I shared these characteristics that I would have thought of as characteristics of old people or sick people, but now it was me too.

And so that also changed.

And it made me think about the world and how the world comes to shape who we are.

And the one insight I had about aging, or at least was at the beginnings of my thinking about aging,

was

that aging is a biological process, but it's driven, shaped by the social world.

And that was the insight that led me to be interested in the science of aging.

Laura spent four months in the hospital.

After she was discharged, she was in a wheelchair for a while and then walked with a cane for several years after that.

While she gradually recovered from her injuries, the hospital experience stayed with her.

She finished college, went to graduate school, and decided to become a researcher who studies the science of aging.

She was soon to discover a phenomenon that affects not just the elderly but everyone at every stage of life.

That's when we come back.

You're listening to Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Laura Karstenson is a psychologist at Stanford University.

She's the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity.

When she was a young woman, she sustained some serious injuries in a car crash.

As she recovered in the hospital, she found herself surrounded by elderly patients with many infirmities.

The experience helped her decide to specialize in the science of aging.

Laura, when you started your career as a psychologist in the early 1980s, there was a scientific consensus about what it meant to grow old.

Was it fair to say that that consensus was a grim one?

Oh, it was grim indeed.

Aging was considered to be a serious threat to virtually everyone's mental health.

There was a clinical psychology textbook that I had when I was in graduate school.

So this was a textbook on psychopathology.

They had a chapter on anxiety, a chapter on depression, a chapter on drug abuse, and then they end a chapter on old age.

So old age itself was considered pathological.

And I'm assuming that when scientists were talking about the pathologies of old age, they were referring to things like declines in cognitive function, impairments in memory, depression, anxiety, a whole range of problems.

The whole range.

And, you know, at the time, people also believed that Alzheimer's disease was the inevitable consequence of aging.

So that cognitive impairment would begin and would eventually progress to dementia.

So that that was the fate of people who lived very long lives.

So soon after you started working as an academic, the National Institute of Mental Health funded a study to assess the prevalence of psychiatric disorders.

What did it find and what was its impact on you, Laura?

Yes, this was an epidemiological catchment area study of mental health.

conducted in the early 1980s.

And it was not a study designed about old age at all.

It was was a study that was designed so that the researchers could get a better estimate of different forms of psychopathology in the community.

And so, what they did was to have trained clinicians go out into the communities and interview a representative sample of people in a number of different geographical areas around the country.

So, it was the best epidemiological study of mental health that had been done in this country, probably anywhere at the time.

The results of it were to give them pretty good estimates of the prevalence of anxiety, depression, phobias, etc., etc.

And one of the findings that was embedded in this set of findings about prevalence was that the prevalence of every form of psychopathology, with the exception of the dementias, was observed at lower rates in older people than middle-aged or younger people.

And this really turned on its head the idea that psychopathology, mental health problems, depression, anxiety, were part and parcel of growing old.

The National Institute of Mental Health Study was studying emotions associated with psychiatric disorders.

Laura wanted to broaden the picture.

What were the everyday emotions experienced by people who are young, middle-aged, middle-aged, and elderly?

To find out, she ran a study that measured the daily emotions of people ranging in age from 18 to 94.

We studied a whole range of positive emotions and negative emotions.

We wanted to understand what emotional experience in day-to-day life was like.

So we knew from this large study of mental health problems that they had lower rates of that, but we didn't know a lot about what day-to-day emotional life was like in old age.

And so, at the time, we designed a study using what was then the gold standard, probably still is, of studying emotional experience in day-to-day life.

And we gave people pagers, electronic pagers, and they carried them for a week.

And at random times, during each of seven days, we paged them and asked them to tell us the extent to which they were feeling each of 19 different emotions.

Some were positive emotions like joy, happiness, calm.

Some were negative emotions like anger, sadness, fear.

And so we had this detailed record now for individuals about their emotional lives.

So the NIMH study was finding that older people, in fact, were not suffering from higher levels of psychopathology.

You were studying, if you will, more ordinary emotions, everyday emotions.

What did you find in terms of

the everyday emotions of the young, the middle-aged, and the elderly?

We found that

increasingly older people had fewer negative emotions, less anger reported, less fear, less disgust, and just as much happiness, joy, calm.

And so this was consistent with these findings about psychopathology as well, right?

Now we had a normal, healthy population from the community, and we were observing something similar.

Now, it must have felt a bit like a head scratcher given all that we had heard about how aging is a horror show.

Did you ever worry that you had something wrong in the data?

It wasn't just us who worried about it.

It was the whole field that was in disbelief.

So the general public kind of didn't buy it.

More importantly, the scientific community was very eager to scrutinize these findings and figure out what was wrong.

And in science, nothing better can happen than that.

Having a finding that

lots of other laboratories, lots of other investigators say, I don't quite believe it.

I'm going to look at it this way.

Maybe X explains it.

Maybe Y explains it.

So there was one alternative that people were reporting that they were happy because they didn't have the cognitive ability to really

ruminate and generate lots of negative emotions.

That is, if you can't remember how upset you were yesterday and how people treated you, then you're not going to feel bad about it.

So one was that cognitive impairment was actually leading to more happiness.

Lots of studies have looked at the relationship between everything from executive functioning and education to intelligence and this positive outlook on life, and it's the reverse so people with the highest levels of executive function and cognitive abilities and education those are the ones showing this effect the strongest so we ruled that one out

then there was a hypothesis generated by many in the field of psychiatry that was called masked depression that is really older people were terribly depressed but they were covering that up because it was a way of keeping it from others but more importantly, fooling themselves.

So we did studies and others did studies where we would have people experience different kinds of emotions while they were in brain scanners and be able to look at activation of different regions of the brain.

And again, you couldn't explain it through a lack of activation.

And a lot of research was done to try to explain or reconcile that this was really just cognitive impairment or brain impairment.

It was really about something else.

But with every study, it became clearer that this was a highly reliable finding.

Older people were

happier in their day-to-day lives on balance than younger people were.

So eventually the weight of all this evidence convinced even the skeptics.

And the finding that older people were in fact happier than younger people was dubbed the paradox of aging.

What was the paradox, Laura?

Well, the paradox really was that aging entails a lot of bad things.

You know, cognitively, people often do change,

feel that memory isn't as good, attention is tougher to keep and focus.

Not to mention the physical changes with age.

Most of us experience more aches and pains.

So all these things are changing.

And then we're in the societal context.

People aren't taking us as seriously as they used to.

You know, there's an invisibility people talk about when they get old that people walk almost right through them and they're just not noticed.

And so if all of that's happening with aging, and it is,

how could it be that older people are emotionally doing well?

I mean, and it does seem like a mystery because of course, you know, social status, physical health, you know, friendship networks can become more limited, social engagement can decline.

And you would think that if all those things happened, you know, if you had less social status, less physical health, a smaller network, less levels, you know, lower levels of social engagement, you would predict that the people would then have worse psychological health and yet psychological well-being seemed to be improving.

Yeah, it challenged all of our basic assumptions about what gives us happiness, right?

It's It's having a lot of friends, you know, it's having a bright future.

And here, you know, the older we get, the closer we are to death.

You know, how could it possibly be that people get happier?

So as you were trying to tease apart this mystery, in some ways, the fact that the data coming in was so at odds with the intuitions and cultural beliefs that many people had about aging, you stumbled on an answer to that mystery one day as you were interviewing a pair of elderly siblings, Laura?

Yes.

One day I interviewed two sisters who lived together in an apartment in San Francisco.

It was an apartment that housed a lot of older people.

And they were talking to me about how sad they were that they had lost many good friends and relatives as they'd gotten older.

And I said to them, oh, what about new friends?

There are a lot of people who live here in this building.

And And do you reach out to them?

Do you want to make new friends?

And I remember them giving me this kind of blank stare, like you just don't get it.

And they said, Laura, we don't have time

for those people.

And I

looked at them and first thought,

you don't have time?

Come on.

You've got a lot of time, you know, on your hands, don't you?

And then I went away and they were kind enough to send me off and be sweet to me.

But I went home and I remember sitting at my dining room table, staring out at the San Francisco skyline.

And it was this moment

where I feel like I had kind of an epiphany where I said, it's about time.

And I realized that it wasn't about time in the day.

It was about time left in life.

And

if our time horizons are changing, if they're getting shorter as we grow older, then our goals may systematically change.

And everything in my life and my research changed after that evening.

Laura's epiphany was quickly followed by a second moment of insight.

She realized her own life contained a case study of the very phenomenon the elderly siblings had demonstrated to her.

She thought back to the time she had come close to dying at the age of 21.

She remembered how her priorities, her social world, had changed dramatically.

I didn't know that I was going to make it through those months of recuperating, and the idea of exploring this very large world full of possibilities was of no interest to me either during that time.

But I did care about things.

It wasn't a flattening of emotions.

It was a very sharp focus of what matters and what doesn't.

And it's very much tied to time.

Time left.

When we come back, the powerful force that shapes us throughout our lives from youth to old age.

You're listening to Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Laura Karstensen is a psychologist at Stanford University.

She's the author of A Long, Bright Future, Happiness, Health, and Financial Security in an Age of Increased Longevity.

While conducting research on the surprising emotional resilience of elderly people, Laura identified a powerful subterranean force that was shaping the outlook of the

she studied.

This force had to do with how people of different ages and people at different life stages perceive the amount of time they have left in their lives.

Humans, to the best of our knowledge, are the only species that appreciates our mortality throughout most of our lives.

So there are other species like elephants, lions, they probably know when they are dying.

But we anticipate how much time we have left throughout the course of our lives.

And we do this subconsciously most of the time.

And then every once in a while, events occur that prime mortality.

It could be the death of a friend or a terrorist attack, you know, a war.

Something happens that reminds us that we're mortal.

We're not going to live forever.

We don't have all the time in the world.

And as we get older, we increasingly experience those kinds of reminders.

And so we come to take account of time

and value time differently.

Goals change systematically as our time horizons change.

So let's delve into that with a little more detail.

When we are younger, take for example the undergraduates that you're teaching at Stanford.

Obviously they are young people.

They have their entire lives in front of them.

What are their time horizons and how does it affect how they're thinking, Laura?

It's an interesting question because when we began this, we thought younger people think about their futures a lot and they think of, they envision their futures as very, very long.

It turns out, the more we've studied this, that a clearer answer, a more accurate answer, is that younger people don't think there are any constraints on time.

So they don't think about the future so much in terms of how much left there is.

It's that it's just vast.

It's abundant.

They don't need to think about time.

And it's really the shift is as we grow older where we come to think about time more, how much time we have left.

But for young people, they have all the time in the world, essentially.

So as we get older,

the shifting time horizon has a number of different kinds of effects on our lives and our choices.

We talked briefly about this before, but one of the effects is on our social relationships.

What is the effect of our shrinking time horizons on our social relationships, Laura?

Social networks get smaller as people get older.

And I should note that this was part of the thinking about the paradox of aging.

You know, because social relationships are what bring us our greatest happiness,

there was thinking that if networks in older people were smaller than they were in younger people, then older people must not be as happy.

That was basically the thinking.

Instead, it appears that what happens is that over time, social networks get smaller, but they're very well honed.

And so the people who are retained in the networks are those that are most important, the people who are most predictable, most valuable in our lives.

And those are the relationships that stay.

And we let these other more distant acquaintance-like relationships fade away.

But what it means then is that our social networks, as we get older, are more emotionally dense.

They're people who we really care about.

And so there's a real benefit to that kind of a social network.

You know, there are so many jokes about how the elderly are incurious.

They're stuck in their ways.

You know, you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

But partly what I'm hearing you say is that the old dog's old tricks are actually pretty good.

Yeah.

In fact, the old dog is pretty happy with those tricks.

Exactly.

I try to explain this to undergraduates who are having a hard time grasping that.

Like I say, imagine that you only had one week left in a city that you'd been exploring.

Do you want to try another new restaurant or do you want to go to your favorite restaurant in that last time out?

And I think that's some of what's happening with age.

Exploration is extremely adaptive when time horizons are long.

We need to learn.

We need to explore.

We need to collect

because those kinds of things could be useful.

And especially if your time horizon is so vast, right?

Anything could happen.

So meeting somebody at a party, even somebody you may not particularly like, could end up being an important contact five years from now when you're looking for a job.

So people are collecting and they're very open to that.

But as time horizons are shorter, we focus.

We focus, we savor, we see better what's important and what's not.

Another change that accompanies old age and one that also appears to be driven by shortened time horizons is a shift in the kinds of information to which older people attend.

Tell us more about this, Laura.

I think this is one of the most interesting findings.

Brains do not take in information evenly, but rather goals direct our attention, goals direct our memories, goals direct cognitive resources.

And so with colleagues of mine, Mara Mather and Susan Charles, we began to think one day about whether these changes and goals that we had documented widely in social preferences and social networks would be represented in fundamental aspects of cognitive processing.

And we began to run a study which since has become widely replicated, but it a study where we presented positive, negative, and neutral stimuli to younger, middle-aged, and older adults.

And we had them sit in front of a computer screen and they would go through the images.

And then after they've done this viewing, tell us all the images you remember.

And what we find is that younger people remember almost the same numbers of positive and negative images.

By middle age, we see a preference and memory for the positive images.

and in old age, that preference is whopping.

That is, older people are remembering almost exclusively the positive images, and they're not recalling the negative, nor the neutral ones.

And so that was the first time we'd seen this.

It was a little surprising to us because we weren't exactly clear why people would selectively attend to positive and not negative too, because negative could be emotionally meaningful.

And we thought this was super interesting.

We then ran a study of autobiographical memory, again, same finding,

using neuroimaging, where you look at amygdala activation in response to the negative, the neutral, the positive.

And again, what we see is more amygdala activation in response to positive viewing than the viewing of negative images in older people.

And again, let me loop this back to some of the thinking about how negative aging was years ago.

Prior to the study we did, and this was a study published in the early 2000s, but prior to that, there'd only been one study where they looked at amygdala activation in response to emotional stimuli, but the researchers had only used negative stimuli,

and older people didn't remember them as well.

And so the conclusion was that

The amygdala is broken.

You know, I mean, there's some neural impairment.

But what we showed is the amygdala is activated just fine in response to positive stimuli.

And many people, by the way, think of the amygdala as more of a salience indicator than emotion per se, right?

So it's what is capturing attention, what's valuable in attention.

And

since then, as I say, there are now hundreds of studies showing the positivity effect.

This is actually striking because, of course, there's also a wide literature across the social sciences generally arguing that bad news is perceived more strongly than good news, right?

It's sometimes called the bad news bias.

But what you're saying is that really that might actually have an interesting intersection with age.

Exactly.

So

people have long

believed that negative stimuli have powerful, adaptive, evolutionarily based value.

And so of course people

and that was the way these studies were described, people will pay more attention to negative stimuli than positive.

However, people, as it turns out, were young college students and virtually all of these studies.

So we were generalizing from what younger people were observed to do to humans writ large.

And actually what we see now, if we look at the body of research that has emerged since we first identified the positivity effect in cognitive processing, is that there's a gradual age effect in it.

And yes, younger people pay more attention to negative stimuli than positive.

And then gradually that not only diminishes, but heightened attention to positive emerges.

Another effect that you and other researchers have examined that looks at the effect of shrinking time horizons is how focused people are on the present versus the past or the future.

Talk about this idea, Laura.

There is a stereotype of older people that they live in the past and think largely about the past.

There's also a literature literature in clinical psychology showing that when people think about the past, they're more likely to be depressed.

So that kind of pattern was, you know, long believed to capture the obvious depression we would see in older people, but of course they're not depressed.

And here's the finding.

They also don't think about the past any more than younger people do.

But they don't think about the future as much as younger people do.

So younger people are rarely in a present-focused mode.

They're almost always thinking about the future.

Older people can actually be in the present

and that tends to be very good for mental health.

There are lots of meditations now, Buddhist meditations that are intended to help people get to that present focus because living in the moment tends to take people's attention to positive aspects of the world.

So in many ways, it strikes me that your focus on the effects of time horizons means that this is not really about aging in a chronological sense.

It's more about the psychology of how we perceive time.

Does this mean that if you experimentally induce younger people to feel like their time horizons are short, that this would then change how they feel and behave?

Isn't that exciting?

Yes, it does.

Sarah Barber, a psychologist who works also with Mara Mather, ran a study about five years ago where they induced endings, mortality, you're approaching the end of your life.

They did this kind of imagery induction with younger people and then presented them with stimuli, positive, negative, and neutral.

And younger people also showed this shift and a favoring preference for positive information in attention and memory.

What's most exciting, actually, about this whole line of work is we've been able in most cases to just lift age out of the equation and say it's time, it's our beliefs, it's our perceptions, it's our sense of a future that affect the goals that we pursue in everyday life.

I'm wondering on a college campus whether you can see interesting differences between

people who are freshmen and people who are seniors, because in some ways you almost have a natural experiment that's unfolding of people who have a sense of a long time horizon and people who have a sense of a short time time horizon, at least on campus.

Yes, you can compare returning sophomores to graduating seniors and their social preferences for spending time with others.

And as you've anticipated, the returning sophomores are interested in meeting new people and the graduating seniors are not interested in meeting new people.

They're interested in spending time with their very good friends.

Does the effect run in reverse as well?

What happens when older people are are asked to imagine that they have more time left to live?

We ran an experiment where we asked exactly that question.

We thought, wow, we can make young people old.

Can we make old people young?

And so in one study, before we asked people to choose from among an array of social partners, we said, now imagine that you just received a phone call from your physician who told you about a new medical advance that virtually ensures you'll live about 20 years longer than you expected in relatively good health.

Who do you choose?

And now older people were no longer expressing preferences for these very well-known friends and loved ones.

They were interested in exploration and novelty too.

So I love this because in some ways what you're really identifying is sort of the underlying psychological mechanism here, regardless of whether people are old or young, it does happen to be the fact that older people, because they have a more limited time horizon, are behaving in a certain way, but you can induce them to behave differently.

I'm wondering, once you understand this underlying psychological mechanism, what the implications of this are, are there benefits to pulling back the curtain and looking at how our sense of time left in life might be affecting us?

I believe that there are.

So occasionally I'll give a talk to a largely young audience about these findings and somebody inevitably comes up to me after the talk and says, how do I get to be more like an old person?

I'd really like to be that.

And then what I say is, it's not a good idea,

that it's adaptive to explore, to learn, and it entails taking risks, including emotional risks.

But it's good to do that when you're preparing for a long future.

And when you don't have to prepare for a long future, then you can focus on what really matters.

So in some ways, aging relieves us of the burden of the future.

We can be in the moment and it's adaptive to do that.

Now, that said, it will be great if we can find ways to have younger people step out of that future-oriented mode occasionally and really experience the present, see what's positive in the world.

This would be really good for them, I believe.

And just the same, there are context occasions where it's really good for older people to think about the future, the long-term future, and not just the present.

Think of a climate change, for example.

Probably not going to affect somebody too much who's very old today, but good to pay attention to it.

And so, yes, we should be able to time travel so we can step into the future or step into the present.

I'm wondering whether you do this in your own life, Laura.

Having done this research now, do you try and apply this?

Do you actually catch yourself at various points in your day saying, you know, here's how my time horizons are shaping how I think, and maybe I want to make that choice more mindfully?

I try to take the findings to heart, and there are a couple things I do.

One is

something will happen to me during the day, as these things happen to all of us, right?

That's just really irritating, or something where I just keep going over it and over it in my head again, like, I wish I said this to so-and-so, you know, and what.

And it really helps to put it in perspective: like, if this were the last month of your life, would you care?

And the answer is always no.

And so, being able to do that, I do think helps.

And then there are moments where I can get lost in staring out the window of my office at home where there are a number of trees and goldfinches and bushtits and

blue jays and they're always out there.

And I can just stop and really just

love them.

You know, just love that experience.

And then quickly go back and begin to think about what I have to do next and what paper is due and what email I need to return, and I can go back to that.

But yeah, it's good to be able to step out of the future demands occasionally.

When we come back, Laura Karstenson answers listener questions about the dynamic relationship between aging and happiness.

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Paul McCartney was only a teenager when he wrote the melody to the song When I'm 64.

The famous Beatles tune is framed as a question from a young man who asks asks his lover, will you still need me?

Will you still feed me when I'm 64?

The idea of being in your mid-60s, much less in your 70s, 80s or 90s, is difficult for most teenagers to imagine.

When we're young, many of us have a hard time contemplating that we'll ever be old, much less that it might be one of the most fulfilling phases of our lives.

But that's the case more often than we realize, according to Laura Karstenson.

Laura is a psychologist psychologist who studies aging at Stanford University.

After we first aired our conversation with Laura back in 2023, listeners submitted follow-up questions on topics ranging from grief to divorce to societal expectations about aging and how they shape our mindsets.

Today, we bring you her answers to many of those questions as we revisit a favorite edition of our segment, Your Questions Answered.

Laura Karstenson, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

Thank you.

Pleased to be back.

Laura, I said you studied aging, but you're really better described as someone who studies the human life cycle.

Much of your work has closely examined our notions of who is old, what is the appropriate retirement age, and when people should seek out educational opportunities.

Can you give me the big picture view of why many of our notions about these questions might need updating?

You know, my analysis of why this aging thing seems so difficult for so many of us is that

in historical sense, it's brand new.

Through most of human evolution, our lives were short, really short, like 18 to 20 through most of the years we were evolving on the African plains.

And then in a single century, the 20th century, we added more years to life expectancy than had been added across all prior millennia of human evolution combined.

Wow.

So it's just this sudden, sudden change.

And, you know, humans are creatures of culture.

We have

physical infrastructures, social norms, expectations that help guide us through life.

And the world today, with all of those infrastructures and norms, was one that evolved around lives half as long as the ones we're living today.

And so I think that's what makes a lot of this feel

awkward, tense.

We have notions about old age, but today, you know, if you reach 65, you've got a good chance of making it to 90.

So

things are shifted, have shifted very quickly in terms of length of life, but our expectations are old.

And even sort of notions of who is young, who is middle-aged, who is old, even those are changing dramatically.

Absolutely.

I mean, today, 65-year-olds in my book are not old.

And in fact, a lot of the emails I got after our conversation comprised uh messages of people telling me i'm not old

i'm happy but i'm not old exactly right

all right so let's get to the listener questions our first comes from listener rick morgan who has a question for you about the relationship between happiness and longevity As I was listening to the episode, I kept thinking back to all the studies I've read about how happy people tend to live longer.

And now after listening to this podcast, I'm starting to think that it might just be people who live longer tend to be happier.

So, I was curious if there's any kind of dialogue in the research community between the folks who study the effects of happiness on aging and researchers like Dr.

Carsenson, who study the effects of aging on happiness.

And if so, what are those conversations like?

And what are some of the scientific thoughts out there?

Thank you so much for a great episode.

So, Laura, are older people happier, or do happier people live longer?

That's a great question.

And so when these findings first appeared, people asked this question exactly.

Is it a selection effect?

Are these people who have always been happy?

Which is part of the motivation for a longitudinal study that my colleagues and I ran where we followed people over time.

And

we found that there was this change in people from being more negative when they were young within individual change to more positive when they were older.

So, we don't think that a selection effect accounts for the full finding.

However, it is the case that happiness contributes to life expectancy.

That's a fairly modest contribution.

So,

both are true, but selection doesn't account for everything.

Another question from listener Charu Singh was also a follow-up about your finding that older people are often happier than people in younger demographics.

Here she is.

One of the questions I have about increased positivity as you age is whether the negative experiences start to feel less painful, which is to say as you age, you're able to weather pain or ignore pain

more than when you are young and you have yet to experience much pain or hardship.

So I think this question is, are we seeing more happiness or less sadness as people age?

Well, the data suggest it's driven more by less sadness than an increase in happiness.

The main drivers of this improvement in what I would call emotional balance, so you know, the ratio of positive to negative, the main driver is a reduction in negative emotions, not so much an increase in positive, but because there's no decline in positive, on balance, we experience more positive than negative in everyday life.

And what do you make of the listener's hypothesis that some of this is just an exposure effect, that we're used to seeing a lot of setbacks.

The older we get, the setbacks seem less unusual.

We realize that setbacks come, setbacks go, we're able to roll with the punches a little bit better.

Do you think there's any merit to that theory?

I do think there's merit to the theory that

the comparative strength of pain weakens the more experiences we've had.

However, when we first began this line of research and found that older people were doing better emotionally and experiencing less sadness, there was some question about a physiological basis grounded in a kind of a deficit in the ability to feel.

So can we not experience intense anything and that makes us feel better?

And so with Paul Ekman and Bob Levinson and Wally Friesen, we ran a study where we induced strong negative emotions and strong positive emotions in younger and older people in the laboratory, measuring facial expression, physiological responding, and so on, as well as subjective response to memories.

And older people looked very much like younger people there.

So it didn't look like the emotion system was broken in that sense, right?

It wasn't that we're unable to feel things deeply or strongly, but older people tend not to.

So I think what I would guess is that we're navigating those intense emotions better, being able to pull ourselves away from them better than younger people do.

Is it possible, Laura, that what you're finding in the contrast between older people and younger people might be a special case of actually a more general phenomenon, where in general, as we age, we tend to have more perspective on our younger selves.

So when we're in our 20s, for example, we can look back on our childhoods and say, you know, the fact that I was brokenhearted that I didn't get a piece of candy when I was five years old, I can look back at that now and smile because I realized that, in fact, it wasn't as devastating as I thought.

And the same, I think, is true as we go through life.

Is it possible that this is just part of a larger phenomenon of sort of looking back with more maturity?

Even looking back without more maturity, we tend to remember the past more positively than it was actually experienced.

We ran a study years ago with an order of Catholic nuns.

And this was actually, the initial data collection was now probably 40 years ago, close to it.

But we asked them a series of questions about their day-to-day lives and how they felt about many aspects of their life.

And then we were able to go back to these sisters who very graciously completed the same questionnaire from the perspective of how they would have completed it then.

And it turns out that

they remembered the past more positively than they had actually reported it to us.

It's very hard to get those kinds of studies done because we usually don't have that kind of data to do it.

Fascinating.

So the next question comes from someone who is grappling with a more difficult life situation.

Nancy Weissman sends an email where she says, I'm 81 and listened to your broadcast while jogging.

I'd like to know if you studied older people who lost their spouse and if this had any effect on their outlook.

Obviously, I'm in good physical shape, but I wouldn't say I'm as happy as I was before I lost my husband.

Is grief a relevant variable in your studies?

Thanks.

She makes a profound observation.

Older people overall on balance are reporting more positive emotions, fewer negative emotions, right, in day-to-day life.

But

there is a feeling of loss that comes with the deaths of loved ones over the years, the deaths of friends and relatives.

And the research suggests that people don't fully recover from those really important relationships when they end.

They continue to feel a longing, an absence in their lives.

Apparently, again, if we look at the larger picture there, people then go on and enjoy a dinner with friends,

find a way to feel good and calm and serene in addition to having those kinds of negative emotions.

It reminds me of another line of research we've done on mixed emotions, and emotions not only become on balance, less negative, more positive, but they're more mixed, they're more complex.

So younger people, when we ask how they're doing in a momentary experience sampling, are more likely to give us kind of unidimensional reports.

They say they're happy, they're excited, they're joyful.

When you ask older people, they're more likely to give you a mix of positive and negative emotions.

So they might say, I'm happy, I'm appreciative, I'm sad, I'm longing.

So they'll give you this complex state,

which I think is really, really important.

And sometimes when I talk about emotion and aging, I feel like I am really oversimplifying it and making it sound like older people are happy in a happy-go-lucky sense.

And that isn't the state.

It's much richer than that.

It's more interesting.

We got a somewhat related question from a listener, Camille Johnson, who wanted to hear your thoughts on the topic of divorce in the later years of life.

Here's her question.

Your guest ended by saying that even marriages that had been less than satisfactory seemed to come to some sort of a comfortable resolution in later years, the familiarity of the things that they had experienced together.

But I'm interested in knowing how the phenomenon of the gray divorce in the United States,

of which I am a participant, I will be honest.

I wonder how that plays into this psychology discussed today.

And it's the fact that couples 50 and over are divorcing at a higher rate in the United States right now.

So I'm interested in knowing her thoughts on that phenomenon, especially since it's personal to me.

Thank you so much.

So do patterns of divorce among older people tell us anything about the changing patterns of happiness among the elderly, Laura?

I think the changing patterns of divorce are telling us something about time horizons.

If we went back 20 years, even though life expectancy was going up, there wasn't as much of an awareness of it.

So we go back 20 years and when people were in their 60s and life they felt was kind of winding down, they were less likely to strike out on their own, to do something different.

I think today, as people are realizing just how long lives are getting,

Somebody in their 50s, somebody in their 60s looks across the breakfast table at somebody they're not particularly enamored with and say, you know, I got a long future ahead of me.

Is this really how I want to spend it?

And so we're seeing more divorces, I think in part because people are seeing their time horizons as much longer.

I think you're less likely to see somebody start a brand new chapter if they think they're in the last chapter already.

But as people look forward more positively and longer, I think we'll see more of that.

Is there any evidence that suggests that the growing rates of divorce among people 50 and older is shaping or will shape the happiness levels of older people?

Oh, that's a great question.

And I do not know the answer to that.

If it will come to change levels of happiness.

In general, when people divorce, we see them come back to their sort of baseline levels of happiness after a period of a year or two.

So it may be a struggle, but most people will come back to that kind of equilibrium.

How this affects older people when they divorce in the long term or the short term is a question I think we don't know the answer to.

Yeah, well, this is the wonderful thing about research.

Each answer produces new questions, which is what makes it so wonderful.

That's right.

This is Your Questions Answered, our segment in which we bring researchers back to answer listener questions.

After the break, Laura Kostenson will answer questions on how the media impacts our perception of age, how health impacts happiness, and the role that education can play in our quality of life.

You're listening to Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedanta.

Laura Karstenson is a psychologist at Stanford University.

Today, she joins us to answer listener questions on aging.

Laura, a listener named Teresa sent in a question about the representation of older people in the media.

In the year preceding my 65th birthday, I was deluged by mailing advertisements informing me that I need to buy medical care.

And the images accompanying these advertisements showed my peers or myself in a group of people who are white-haired and retired and generally inactive.

And we would soon need devices like walkers and wheelchairs and canes.

So these images saturate the media.

And if we believe such images, it seems that those of us who are 65 or older have nothing left to give

and are fragile and require

a lot of care.

I strongly believe that such images are detrimental to my well-being and longevity.

What do you think?

Thanks.

What do you think, Yora?

Fascinating question.

It is a fascinating question.

I agree with her.

And a researcher at Yale, Becca Levy, has shown that when you prime these negative images of aging, people respond behaviorally.

You actually walk more slowly as they're leaving the laboratory than if they were primed with positive images.

And so the broader environment, the mealie, you know, in which we live and age signals us that we should be happy or we should be fragile or we should, and it does have an effect.

We need to change it.

What I like about that insight, Laura, is that I think there's a tendency that we sometimes have to imagine that these things in some ways are outside our control.

And I think the research that you're just citing suggests that in some ways there are things that we can do, both at an individual level as well as a societal level, to change the trajectory of our happiness as we age.

I agree.

And some of it is just knowing what the research says.

If the expectations are really negative, and then you hear about a study saying, no, actually people are happier, sometimes that makes people pay pay attention more.

I've had people come to me after talks that I've given on emotion and aging

who will say,

interestingly, with a surprise, that they are happier.

You know, like you'd think they would know that, but that's not always the case.

And so I think we do need to present a better mosaic of what old age is like.

You know, every stage in life has positive aspects to it and negative aspects to it, and we need to focus on the full picture.

Our next question comes from a listener named Nayana and has to do with a topic that many people worry about as they get older, which is money.

Here she is.

Hi, Laura.

I'm 37 and one of my biggest worries about aging is financial.

While young people must equally worry about money, the possible combination of less money and more health and living expenses must weigh heavily as millennials age.

Do you think there is a chance the findings about old age based on studies mainly conducted on a more financially secure older generation might change when it comes to newer generations such as ours who are going into the old age less financially secure and with less

stronger relationships

if we have to go by the loneliness epidemic concerns today, for example?

It's a provocative idea, Laura.

If more of us are living longer, but we don't have the financial means to ensure security in old age, are we really going to be happier as we age?

Yeah, financial security influences a subjective sense of well-being, clearly.

However, older people,

while they hold, as a group in the United States, they hold more wealth than any other age group.

There is great diversity within the older group, and many people today who are older are struggling financially.

Our work has included people at the relatively low levels of income to relatively high levels of income, and we don't see differences in the trajectory.

So we're still seeing people getting better relative to younger, right, older.

But I don't mean to be dismissive of this.

This is a really important

issue, and younger people are right to be be concerned about their futures and their financial security.

I mean, if we are going to live longer, it is actually going to be vital for us to preserve and protect our financial security for a longer period of time,

you know, regardless of the psychological consequences.

Maybe, in fact, we are going to be more psychologically resilient.

But separate from that, of course, of course, it makes sense as policymakers think about increased longevity to think about increased financial security as people age.

I couldn't agree more.

I believe that people are going to work longer because we're living longer.

And

most people,

my colleague John Chauvin says every chance he gets, he's an economist at Stanford, and he says very few Americans can earn enough in 40 years to not work for 30 years.

It's just an impossibility.

And so I do believe, and we are seeing trends in this direction, that people will work longer.

When you ask people today over 65 who are working why, about half of them say it's because they love their work and the other half say they need the money.

I think we need new models of financial security, however, much more radical ones.

The ones we have today are about saving an increasingly larger pot of gold for the end.

And I think so many people struggle in their day-to-day lives that the idea that they're supposed to save millions of dollars so that they can support themselves when they're old is so out of reach that they give up altogether.

Instead, I think if we changed our models of work where we worked

more hours at certain times during our lives, more days in the week, and then fewer at other times in life, we could have higher quality working lives for much longer.

Often when people hear me talk about financial security and retirement and how we can't afford it,

I say something like, we need to work longer and the audience moans, you know, it's like, oh, please.

And

then I say, would you be willing to trade retirement in your 60s for four-day work weeks and six-hour days?

And almost everybody's ready to make that trade.

Well, we can make that trade.

And the studies that are going on now look like we could make that trade with very little change in productivity level.

So we can think about working longer if we also think creatively about how much and when we would work longer.

Because if we had an income stream, even into our 80s, we're working many fewer hours, let's say, but you have some money coming in, it's a much more manageable situation financially.

So we need to really rethink how we support century-long lives.

And this goes back to what we said at the top, which is really thinking in terms of life cycles instead of thinking thinking only in life stages.

Because, of course, if you think in life cycles, then perhaps someone becomes a new parent and they want to scale back the number of hours they're working.

And in fact, they'd be happier to work, you know, once their children leave for college.

And so our model that we work super hard in our 20s, 30s, 40s, and then sort of taper off as we get older, that model might need revision.

Thank you for saying that.

And I try to argue that every chance I get.

You know, the least happy workers in the labor force in this country are parents of young children.

And because every day they're making a choice between being a good parent or being a good worker, and they want to be both, and they need to be both, but we ask them to make that choice.

And with an additional 30 years added to life expectancy, we shouldn't have to keep making those hard choices.

If we were have new models of work where people worked more and less at different phases, very often you would work fewer hours when you had very young children in the home.

And then you could increase the hours as they're being launched out of the home and going off on their own and to college and starting their own lives.

Maybe that's when we reach the peak.

And then as we get much older, we might reduce the hours again.

But we could come in and out of

full and part-time work.

It would be good for individuals and certainly good for their financial security.

We got a question from a listener, Laura Crowley, and she called in with a question about how adult children can approach difficult conversations with their parents as they age.

Here's the question.

So I am 47.

I'm raising teenagers, and I'm also beginning to care for my aging parents, who have been generally healthy, but started experiencing some health issues.

And I'm just wondering if the research has anything to say about best practices for

helping people at each of those different phases and ways that I have conversations with my parents that can help support them and myself as well.

So that is my question.

Thank you.

This might be a bit of a broad question, Laura, but perhaps a narrower framing might be,

should your research findings into aging change the way younger people think about and speak to their older parents?

Over the years, I've done a fair amount of clinical work with an older population, and

there were often tensions between

adult children and their older parents about where they lived and the kind of care that they got, where the older person was saying, just leave me alone, and the younger person was wanting them to do something different.

Adult children tend to be more focused on safety, and their parents tend to be more focused on living a meaningful life.

And so that's where I think we often see the conflict.

And

my personal view on this is we should appreciate that as

people come close to the end of their lives, that being able to live their life in ways that give them satisfaction and joy and meaning is probably more important.

I'm saying this tentatively because it's tough, but than their safety.

Living in a home you've lived in forever is a really important goal for many people in later life.

The vast majority of older people say they want to die living in their own homes.

They don't want to move.

And so I think what we need to do as a society is to help people do that better.

But trying to talk somebody into

making a very different life choice because you'll feel better is something that I think younger people should consider when they're feeling uneasy about their parents' situation.

I I had one last question for you, Laura, and that's related to the fact that you're a university professor and in the business of education.

A few years ago, I had an opportunity to take some time off, and I got to spend time at a wonderful university and took whichever classes I wanted, attended lectures, got to meet professors, think about ideas, read books, and I found it to be an utterly mind-expanding opportunity.

I came away so refreshed and thinking about so many interesting things in ways that I hadn't thought about them before.

And it really got me thinking about that old joke.

You know, I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said, you know, youth is wasted on the young.

And it might also be the case that education to some extent is wasted on the young.

And of course, I'm being facetious here.

Obviously, young people need to be educated.

But of course, there's no reason why we can't extend and expand the gifts of education to people who are middle-aged or older.

Can you talk a little bit about the role of education in the course of the life cycle and whether we should think about it differently than we do today.

Education is one of the best predictors of quality of life and physical functioning in later life.

And I think it's remarkable that

in almost all studies, we're taking that education from decades earlier, from when people were children into the maybe their early 20s, but that's stretching it, right?

And then education ends for most people in the United States.

And still, their levels of education early in life are predicting how well they're doing in later life.

Imagine if education was integrated all the way through.

This is the kind of world I believe we really need to create.

The model we have today that guides us through life suggests that the first part of life is about education and learning.

You go to school, you learn a trade.

The second part of life is about work and family.

That's when you're earning money and raising those kids.

And then the third part of life is finally about leisure.

And you didn't get much of it back when life expectancy was 50, but you might get a little bit of leisure those last couple years.

What we can do now, because of this gift of time, is to integrate education, work, and leisure.

throughout all of our lives.

And it would solve so many of the challenges.

It would solve the challenge of finding time for leisure in the the middle of life.

It would solve the financial problem of trying to save enough money in 40 years to support yourself for decades longer.

And it would allow us to continue learning throughout our lives.

To me, this is the model we need to strive for.

And it would be a model that would improve quality of life, not just for older people, but for all of us all the way through.

Laura Karstenson is a psychologist at Stanford University.

She's the author of A Long, Bright Future: Happiness, Health, and Financial Security in an Age of Increased Longevity.

Laura, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

It is my pleasure to speak with you.

Thank you.

Thanks also to our listeners listeners for sharing such a broad range of provocative questions.

It's clear you are not just listening to these episodes, but listening deeply.

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