 Alright, as usual, what we'll do is we'll begin by allowing members of the panels to ask questions and then as your questions come in, we'll read as many as we have time for at the end. I'll ask my fellow panelists here to do one thing to help with the sound out there if you would direct your voice into the microphone. They have trouble hearing us when we turn our heads to the side. So, if we can speak directly to the microphone, that would be very helpful. Okay, anyone on the panel? Dr. Whitehouse. Well, that was wonderful and inspiring and we had some great talks yesterday as well that focused more on biology. And I actually wanted to just relay Len's kind of biological definition of aging as kind of evolutionary, universal, the concept of molecular infidelity. You started off your talk bringing human beings more directly into it by talking about unique human characteristics. And one of the characteristics we have is inventing words like aging. So, I have a very simple question. What's your definition of aging? And if you have time, what do you think it is malleable? What do you think the future of aging is all about? How much time do we have? Well, I completely buy Professor Hayflick's definition of aging. But aging, of course, is socially constructed. That is aging in the sense of how we think about it and talk about it. What old age is entirely socially constructed. One of the things that I think we're doing right now is to try to accommodate socially and not very well this extended life expectancy. And what we're doing in the social construction of aging is we're tacking all the years on at the end. So, we say we got all these extra years on average and they're all going to be in old age. But nobody ever said all the extra years had to come at the end. They can go anywhere. So, we can insert them into early adulthood, into middle age. We can stretch things out. But it doesn't have to mean that we're all going to be old for a lot longer. Dr. Hayflick. I'd also like to thank you for Marvel's presentation. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Although you didn't say it, I would assume that most of the studies where, and you showed the loss of some aspect of cognitive function with age, that these studies were all or most, all of them I assume, cross-sectional studies. I, as you know, are certainly better than me. The dangers of cross-sectional studies as opposed to longitudinal studies. I wanted to know whether you would be willing to comment on that criticism. I should tell the audience the dangers of doing cross-sectional studies. Remind me of a cross-sectional study done in Miami, Florida, where it was determined that most people are born Hispanic and die Jewish. That's also one of my favorite observations about Florida. You're, of course, entirely right. And when you compare younger and older people at one point in time, you're comparing people who were born at different eras historically, people who had different educational opportunities, different nutritional opportunities, different environments in which they lived. And so if you find differences between old and young, you can never rule out completely that those aren't differences that are reflecting something other than age. The way, we've tried to get around it in a couple ways. But I think probably most importantly, theoretically, is that we've tried to do this experimentally. And that is that we took a finding that has been reported as a difference between young and old in social preferences now. So who do people prefer? And shown that we could eliminate that in old people and we could generate it in young people in the same people by changing the experimental conditions. In that way, I think we were able to get around the cohort problem in that set of studies. In terms of some of the other work and the cognitive work, you're entirely correct that we haven't been able to do that. We're comparing young and old. We are working, however, from the theory that the theory behind it is one in which we have been able to manipulate time and get these differences that are then consistent with the behavioral data that we get. We've also collected longitudinal data on emotional experience in everyday life. So we now have 10 years of data on the same sample of people over time. And indeed, you do see a decrease in the frequency of negative and a maintenance. In fact, what we're getting now longitudinally is a positive increase in positive emotions reported in people over a 10-year period of time. But it's an excellent question. Okay. Dr. Olshanski. Actually, I wanted to congratulate you on a fantastic presentation. You dispelled one of the great myths of aging, of which there are many. So congratulations on that. I wanted to point out that yesterday I did actually comment on when we had survival time. And I said, it's always at the end. Now, of course, what I was talking about was survival time, actually living. And what you were talking about was something a bit different. For those who heard what would appear to be a discrepancy, there's a discrepancy there. I wanted to ask a question about this conversation that we had and the two high school students that were back there earlier because this was an important point. And I was sorry you didn't have more time to talk about it. I know you're pregnant and you're pregnant with a book. Anyone who's writing a book is pregnant. You gestate for a while, you deliver it, and then you show the baby around. You can only say things like this jokingly to women my age. And it's a joke. And the topic of the book is one that I think is extraordinarily important and of course the issue is that in the blink of an eye, as you said, we have experienced aging at a level that no species has ever experienced it before. And everyone here is part of that experiment, that grand experiment in the biology of aging. All of us are living this. And it happens so rapidly that we seem to be unprepared for it. And not only have we been unprepared for what happened during the course of the 20th century, we're trying to accelerate this process much more rapidly in the 21st. So what insights can you tell us about where you're going with this book and this line of reasoning? Thank you so much for the book plug. You have to tell us the title. It will inspire me to finish it. What's the title by the way? The title is The Unexpected Years and it's called that for exactly the reasons that Professor Olszanski is saying it is these are, we didn't anticipate this. I think part of the problem in getting people to think about aging as something that is a crisis and sudden is because aging is as slow and steady as the day is long. I mean, there's nothing much more consistent constant than aging. And so it's hard to get people excited about it enough to say this is dramatic, this is a crisis. But here's what happened. And I sort of think we're forgetting. Well, actually, I wish I heard you talk yesterday because maybe you reminded people that we didn't get this life expectancy increase by people in a gradual way. It really is the reflection of an enormous amount of effort on the part of both scientists and the public to save the lives of the youngest members of our population, that is to reduce infant mortality. And it was around the turn of the 20th century where we threw everything we had at that task. So around the turn of the century in New York City 70% of infants had rickets, 25% of kids died before they were five. And what we said as a society is we're going to fix things so that doesn't happen. So we improved sanitation and we found ways to inoculate children against diseases that were killing them. And in doing so, we inadvertently created old age or an old age. Nobody was really, that wasn't our design, right? But suddenly we have longer, I want to be careful here, not to get this right, it's not longer life span, but longer life expectancy that as many more people who are born are getting the opportunity to live out their lives. Again, what we're kind of doing as a society is saying the sky is falling, everything's bad about this. What we need to do now, it seems to me, and it seems so crystal clear and obvious, we need to throw everything we have in terms of science, technology, and cultural change at the second half of life. We need to now do, for old age or the later years, what we did for the early years. And again, turn of the century, think about what infancy was like. It was not good, infancy in early childhood. And people said nothing could be done, something can be done, it was done, and now we're going to do, we need to do the same thing for the later years. And we can't if we have a sustained scientific and behavioral effort. Dr. Selto, I wanted to ask you something slightly different about when I see my patients who complain of memory disorders and we ask them to remember things. And I think the lessons I've learned from your lecture are very helpful in terms of emotional content and positive versus negative stimuli that we ask them to remember. But in any event, regardless of whether it's positive or negative, it seems that time itself during the testing is very important and that if you give older people considerable more time to perform. And I know this is something that's been studied over the years and I want to ask you as an experimental psychologist whether that is something that is unequivocal, that is definite, that old folks, if they're given twice as long to answer or to try to recall a set of items that have been asked to remember, whether they're emotionally positive or negative, will almost always perform better and will begin to approach the level of young people. My understanding of this literature and it's true in our laboratory is that even with longer time older people do perform better and they do not perform at the levels of younger people on memory tests. So you still see an age-related deficit even with more time. So time doesn't seem to eliminate it altogether. We'll take a couple of questions from the audience here. The idea of not thinking about negative things, is this a form of repression which may not be good for mental health? There are a couple reasons why I think it looks like it's not repression and it's not denial. One is that older adults, again, much to the contrary of popular perceptions, have lower rates of every form of psychiatric disorders except for the dementia. So you see lower rates of depression, of generalized anxiety, of phobias, and so on, and older adults as compared to younger adults. So in fact, in psychopathology, if you're going to measure that as the outcome, they're doing better than their younger and middle-aged counterparts. But the other reason why I would say even sort of in the realm of normal, not having to go to psychopathology, but in that realm, in studies that we and others have done in the laboratory where we bring people into the lab and we induce a negative emotion or a positive emotion. We don't know a lot of this kind of stuff. We bring married couples into the laboratory. We have them talk about conflicts and their relationships. Those are fun studies. When we do that, older people report the same intensity of negative emotion as younger people do. So they're feeling the emotion. The emotion occurs. But it doesn't last as long. They're able to do something to regulate it. Here's a question. Sometimes what people say in class come back to haunt them. I was a student in your psychology of gender class at Stanford, during which you discussed the impact of one's personal life, marital status, happiness, on lifespan and life expectancy. Does one's marital status as a man or woman impact memory or cognitive processing in old age? What a great question. Those Stanford students. Hello? No. We don't find much in the way of gender differences at all in this series of studies. And as this student knows, I'm very interested in gender and the area of emotion is an area where you see a lot of gender differences. But we don't find any kind of age interactions with this. It looks like males and females are both changing in the same way along these dimensions. Okay, I have a couple of questions along this line. Does your research suggest that older people are less likely to respond to negative political ads? Yes. Absolutely it does. And we're now seriously working on some health-related messages. We're working with a health economist, Alan Garber, at Stanford. One of the things we want to do, and I should say a couple of folks who are great, Mark Waldman from Young and Rubicam, the largest ad agency in the country, and they're working with us to develop persuasive health messages that we can use to target older adults. And our thinking is exactly this, to say, you know that advertisement that they've got a fried egg and a skillet, so this is your brain on drugs? We think that kind of an approach would work great with young people, and that's who that ad is targeting, of course. And we think it'd be disastrous with old people. That when you say something terrible is going to happen, if you don't, that it's just not, picture it, remember that, those brain scans. The negative stuff is not getting encoded. Terrific. Because I teach undergraduates who have a, sometimes have a negative view of aging. How might I best advertise the positive aspects of aging? You know, I have found it very successful a successful way to get younger people interested in aging is to talk about these experimental studies where you change the perception of time, because younger people experience that too. So I end up, I teach a freshman seminar on aging and start with talking about relocation. They've just moved from their high schools to the college campus, and you start talking to them about, were they interested in making a lot of new friends just before they moved from home? No. And who did they want to spend time with? They wanted to spend time with their family and their good friends. And then all of a sudden, older people don't look like another species anymore to younger people, but rather, you know, this is, this is, I get it, I relate to it now, and I think that's useful. That's great. Picking up on that question from two younger people here, why is it that younger people have a better performance than older people? This is from David and Erin again, right? My friends. Hi. Well, one thing I'd like to say is it depends on what task. If it's a regulation of emotion, they don't have a better performance than older adults, but I think you're referring to these memory studies. So why do we have this persistent advantage that we see among younger people as compared to older people on these memory tasks? And as I pointed out, even on the ones for the emotional trials, you're still seeing younger people doing better. Most people are thinking that has something to do with the depletion of neurotransmitters, and it's something that's happening very gradually, again, across the lifespan. From the beginning in the 20s, so you know, something happens much later. But from very early on, we see this very steady decline, depletion of neurotransmitters, and most people think that that's what's accounting for this change in memory. So younger people probably have better biology there or memory. Okay. Here's one final question here. This comes from an older person. Have you ever used a memory test designed by old people? The test you described seems biased towards youth. It goes on to say older people simply have experienced slash wisdom to recognize rubbish and to ignore it while younger people are subject to any kind of foolishness. I am with you. I think it's a wonderful idea to get older people to design a memory test. First of all, I've never thought of that, and I think it's fabulous. But I have argued with a lot of cognitive psychologists on exactly the grounds that you just described. That is, we bend over backwards to come up with words lists that are totally meaningless. There are some cognitive psychologists who make up nonsense words and give them to people in studies because they don't want it to have any significance at all. So we strip all the emotional significance of information, then we present it to people. I was in a workshop with the director of the Neuropsychology and Neuroscience section of the National Institute on Aging, and she was listening to the results of this work, and she said, sounds to me like older people are able to separate the grain from the shaft, and younger people aren't. You know, that everything, everything in there, I think it's probably more curious that younger people will remember anything that you present to them than it is that older people are being selective. That's the thing we may have to explain is why it is that younger people will do that. Thank you very much. We will reassemble about a quarter to one for our next plot. Thank you very much.