The NYT Mag­a­zine today is devoted to the topic of Can Sci­ence Tell us Who Grows Wiser.

It may have been even bet­ter had the ques­tion been, “What Sci­ence Tells us About How we Can Grow Wiser”, but it is a pretty good issue anyway.

A very good arti­cle on The Older–and–Wiser Hypoth­e­sis. Quotes: 

• One of the most inter­est­ing areas of neu­ro­science research involves look­ing at the way peo­ple reg­u­late their emo­tions and how that reg­u­la­tion can change over the course of a life­time. Laura Carstensen of Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity has pro­duced a sub­stan­tial body of research over the past two decades show­ing that the abil­ity to focus on emo­tional con­trol is tightly linked to a person’s sense of time and that older peo­ple in gen­eral seem to have a bet­ter feel for keep­ing their emo­tions in bal­ance. This has emerged in part from a long-running research project known infor­mally at Stan­ford as the “beeper study.”
• What the Stan­ford researchers have found — in the lab­o­ra­tory and out in the world — is that despite the well-documented cog­ni­tive declines asso­ci­ated with advanc­ing age, older peo­ple seem to have fig­ured out how to man­age their emo­tions in a pro­foundly impor­tant way. Com­pared with younger peo­ple, they expe­ri­ence neg­a­tive emo­tions less fre­quently, exer­cise bet­ter con­trol over their emo­tions and rely on a com­plex and nuanced emo­tional ther­mo­stat that allows them to bounce back quickly from adverse moments. Indeed, they typ­i­cally strive for emo­tional bal­ance, which in turn seems to affect the ways their brains process infor­ma­tion from their environment.

We met Prof. Laura L. Carstensen recently. As we write in Stan­ford Media X: “Cells that fire together wire together”, her main mes­sage was that

• Tech­nol­ogy & Sci­ence has been improv­ing Biol­ogy for the last 150 years, and now we need to focus on how to help peo­ple remain phys­i­cally fit and men­tally sharp as we age
• We need to rede­fine “aging”. Nowa­days, there are many role mod­els in their 70s and 80s that show how age is not an obsta­cle for being active con­trib­u­tors in society

Other good arti­cles in the NY TImes Magazine:

• Mus­cu­lar Metaphor on Posit Sci­ence and other brain fit­ness programs
• A Longer, Bet­ter Life on our “health spans”

Related pre­vi­ous posts:

Baby Boomers, Healthy Aging and Job Performance

The way we age now

The Upside of Aging-WSJ

Emo­tional self-regulation and biofeedback

And, in gen­eral, you may enjoy brows­ing our Brain Fit­ness Topics

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