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When I was a boy, one of my most treasured possessions was an oversized, illustrated collection of Greek myths. It was a treasure of adventures: tales of Hercules' strength, Zeus's thunderbolts, and the Fates' power to extend a life...or end it. Today, as I read the collection of books that come across my desk, I see a different set of myths being studied by people my age. These so-called Myths of Aging--such as "Use it or lose it" or "To be old is to be sick"--take almost as many forms as Zeus did in his quest to defile young maidens.
People are lining up to torch these dry, crackling myths. In Successful Aging (Pantheon, 1998), John W. Rowe, M.D., formerly at Harvard Medical School and now at Columbia University, and Robert L. Kahn, Ph.D., use the results of the landmark MacArthur Foundation Study of Aging in America to take aim at a few of these myths, such as "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." Rowe and Kahn correctly point out that there are thousands of examples of older people who earn degrees in previously unfamiliar fields, launch new businesses after retirement age, learn to survive in harsh foreign environments, or take on the challenge of new languages, musical instruments, or art forms.
The razing of such simplistic axioms comes as a great relief to those of us--all of us--who are among the aging, and contributes to a widespread belief that most of our negative impressions about aging are invalid. Increasingly, we hear that aging will be "what you make it." Late life appears as a clean slate, perhaps even a reprieve from the pressures of young adulthood, just waiting to be fashioned into our own version of strategically active serenity.
Yet in depicting aging this way, we may be creating new myths. Broad brush strokes can't convey the variability of aging: the deeper we delve into its mysteries, the more we realize it is anything but a uniform experience. Some species, such as salmon, age very quickly as they mature sexually. Some turtles and pelagic birds, on the other hand, appear not to age in the conventional sense of losing physical capacity, although in time they do die, even when guarded from predation and disease. For humans, aging is a very personal phenomenon; some of us will age extremely well, while others will be stricken severely with disease.
As Rowe and Kahn show, healthful practices have the potential to extend one's healthy life span significantly, thus making the experience of aging even more worthwhile. But for many people, aging still takes a significant toll on mental and physical abilities. In The Nine Myths of Aging (W.H. Freeman, 1998), Douglas Powell, Ed.D. '59, consultant in psychology at Harvard University Health Services, concurs with Rowe and Kahn that older people can learn. Powell maintains, however, that there are clear differences between the capabilities of younger and older people, even healthy older people, when groups are considered en masse. Research in both humans and animals has shown that keeping one's mind active maintains its sharpness, yet age sets limits to how much benefit such mental bench-pressing provides. Powell's study of more than 1,000 physicians between the ages 25 and 92 showed a marked drop-off in spatial thinking and ability. Fifty-year-old doctors scored 20 percent worse than 30-year-olds, and between the ages of 50 and 70, the average physician lost another 27 percent of spatial ability. Powell believes that "Use it and lose it anyway" is probably a more accurate description of the state of affairs for most people.
"There's this bland assumption that as long as you continue to exercise your mind you'll be able to continue functioning at a high level, and that's not true at all," Powell says. "We've known for a long time that people who continue to 'use it' mentally do not necessarily perform at the same high levels as their younger colleagues."
It's somewhat dispiriting to acknowledge that aging is going to have some effects we won't be able to ignore or prevent. But Powell thinks it's better to see the punch coming, rather than be conned into complacency. In the same vein, he says, most people think that good mental and physical health go together in old age. According to Powell, that's a myth, too. When he tested 50 retired Harvard faculty and staff members living in the Boston area, he found little or no correlation between their overall physical health and their scores on a test of mental ability. A healthy heart was the only physical attribute associated with good mental function. "It's possible to have quite a bit wrong physically and still be at the top of your game intellectually," he says. "You can be taking a lot of medication and score quite well on IQ tests.
"Cutting cholesterol and avoiding smoking were associated with a substantial decrease in the percentage of people who needed assistance with activities of daily living, like dressing and cooking," Powell reports. "That's moving in the right direction, but we still have to be careful with assumptions that promise too much. A proper diet can't get you to live to 115, and even if it could, would it be worth extending your life if you had to starve yourself?"
Although they are clearly important, diet and lifestyle factors are only part of the story of aging well. But if working out the mind and body won't guarantee a healthy old age, what accounts for the difference between someone who develops Alzheimer's disease at 50 and someone like MIT professor of mathematics emeritus Dirk Struik, who is still writing and lecturing in his field at the age of 104?
The answer will probably come from genetics. Research by Thomas Perls, M.D., M.P.H. '93, and Margery Silver, Ed.D. '82, indicates that extreme longevity, which by its nature requires healthy aging, runs in families. Perls has identified several families in which healthy longevity appears to span generations. The genetic associations are so strong, in fact, that Perls believes there may be a very small number of extremely poweful genes that determine the rate at which we age. It is quite possible that a significant proportion of people have genes that would allow them to live into their eighties in relatively good health. But we won't know for sure until more people reject the lifestyle choices--like smoking, obesity, high-fat diets, and sedentary living--that shorten life span. Right now, our only hope is to maximize the genetic endowment we have with sensible practices, like getting plenty of regular exercise and taking the brain out for a challenging spin on a regular basis. Such healthy habits won't guarantee us a longer ride on life's freeway, but they can make the road smoother as far as we go.
Whether they portray aging as a curse or a boon, the myths of aging are based on generalization, which is to say they're not generally useful. Research on aging is moving fast, and in the coming years it may be possible to avoid or slow down many of the associated changes that cause us to fear old age. But until science reveals conclusively how many of these unwanted changes are due to lifestyle, how much depends on our individual genetic configurations, and how much is caused by disease, we'll have to treat all our assumptions about aging--exciting and attractive as they may appear--as modern myths.