People Who Tried to Get Young Again
The thought that getting old means getting frail and forgetful is so embedded in our cultural agreement of ageing that it can be hard to tease apart medical realities and simple biases about the elderly. Simply Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist, has long wanted to endeavor.
"Social weather may foster what may erroneously appear to be necessary consequences of ageing," Langer suggested in "Old Age: An Artifact?", a 1981 book chapter. So-chosen "senior moments," after all, are not only the purview of seniors. "Young nonsenile people also are often forgetful."
How many of ageing's negative furnishings could exist manipulated and even erased past a psychological intervention?
In a radical experiment in 1979 that was featured in a New York Times Magazine cover story concluding autumn, Langer and her grad students decided to take this question as far every bit they perhaps could.
The results were boggling — but the research was also so unorthodox, and so minor, and and so defective in rigour that interpreting exactly what those results mean requires caution.
The 'counterclockwise' study
Imagine, for a moment, living in a nursing home. Your meals are in a cafeteria, your recreation is at scheduled times, and you're surrounded by other sometime people, mostly strangers. You've been robbed of your autonomy, maybe fifty-fifty your identity — the very things that make you you may be more tied to your past than your present, and nobody expects very much of y'all anymore.
No matter your age, this is not an surround in which most people thrive. But Langer thought that peradventure, just mayhap, if you could put people in a psychologically improve setting — ane they would associate with a better, younger version of themselves — their bodies might follow along. "Wherever y'all put the listen, you're necessarily putting the body," she explained many years afterward, on CBS This Morning.
Since Langer couldn't actually send elderly people into the by, she decided to bring the by into the present. "We would recreate the world of 1959 and ask subjects to live as though information technology were 20 years before," she wrote, in her 2009 book "Counterclockwise."
How exactly did that work? Here's how Bruce Grierson described the beginning of this experiment in The New York Times Magazine:
Eight men in their 70s stepped out of a van in forepart of a converted monastery in New Hampshire. They shuffled forward, a few of them arthritically stooped, a couple with canes. Then they passed through the door and entered a time warp. Perry Como crooned on a vintage radio. Ed Sullivan welcomed guests on a black-and-white Television set. Everything inside — including the books on the shelves and the magazines lying around — were designed to conjure 1959.
The men didn't just reminisce about what things were like at that time (a command grouping did that). They were instructed to behave as if it were actually 1959, while the control group lived in a like surroundings but didn't act every bit if it were decades ago.
They discussed historical events as if they were current news, and no provisions were made that best-selling the men's weakened physical state; no i carried their bags or helped them upwards the stairs or treated them like they were old.
"Zip — no mirrors, no modern-day vesture, no photos except portraits of their much younger selves — spoiled the illusion that they had shaken off 22 years," Grierson wrote.
A week later, both the control group and the experimental group showed improvements in "physical strength, transmission dexterity, gait, posture, perception, memory, noesis, taste sensitivity, hearing, and vision," Langer wrote in "Counterclockwise."
And according to Langer's account, most of those improvements were much more significant in the grouping told to alive as if it were actually 1959; a full 63% of them had better scores at the end of the experiment than they did at the offset, compared to 44% in the control group. Four contained volunteers, who knew nothing almost the study, looked at before-and-afterwards photos of the men in the experimental grouping and perceived those in the "after" photos as an average of two years younger than those in the "before."
On the last 24-hour interval of the study, Langer wrote, men "who had seemed so delicate" merely days before ended up playing "an impromptu touch on football game on the front lawn."
In some ways, the results should non exist surprising. Grierson writes that Langer actually said to the participants that "nosotros have practiced reason to believe that if you are successful at this, you will feel every bit you did in 1959."
When yous believe that something volition affect yous in a particular style, it ofttimes does. That's why placebo controls are broiled into every rigorous clinical trial.
Your own expectations, and the expectations of others, are powerful. And expectations of the failing cognitive and physical abilities that come with age are pervasive.
But equally Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow noted in The Boston Globe Ideas section, in a story about the power of placebos, "there are limits to even the strongest placebo upshot. No simulation could ready a broken arm, of course, or clear a blocked artery. As a rule, placebos appear to affect symptoms rather than underlying diseases."
Nonetheless, Langer seemed to take the "counterclockwise" results as further confirmation of her theories near the ability of the mind over the body, even as fuel for her argument that — as she wrote in 1981 — "many of the consequences of old historic period may be environmentally determined and thereby potentially reversed through manipulations of the environment."
Years after, she remained convinced. "These findings are in some ways astounding," Langer said, in a 2010 BBC documentary. "Call up, old people are only supposed to become worse."
Science… or stunt?
Langer has talked and written nigh her "counterclockwise" experiment many times in the decades since it happened. She offered the near detailed record of it in a chapter of an Oxford University Press book she co-edited.
The findings, however, were never actually published in a peer-reviewed periodical. And they were never replicated, except as fabricated-for-TV stunts.
"Langer's sensibility can feel at odds with the rigors of gimmicky academia," Grierson wrote, in The New York Times Magazine article. "Sometimes she will give equal weight to casually hatched ideas and peer-reviewed studies."
In an interview almost his cover story, Grierson best-selling that while Langer'southward unorthodox techniques may inspire wonder, they should also provoke scepticism. "She's all the same pretty far out at that place on a limb with some of this piece of work," he said. "People won't be convinced until it has been replicated under strictly controlled weather. Nor should they be."
James Coyne, a longtime University of Pennsylvania psychologist and an indefatigable sceptic, goes fifty-fifty further.
"Ellen Langer's identification as an eminent, well-published Harvard psychologist is an important office of her branding and the promotion of herself…. Yet, she assumes none of the responsibleness that goes with existence a scientist," he argues, in a critical response to Grierson's commodity on the blog Science-Based Medicine. "She does non consistently submit her piece of work to peer review. She makes references to unpublished studies, fifty-fifty those that have remained so for many years… Langer has published in scientific journals, but she is not otherwise interim like a scientist."
Coyne takes issue not merely with the unpublished counterclockwise experiment, but as well with some of Langer's other work — especially her plans to test her theories in an upcoming study of cancer patients, who will be told to live as if information technology is 2003, earlier they had any signs of illness.
As Grierson writes, "positive psychology doesn't have a great track tape as a manner to fight cancer."
Looking frontward
The media and general public seems to be especially absorbed past the counterclockwise report — intuitively appealing in a society so fearful of ageing — but information technology's of form merely i part of Langer'south decades-spanning career.
While there are enough of compelling reasons to exist sceptical of her most famous experiment (and, Coyne argues, many others as well), the takeaways from virtually of Langer's work remain compelling: Mindfulness (witting awareness of and focus on the present moment) is important; placebo effects cannot be discounted; and evidence supports the benefits of making sure people maintain agency and independence as they go older.
And then what if nosotros tin can't actually plow back the clock? Our lives need not exist dictated by it.
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Source: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/ellen-langers-reversing-aging-experiment-2015-4
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