http://finance.yahoo.com/news/radical-experiment-tried-old-people-204944551.html
The idea that getting old means getting frail and forgetful is so embedded in our cultural understanding of aging that it can be hard to tease apart medical realities and simple biases about the elderly. But Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist, has long wanted to try.
"Social conditions may foster what may erroneously appear to be necessary consequences of aging," Langer suggested in "Old Age: An Artifact?",
a 1981 book chapter. So-called senior moments, after all, are not only
the purview of seniors. "Young nonsenile people also are often
forgetful."
How many of aging's negative effects could be manipulated and even erased by a psychological intervention?
In a radical experiment in 1979 that was featured in a New York Times Magazine cover story last fall, Langer and her grad students decided to take this question as far as they possibly could.
The results were extraordinary,
but the research was also so unorthodox, so small, and so lacking in
rigor 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 old people, mostly
strangers. You've been robbed of your autonomy, maybe even 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 you anymore.
No matter your age, this is not an environment in which most people thrive.
But Langer thought that maybe, just maybe, if you could put people in a
psychologically better setting — one they would associate with a
better, younger version of themselves — their bodies might follow along.
"Wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily putting the body," she
explained many years later, on CBS This Morning.
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