What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [130]
Notes
Introduction
1 “that hulking milestone of mortality”: William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Random House, 1990), 78.
1 In recent years, neuroscientists have been providing news: The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D. (New York: Penguin, 2007), provided a fascinating introduction to neuroplasticity and the scientific pioneers who discovered and mapped the ways in which the structure of the brain changes to meet its challenges. Dr. Doidge’s book captured my imagination and underscored themes that I considered as I gathered my subjects’ stories.
2 79 percent of boomers between fifty and fifty-nine did not intend to voluntarily retire from f ull-time work at the traditional age: The MetLife Foundation/Civic Ventures Encore Career Survey was directed by Phyllis N. Segal of Civic Ventures and conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, Inc., from February to April 2008. It involved 1,063 phone interviews and 2,522 online interviews. By 2008, boomers had rapidly advanced into encore careers without much help from institutions or policy makers, the survey found. Those pursuing encore careers were hardly unusual, amounting to somewhere between 6 and 9.5 percent of those forty-four to seventy years old, or between 5.3 and 8.4 million men and women.
2 encore careers: In Marc Freedman’s Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life (Philadelphia: PublicAffairs, 2007), the founder and CEO of Civic Ventures notes that 25 percent of all U.S. residents will be sixty or older by 2030. In arguing for second careers, Freedman was looking beyond the need for baby boomers to earn money to defray the costs of living longer lives to how they could best use their accumulated knowledge and skills for the greater good, solving society’s largest problems.
3 three pounds of protoplasm: I don’t remember precisely when I first heard Marian C. Diamond, Ph.D., one of the world’s leading neuroanatomists and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, use this phrase to refer to the brain. But she owns it. She has used it often in her writings and university lectures on anatomy, and she used it in a 2009 telephone interview. For forty years, Diamond and her colleagues studied the brain development of rats in enriched and impoverished environments. To create enriched environments, toys were placed in the cages of some rats. Those rats were found to have more connections in their brains than rats that were kept in empty cages. After discovering during a visit to Japan that lab rats there lived much longer than those in her labs, she discovered that touching and holding rats, rather than leaving them untouched in their cages, significantly extended their lifespans.
Surrounding “ourselves with a rich amount of stimuli to fulfill a useful life can mean living a full one hundred years,” Diamond said. She likes to enumerate five commonsense elements to promote ongoing neurological development as we age: diet (particularly protein, vitamin B6, and antioxidants); exercise (an hour a day, she says, is optimal, including balancing on one leg at a time for at least one minute); challenge (because the brain gets bored); novelty (new ideas and activities); and love (a warm, nonsexual touch). At eighty-two, still teaching neuroanatomy at Berkeley, she travels to Cambodia each winter to work with children in a neural development program at an impoverished orphanage run by Buddhist monks. She also continues to swim laps five days a week, at 5:45 a.m., in Berkeley’s Hearst Pool, “where the air is freezing but the water delicious.”
3 the more likely it is to shrink: Numerous skill acquisition studies have found functional enlargement of regions that underlie particular skills. An MRI study by the Wellcome Department