Home | Bio | About the Book | Reviews | Other Writings | Blog | Buy the book Note: This article originally appeared in the July 26 issue of the Australian. Life Sentence Some scientists reckon humans soon will be living to 200, at least. The problem with that, Carl Elliott writes, is not whether we will get bored but that we will become boring At a recent meeting about the ethics of anti-ageing therapies, I heard a Canadian bioethicist argue the virtues of immortality. She especially wanted to rebut the argument that immortality would be boring. One counter-example, she said, was that dogs seem able to do the same things over and over without getting bored. Also, many people never seem to get bored watching hockey on television. I thought I had heard about every possible argument for bio-enhancement, but this was new to me. Is this what we have to look forward to? Immortality, with Canadians and their dogs watching cable TV? It was not so long ago that anti-ageing therapies were exclusively the province of hucksters, quacks and wishful thinkers. These days, thanks to geneticists, the biology of ageing is being taken seriously. Now that it is possible to extend the life span of worms, fruit flies and mice by manipulating their genetic material, bioethicists have started to ask: What would happen if the same could be done for humans? The President's Council on Bioethics in the US has begun to look at the issue. What would our lives be like if we could live two or three times as long as we do now, without the long period of physical decline at the end? Maybe the worry about anti-ageing therapies is not that we will become bored but that we will become boring. What strikes fear into many young people as they contemplate the passing years is the perception that middle-aged and older people live such dull lives. The older we get, the more set in our ways we become, so by the time we hit 70 we are as rigid and inflexible as a six-year-old who refuses to eat anything but fish and chips. Is there any truth to this stereotype? Is there something about the ageing brain that makes us less receptive to novel ideas, activities or tastes? If so, could it be reversed? There are sophisticated psychologists and neurobiologists doing studies in cognitive ageing who could speculate on these questions with great facility. Unfortunately, I'm not one of them. I am, however, a regular reader of The New Yorker, which published an essay on this question a few years ago by Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky, who started thinking about novelty after observing his young administrative assistant, Paul. Paul was just out of college and, like most college students, he listened to a lot of music in the office. Sapolsky found this irritating, not because he disliked the music but because the music was so unpredictable. One day Sonic Youth, the next day jazz; one day, Gregorian chants, the next, Woody Herman. Paul seemed remarkably open to new things and not just in music. He'd wear his hair long for months, then turn up to work bald. He'd spend a weekend watching Indian musicals, then the next day reading Chaucer. Sapolsky, who had just turned 40, started to think: How long has it been since I've listened to any new music? And why do I always order the same dishes at restaurants? He theorised that most people have a window of opportunity to develop a cultural taste and that this window gradually closes as a person gets older. He decided to test his theory on three kinds of tastes: music, food and fashion. But, to test the theory, he needed data on the ages at which people developed these tastes. For music, he had his research assistants call up "period" radio stations -- stations that specialised in 1940s swing music, for example, or '70s heavy metal -- and find out the average age of their listeners. For food, he did the same thing with sushi restaurants in the US midwest (reasoning that most new sushi-eaters in Omaha or Duluth would need to be pretty receptive to novelty). For fashion, he decided on San Francisco Bay area body-piercing parlours. After many phone calls, Sapolsky began to see some patterns. Most people, he found, develop a taste for what will become their favourite style of music before they are 20. In fact, if you are over 35 when a particular style of popular music is introduced, the odds are greater than 95 per cent that you will never choose to listen to it. Sapolsky says the music window closes at 35. The food window closes a bit later. If you were older than 39 when sushi arrived in your midwestern town, the odds were greater than 95 per cent that you would never try it. The fashion window, in contrast, slams shut early -- by 23. The typical customer at a body-piercing shop is 18 or younger. If you have passed 23 and still have not gotten, say, a barbell inserted in your penis, there is a 95 per cent chance that you never will. So much for new tastes. What about new ideas? Is there any truth to the cliche that we become less intellectually adventurous as we age? The classic work here is an eccentric book published in 1953 by Harvey Lehman called Age and Achievement. Lehman's topic is the correlation between age and outstanding performance, and there is virtually no kind of outstanding performance that escapes his gaze. Lehman examines bacteriology, physics and opera singing. He measures outstanding performance in philosophy, golf, poetry, rifle shooting and bowling. He even charts the national corn-husking championships. His research method is simple. First he compiles a "best of" list -- best oil paintings, all-time classic children's books, great achievements in hymn-writing. Then he matches up each great achievement with the age at which the person achieved it. The result is a series of charts mapping the great achievements with five-year spans of the achievers' lives. For anyone over 40, these charts make for depressing reading. Surgeons, geologists and opera composers all peak before 39. Amateur bowlers and writers of children's literature do their best work before 34. Chemists do their best work before 30. In most fields, the golden years for creative work fall between 30 and 40. (The 70s, says Lehman, are the "wooden years".) Only when Lehman starts to examine earned income, industrial leadership and membership in the British cabinet do the curves on this charts shift favourably towards the later stages of life. The latest addition to this debate comes from Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. In the current issue of the Journal of Research in Personality, Kanazawa charts the biographies of great scientists and, like Lehman, he finds that the productivity of these scientists peaks when they are in their mid-30s. But the same pattern applies to criminals. Murderers and thieves, he notes, also peak when they are young adults. Criminal behaviour rises in adolescence, crescendos in early adulthood, then levels off about 40. The key to understanding this similarity, believes Kanazawa, lies in the fact both scientists and criminals are much more likely to be men than women. Success in science or crime has less to do with creativity or criminal genius than with the desire for sex. Both science and crime are kinds of "cultural display". The aims of such displays in the "ancestral environment" that shaped us genetically, Kanazawa argues, was to attract women and pass one's genes on to the next generation. Scientists and criminals are all very interesting, especially in the "just-so" stories that evolutionary psychologists like to tell. But the really pressing question is: What about philosophy lecturers like me? When do we peak? According to Lehman, philosophy lecturers, like surgeons and geologists, head downhill after 40. But for us there is one small consolation -- the ride down is much slower. The drop-off in quality of philosophical work is apparently not very steep until we reach our 50s and 60s. In fact, measured in terms of sheer quantity, the drop-off does not appear until a time close to death. Many of us keep on writing philosophy well into our 80s. The only problem is that it is not much good. So there is hope. As Lehman takes care to point out, Benjamin Franklin was 78 when he invented bifocals and Goethe finished Faust when he was 80. For every Jane Austen, who published Pride and Prejudice at 20, there is a Samuel Johnson, who published the Lives of the English Poets when he was 72. In philosophy, maybe the most encouraging example is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who published his first great work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, when he was a young man, then did even greater work later in his life with his Philosophical Investigations. The downside, of course, is that Philosophical Investigations was not published until Wittgenstein was dead. Carl Elliott teaches philosophy and bioethics at the University of Minnesota, and is visiting associate professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He is the author of Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (W.W. Norton, 2003).

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