8 ms·

I too would like to live forever, but one problem I see is that if you just extend peoples physical age but their minds become frozen in time, then all progress

I too would like to live forever, but one problem I see is that if you just extend peoples physical age but their minds become frozen in time, then all progress stops. It is well known that as people age their neural plasticity degrades and they loose the ability to learn anything new. I have observed this with my Dad who is 84. If people lived to be 1000 but their neural plasticity was gone by 120, we would still have slavery, women would not be able to vote and we would still be riding around in horse and buggy. There has been a lot of speculation that progress in technology or society or both has slowed are stopped. I think if true, it is likely due to an aging population. In addition to slowing the physical aging process, there would need to also be a way to somehow maintain peoples brain function, including neural plasticity.

andyrj 12y ago
Anything other than your speculation to back up your belief in individuals neural plasticity having anything to do with the social advances you mention? Young people have not had a great record of voting. So those changes you are attributing to neural plasticity are likely brought about by those old frozen minds you mention, and less so the young plyable ones if you ask me. But everyone has a right to an opinion I suppose.
- kcovia 12y ago
  Check out The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for an argument for this in the science world: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_R... In a nutshell: people don't change fundamental beliefs, even when confronted with evidence. Instead, they die off and the newer generation adopts the new theory.
  - kiba 12y ago
    I am sure Einstein and his generation would like a word with you.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - zw123456 12y ago
      Most of what Einstein achieved were during his miracle years from 1905 - 1915 when he was in his 20's and 30's. But just to level set, I am not an ageist, I am 58 years old. And all this is just my opinion of course, but I find for myself it is harder and harder to accept new ideas. But being aware of this, I try to always listen and embrace new "crazy" ideas young people come up with. I think older people like me have wisdom and younger people have new ideas and if there was a way to combine those things it would be powerful. Perhaps stating the obvious there.
  - benbreen 12y ago
    That really isn't what Kuhn is getting at with the idea of a paradigm shift. It's not an argument based on generational age or demographics, it's more about observational data slowly accumulating until current explanatory models become untenable. The people doing the accumulating and the people doing the sudden theoretical shift aren't necessarily the old in one camp and the young in the other. Granted I do see how that argument could be made, given the fact that a lot of the famous paradigm shifts were made by people in their 20s - it just isn't Kuhn's argument.
- nitrogen 12y ago
  Young people don't vote in part because they feel like there are too many old people voting for their votes to make a difference.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  "Anything other than your speculation to back up your belief in individuals neural plasticity having anything to do with the social advances you mention?" You seem deeply confused. If those changes happened entirely because old people changed their minds, then individual neuroplasticity has a tremendous amount to do with the changes mentioned. On the flip side, in a world with no neuroplasticity at all, we would only see change when people are born with different views. "Young people have not had a great record of voting. So those changes you are attributing to neural plasticity are likely brought about by those old frozen minds you mention, and less so the young plyable ones if you ask me." "Young people" and "old people" are not static sets. Imagine a world where young people change their mind frequently until 25, when they stop changing their mind and start voting. You would never see the mind of any individual over-25-year-old change, but the distribution of views in the over-25 population would still change as people enter and leave that population. If social change requires support of some proportion of that population, stopping people from leaving it will slow social change. I have no strong opinion about just how much our world resembles that one, but your reasoning does not support your claim here. There is some evidence that neuroplasticity tends to decline as people age.
- zo1 12y ago
  Just like to add that voting isn't the only means to affecting change in this world.
anon4 12y ago
I don't think you can extrapolate like that. The computer revolution took place much faster than generation turnover did, for example. And if the young ever find themselves under the yoke of a bunch of really old people, with no prospects at all, you can bet the more violent ones will take it upon themselves to "even the scales". Adapt or perish will continue to hold, it might just not look quite like what you're used to.
chubot 12y ago
It would be pretty interesting if you had more than 3-4 generations at a time (say a generation is 30 years, then 3 x 30 = 90). I think the significance of a generation is as you say: in human terms, it seems the vast majority of your personality and outlook is formed by age 30. If people lived to be 1000 years old, then you would have 33 different generations at once. At the very least, those 33 different generations will tend to cluster together socially, to the exclusion of another. They will have come of age with the same events. You already hear people in their 30's talking about how they don't understand what teenagers are doing (Snapchat, etc.). Imagine if there were 32 other generations to comprehend: you would have to be an expert in history to even relate to people. People already say that baby boomers have hogged wealth at the expense of their children and younger generations. I haven't investigated those claims in detail but it seems plausible. You would probably see different generations fighting for policy that favors them. I mean it would be hard to imagine this NOT happening.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  >People already say that baby boomers have hogged wealth at the expense of their children and younger generations. I haven't investigated those claims in detail but it seems plausible. This generational warfare meme is pushed by, among others, Stan Druckenmiller: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/three-card-monte-generational-warfare.html http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/three-card-monte-gene... You'll note that they push both sides at once. Boomers are told that millenials are feckless and lazy. Millenials are told that Boomers screwed up the economy and are hogging all the wealth. Divide and conquer. It's working, too.
  - marincounty 12y ago
    I'm a boomer, and I just want to state I don't feel 'millennials are feckless and lazy'! I get so tired of every generation looking for fault in the new generation. As a kid--my father never stopped complaining about the Hippies, even though deep down inside he had the same values, but did what society dictated. I always knew he wanted more out of life than going to a job he really didn't like, and putting up with a partner who just complained. He died from liver cancer at 64. Yes, due to drinking. He was a good man and tried to rebel againts the system in little ways, but I always knew the life he kinda picked, or fell into is not the life ge really wanted. I rember as a child he once told me, he would probally like the effect of heroin if it wasn't so dangerous. He repeated that stement many times over the course of his life. Years later, I still wonder how such a convective man could even go to those dark areas? I am sharring too much? I just want to go on the record as I'm sick of the sterotypes(hippies, generation z,y,x etc., hipsters, all of them). While, I on the box. I wish society would stop judging me by what I do. I have never liked the obligatory "What do you do?". Maybe, it's just an American thing? When I used to go to clubs if the "wdyd" came out if a person's mouth; I just politely answered, and walked away. Sorry, about rambling. I'm just venting.
michaelochurch 12y ago
Not everyone loses neural plasticity. Some people are as sharp at 90 as at 25. Some begin to decline in their 20s (especially if heavy use of drugs is involved). Aging is a phenomenally hard problem. I have no idea whether it will be "solved" in 25 years or 100 or 2500 or never... but I'd imagine that neural plasticity is but a small subproblem of it.
- mistercow 12y ago
  > Not everyone loses neural plasticity. Some people are as sharp at 90 as at 25. Is there documented evidence of this. Some people do better than others, obviously, but I find it hard to believe that anyone has literally as much plasticity at 90 as they did at 25. > Some begin to decline in their 20s (especially if heavy use of drugs is involved). Probably should be more specific than "drugs", since most drugs have no effect on neuroplasticity, and some drugs appear to actually enhance it.
modeless 12y ago
I don't think anyone needs to worry about a hypothetical future where medical science has cured cancer, Alzheimer's, and every other disease, but somehow has failed to restore neuroplasticity. Restoring neuroplasticity is a tiny, easy task compared to all the other breakthroughs needed to reverse or stop aging.
- reasonattlm 12y ago
  Absolutely. There is something about the defeat of degenerative aging as a topic that causes people to fall off the rails of simple logic and common sense that they'll apply to every other type of medical research currently in progress. The goal in the research community is health assurance, so of course every aspect of aging that impacts health will be addressed. The goal of people who are in the market for health assurance technologies will also be for all aspects of aging that impact health and function to be addressed. So it seems rather unlikely outside of dystopian fiction that we'll run into a situation in which everything except aspect X gets fixed. This is especially true because the hundreds of distinct manifestations of degenerative aging are caused at root by only a small handful of distinct types of damage [1] resulting from the normal operation of metabolism. Effective treatments will be those that repair the root cause damage, each damage repair approach (and especially in conjunction with the other approaches) being capable of treating and preventing whole swathes of age-related conditions. So it would be exceedingly implausible for any particular aspect of aging to stand alone and unaffected by repair strategies for aging. [1]: http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research
- cafebeen 12y ago
  Any evidence to qualify the "tiny, easy task" claim? IIRC, plasticity likely involves interactions of many neurons and is not well understood...
mistercow 12y ago
Fixing loss of brain plasticity is definitely part of the problem that needs to be solved, but I suspect we'll get there before we extend life expectancy to 120 regardless.
thangalin 12y ago
Valproate, valproic acid, and sodium butyrate affect histone deacetylase, which might help rejuvenate brain plasticity. See also: * http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2010.07261.x/abstract;jsessionid=CED43539E0637410DE55806D431EFDB2.f03t02 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2010.... * http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24831-learning-drugs-reawaken-grownup-brains-inner-child.html#.VLLa_l2Yp_J http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24831-learning-drugs-r... * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleability_of_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleability_of_intelligence
- DanBC 12y ago
  Valproate is used as an anti-epileptic and as a mood stabiliser. There are some risks of PCOS for women, but those risks have never been explained properly to me.
  - derefr 12y ago
    The connection that immediately leaps to mind is the role of dopamine in inhibiting prolactin—if you have a slight hormone production imbalance on the thyroid/pituitary axis, decreasing dopamine production (and thus increasing prolactin) could exacerbate it.
  - scythe 12y ago
    Valproate causes massive weight gain. It likely exacerbates any conditions (incl. PCOS) associated with obesity.
_greim_ 12y ago
Let's assume that we did in fact solve every aspect of aging except somehow for neural plasticity, and that this did in fact cause social progress to freeze. Would you be okay with killing fifty million people per year, perpetually, in order to achieve some ideal vision of social progress? Wouldn't that make you worse than all the evil dictators in history, combined? I'd argue that this isn't a position we can seriously consider while maintaining our essential humanity.
iwince 12y ago
Aging does not necessarily stop the ability to learn anything new. You cited your dad so I'll cite mine, he taught himself assembly programming for fun when he was in his late 60's. He lived to be 75 but always challenged himself to learn and do new things. "There is solid evidence that neurogenesis (birth of brain cells) occurs in the adult, mammalian brain—and such changes can persist well into old age." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity Here's another case cited in the same article above, "His father’s story was firsthand evidence that a ‘late recovery’ could occur even with a massive lesion in an elderly person." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

andyrj 12y ago

Anything other than your speculation to back up your belief in individuals neural plasticity having anything to do with the social advances you mention? Young people have not had a great record of voting. So those changes you are attributing to neural plasticity are likely brought about by those old frozen minds you mention, and less so the young plyable ones if you ask me. But everyone has a right to an opinion I suppose.

kcovia 12y ago
Check out The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for an argument for this in the science world: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_R... In a nutshell: people don't change fundamental beliefs, even when confronted with evidence. Instead, they die off and the newer generation adopts the new theory.
- kiba 12y ago
  I am sure Einstein and his generation would like a word with you.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - zw123456 12y ago
    Most of what Einstein achieved were during his miracle years from 1905 - 1915 when he was in his 20's and 30's. But just to level set, I am not an ageist, I am 58 years old. And all this is just my opinion of course, but I find for myself it is harder and harder to accept new ideas. But being aware of this, I try to always listen and embrace new "crazy" ideas young people come up with. I think older people like me have wisdom and younger people have new ideas and if there was a way to combine those things it would be powerful. Perhaps stating the obvious there.
- benbreen 12y ago
  That really isn't what Kuhn is getting at with the idea of a paradigm shift. It's not an argument based on generational age or demographics, it's more about observational data slowly accumulating until current explanatory models become untenable. The people doing the accumulating and the people doing the sudden theoretical shift aren't necessarily the old in one camp and the young in the other. Granted I do see how that argument could be made, given the fact that a lot of the famous paradigm shifts were made by people in their 20s - it just isn't Kuhn's argument.
nitrogen 12y ago
Young people don't vote in part because they feel like there are too many old people voting for their votes to make a difference.
dllthomas 12y ago
"Anything other than your speculation to back up your belief in individuals neural plasticity having anything to do with the social advances you mention?" You seem deeply confused. If those changes happened entirely because old people changed their minds, then individual neuroplasticity has a tremendous amount to do with the changes mentioned. On the flip side, in a world with no neuroplasticity at all, we would only see change when people are born with different views. "Young people have not had a great record of voting. So those changes you are attributing to neural plasticity are likely brought about by those old frozen minds you mention, and less so the young plyable ones if you ask me." "Young people" and "old people" are not static sets. Imagine a world where young people change their mind frequently until 25, when they stop changing their mind and start voting. You would never see the mind of any individual over-25-year-old change, but the distribution of views in the over-25 population would still change as people enter and leave that population. If social change requires support of some proportion of that population, stopping people from leaving it will slow social change. I have no strong opinion about just how much our world resembles that one, but your reasoning does not support your claim here. There is some evidence that neuroplasticity tends to decline as people age.
zo1 12y ago
Just like to add that voting isn't the only means to affecting change in this world.

anon4 12y ago

I don't think you can extrapolate like that. The computer revolution took place much faster than generation turnover did, for example. And if the young ever find themselves under the yoke of a bunch of really old people, with no prospects at all, you can bet the more violent ones will take it upon themselves to "even the scales". Adapt or perish will continue to hold, it might just not look quite like what you're used to.

chubot 12y ago

It would be pretty interesting if you had more than 3-4 generations at a time (say a generation is 30 years, then 3 x 30 = 90). I think the significance of a generation is as you say: in human terms, it seems the vast majority of your personality and outlook is formed by age 30. If people lived to be 1000 years old, then you would have 33 different generations at once. At the very least, those 33 different generations will tend to cluster together socially, to the exclusion of another. They will have come of age with the same events. You already hear people in their 30's talking about how they don't understand what teenagers are doing (Snapchat, etc.). Imagine if there were 32 other generations to comprehend: you would have to be an expert in history to even relate to people. People already say that baby boomers have hogged wealth at the expense of their children and younger generations. I haven't investigated those claims in detail but it seems plausible. You would probably see different generations fighting for policy that favors them. I mean it would be hard to imagine this NOT happening.

crdoconnor 12y ago
>People already say that baby boomers have hogged wealth at the expense of their children and younger generations. I haven't investigated those claims in detail but it seems plausible. This generational warfare meme is pushed by, among others, Stan Druckenmiller: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/three-card-monte-generational-warfare.html http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/three-card-monte-gene... You'll note that they push both sides at once. Boomers are told that millenials are feckless and lazy. Millenials are told that Boomers screwed up the economy and are hogging all the wealth. Divide and conquer. It's working, too.
- marincounty 12y ago
  I'm a boomer, and I just want to state I don't feel 'millennials are feckless and lazy'! I get so tired of every generation looking for fault in the new generation. As a kid--my father never stopped complaining about the Hippies, even though deep down inside he had the same values, but did what society dictated. I always knew he wanted more out of life than going to a job he really didn't like, and putting up with a partner who just complained. He died from liver cancer at 64. Yes, due to drinking. He was a good man and tried to rebel againts the system in little ways, but I always knew the life he kinda picked, or fell into is not the life ge really wanted. I rember as a child he once told me, he would probally like the effect of heroin if it wasn't so dangerous. He repeated that stement many times over the course of his life. Years later, I still wonder how such a convective man could even go to those dark areas? I am sharring too much? I just want to go on the record as I'm sick of the sterotypes(hippies, generation z,y,x etc., hipsters, all of them). While, I on the box. I wish society would stop judging me by what I do. I have never liked the obligatory "What do you do?". Maybe, it's just an American thing? When I used to go to clubs if the "wdyd" came out if a person's mouth; I just politely answered, and walked away. Sorry, about rambling. I'm just venting.

michaelochurch 12y ago

Not everyone loses neural plasticity. Some people are as sharp at 90 as at 25. Some begin to decline in their 20s (especially if heavy use of drugs is involved). Aging is a phenomenally hard problem. I have no idea whether it will be "solved" in 25 years or 100 or 2500 or never... but I'd imagine that neural plasticity is but a small subproblem of it.

mistercow 12y ago
> Not everyone loses neural plasticity. Some people are as sharp at 90 as at 25. Is there documented evidence of this. Some people do better than others, obviously, but I find it hard to believe that anyone has literally as much plasticity at 90 as they did at 25. > Some begin to decline in their 20s (especially if heavy use of drugs is involved). Probably should be more specific than "drugs", since most drugs have no effect on neuroplasticity, and some drugs appear to actually enhance it.

modeless 12y ago

I don't think anyone needs to worry about a hypothetical future where medical science has cured cancer, Alzheimer's, and every other disease, but somehow has failed to restore neuroplasticity. Restoring neuroplasticity is a tiny, easy task compared to all the other breakthroughs needed to reverse or stop aging.

reasonattlm 12y ago
Absolutely. There is something about the defeat of degenerative aging as a topic that causes people to fall off the rails of simple logic and common sense that they'll apply to every other type of medical research currently in progress. The goal in the research community is health assurance, so of course every aspect of aging that impacts health will be addressed. The goal of people who are in the market for health assurance technologies will also be for all aspects of aging that impact health and function to be addressed. So it seems rather unlikely outside of dystopian fiction that we'll run into a situation in which everything except aspect X gets fixed. This is especially true because the hundreds of distinct manifestations of degenerative aging are caused at root by only a small handful of distinct types of damage [1] resulting from the normal operation of metabolism. Effective treatments will be those that repair the root cause damage, each damage repair approach (and especially in conjunction with the other approaches) being capable of treating and preventing whole swathes of age-related conditions. So it would be exceedingly implausible for any particular aspect of aging to stand alone and unaffected by repair strategies for aging. [1]: http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research
cafebeen 12y ago
Any evidence to qualify the "tiny, easy task" claim? IIRC, plasticity likely involves interactions of many neurons and is not well understood...

mistercow 12y ago

Fixing loss of brain plasticity is definitely part of the problem that needs to be solved, but I suspect we'll get there before we extend life expectancy to 120 regardless.

thangalin 12y ago

Valproate, valproic acid, and sodium butyrate affect histone deacetylase, which might help rejuvenate brain plasticity. See also: * http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2010.07261.x/abstract;jsessionid=CED43539E0637410DE55806D431EFDB2.f03t02 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2010.... * http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24831-learning-drugs-reawaken-grownup-brains-inner-child.html#.VLLa_l2Yp_J http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24831-learning-drugs-r... * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleability_of_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleability_of_intelligence

DanBC 12y ago
Valproate is used as an anti-epileptic and as a mood stabiliser. There are some risks of PCOS for women, but those risks have never been explained properly to me.
- derefr 12y ago
  The connection that immediately leaps to mind is the role of dopamine in inhibiting prolactin—if you have a slight hormone production imbalance on the thyroid/pituitary axis, decreasing dopamine production (and thus increasing prolactin) could exacerbate it.
- scythe 12y ago
  Valproate causes massive weight gain. It likely exacerbates any conditions (incl. PCOS) associated with obesity.

_greim_ 12y ago

Let's assume that we did in fact solve every aspect of aging except somehow for neural plasticity, and that this did in fact cause social progress to freeze. Would you be okay with killing fifty million people per year, perpetually, in order to achieve some ideal vision of social progress? Wouldn't that make you worse than all the evil dictators in history, combined? I'd argue that this isn't a position we can seriously consider while maintaining our essential humanity.

iwince 12y ago

Aging does not necessarily stop the ability to learn anything new. You cited your dad so I'll cite mine, he taught himself assembly programming for fun when he was in his late 60's. He lived to be 75 but always challenged himself to learn and do new things. "There is solid evidence that neurogenesis (birth of brain cells) occurs in the adult, mammalian brain—and such changes can persist well into old age." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity Here's another case cited in the same article above, "His father’s story was firsthand evidence that a ‘late recovery’ could occur even with a massive lesion in an elderly person." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity