Can We Slow the Aging Clock? -One of World's Leading Expert Says "Yes"

Just Say NO To Old Age: Professor X isn't the only one with incredible mental powers: recent research says that you might be even better at brain-boosting, helping heal yourself with the power of a positive attitude - while he can't even summon up the mental energy to stand.

The power of positive thinking might make us sound infinity percent more likely to wear hemp and say "man" an inappropriate number of times for science reporters (i.e. ever), but it's real research at Harvard.  Professor Ellen Langer has conducted several studies into "mindfulness theory", researching just how much your attitude affects your actual body.  The answer: quite a bit.

One of Benjamin Button's many stories-within-stories in F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, involves the tale of a clock built for the New Orleans train station that is designed to run backwards, in the hope that it will resurrect the First World War dead.

With a similar result in mind, in one experiment Langer shut several septuagenarians in a hotel that had been redecorated in mid-eighties style, eliminating all evidence of the last two decades.  Subjects were instructed to act as if they'd really gone all Doctor Who, and after only seven days they were faster, stronger, better than before.  Stronger for seventy-year olds, anyway, and certainly stronger than a control group who didn't get this amateur time-travel and were basically left to think about how damn old they were.

This raises a number of interesting questions, and if you don't think so then we hate to bear bad news but aging applies to you too.  How can we best apply this technique to our own lives?  And if you can feel younger but have to listen to 80s music to do so, is that too high a price to pay?

Dr Langer's theory is that all the external reminders that "you are old and broken" can convince the brain and body that it must be so.  It's quite possible - anyone who talks about brain and body as if they were separate items isn't using either properly, so all kinds of unconscious instructions could affect your health.  There's no "be healthy!" switch, and this can't prevent aging (that's a job for the gene-workers) - but it can slow the clock down.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

Can we reverse aging by changing how we think? 

Comments

[DaiLaughing]

Does that first paragraph even make sense?

It certainly doesn't to me.

[Jilly]

DaiLaughing, the first paragraph only makes sense if you are an "X-Men" comics or movie fan - which is not necessarily a good way to write...to a small and exclusive audience but the author assumes everyone is going to know what he's talking about.

Hey Luke, your new editor should be catching more things than typos and misspellings!

As for the article, common sense folks. Feel good about yourself, positive self esteem, eat right, exercise, and bad stuff in moderation and everyone will live longer!

[Narendra Nath]

Natural deaths are mostly based on our inner will. What we feel determines our consciousness/awareness level and it certainly contributes. the rest is biological aging. But remember, all the parts of the biological system do not have the same age, some are short lived and others longlived. and such variations are individual based. Then, there are young people who feel and act old even in middle age. personality and attitudes determine what we actually become in life.