The science of aging is going several directions. It appears that there isn't one secret of aging, although the study of telomeres, the knot at the ends of our chromosomes, may be a key factor in aging at the cellular level. But it's not the only factor. Psychologist Ellen Langer has been studying the effects of aging, particularly how one's mindset affects their biological health. In 1979, she set up an experiment in which elderly men were given a retreat back into the 1950s for a week.
Every day Langer and her students met with the men to discuss “current” events. They talked about the first United States satellite launch, Fidel Castro entering Havana after his march across Cuba, and the Baltimore Colts winning the NFL championship game. They discussed “current” books: Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger and Leon Uris’ Exodus. They watched Ed Sullivan and Jack Benny and Jackie Gleason on a black-and-white TV, listened to Nat King Cole on the radio, and saw Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. Everything was transporting the men back to 1959.
When Langer studied the men after a week of such sensory and mindful immersion in the past, she found that their memory, vision, hearing, and even physical strength had improved. She compared the traits to those of a control group of men, who had also spent a week in a retreat. The control group, however, had been told the experiment was about reminiscing. They were not told to live as if it were 1959. The first group, in a very objective sense, seemed younger. The team took photographs of the men before and after the experiment, and people who knew nothing about the study said the men looked younger in the after-pictures, says Langer, who today is a professor of psychology at Harvard University.
So there may be something to the habit of lying about one's age -to oneself. Read about research on aging and the mind's effect on it at Nautilus. -via Digg
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There are exceptions, but for the most part the tone of the comments reflect the tone of the article. An article that expresses ridicule and hate towards those who disagree with the author will get comments returning the sentiments.
I also think it might have something to do with context. I know that I have inadvertently almost started flame-wars because of a comment I have made, which was not understood in the way I meant it to be. Trying to explain my point of view without the other people understanding (or understanding that the original comment might have been said in jest; again, context) only fanned the flames larger, until I felt it necessary to just drop the whole conversation. Of course, there are people out there who say inflammatory things just to watch the ensuing coniption fits. I don't believe there are more of those types of people now (born troublemakers?), they just have a larger audience.
After thinking about it for a while I have come to the conclusion that the internet is probably the best thing that ever happened to humankind.
It isn't really fair to expect this, because the history of genocide, for instance, isn't taught in schools from brief, cursory mentions of events such as the Holocaust, and they are never put in any real historical context. But read historian Dr. Leon Litwack's work, for instance, if you want to know more about the unimaginable rage and hatred and violence that people are capable of inflicting on each other for no rational reason at all (*Been In the Storm So Long*, *Trouble In Mind*, *The Long Death Of Jim Crow.*)Actually, I would argue that if anything, expressing this kind of idiocy in internet posts might even keep people from the real violence they might otherwise commit.