But I can tell you that now is the very best time in history to be getting old.

We're living longer and healthier than ever before.

We're living more productively into our later years there a number of reasons for this.

But a lot of it is thanks to the ingenious people in medical research who have figured out how to keep us alive not just longer, but better and healthier.

Almost every disease that killed people 100 years ago has been eradicated.

Think about that now.

We have new diseases, of course, that can kill us because we're living long enough to get, um, like cancer and Alzheimer's.

But the good news is that there's enormous progress being made in both fronts.

I'd like to begin by exploding a couple of myths about aging.

There's a kind of societal narrative that we share about what it means to get older, and it's just not consistent with science.

The scientists has changed a lot in the last 10 or 15 years.

In neuroscience in particular, we've learned a whole lot about the aging brain, and most of that hasn't trickled down to the average reader.

One of the myths is that memory failure is inevitable now.

It's true there are some older adults who experienced memory difficulties.

In fact, that is one of the the behavioral markers of Alzheimer's.

It's what causes people to go to the doctor, but it's Alzheimer's is rarer than you think, and memory impairment is not a given.

If you look older adults in the aggregate, many, many older adults will have very little or no memory impairment all through their eighties and nineties.

It's hard to believe, isn't it?

Ah, lot of misdiagnosed cases of Alzheimer's based on patient.

An individual presenting with the memory impairment aren't actually because the person has a memory impairment.

It's because they're sleep deprived.

One of the things we've learned his neuroscientists in the last 10 years is the importance of sleep even among older adults.

Another myth.

Older adults don't need as much sleep.

Not at all true, they only get about 5.5 for six hours for a whole bunch of other reasons, but they still need eight or nine hours like the rest of us, and an hour and a half to two hours of lost sleep in the night on several consecutive nights, presents his memory impairment.

Profound memory impairment.

You can have difficulty encoding memories for two weeks after just one bad night of sleep.

After age 70 the older adults are more tolerant, more compassionate, uh, mawr, accepting of individual differences.

And as a consequence of all these things, they're better at solving a host of problems, especially those that involve interpersonal problems, political problems, social problems because they have the compassion and the insight born of decades of experience and interacting with others.

So again, a myth is that older adults are less happy, not true.

Older adults are not good at solving problems.

Not true.

Another domain in which older adults are great at problem solving is anything involving what a cognitive scientist would call pattern matching.

This is the ability to extract from disparate experiences commonalities common threads to be able to see analogies to this problem, from problems that have come by before.

If you have to get an X ray read, you want the 62 year old or the 70 year old radiologist, not the 30 year old.

If you need a surgery, ask your surgeon How many times have you done this operation?

If the surgeon says I've done it 5000 times and there are plenty of surgeons who have done surgeries 5000 times, that's the person you want.

If the insurgents says, Oh, I've done it.

I saw it in school.

I saw them do it in school.

I was standing right there.

How many times have you done it?

Well, five or six, But I'm learning.

They have to learn on someone, but they don't have to learn on you.

Um, and even now, with robotic surgery, somebody was shaky.

Hands, which could happen at any age, can still do the surgeries.

I would rather have a 72 year old with shaky hands guiding the robot than the 25 year old who hasn't done it before.

We get better with experience.

Part of this societal narrative that I'm weaving here that's faulty is that we look over the course of a lifespan and we see the different developmental stages, and we tend to see them is times of growth along with challenges.

So, um, infants, air learning thio take in the world and they're just beginning to learn language toddlers air learning toe walk.

You've got childhood and pre adolescents and adolescents, and each of these is marked by certain cognitive abilities, certain abilities and thinking that expand.

You've got young adulthood, middle age.

We see all of them as phases in which something about us gets better.

Uh, we tend to see old age differently, which again is not consistent with neuroscience.

But the societal narrative is that some age at some point we just start losing everything.

It's all declined.

You can argue about what that point is.

70 80 I'm a child of the sixties and you know, we used to sing Hope I die before I get old and don't trust anybody over 30.

So, you know, maybe 30 was the point where everything went down, but it doesn't matter.

The fact is, it doesn't go down even at 90.

Not necessarily, um, old age is accompanied by a number of compensatory mechanisms that kick in a number of strengths and new abilities.

And yes, it's full of challenges, aches and pains.

The body starts to go, uh, generalize slowing down.

But every life phase is accompanied by challenges.

I have not yet met somebody who wants to go back to seventh grade, Not a one.

It was a terrible time for most people.

So that was its challenge on I know a lot of people who don't want to be starting their first job again.

You know, at any age you can point to something that was unpleasant about it.