To see whether attitudes can still
be reversed closer to the end of life,
Langer ran studies in which older
people were encouraged to remember
what it was like to be young. In her fa-
mous ‘Counterclockwise’ study, con-
ducted in 1979, eight men in their 70s
and 80s were dropped into an elabo-
rate time-capsule recreation of 1959.
They emerged, one week later, meas-
urably more spry – their grip strength
and flexibility had improved, and they
performed better on tests of cognition.
This work has inspired the de-
sign of some seniors’ facilities and
the rethinking of elder care. In the
Hogeweyk ‘Dementia Village’, built
near Amsterdam in 2009, residents are
placed into cottages tailored to evoke
the familiar and comforting surround-
ings of their particular upbringing.
In addition to her studies on mortal-
ity and heart disease, Levy has gone on
to show that ageism affects even things
you wouldn’t expect to have a psycho-
logical dimension, such as balance,
handwriting and memory.
And last February, in the Public
Library of Science’s journalPLOS
ONE, Levy published her most
personal study yet.
Her grandfather had suffered from
Alzheimer’s and, in collaboration with
the scientific director of the Nation-
al Institute on Ageing, she explored
whether ageist thoughts could influ-
ence that condition.
Using a data set of 4765 subjects
with an average age of 72, Levy and
three colleagues zeroed in on people
who carry the 4 variant of the APOE
gene, which increases the likelihood
of developing early-onset Alzheim-
er’s and other forms of dementia by
50 per cent.
As it turned out, around a quarter
of the subjects carried the variant,
and all of them were still demen-
tia-free at that point. When Lev y
compared attitudes towards getting
older with health outcomes four
years later, those who held more
optimistic views of ageing were half
as likely to show signs of dementia.PUSHING BACK AGAINST AGEISM
should begin early, says Lev y, noting
that studies have shown children as
young as three have already taken in
negative stereotypes.
“But we also have research that
suggests that thoughts are mallea-
ble,” she adds. “If you prompt them,
most people can come up with posi-
tive images of ageing. People can be
taught to question negative beliefs.”
How would we know whether a
new generation is accepting more
positive attitudes about ageing?
Perhaps, down the road, when you
begin to type “Old people should”
into Google, the search engine will
spit out a result like: “Old people
should be respected.”
Or perhaps: “Old people should
have patience with the rest of us.”
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