My fellow Americans, first I want to thank the conference organizers who have accommodated
me so I could spend the last evening and tonight with my kids.
So thank you for that and I'm delighted to be in a lecture format where I can wear my
pajama bottoms.
Okay, so starting off, I'm a neurobiologist, what I do for a living is study the molecular
neurobiology of neuron death and thank God for everybody's sake here, I'm not going to
talk about that.
What I'm going to talk about instead was a very technical study that I did a number
of years ago that wound up getting published in this famous neurobiology journal called
The New Yorker.
And what it was prompted by was a number of years ago, a secretary that I had.
This was a guy, he had just graduated Stanford the year before, he was working a couple years
before going off to English literature grad school, and the problem with him was I realized
one day he was just irritating the hell out of me.
And it had nothing to do with his job, he was doing a great job working there.
What it had to do was his music tastes.
Okay, you know what comes next, which is my complaining about his listening to his 20
year old's music which could be scientifically proven to be inferior to mine, that wasn't
the problem.
The problem was one day he would be listening to whatever horrendous music there was of his
age group, and the next day he's listening to Beethoven.
And the day after that he's listening to Gorian Chatz and then Grand Old Aubrey and
then Klezmer and then Pygmy Wedding Music.
And this kid was just wildly interested in new types of music.
He was getting his first paychecks and was using them to just explore music and he was
having a great time.
Then one Monday morning he had long hair and a beard, one Monday morning he comes in and
he shaved everything off, his beard and he's shaved his head.
And what's that about?
And he says, I thought it would be interesting to see if people would interact with me differently
if I look so different.
Then one day he's reading Chaucer and the next day some sort of Hungarian realist or
Monday asked him what he did over the weekend and he's been to some Indian movie musical
festival and seen 14 of these in a row and just because he had never done it before.
This kid was like pathologically open to new experience.
So financially I didn't like this one bit because I just want to think about where I
was and I listen to music all the time and I realized it's been decades since I've listened
to a new composer and I haven't changed my appearance since Jimmy Carter was president
and I suddenly realized I've become one of those people where on late night TV they sell
you anthologies of 1970s music.
Like all I listen to is like this one tape of Bob Marley's Greatest Hits over and over
and over again.
And how did this happen?
How did this happen to me?
And now if you're not a scientist what this might prompt is some degree of introspection
or painful considering your priorities or God knows what.
But being a scientist what you're allowed to do is sublimated into an experiment.
So I decided to do a study, so getting my lab code and my microscope all fired up I
started making phone calls.
And what I wanted to do initially was try to explore this notion of why we close to
novelty as we get older.
And being prompted by my secretary in the next room was now listening to Wagner on the ukulele
or something.
So I decided what I'm going to do is explore this in terms of music tastes.
So I called up 50 music stations across the United States.
Some contemporary rock, some oldies, some, you know, fifties, Shannanah, some big band,
whatever.
And in each case I get the station head, station master, whatever, get the program director
on and ask him two questions.
First what's the average age of the music you play?
And second what's the average age of the people who listen to your music?
And you do a whole bunch of fancy statistics and back comes the finding that there's not
a whole lot of people listening to rage against the machine in nursing homes or the Andrew
sisters in high school or the people who listen to James Taylor starting to wear relaxed
jeans.
But you see something very clear which is sort of generational associations with music.
Do the statistics and back comes the finding if by age 31 you're not listening to a certain
type of music, 95% chance you're never going to listen to it voluntarily.
And some sort of window closes.
Okay, so fired up by that I decide to try another version of this, looking at food tastes,
being open to novel food tastes.
And the issue becomes of course what counts as novel food, you know, bagels or as American
as apple pie by now or what sort of options there.
And eventually I settle on sushi, sushi in the American Midwest on the assumption that
meat and potatoes, amber wave of grain crowds, that little raw fish and little carved lotus
carrots and stuff are going to be a little off-putting to many.
So I get my telephone and I called 50 sushi restaurants in the Midwest, ranging from Chicago
down to Eden Prairie, Minnesota.
And in each case I get the owner on the phone and I ask the same two questions, when did
sushi come riding into town and how old is your average non-Asian clientele?
So one of the things I discovered with this was an enormous consternation amongst these
people being told that there's some like Stanford biology professor wanting to grill
them about their sushi restaurant.
What I also discovered is that in Bloomington, Indiana there's an incredibly bitter argument
between the two sushi restaurants there, there's that rule in the first.
But what I mostly found out after doing the same sort of statistics was this finding,
in this case by age 35, if you were not voluntarily eating sushi, 95% chance that you're never
going to.
Okay, so at that point I decided to try a third option and I decided to look at fashion.
Now I live in the Haight district in San Francisco, so virtually on an hourly basis I can see
how many generations worth of fashion I'm out of touch with, but I go sort of exploring
that and try to figure out what's going to be the thing to go after.
Tattoos, tattoos don't do it anymore, tattoos have always been there, all this changes,
the reasons for it, earrings on men, like Orin Hatch can wear an earring on one earring
and you sort of alienate his constituency, that's become so mainstream by now.
So what I suddenly discovered is I had entered the world of tongue studs and genital rings.
So at that point I made my secretary start making phone calls and I bought a piercing
collar.
It's half in San Francisco, half in New York and in each case getting the owner on the
line and asking the same two questions.
When was tongue studs first available in your town and what's the average age of your clientele
coming in and getting them?
And there was this one place in the East Village in New York where the owner insisted
that all of his clientele were octogenarians and I tried to make him take it back and he
wouldn't so I had to throw out the data point, but after that I made my 49 body pierces in
places, you do the math and back comes the finding which is by age 21.
If you haven't gotten a tongue stud 95% chance that instead you're going to get a hairdo
like Jennifer Aniston or something, yet another window or novelty is closed.
So we've got this age 21 for fashion, 31 for music, 35 for food taste and what is this
about?
What I next discovered was I had very arduously reinvented the wheel and that there's all
sorts of people making a living studying the closure to novelty, the closure in the novelty
that we generate, the closure of the novelty that we want to experience.
There's these psychological personality profiles you can take and one of the components is
openness to novelty would you rather need a book or go to a party filled with people
you don't know and you do these studies and you get the exact same curve of being less
interested in novelties, you get older, the exact same curve if you're looking at somebody
in Peoria or a fishing village in Iceland or in South Korea very, very consistent cross
culturally.
Then psychologists looking at it, there's a guy here at Davis named Dean Simonton who
is documented amongst immensely creative people, how their creative output on the average
goes down with age and quantifiable the number of lines of sonnet, the number of measures
of composing, going down with age but what's even more interesting was his finding completely
consonant with what I was talking about is that these highly, highly creative pioneers
become less open to somebody else's novelty as they get older and this is the whole world
of Einstein spending his last decades doing this rearguard action against quantum mechanics
or there was this guy in grad school and I was there, this guy was like one of the most
accomplished cell biologists of the 20th century and the only thing this guy is ever
going to be known for is he was the last credible scientist on earth who didn't believe in DNA.
Went to his grave saying nah DNA epiphenomenon is not the real thing, this guy was extremely
disinterested in his later years in anything new that came along.
So the question becomes why does this happen?
Why is it that we get older and what these studies show is interest in novelty goes
up in early adulthood, late adolescence peaks around then and it declines thereafter.
Why is it that this happens to us?
Okay, so I'm a neurobiologist so of course what I first think about usual suspects is
the aging brain and what's going on there and you can immediately come up with all
sorts of speculations.
We have a novelty part of the brain and clearly something dreadful happens to the novelty
part of the brain when we get older and that simply doesn't work for a bunch of reasons.
Okay, what's brain aging about?
What everybody used to know from day one was something horrendous happens to our brains
as we get older.
You're 18, your brain is great, your synapses are potentiating their electrophysiology and
all of that and on the very morning of your 21st birthday something happens, something
happens and you start losing neurons and this is normal, inevitable brain aging.
You can't stop it by the time you're 40, you're neck and neck with a brine shrimp.
This is not how the brain ages, it turns out catastrophic neuron loss is not a feature
of brain aging.
So there's no massive neuron loss in our novelty center and in fact there is no novelty center
in the brain let alone subsections based on sushi and tongue stones.
So that doesn't work and it turns out the adult brain is incredibly plastic and resilient
and valuable.
One of the things they would teach you in intro neuroscience like in the first day for
the last 5,000 years is the adult brain doesn't make new neurons and huge revolution in the
field in the last decade turns out the adult brain does in some very interesting parts
of the brain and in response to new experience, novelty, stimulation, we make new neurons,
we make new neurons into old age, we make new connections in response to experience.
The brain is not set in stone and insofar as it's not set in stone, it's not melting
away on you as you get older, so the neurobiology wound up not telling me much.
Okay, so then I think about psychology and go see what the psychologists have to say
about this issue, why do we get close to novelty as we get older?
And it turns out they've got all sorts of interesting things.
Back to that guy, Dean Simonton and he has a very interesting finding, again looking
at these highly, highly creative people and how their creative output and their openness
to novelty goes down over time and what he discovered was something critical, which is
the main predictor is not your age, it's your age in your discipline, it's your disciplinary
age.
In other words, people who have lived career pick up and change disciplines set the clock
back on their openness to novelty and this is a pretty interesting finding of course
is confounded by this issue of who chooses to pick up and mid-career go and change, but
this is a very consistent finding.
What's also not clear is if you truly take on new sorts of creativity, transformational
creativity, the term you heard before, or do you merely go doing the old thing and in
the new setting it's amazing, you know, what you used to do as a particle physics system
was getting stale now that you're a modern dancer, has a very different connotation.
Nevertheless, it is not chronological age, it's disciplinary age and he found something
in addition which was even more important, which was, again, he's looking at these highly
creative, highly accomplished people and what he finds is as a predictor of which of them
closed a novelty, somebody else's novelty during aging, the predictor is if you wind
up suffering from the very, very, very dread state of being eminent in your field.
Because if you're eminent, that's a huge predictor, you're looking at closed a novelty, what's
that about?
You're very eminent, you're august, you're silverback and a great beard and sitting on
your laurels and all, and anything new comes along and what's it going to do?
It's going to knock you and your buddies out of the textbooks.
No wonder you start rear guard actions against novelty.
So it's this whole finding there that it's not so much your age, it's how long you've
been in your discipline and the more investment you have in nothing changing in that discipline
because you are part of the bedrock of it by now.
Turns out another psychologist had a lot to say about this and this is psychologist named
Judith Rich Harris who about ten years ago came up with that year's controversial coffee
table book, a book called The Parental Assumption, The Nurture Assumption, which ripped apart
the developmental psychology literature about how important genetics was and I suspect
Steve Pinker is going to put in a vote for that later because we're both very enthusiastic
about it, but one of the things she emphasized in there was the power of peer groups, the
power of peer socialization and the way she would think about this phenomenon closing
to novelty during age is you're a teenager, you're an adolescent, what is the cultural
imperative you have above everything else to demonstrate to the world that you have nothing
whatsoever to do with anybody who ever came before you in time, especially your parents
and you just wait until whatever cultural outrage is invented by some mal-content of
your generation and you all grab onto it and it defines your peer group horizontally.
So now you come back 20, 30, 40 years later and it's you and your peer group and that
same generational identification is going on and you sit there and you say why should
I listen to this new music, the stuff I listened to when we were defeating Hitler or Liking
Ike or sleeping with each other, Woodstock or whatever it is, it was fine then, it's
still good now and thus you find yourself twiddling the dial on the radio station in
the car trying to find something that's familiar.
Okay, so all of this gives us some insights, neurobiology doesn't give us much insights,
biology, disciplinary age, eminence, investment in the status quo, identification with your
generational peer group, all of this is great but as a biologist this wound up being completely
dissatisfying to me for a very simple reason, you look at a rat and you look at what point
in life it's willing to try a new type of food and it's the exact same curve.
You take a baby rat and it is no more interested in new food than our three year olds aren't
trying green vegetables, somewhere about adolescence, early adulthood, the willingness to eat new
foods goes way up and it goes straight down after that, it's the exact same curve.
And there is no rat sitting there over identifying with its tenured position in its university
and its age or any such thing, whatever's going on here is deeply, deeply embedded in
a whole bunch of species far more than ourselves because this is a pattern you see in non-human
primates, rodents, all of that, whatever it is it is highly, highly biological.
So what can that be about, so at that point I start poking around to see what the anthropologists
have to say about it and you see very interesting there are some advantages to being this way,
there are some advantages to holding on to what you had and not falling for the new.
Great example of this, this was a study published in Nature some years ago looking at elephant
herds in East Africa and what the researcher showed was the older the oldest matriarch
is in the group, the better the infant's survival rate and this was after controlling
for whether this was grandma who was the oldest matriarch unrelated the older the oldest matriarch
is the better the infant's survival.
What's that about, that's memory, that's once every fifty years some disastrous drought
and famine hits and you better help, there's a sixty year old matriarch there who remembers
how many fields over in valleys in that direction do you need to go to find that one swamp that's
still going to be there, you need that sort of history and you need somebody holding on
to it.
Jared Diamond has made the same point when thinking about chromadians versus Neanderthals.
Neanderthals as far as we can tell forty year life expectancy, chromadians sixty year life
expectancy, critical implication of that which is some rare disastrous event comes along
and the chromadians had a fifty percent better chance of having somebody still around who
remembered how to get out of that mess the last time it happened and the only way that
can occur is if you have your old hanging on to what they know instead of jettisoning
it for whatever this year's hemline is.
So okay, we got a lot of different views here, disciplinary age, group identification,
eminence, all of that, anthropological precedent where there may be some advantages, share
taxonomically with their species, so what you're supposed to say as a scientist at
this point is more research is needed on the subject and send a grant money and it was
around this point that it struck me maybe all of this was being so puzzling to me because
I was asking the wrong question throughout, maybe the key issue is not why is it that
as we get older we're less interested in novelty, maybe the question is why is it that as we
get older we want the familiar so much more often and this comes through a wonderful book
by an author named Tracy Kidder, a number of great books, one of his books where it's
set in a nursing home in western Massachusetts and it's just sort of a study, a sociological
study of the people in there and one person he focuses on a lot, this was this 80 year
old guy and he and his roommates had been together for three, four years in there and
this guy's memory was not the greatest anymore, his roommates and he told the same stories
over and over, so this was interviewing this guy and he was saying to hear one of Joe's
stories is great, to hear Joe's story ten times in a day makes me completely crazy,
to hear Joe's story ten times a day for the last three years is one of the most comforting
things I can rely on now.
Another version of this, when Igor Stravinsky was on his death bed, apparently this was
this hospital vigil and his wife was sitting there for days and it was clear he was going
to go and she was there around the clock and he had this heavy ring and every now and then
he would bang it on the railing of the hospital bed and finally she gets irritated with him,
he's there at her husband's death bed and she gets irritated with him and says will you
stop doing that already, you know I'm still here and he says I just want to make sure
I'm still here and in lots of ways again not why do we dislike novelty, why do we hold
on to the familiar because all that happens over time is the footing underneath us gets
more and more squishy and we want to make sure we're still there in a familiar form.
So ultimately I think this gives us a lot of insight but back to that issue I raised
two minutes ago more research is needed, do we actually need more research on the subject?
Is it such a crime that I listen to Bob Marley all the time, is one of our societal disasters
that we don't have a whole lot of 80 year olds with tongue studs eating raw eel, is
this such a big deal?
And I think it is and one of the ways this has brought home to me is because of what
I do for a living which is to spend my time around highly agitated smart creative 20 year
olds at a university and there's something you notice there that I see among my best
students and these are not the ones with the best GPAs but the ones who are on fire with
something on fire about somebody else, these are the ones who are going literally across
the track to read to kids in the barrio, these are the ones protesting whatever, these are
the ones who after graduation are going to pick up and treat lepers and congo and such,
these are the ones where I sit there and I look at them and I always have the same depressing
thought which is it used to be so much easier to be like that.
And ultimately I think the biggest reason why we have to fight this tendency to close
to novelty not just the advantages we will get from it, it is not just 20 year olds who
should be burning with the excitement of something new but ultimately I think the most important
reason looking at these kids heading off to the congo is an open mind is a prerequisite
to an open heart and if we can hold on longer and longer in life to seeing the similarities
rather than differences and embrace those, that's going to make for a better work, I
think, so on that note I will need to leave shortly to get my tongue stud but I will touch
on that.
Thank you.
