In Our Prime (23 page)

Perhaps this is one reason that in this neighborhood black men and women in their 40s and 50s “never mentioned ‘middle-age' as a period in the life cycle, preferring instead a long period of undifferentiated adulthood,” as Newman observed. They had not adopted the “cultural fiction” of middle age, because it was not a useful benchmark. Much more important to them were history, place, and race—three elements that had been neglected before the advent of life course theory. This middle-aged generation was bound to look very different from the one that followed because their histories were so different.

The decade-long MacArthur project filled in many of the gaps and corrected long-held misconceptions about middle age in America. But absent from this still photograph was a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end—an unfolding narrative. That required following the same people over a number of years, as was done in the Oakland and Berkeley studies. More biological and neurological information from the survey participants and comparisons over time were also needed to answer puzzling questions about why some people remained healthy and engaged as they grew older and others did not. Did behavior in the decades between 40 and 60 mean the difference between a long, healthy life and a short, afflicted one? And if so, was there anything one could
do about it? With middle age finally established as a legitimate field of social scientific research, in 2002 the National Institute on Aging took over from the MacArthur Foundation, rechristened the project Midlife in the United States, or MIDUS, and gave $26 million to turn it into a long-term study.

In this second phase, the reconstituted research team could take advantage of sophisticated cutting-edge tools to track the neurological mysteries of the brain that were sparking a flood of new research by scientists like Richard Davidson in Madison, Wisconsin. MIDUS II was in a position to expand the already impressive database by exploring the effects of aging on the brain and the intricate neural links between emotional and physical health.

The Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard gets his brain scanned by Richard Davidson.

“If you believe,” he shouted to them, “clap your hands; don't let Tink die.”

—J. M. Barrie,
Peter Pan

I
n 2004, ten years after Bert Brim's
team had started telephoning and mailing questionnaires for the MacArthur-funded study, now renamed MIDUS I, researchers began to reconnect with the more than seven thousand people who participated to ask if they were willing to continue with the second wave. Brim had retired and Carol Ryff, the head of the University of Wisconsin's Institute on Aging, sat in the director's
chair. For the next five years, through 2009, MIDUS II researchers gathered information, building on the storehouse of data already collected. Five thousand of the original participants—now between the ages of 35 and 86—agreed to cooperate, while researchers recruited a few hundred more to replace those who had quit. Once again the volunteers fielded intensive and detailed questions. Researchers returned to the group that kept exhaustive daily stress diaries during phase one to see how their load had changed and what toll the previous ten years had taken on their mental and physical health.

The MIDUS II team also added a new series of assessments in order to more closely examine the traces of wear and tear that experience leaves on the body. Three times a year, 1,255 of the survey group journeyed to one of three testing laboratories at the University of Wisconsin, Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., or University of California–Los Angeles to be measured and monitored so that a full series of physiological assessments could be added to the database. Immune and cardiovascular systems; nerves and hormones; blood, urine, and saliva were all tested. The volunteers were also asked to keep daily sleep diaries. Others wore what is known as an activity watch, or Actiwatch, to record sleep patterns during their visit to the lab. In addition to the hundred-page survey that all the MIDUS participants completed, this troupe answered a detailed, twenty-six-page-long questionnaire about how they had felt over the previous week or month. Were you happy, depressed, crying? Did you have diarrhea, a dry mouth? Were you able to control irritations in your life, or were you upset because something happened unexpectedly? Do you generally fly off the handle, say nasty things when you get mad, consider people who think they are always right irritating?

MIDUS II also launched two new studies focused on the brain that explored the links between cognitive ability and aging, and between emotional and physical health. By learning more about the brain's functioning, investigators hoped to uncover clues about keeping the mental gears smoothly turning and the body spry and diseaseless in later years.

One brain study was led by Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology
and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. His research was the reason that I had traveled to Madison and lay inside an fMRI machine on that sweltering summer day discussed in chapter two. Davidson was interested in exploring the mind's inner workings to discover the links between emotional resilience and health. What he refers to as “affective style”—the various ways in which people respond to significant emotional events—is something that has been studied at every age, from babbling infants to the elderly. He had not intended to focus specifically on the affective style of middle-aged adults, but when the MIDUS headquarters relocated to Madison he saw an opportunity. The more he thought about it, the more midlife appeared to be the ideal age to study the connection between emotion and health.
Despite claims that emerged in the 1990s
that the critical window of brain wiring closed after age three, the brain continues giving birth to neurons, padding its insulation, and enlarging the maze of undulating pathways into adulthood. And the prefrontal cortex—located right behind the forehead; the place where judgment, personality, impulse control, conscience, and critical self-appraisal reside—is the last part of the brain to mature, sometimes not until a person's 30s.

What appealed to Davidson about studying the middle-aged was that they have had their share of life experiences. Their resilience has been tested. They have had the opportunity to learn how to better cope with adversity, and their reactions, repeated thousands of times over the years—to a delayed train, a child's accident, an overdue bill, a lost wallet, a split pair of pants—have etched themselves in the body. It is the perfect time to observe the diverse patterns of emotional reactions that people develop.

Davidson believes that coping effectively with adversity is at least one element of staying healthy. Chronic stress has been linked to cancer, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Recent experiments have demonstrated that just the perception of intense stress can make the body's cells age more rapidly—perhaps as much as ten years—by eating away the tips of each cell's chromosomes. The pressing question is whether people can learn to control their emotions and anxieties. Such composure is particularly important for people in their middle decades, when the stresses of family, work, and finances are at their peak and the physical wear that plays out in later years first surfaces.

MIDUS II offered an unusual opportunity to marry the bird's-eye view that large-scale surveys deliver with the detail and intimacy of laboratory research and in-depth interviews. Davidson could attach a hairnet of electrodes to the scalps of survey respondents to record electrical activity in the brain or slide them into his fMRI when they came to the university for other lab tests. “
That's been a spectacular strategy
,” he explained. “I don't think that MIDUS has at this point even come close to realizing its potential as a unique research enterprise.”

Davidson and his colleagues plan to follow
their sample of 331 MIDUS subjects over the next five, ten, twenty years, and beyond. The process is comparable to one of the most famous and ambitious long-term health studies, the Framingham Heart Study, begun in 1948 by the National Heart Institute (now called the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute). By tracking the men and women who lived in Framingham, Massachusetts, and then their children and grandchildren, scientists have been able to explore the roots of heart disease. Over the years more than fifteen thousand participants have dutifully submitted to medical examinations, lab tests, and interviews every four years, helping scientists learn, for example, that high blood pressure in middle age was a risk factor for cardiovascular disease later on. Davidson essentially wants to do the same thing, but instead of blood pressure he is looking at emotional responses. “I am particularly interested in how life experience may play a role in modulating brain function, which then will be associated with physical health and illness,” he said. The brain works on every organ in the body, and every organ sends messages back to the brain; we just don't know the pathways. By discovering the biological connection between the head and heart, Davidson hopes to detect whether the way in which individuals respond to adversity at 50 will predict whether they develop cardiovascular disease at 60.

“I've been interested in emotion my entire life,” Davidson told me during my first visit to his office at his laboratory at the University of Wisconsin. Davidson is trim in khakis and a crisp button-down shirt. A wave of gray-speckled black hair surfs across his forehead. He has a low, husky voice that on certain words reveals his Brooklyn roots.

How, he wondered, were these insubstantial, immaterial feelings—
fear, anger, guilt, joy—produced? At 14, he was volunteering in the sleep lab at a local hospital, cleaning electrodes and trying to decipher electroencephalography (EEG) recordings of electrical activity in the brain. In high school, he read voraciously and became deeply interested in meditation. While at Harvard working toward a PhD in psychology, he took three months off to travel through India and Sri Lanka. In 1974, as most Americans watched Richard Nixon resign from the presidency, the 22-year-old Davidson and his soon-to-be-wife, Susan, were on a mountain in northern India for a meditation retreat.

He came to teach at the University of Wisconsin in 1984, and has since won a shelf full of awards for his psychological and neuroscience research, as well as a spot on
Time
magazine's 2006 list of the hundred most influential people in the world. In 1992, Davidson was surprised and thrilled when Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, got in touch with him. He had heard of Davidson's work through the Mind & Life Institute, a nonprofit organization in Boulder, Colorado, where Buddhists and scientists research the brain's abilities and contemplation. Davidson was on the board of directors.

“He was interested in having neuroscientific research on Tibetan monks who had spent years cultivating their minds,” Davidson said. Behind his desk is a photograph of him with the Dalai Lama in his recognizable saffron and maroon robes. The Dalai Lama wondered whether the monks' deep and extended meditative training could generate compassion and more positive thoughts. Davidson accepted the invitation to visit Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama's residence in northern India during his exile from Tibet. In the psychologist's considerable load of baggage were portable electrical generators, laptop computers, and EEG recording equipment.

After the trip, Davidson said, “I made a commitment to myself . . . that I was going to come out of the closet with my interest in meditation.”
He had kept this passion
a secret ever since his Harvard professors scorned it. “They patted me on the knee and said, ‘Richie, this is not a good way to start a scientific career.'”

In the years that followed, the scientist and the monk have collaborated on a variety of studies as robed lamas have journeyed to Davidson's lab to lie on the scanner bed, as I did, and have their brain circuitry scrutinized.

Davidson is bringing the full arsenal of advanced technology to bear on the centuries-old mind-body problem. Since the Enlightenment, Western civilization has hewed to the model that the Parisian René Descartes set forth in the seventeenth century, with the immaterial mind in one realm and the physical body in another. “
This I (that is to say, my soul by which
I am what I am) is entirely and absolutely distinct from my body, and can exist without it.” Davidson was dissatisfied with this formulation. Emotions were incorporeal, but something in the body had to generate them. They had no substance, yet they could cause your hands to sweat and the back of your neck to tingle. “
I was interested in emotion
when emotion was in the dustbin of American psychology,” Davidson said of the 1970s and 1980s. “There were probably three people in the academy who were studying emotion and it was considered a real backwater, not at all tractable and really uninteresting. And it just seemed to me that was really an off-base view, because emotions seemed to be so central to everything that is important about our behavior. . . . People thought I was completely off the wall.”