Disciplinary Roots of Gerontology

 

  The Journals of Gerontology has this fascinating article on the disciplinary roots of gerontology (see image here). 

 

There is also a list of the top 300 scholars in the field, which is a helpful resource to reference. 

Cheers, 

Colin 

Year in Review (2022)

 

As 2022 comes to an end I was thinking of a word which could summarize my impression of the past 12 months of my career and one popped into my head almost immediately- exhaustion!  It was another very busy academic year.  I had deferred my winter 2022 sabbatical as the prospect of doing any travel looked precarious and I also wanted to ensure the students that had endured prolonged campus closures could enjoy some quality in-person courses when classes returned to in-person teaching last year. 

In total I taught 7 courses in the year 2022- 3 courses in the winter term, a summer course, and 3 courses again in the fall semester.  That is by far the most teaching I have ever done in my 23 years of teaching, nearly twice as many classes as the normal 4 course load.  

Despite my optimism that all the courses would be in-person, unfortunately the first half of the winter term was actually online because campus closed again when the Omicron strain appeared.  Fortunately I had already learned to manage the "online pivot" in 2020 so I was able to manage things this year, despite the additional course load.  However in the winter 2022 term I was also teaching a brand new 4th year seminar titled "The Politics of Pandemics and Epidemics".  This course covered public health ethical issues pertaining to 4 infectious diseases- malaria, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and COVID-19- and 3 non-infectious disease predicaments- the "war on drugs", obesity and gun violence.  So teaching that course online during the Omicron wave lockdown was not the kind of "experiential learning" I wanted to explore with my students!  Nevertheless, we managed to get through it.  

Face masks remained in place until halfway through my summer course "Science and Justice".  And then in the Fall of 2022 it was the first time I lectured again to my large (300 students) class since March 2020.  Returning to large lectures, and seeing students' faces again, was a great joy.  So while an exhausting year of teaching, it was well worth it.  

I am on sabbatical this coming winter term, so I will have the opportunity to focus on more on research.  In terms of publications out this year I had two journal articles appear in print- here and here.  And most of my research was consumed writing a new textbook on the history of Western political thought.  I completed drafts of chapters on utilitarianism, feminism, Marx, Black Political Thought, conservatism.  This leaves me the last chapter on Aristotle and the Stoics, and then revisions and the conclusion.  So I hope to get this work completed on my sabbatical.

I have some other projects in mind further down the road, but they will have to wait till I have completed the current projects I am committed to.  I am looking forward to 2023!

Cheers 

Colin

Career Advice RE: Maintaining a "Growth Mindset"

 

A few weeks ago I organized a research and teaching luncheon for junior faculty, post-docs and graduate students in my department with two retired faculty (here and here), and the idea was to share thoughts about "advice I wish I received at the beginning of my career". 

There was a very interesting discussion about the isolation of academic work, the pressures of balancing research, teaching, administration, and life.  While I am not (at least yet) at the retired stage of my career, I shared a few insights based on how things look to me now after 23+ years into my academic career.

My comments were informed by the fascinating psychological research done on the difference between a "growth" vs "fixed" mindset.  As I was reading through this book I made a number of linkages with a career in higher education.  And so my comments at the luncheon focused on the importance of 3 "epistemic virtues" that I think, at the start of one's career, it is really important to be aware of and consciously cultivate to help improve the odds that one develops a "growth" vs "fixed" mindset in one's research and teaching. 

The 3 epistemic virtues I emphasized are: 

1.    Curiosity:  a genuine desire to fill the gap between knowledge and understanding vs having a closed/indifferent mindset.

2.    Humility:  being comfortable to acknowledge your own “gaps” in knowledge and the limits of one’s expertise vs acting and thinking like an arrogant “know it all”.

3.    Intellectual risk-taking: taking on some new challenges that have uncertain or more difficult payoffs vs only inhabiting the safety of established research paradigms and professional norms.

Below are a few personal reflections of how I think these virtues can apply in research and teaching.

In the classroom, an instructor can motivate students to learn the class material by stoking their curiosity.  There are a diverse range of ideas historical political thinkers have advanced for diagnosing the societal predicaments that face our societies, and a diverse range of prescriptions for addressing those problems.  What are the merits and demerits of viewing the political landscape through the lens of Marxism vs liberalism vs critical race theory vs feminism vs utilitarianism vs conservatism, etc.?  Where did these different ideas come from? What events or observations inspired thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Wollstonecraft, Mill, Marx, Du Bois or MLK, Jr.?

As an instructor if you demonstrate intellectual curiosity in the classroom students will mimic this.  Curiosity is infectious.  In my classes students will often ask me what my own political convictions and perspectives are because they can not discern them from the way I teach.  I take such comments as a complement!  I tell my students I am still figuring out my own political convictions and perspectives. 

In my final year as an undergraduate student I was swayed by anarchism, libertarianism, existentialism and Marxism all within the span of about 12 months!  I am still growing and exploring the moral and political landscape.  I think instructors that approach the classroom with strong ideological commitments do a disservice to the mission of higher education.  They approach the classroom from a fixed mindset (e.g. “I, the course instructor, know the truth about justice, democracy and equality, and my goal is to get you, the student, to espouse what I espouse”).  When the intellectual journey is instead approached as a joint collaboration (e.g. “We all have our starting beliefs and experiences, assumptions and intuitions, and together we will critically assess and explore them and see where that takes us”) that is genuinely open then real learning occurs.  The desire to “virtue signal” that one is “on the right side of some ideological battle” must not trump the prime directive of higher education-  to help facilitate and celebrate critical thinking.

Intellectual humility is another (related) critical mindset for an instructor and researcher.  The opposite of humility is arrogance, the uncritical presumption that you know all the answers to important questions, as well as what constitutes the important questions to be answering in the first place.  Arrogance should not be confused with confidence.  Of course an instructor and researcher should have confidence, at least when they are teaching and researching something they actually have competence in.  But humility is also critical to the educational mission.  Possessing the ability to distinguish between the topics one can speak to with some confidence, vs those that one cannot, is a mark of a good instructor and inquisitive intellectual.  The mindset that tries to prove one knows all things, whether it be to their students or “Twitter followers”, is coming from a motivation of “ego” vs intellectual humility and curiosity. 

For one’s research, I think having intellectual humility can help one step back and re-evaluate the future trajectory of one’s research.  For example, after my PhD I published a few articles from my thesis, defending the Rawlsian paradigm of political philosophy by applying it to the issues of a basic income, free speech and economic incentives.  But then I began to critically reflect on the shortcomings of that paradigm.  If my primary goal was to simply publish more of the same stuff I had already published, or to defend the theoretical tradition I happened to find attractive as a graduate student, I would have constrained my intellectual growth and probably contributed much less to the field in terms of original insights.         

And finally, the third and final epistemic virtue I would encourage a young academic to cultivate is “intellectual risk-taking”.  This virtue occupies the mean between the foolish or careless academic who says “I will write what I want to write, where and when I want… the publishing expectations of the discipline and tenure be dammed!” (good luck getting tenure or even finding a TT job with such an attitude!) and the conservative approach of trying to hedge bets on what would yield the safest and most prodigious publication record in the future.  

One might ask why do any intellectual risk-taking at all?  I think the answer to that question depends on that type of academic you are/want to be.  If you are like me then intellectual risk-taking is where the most significant intellectual development and growth occurs, and it is really fun challenging the wisdom of established research paradigms and trying to forge novel ground in a discipline.

For me, the most rewarding research I have done has involved intellectual risk-taking of the following kind: 

(1) writing a textbook as my first published book (vs my dissertation);

(2) publishing a second book which in some respects represented my anti-dissertation vs dissertation;

(3) publishing papers and books that criticize the dominant methodology of the discipline;

(4) exploring new ways (here and here) to understand a historical thinker whose central ideas I do not espouse (but I think are worth seriously engaging with)

(5) spending 15 years writing a book on a neglected topic in the field in the hopes that a reputable publisher would eventually publish it;

(6) and then, after (5), agreeing to write another book on that same topic from a completely new methodological perspective.

(7) devoting 15 years of my research to a topic that is completely ignored by my discipline, and publishing my articles in journals outside my field, like science, medicine.

Wrapping this long post up… the bottom line in terms of advice I wish when I started my career:  academics ought to reflect, often and deeply and critically, on the question of the type of scholar and instructor they aspire to be.  The research on fixed vs growth mindsets is very relevant to these issues.  I have spent 20+ years refining the epistemic virtues of curiosity, humility and intellectual risk-taking. I am still learning and growing.  And I think the growth mindset has paid the generous dividend of helping me successfully navigate some of the challenges of a career in academia and do so in a way that has not diminished my passion for teaching and research. 

Cheers,

Colin

Dogs and Aging Research

Aging research strives to increase the human healthspan, that is, the portion of lifespan free of major disease and disability. A lot of my current research examines how this aspiration resonates, or fails to resonate, with people's convictions concerning what the goals of science and preventative medicine are (or rather, ought to be), and what we think would constitute a fair or just distribution distribution of the opportunities for health and life. One effective way of helping us gain some clarity on such matters is to reflect on what our attitudes are with respect to the health of our pets. The "Dog Aging Project" is a fascinating scientific study which may lead not only to improvements in canine health, but also to key insights into how the aging process of humans could be manipulated to delay the diseases, frailty and disability of late life.

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Cheers, 

Colin

Study on the Impact of Art and Happiness

Is push-pin really as good as poetry, as Jeremy Bentham contended?  Or are there “higher” and “lower” pleasures, as JS Mill maintained?  Science says….  

We predicted and found that high (vs. low) art elevates the sense that life has meaning, because it stimulates integrative complexity, a cognitive process in which disparate information is combined into unified, coherent representations. These integrated thoughts pique interest, leading to the sense of life’s meaningfulness. Moreover, the results of two experiments point to the psychological benefits of viewing low (vs. high) art, namely the sense that life is happy. It seems that the relative lack of complex, integrated thoughts stimulated by low art, along with facilitated processing fluency, befits positive feelings about one’s life.

Cheers, 

Colin

The Institute of Positive Biology: 10 Years Ago

 

A decade ago I published this article, and used my own personal research funds to ensure it was an an "open access" article because I believed it was an argument that the medical sciences needed to hear.  And my argument was a bold one:  that the foundational question guiding most medical research today- what causes disease?- may no longer be the most significant question to be asking and trying to answer.  Instead, a better of understanding of what causes health, happiness, resilience, play, love,  optimism, etc. might reap significant societal dividends in terms of keeping our populations more heathy and happy.  

And what has happened in the decade since that article was published?  

We have doubled down on disease research and our populations are more unhappy and unhealthy for it.  Progress is often a case of one step forward and two steps back.  While living through one's own times, one can never stand back to perceive, at least with some accuracy and objectivity,  whether the times we are in constitute genuine gradual steps forward or large steps backwards.  But I feel confident, after witnessing the public health predicaments of the past 3 years, that we have been knocked back a few steps.  

There is a potential, brighter future on the horizon for humanity.  But to aspire to make it a reality requires transcending the current prevalence of the negative, neurotic mindset that permeates the media every day, and the fixation on pathology research which drives the majority of research in the medical sciences. 

Cheers, 

Colin 

Journal Impact Factors During the Pandemic

Two leading journals in their respective fields- The Lancet (General Medicine) and The Journals of Gerontology: Biological Sciences (Gerontology)- experienced quite different journal impact boosts from the pandemic.  Many comments could be made about this, but for now I just post the photo comparison.

Cheers, 

Colin

Teen Brains During Lockdown

What happens to the teen brain when adolescents are isolated from interacting with other human beings for prolonged periods of time?  Sadly 2020-2022 provided the opportunity to study such an experiment, as it was implemented by governments around the world to try to minimize the harms of COVID-19. 

The Guardian reports on this study which found that teens had not only poorer mental health, but there was also evidence of accelerated brain aging.  A sample from the Guardian story:

The researchers compared MRI scans of 81 teens in the US taken before the pandemic, between November 2016 and November 2019, with those of 82 teens collected between October 2020 and March 2022, during the pandemic but after lockdowns were lifted.

After matching 64 participants in each group for factors including age and sex, the team found that physical changes in the brain that occurred during adolescence – such as thinning of the cortex and growth of the hippocampus and the amygdala – were greater in the post-lockdown group than in the pre-pandemic group, suggesting such processes had sped up. In other words, their brains had aged faster.

....“Large-scale measures of the brain don’t tell us about the detailed circuits that drive behaviour. I would say it’s very speculative what, if any, long term consequences there will be, and whether these brain changes will be enduring or fade away.”

Thomas also stressed that it was not clear that potential impacts would necessarily be negative, noting some of the accelerated changes reported by the team were also associated with higher performance, such as in intelligence tests.

Cheers, 

Colin 

 

Rapamycin and Female Lifespan

EurekaAlert drew my attention to this study on the impact rapamycin has on the lifespan of female (but not male) fruit flies.  This is very relevant to my forthcoming piece on longevity science and women's health and wellbeing.  And brings to the fore a host of other ideas I will be exploring in the years to come.  Just when I think I have written everything I could possibly cover on the fascinating science of longevity a host of novel issues and empirical insights compel me to explore the issues again!

A sample from the news item:

The life expectancy of women is significantly higher than that of men. However, women also suffer more often from age-related diseases and adverse drug reactions. “Our long-term goal is to make men live as long as women and also women as healthy as men in late life. But for that, we need to understand where the differences come from”, explains Yu-Xuan Lu, one of the leading authors of the study.

The researchers gave the anti-ageing drug rapamycin to male and female fruit flies to study the effect on the different sexes. Rapamycin is a cell growth inhibitor and immune regulator that is normally used in cancer therapy and after organ transplantations. They found that rapamycin extended the lifespan and slowed age-related intestinal pathologies in female flies but not in males.

Cheers, 

Colin

Herter on Imagination