Welcome to another episode of The Talk. Today we are back with Dr. Mary Nealachlan, and we are talking all about aging. And particularly, I want to know what you have learned from the oldest people that you have seen in the lab. We had just talked in our last episode, how you had said a positive attitude is super important. And first of all, I want to ask you, like, do you think that's something that

they've always had, or is it that they've developed it as they've gotten older? Because I know

a lot of other researchers work, for example, has shown that, like, as you get older, your life

satisfaction increases and your contentness with, like, your life increases and stuff, because...

We've done that quiz here here right here in the studio.

Yeah, Eddie loves to talk about this quiz we did. We did like a life satisfaction quiz and I was like,

I hate everything. And Eddie was like, everything's awesome. And we attributed it to age.

But anyway, so do you think that it's like as you get older, you have a different outlook on life?

And obviously there's also,

there must be a spectrum because you're saying that there are patients that have a great attitude.

I'm guessing there are people that also don't have a great attitude. Totally. And like none of these

rules are ever like 100% rigid. There's a lot of inter-individual sort of variability. And they're

just sort of general things to try and live by. But, you know, you can't necessarily

force someone to change the way that their attitude is. And sometimes some old cynic will still

have a great long life. You know, it's not... Oh, that curmudgeon. He just won't die. Yeah. Yeah,

exactly. Like, you know, so that it's just, it's just one of the things that comes up repeatedly in the oldest old is that they tend to have quite a positive attitude.

Being social is another important thing. So we know that loneliness can also be as detrimental to health in aging as smoking.

Yeah. Which is crazy because, you know, when you know how negative smoking is for all these systems in the body,

the fact that being socially isolated can compete with that is quite staggering.

And it just shows you how important kind of community is and spending time with other people and how beneficial that is for your health.

So this is made the popular press because we knew that smoking was bad.

Like, excuse me, duh.

...