What makes for a good life? Such a simple question, yet we don't have great answers. Most of us try to figure it out as we go along, and many end up feeling like they never got to the bottom of it.

Shouldn't something so important be approached with more scientific rigor? In 1938, Harvard researchers began a study to fill this gap. Since then, they’ve followed hundreds of people over the course of their lives, hoping to identify which factors are key to long-term satisfaction.

Eighty-five years later, the Harvard Study of Adult Development is still going. And today, its directors, the psychiatrists Bob Waldinger and Marc Shulz, have published a book that pulls together the study’s most important findings. It’s called The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.

In this podcast episode, I talked with Dr. Waldinger about life lessons that we can mine from the Harvard study and his new book.

Dr. Waldinger is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, in addition to being Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. He got his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and has published numerous scientific papers he’s a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, he teaches Harvard medical students, and since that is clearly not enough to keep him busy, he’s also a Zen priest.

His book is a must-read if you’re looking for scientific evidence on how to design your life for more satisfaction so someday in the future you can look back on it without regret, and this episode was an amazing conversation in which Dr. Waldinger breaks down many of the cliches about the good life… making his advice real and tangible. We also get into what he calls “side-by-side” relationships, personality traits for the good life, and the downsides of being too strict about work-life balance.

Show links

- Bob Waldinger
- Waldinger's book, The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness
- The Harvard Study of Adult Development
- Waldinger's Ted Talk
- Gallup report finding that people with good friends at work have higher engagement with their jobs
- The link between relationships and well-being
- Those with social connections live longer

This episode features a discussion originally recorded for MSoS.

Last Thursday, scientists at Columbia University published a new study finding that cutting down on calories could lead to longer lives. In the phase 2 trial, 220 healthy people without obesity dropped their calories significantly, and a test of their biological age showed that their rate of aging slowed by 2 to 3 percent in over a couple of years. Small though that may seem, it amounts to a decline of about 10 percent in the risk of death as people get older, according to the researchers' estimate. That's basically the same as quitting smoking.

Previous research has shown that restricting calories results in longer lives for mice, worms and flies. This research is unique because it applies those findings to people. It was published in Nature Aging.

But what did the researchers actually show? Does the new paper point to anything people should be doing to have longer, healthier lives? Spoiler alert: Maybe, but first, you'd want to consult a medical expert about it.

I had the chance to chat with someone with inside knowledge of the research -- Dr. Evan Hadley, director of the National Institute of Aging's Division of Geriatrics and Clinical Gerontology, which funded the study. Dr. Hadley describes how the research participants went about reducing their calories, as well as the risks and benefits involved. He also explains the "aging clocks" used to measure the benefits.

This episode features a discussion originally recorded for MSoS.

The Friday Five covers five stories in research that you may have missed this week. There are plenty of controversies and troubling ethical issues in science – and we get into many of them in our online magazine – but this news roundup focuses on scientific creativity and progress to give you a therapeutic dose of inspiration headed into the weekend.

It features interviews with Dr. Christopher Martens, director of the Delaware Center for Cogntive Aging Research and professor of kinesiology and applied physiology at the University of Delaware, and Dr. Ilona Matysiak, visiting scholar at Iowa State University and associate professor of sociology at Maria Grzegorzewska University.

- Could this supplement help prevent Alzheimer's?
- Why you should care about smart senior towns
- Here's how to reverse being drunk
- Money can make you happy - if you're this type of person
- Personalized anxiety medicine

The Friday Five features interviews with leading medical and scientific experts about the latest developments in health innovation and the big ethical and social questions they raise. This episode features a discussion originally recorded for MSoS.

In recent years, researchers of Alzheimer’s have made progress in figuring out the complex factors that lead to the disease. Yet, the root cause, or causes, of Alzheimer’s are still pretty much a mystery.

In fact, many people get Alzheimer’s even though they lack the gene variant we know can play a role in the disease. This is a critical knowledge gap for research to address because the vast majority of Alzheimer’s patients don’t have this gene variant.

A new study provides key insights into what’s causing the disease. The research, published in Nature Communications, points to a breakdown over time in the brain’s system for clearing waste, an issue that seems to happen in some people as they get older.

I asked Michael Glickman, a biologist at Technion University in Israel, who helped lead this research, to tell me about his approach to studying how this breakdown occurs in the brain, and how he tested a treatment that has potential to fix the problem at its earliest stages. This episode features a discussion originally recorded for MSoS.

Tom Oxley is building what he calls a “natural highway into the brain” that lets people use their minds to control their phones and their computers. The device, called the Stentrode, could improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people living with spinal cord paralysis, ALS and other neuro degenerative diseases.

Leaps.org talked with Dr. Oxley for today’s podcast. A fascinating thing about the Stentrode is that it works very differently from other “brain computer interfaces” you may be familiar with, like Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Surgeons implant the some BCIs directly into a person’s brain, but the Stentrode is much less invasive. Dr. Oxley’s company Synchron opts for an ingenious “natural” approach, using stents in blood vessels to access the brain, with some major advantages for a handful of people who’ve already started using the Stentrode. 

The audio improves about 10 minutes in. There was a minor headset issue early on but everything is audible throughout. 

In our conversation, Dr. Oxley talks about what it means to have a “Bluetooth brain,” the critical role played by AI in the present and future of BCIs, how BCIs compare to voice command technology, regulatory frameworks for revolutionary technologies, specific people with paralysis who’ve been able to regain some of their independence thanks to the Stentrode, what it means to be a neurointerventionist, how to scale BCIs so that more people can use them, the risks of BCIs malfunctioning, organic implants, and how BCIs help us understand the brain, among other topics. 

Dr. Oxley received his PhD in neuro engineering from the University of Melbourne in Australia. He is the founding CEO of Synchron and an associate professor and head of the vascular bionics laboratory at the University of Melbourne. He’s also a clinical instructor in the Deepartment of Neurosurgery at Mount Sinai Hospital. He’s completed more than 1,600 endovascular neurosurgical procedures on patients, including those with aneurysms and strokes, and has authored over 100 peer reviewed articles. 

Dr. Oxley’s work opens up game-changing opportunities for many patients, and his views on the present and future of BCIs are must listening for anyone who cares about health and technology.  

Links:

Synchron - https://synchron.com/ 

Tom Oxley social links
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomoxl
https://twitter.com/tomoxl?lang=en 

Tom Oxley TED talk and website
 https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_oxley_a_brain_implant_that_turns_your_thoughts_into_text?language=en
https://tomoxl.com/ 

Novel brain implant helps paralyzed woman speak using digital avatar - https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2023/08/novel-brain-implant-helps-paralyzed-woman-speak-using-a-digital-avatar/ 

Edward Chang lab - https://changlab.ucsf.edu/ 

BCIs convert brain activity into text at 62 words per minute - https://med.stanford.edu/neurosurgery/news/2023/henderson-brain-implant-speech-als

This episode features a discussion originally recorded while I was hosting MSoS.