Who Says You Can't Live a Million Years?

Source: absolutely_free_photos

Living forever has been a goal of human beings for as long as anyone can remember. The reason is clear. Once you know you're mortal, you face the finitude of your time. "I'll be here only briefly, so I should make the most of it. I should eat, drink, and be merry. Or, adopting a more sober tone, I should work hard and leave a legacy. Raise a family, build a business, create output that will live on: paintings, sculptures, novels, blogs." No other species is as consciously aware of their own immortality as we humans are, at least as far as we know, though all species behave in ways that tend to keep them or their confreres alive as long as possible. Given the awareness that we humans have of the brevity of our lives, it’s appropriate to look for psychological tools to help us functionally extend the time we have.

Step back for a moment to consider the strategies for living long. First, pick parents with long-life genes. You can't pick your parents, of course, but mating with someone whose folks made it to their 80's, 90's, or beyond can be a useful strategy. To the extent that having a healthy, long-lived partner can help you stay happy and healthy yourself, hooking up with someone from a long-lived clan may stand you in good stead for the long term.

Apart from betting on genes, you can do what most people think of when they consider life extension: Eat your vegetables, get lots of sleep, exercise regularly, and avoid wild, risky behaviors like jumping off cliffs without checking your parachute.

Another strategy for living long is one that sounds boring: Be conscientious. It turns out that people who are conscientious – people who have regular medical checkups, pay their bills on time, return their library books when they're due, and so on – live longer than people who are less diligent. Conscientiousness, according to one pair of researchers (Friedman & Martin, 2011), is the best predictor of how long you'll live, at least if you have control over your life. Sadly, too many children and others find themselves in situations where they're at the mercy of bombs, roving gangs, diseases run amok, and so on. How much better the world would be if more people could extend their lives by being conscientious!

But what's this business about living longer by stretching the experience of time? Two experiences of my own led to this idea. One was academic. The other was personal.

The academic experience came when I started graduate school in the early 1970's. My field was, and still is, experimental psychology. Entering graduate school, I was curious to know what was expected of us. What sort of PhD theses did the professors want us to write? "Here, read this book," a senior grad student told me, handing me a paperback called "On the Experience of Time" by Robert Ornstein (1969). I read it and was deeply impressed. It described a series of experiments that Ornstein had done for his PhD.

Ornstein's experiments were brilliantly simple, as all great experiments should be. In a typical study, he showed people diagrams, each for a fixed amount of time. Later, he asked his subjects to estimate how long each diagram had been shown. Though the exposure time was constant, the subjective durations were not. The more complicated the picture (within limits), the longer it was remembered to be. An intricate web of line segments was remembered as having appeared for a longer time than a less intricate, or less interesting, design. Careful analysis of the data from a number of experiments led Ornstein to conclude that the remembered durations of the stimuli depended on how interesting they were. The more information the observers gleaned from the pictures, the longer the pics were remembered to have lasted. I have simplified the presentation a bit. Other research has pointed to a host of factors that can affect remembered durations of past events (Block & Gruber, 2014; Grondin, 2008). Still, the main message is the same: How long events are remembered to have taken depends on your state of mind, not just the events’ objective times.

The other experience I had was personal. My wife and I recently spent a week on vacation. Like the man and woman shown in this blog's photo – that's not us but in a few years, hopefully, we will be perfect stand-ins for this couple – we hiked and held hands while admiring Nature. We visited the west coast of Oregon (Cannon Beach, to be exact). When we got back from our week-long holiday, we agreed that we felt like we had been away for a million years. The term was metaphorical, of course, but you've heard it before and may have said it yourself after returning from a trip. "I felt like I was away for a million years," you may have told others.

Regardless of whether the time extension you experience is on the scale of a million years to one week, and regardless of whether you can take a trip for business or pleasure, the point is one I hope is clear and compelling. If what matters to you is how long your life experience is rather the sheer number of days you live, then one way you can extend your life is to expand the range of experiences you have. The more new information you get, the longer your life will seem.

Here's another way of putting it. Would you rather live for 100 years with nothing to do, just to be able to say you lived a century, or live for an objectively shorter time with a life’s worth of interesting memories? If the answer's the latter, then you should travel to places you’ve never been. You should read books on topics you’d normally never consider, talk to people you’d normally avoid, take up a musical instrument you’d only observed from afar. Whatever you can do to stretch your mind, do it. Stretching you mind will stretch your life.

Who says you can't live a million years? Not me. Enjoy!