Verified by 
An article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal describes a high-tech exoskeleton, unveiled at the Las Vegas tech expo CES 2016, that makes the wearer age by about 40 years. “I would like a new dialogue on aging,” the inventor of the R70i Age Suit, Bran Ferren, told WSJ reporter Geoffrey Fowler. “You can intellectualize these things all day long, but when it becomes an emotional first-person experience, it is very different.”
Such empathy aids have been around for a long time. I wrote about the low-tech version of it in my first book, The Myth of Senility, way back in 1980. Architecture students at the University of Michigan were involved in an experiment to gain some first-hand insight into what it felt like to be old -- for the purpose, according to a write-up of the study, of creating "an empathic model in architecture." No virtual reality aids here: all that had been involved in the 1970s version of age suit had been glasses with distorting lenses, earplugs, and de-sensitizing fingertip film.
Just by deadening three senses -- sight, hearing, and touch -- the Michigan architecture students began to feel truly old. (The Age Suit unveiled in Las Vegas also physically slows its wearer.) Yet the effort of trying to manage in the world with these impairments proved so difficult that one student, driven to the edge of depression, quit altogether.
But old people, as I pointed out in my book, can't quit.
They cannot peel off the glasses and suddenly function as efficiently as they used to. This fact of life is especially frustrating for those who still feel as young as ever emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. After all, they have not become different people simply because they have lived a long time. As British gerontologist Alex Comfort describes it, the contradiction they feel between a willing mind and a weak flesh is "like an involuntary change of dress."
I was only 27 years old when I wrote those words -- the age of the architecture students, not the elderly population they were hoping to gain insight into. I'm 62 now, and can see from the other side the benefit of age-empathy. Maybe a couple of hours with an R70i Age Suit would help the younger generation in their dealings with me -- or would help me gain a better understanding of what it feels like, from the inside, for my mother to wake up every morning in a 91-year-old body.
